President Bush's Prayer Service Speech
September 14, 2001, 2:02
PM EDT
We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So
many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation's
sorrow. We come before God to pray for the missing and the dead, and
for those who loved them.
On Tuesday, our country was attacked with
deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and
ashes and bent steel.
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Now come the names, the list of
casualties we are only beginning to read. They are the names
of men and women who began their day at a desk or in an
airport, busy with life. They are the names of people who
faced death and in their last moments called home to say, be
brave and I love you.
They are the names of passengers who
defied their murderers and prevented the murder of others on
the ground. They are the names of men and women who wore the
uniform of the United States and died at their posts.
They are the names of rescuers -- the
ones whom death found running up the stairs and into the
fires to help others. We will read all these names. We will
linger over them and learn their stories, and many Americans
will weep.
To the children and parents and
spouses and families and friends of the lost, we offer the
deepest sympathy of the nation. And I assure you, you are
not alone.
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Just three days removed from these events,
Americans do not yet have the distance of history, but our
responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks
and rid the world of evil. War has been waged against us by stealth
and deceit and murder.
This nation is peaceful, but fierce when
stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of
others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.
Our purpose as a nation is firm, yet our wounds
as a people are recent and unhealed and lead us to pray. In many of
our prayers this week, there's a searching and an honesty. At St.
Patrick's Cathedral in New York, on Tuesday, a woman said, "I pray to
God to give us a sign that he's still here." Others have prayed for
the same, searching hospital to hospital, carrying pictures of those
still missing.
God's signs are not always the ones we look
for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own,
yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this
great cathedral are known and heard and understood.
There are prayers that help us last through the
day or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers
that give us strength for the journey, and there are prayers that
yield our will to a will greater than our own.
This world he created is of moral design. Grief
and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and
love have no end, and the Lord of life holds all who die and all who
mourn.
It is said that adversity introduces us to
ourselves. This is true of a nation as well. In this trial, we have
been reminded and the world has seen that our fellow Americans are
generous and kind, resourceful and brave.
We see our national character in rescuers
working past exhaustion, in long lines of blood donors, in thousands
of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible. And
we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice.
Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself
stayed until the end and at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A
beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two
office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down 68
floors to safety.
A group of men drove through the night from
Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burned victims. In
these acts and many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one
another and an abiding love for our country.
Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called
"the warm courage of national unity." This is a unity of every faith
and every background. This has joined together political parties and
both houses of Congress. It is evident in services of prayer and
candlelight vigils and American flags, which are displayed in pride
and waved in defiance. Our unity is a kinship of grief and a
steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this unity
against terror is now extending across the world.
America is a nation full of good fortune, with
so much to be grateful for, but we are not spared from suffering. In
every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom.
They have attacked America because we are freedom's home and
defender, and the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our
time.
On this national day of prayer and remembrance,
we ask almighty God to watch over our nation and grant us patience
and resolve in all that is to come. We pray that He will comfort and
console those who now walk in sorrow. We thank Him for each life we
now must mourn, and the promise of a life to come.
As we've been assured, neither death nor life
nor angels nor principalities, nor powers nor things present nor
things to come nor height nor depth can separate us from God's love.
May he bless the souls of the departed. May he
comfort our own. And may he always guide our country.
God bless America.
The Declaration of
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Monument at Pointe du Hoc, France, where veterans of the Normandy
Invasion, and others, had assembled for the ceremony.
President Bush's Prayer
Service Speech
September 14, 2001, 2:02 PM EDT
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