On the northeast tip of North America, on an island called Newfoundland, there’s an airport.

 It used to be one of the biggest airports in the world. And next to it is a town called Gander.

They have a two person police department, an SPCA, an elementary school, and a culture of kindness that, in the days following the darkest, most awful day in recent history, changed people’s lives forever.

 Eighteen years ago this past week, this small, isolated Canadian town took in nearly 7,000 people – almost doubling its population – when president Bush closed the american airspace in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and all planes were ordered to land at the nearest airport. 38 of those planes were over the north Atlantic, and this tiny town was the only place left to go. 

 After they figured out how to park all the planes, which was no small feat itself, the town swung into action to help the passengers and crew. Gander all but shut down daily life so they could devote all their resources to help the “plane people,”

 While the plane people sat for hours at the airport, waiting to be vetted by customs, the town was hard at work. Volunteers set up makeshift shelters — every school, gym, community center, church and camp; any place that could fit a planeload of people, was converted.

 School Bus drivers in the middle of a nasty strike laid down their picket signs and went back to their buses so they could get people to shelters.  Donations of toiletries, clothes, toys, towels, toothbrushes, pillows, blankets and bedding piled up. And almost all the Gander residents started to cook— a lot. Grocery store shelves went bare. The Walmart ran out of nearly everything and the local hockey rink transformed into the world’s largest walk in refrigerator to hold it all.

 The outpouring of kindness in the town only multiplied over the next five days.

Not satisfied with leaving their guests in the shelters, Gander residents took the stranded passengers sightseeing, moose hunting, berry picking, and barbecuing. They entertained them with traditional music, stopped anyone walking down the street in case they wanted a ride and brought strangers into their homes as guests. And they refused to accept money.

 In the end, the people of Gander hosted 7000 people from over a hundred different countries. What could have been an incredibly tense situation in the wake of a terrifying attack ended up being a rollicking, 5 day long,  international sleepover filled with people who would become lifelong friends.

The Ganderite’s  simple hospitality to their unexpected house guests changed the lives of those 7,000 9/11 refugees forever, and has inspired thousands upon thousands to live lives of simple, yet radical kindness.

 You may wonder why I’m back on this again, telling the Gander story, the Come From Away story, when you’ve heard it from me at least twice already.

 I tell it, because, while it’s so important to honor what we lost on 9/11, it’s just as important to commemorate, and celebrate, what we found in the days after the attacks.

 We are often fed a narrative that disasters can bring out the worst in people. That, when we are scared, we become focused on our own survival, often to the exclusion of other people. The idea is that, when push comes to shove, we will take care of ourselves, no matter what impact it has on other people.

 The thing is though, that doesn’t have to be true. I have stood, and served, in the place where the worst has happened, and I watched it bring out the best in people. When the sun went down in lower Manhattan on 9/11, it was so incredibly dark, because there was no electricity and very few generators near the pit, but we didn’t see people looting or being hateful to one another. Instead, we saw the residents of lower Manhattan, normal, everyday people, lining the West Side Highway, shining their flashlights on the road to light the responders’ way, silently clapping for us, hugging us, holding up signs thanking us as we came out of the frozen zone. I saw people take care of their neighbors, and go out of their way to help people they had never met before, and in the course of everyday life, would never meet again.

 In her book, “A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit affirms this experience. “What is this feeling that crops up during so many disasters?” Ms. Solnit asks. She describes it as “an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive,” worth studying because it provides “an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility.” Our response to disaster gives us nothing less than a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become.

 That glimpse of what we could become is why I tell the story of Gander. Because in that story lives the people of 9/12. The people who, after the horror and darkness of 9/11, shone like the morning sun that rose over lower Manhattan, bringing all of us hope, relief, and warmth after the darkest night of our lives.

I tell the story because it is that kind of kindness that the world needs now more than ever. We mark the anniversary every year with murmurs of ‘never forget’….but how can we truly HONOR what was lost? How can we become the people of 9/12, who have seen the proverbial sun rise again?

 We can look to Gander, and what happened there, as our blueprint.

 I’m lucky enough to know several of the folks from Gander who were there during the plane crisis, and they will all try to tell you that they didn’t do anything special that day. My dear friend Diane, who ran the shelter at the Gander elementary school, says that they were simply doing the right thing, and that if 38 more planes landed today, they’d do it all over again. Kindness is woven into the very fabric of their being in Newfoundland— they don’t know any other way to live….it’s at the very essence of who they are.

 The year 9/11 happened, I was in my last year of seminary. What I saw at ground zero shaped and redefined my outlook on the world, and especially my thoughts about religion. When the sun rose on the rubble of the world trade center after that first, long, terrible darkness, those of us who made it through that first night became the people of 9/12. And figuring out exactly what that means, and how it effects how I choose to live my life, how others who have survived choose to live their lives, has coalesced, for me, around a theology of kindness that transcends religion.

 What happened in Gander is the biggest concrete example we have of an entire community acting as 9/12 people in a post 9/11 world. There were people from over 100 countries on those planes that landed in Gander.

What was it that resonated and brought them together so beautifully?

 It was the  kindness that they experienced there….and I don’t just mean the acts of feeding and housing them….this was a kindness that sunk in so deeply that it transformed the lives of the plane people, long after the last flight left Gander all those years ago. It’s a kindness that has created a change all over the world.

 

You see, there is a ripple effect that happens when kindness becomes a person’s prevailing theology. This theology of kindness is transformational. It goes beyond simple actions or words to become embedded in a person’s soul – transforming them from the inside out.

Like the people of Gander, our whole way of being in the world and our whole way of interacting with others should be forged in the bedrock of this radical kindness.  Kindness should be at the core of our principles, and our practice; it should be our life.

 When ripples of kindness move from one human being to another, it makes a space for a moment of divine connection to enter…and I’m not talking about a connection that’s dependent on something otherworldly, but a moment of shared understanding that acknowledges the divine humanity within each one of us and then spurs us to act on that acknowledgment.

 Living out kindness creates a touch of something beyond our understanding, something radical and life changing…..just like what happened in Gander in the days following 9/11.

 When we remember 9/11, we have to move beyond simply ‘never forgetting’. Yes, we must remember the horror and darkness of what happened, but also what happens when kindness, and hope, rises up in response. The people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks imagined a reality of fear and isolation, a reality that the people of Gander flatly rejected. What happened up there helps us get a glimpse of a different world – one in which people run toward each other, instinctively. 

This type of 9/12 kindness is radical, and world changing. People look at what happened in Gander, with people taking strangers into their homes, sharing their lives with them for five days, no questions asked, and they try to dissect what happened, asking, ‘Why are they like that?’ instead of asking, ‘Why are more of us NOT like that?’

 We CAN BE 9/12 people in a post 9/11 world. We CAN be a people of great kindness, creating ripples that carry from person to person, changing the world one small act of kindness at a time.  

 It’s that simple. Really. Diane Davis explained it best, so I’ll leave you with her words…. “Everyone looks at us and says that’s an amazing thing that you did, and the bottom line is I don’t think it was an amazing thing, It was the right thing you do. It was just kindness.”  

 May it be so. 

May WE be so.

Amen.