The Guilford community by now knows all the details that CNN, Fox, MSNBC have offered—the units of loss, the gaps on the horizon, the order of terrifying events, the language of suspicion. We have looked at our fellow citizens in bewilderment and transfixion.

We have even devoured cigarettes the same way that gravity sucked the towers down. We think we want answers, but the calls from our parents that shed nothing but warm rain on our confusion are satisfying. The rhythmic affirmation of our glowing American soul as it writhes and seems it could change into any shape, color, spread to any thinness, mass into any degree of spherical perfection, is a blessing that we have always prayed would seize our desert.

We have prayed for such silence, we have prayed for such level-headedness, a fellowship with candles overseas.

If only the buildings had been empty—then it would have been perfect. But they were filled with blood that all of us rush to replace. Even the anemic, the belly-button-pierced are let into the temple to share.

Not only were these landmarks filled with blood; they were filled with our uncles and our friends’ mothers. They were filled with the people we silently supported in their trade, in their defense of our nation’s creed.

If only we had built roots beneath our highest altar. If only it had been an altar that we praised. If only our highest altar had been a symbol of peace—then all would be so much easier.

We would sing wordlessly for the loss of silence. We would pray for lack of solemnity. We would cry to banish all the apathy steaming from the terrorist’s act. But no—trade and war have been attacked and they are the ones that the polls indicate we are feverishly seeking to replace. That is why we must remember the humans that were in the buildings, and the flawed humans they were representing, and still the other humans that we now owe mercy.

We are left with the legacy of our fathers’ acts of war and oppression on the weak parts of the world, and from these ashes we must build a new temple.