The Circle Is Wide Enough
At this very moment, 25 years since 9/11, ten courageous veterans are standing in the wilderness of Eastern Washington in the channeled scablands. It’s a primitive circle of wildflowers, mountain sage, and basalt. It’s about 12’ feet across, with a center holding medals, artifacts of ancestors, rosaries, buddhas, unit patches, sacred trinkets, bracelets carrying the names of brothers and sisters lost in battle, or any symbol of strength relevant to their own being and value system. Tucked in between the the earth and a staff that contains the wooden dogtags of initiates from 27 ceremonies before lie the “I AM” intention statements, cracked alive beneath the armor of their ungrieved grief and untold stories. It is a birthing and claiming that they have been preparing for at least six months, if not a lifetime.
When they enter into the circle they will be blessed or smudged out, marking the true beginning of the warrior’s return, four days and four nights in solitude to journey into the center of their being to answer Who Am I? while laying down what no longer serves and living into the deepest purpose of their lives.
It is the most courageous of acts by a group representing all of America in culture, gender, ethnicity, wholeness, politics, and religion (or non-religion). They are bound here by their very different but shared experiences in making the pledge to sacrifice it all and be ready to die for a cause greater than themselves.
They carry the stories of service, war, healing, and now, transformation.
When the last veteran exits the threshold this morning, the ceremony team will hold those “I AM” statements in prayer (or good thoughts if that language works for you). This particular group of veterans, hailing from Puyallup, WA to San Juan, Puerto Rico will be stepping across the line just as the morning sun hits the alter. In 96 hours of the longest hours of their life they will return to community after their ordeal with the greatest stories ever told, marking their return and new place in community, in their True Identity, Purpose, and Belonging after service, even if that was twenty years ago.
That morning sun and their crossing will likely be near 9:58:59 EST when the South Tower collapsed exactly 25 years ago, or 10:03:11 EST when Flight 93 crashed Somerset, PA, or 10:28:25, when the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
What can this mean, their crossing this auspicious day that burns with painful in so many of our chests?
Only time and their stories will tell, but today we honor that their threshold crossing is connected to a circle wide enough to hold the prayer for thousands that woke up one morning never to return, September, 11, 2001.
Beginning with this smallest circle first,
On this day
we remember the morning
the sky became a wound
and the world we knew
crossed a threshold.
We invoke the names—and listen.
For those who ran toward the fire—
firefighters, police officers, medics,
dispatchers, flight attendants, chaplains, neighbors,
and strangers who became kin
beneath the falling ash.
They have names and stories.
For the survivors still carrying that morning
in their lungs,
their bodies,
their dreams.
For the families who set the table
around an empty chair
and learned that grief
does not move in a straight line.
We invoke the names—and listen.
For the service members and their families who answered the call,
most too young to understand
how long twenty years could be.
For those who died in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and across the widening battlefields
of the wars that followed.
For those who returned
with visible wounds.
For those who returned
carrying war where no one could see it—
in the body,
the heart,
the mind,
and the spirit.
To become casualties of war on American Soil.
For the spouses who held the home front,
the children who measured childhood in deployments,
the parents who feared every knock at the door,
the caregivers who became witnesses,
and the Gold Star families
who bore the unbearable.
We invoke the names—and listen.
For the Afghan and Iraqi people.
For the civilians caught beneath bombs,
between armies,
inside decisions made far from their homes.
For the children who inherited a war
a future they did not begin.
For the villages emptied,
the families displaced and scattered across borders,
for those still waiting for safety.
For interpreters and allies
who placed their lives beside ours with no homecoming.
For journalists, aid workers, contractors,
and all who entered the long shadow of conflict
and did not return or returned unchanged.
For the guardians of innocence, and every person imprisoned by hatred.
For every family, in every country,
still counting the cost.
The circle is wide enough
for every name,
every absence,
every wound,
every truth.
And it must also be wide enough
for our becoming.
Because remembrance is more
than looking backward.
It is the courage to face
what war has made of us in light and shadow.
It is laying down
what no longer serves
without forgetting
those who carried it beside us.
It is choosing to become ancestors
that remember, worthy of the generations
that will inherit what we heal—
or what we refuse to heal.
So today, let us sit together
beneath the wound in the sky.
Let us speak the names.
Let us make room for the emotional sweat.
Let us listen beyond the boundaries
of nation, uniform, religion, and tribe.
Let us remember all who were taken,
all who were sent,
all who were left behind,
and all who are still trying to come home.
May they be held in honor.
May their families be wrapped in gentleness.
May the living find belonging.
May the dead find peace.
And may we have the courage
to cross this threshold together—
not back into the world as it was,
but forward into a world
worthy of all that has been sacrificed.
Welcome Home with Love and Honor.
Ryan Mielcarek, ED, Seabee OIF, Veteran Rites.
