The Nothing Men

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

One of the songs associated in many an American imagination with Sept. 11, 2001, is Bruce Springsteen’s “Nothing Man.” Though Springsteen wrote the song years before 9/11 (and not all of its lyrics fit the story of that terrible day 25 years ago), he didn’t release it until his post-9/11 album “The Rising” in the summer of 2002, and the resonances for a nation still mourning were obvious.

The second stanza truly hits home:

Around here
Everybody acts the same
Around here
Everybody acts like nothing’s changed
Friday night
Club meets at Al’s Barbecue
The sky is still
The same unbelievable blue.

Why? Because every New Yorker who remembers the morning of Sept. 11 will tell you that detail. The sky above was exactly what the lyric calls it: unbelievable. Even if you lived far away (I did), the video of the day shows it all the same. A perfect fall day in New York can still bring back the memory in a hurry. When on your way to work or play, you look up and remember: the same unbelievable blue.

The lyrics otherwise give us another reminder of 9/11, though: the memory of the first responders. Springsteen’s narrator is a somewhat bewildered hero reckoning with a situation whose details still haunt him. He’s the guy in the title, the “Nothing Man.” It doesn’t sound all that flattering at first listen. To be honest, he sounds like one of T. S. Eliot’s famous wraiths from a century ago:

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men.

But the “Nothing Man” is not hollow: He just is reckoning with some action that he doesn’t fully understand, something that made him an unwitting icon for the souls he saved. St. Paul would understand, as today’s first reading makes clear. You can be the most powerful or charismatic or physically elite person you know, like the athletes Paul mentions next in Corinthians or like the gifted preachers and orators found in the marketplace. What makes you a true hero is when you empty out who you are, surrender what you have, for the sake of others. We have a model for that in Jesus, of course, and Paul uses these and other terms to describe our savior in 2 Corinthians and in Philippians. But Paul also tells us today that we can see him as trying to follow that example too. The implicit message is that we can do the same.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, first responders from all over the city rushed to the World Trade Center to try to save others—literally racing to what would in many cases be their own death. We have those images burned into our memory too—the men covered in dust and sometimes blood, the dead priest carried from the ruins by the firefighters whom he stood shoulder to shoulder with as their chaplain. Twenty-five years later, their families and relatives, their friends and surviving colleagues, the rest of us too, honor their sacrifice. It was not kenosis, of course, in the Christological sense, but their casting off of their own lives for the sake of others was a participation in the good work of the Kingdom nonetheless.

Let us pray with them today, a quarter-century after their sacrifice, and ask them to pray for us. And let us honor their heroic lives in the words of St. Paul but also in the words of Bruce, who sang of these blue-collar heroes in his own memorable verses:

You can call me Joe
Buy me a drink and shake my hand.
You want courage?
I’ll show you courage you can’t understand.

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