On September 11, Chaplain Janet Horton, a colonel in the US Army (and a Christian Scientist), ministered to victims in the heart of Washington, D.C., after hijackers flew an airplane into the Pentagon. She was at the opposite end of the building when the plane hit. Here, Chaplain Horton shares her experience and her prayers both the night before, and the day of, the attack.
The night before the attacks, as I was walking home from the Metro, I felt a tremendous urging to pray about thunderstorms that were coming on. There was a great deal of rolling thunder, thunder, thunder. I remembered that Mary Baker Eddy once told her students to pray about the weather, especially about there not needing to be any extreme or disastrous effects from storms.See lrving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1996). pp. 269,275 . See also We Knew Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1979), p. 193.
It came to me with startling clarity that severe thundering might represent a type of thought. When I asked God to help me know what to pray about, the answer came with clarity and force—that storms can represent the gathering of malice. So I prayed with the idea from Science and Health that evil is neither a person, place, nor thing.See Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, p. 71 . The full passage reads: "Evil has no reality, It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense." I also thought about the fact that evil's only power is to destroy itself.See ibid., p. 186 . It was hard to feel that I had prayed enough, however. It just seemed like I needed to keep praying. So, when I went to bed that night, even though it was quite late, I continued to pray.
