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.
Not a single person refused prayer.
The next morning, I got a call to go to the dental clinic for an appointment in a distant part of the Pentagon building. I'd had the strong intuition to take the Full Text Edition of the Christian Science Quarterly Weekly Bible Lessons with me. When I saw the attacks in New York on the television at the dental office, I took out the Lesson and began praying with the Bible passages in the fifth section, in particular. I also affirmed and reaffirmed all that had come to me the night before. The plane hit the Pentagon 20 minutes later.
Everyone was evacuated, and the authorities weren't letting anyone back in for any reason. Then they formed medical teams to go get people out. I said to another chaplain beside me, "We need to have chaplains in there with those medical teams so that we can pray for those people!" It took several tries, but eventually someone let us in.
As this was going on, I went in my prayers to these two sentences from Science and Health, which were also in the Bible Lesson: "When man is governed by God, the ever-present Mind who understands all things, man knows that with God all things are possible." And, "To reduce inflammation, dissolve a tumor, or cure organic disease, I have found divine Truth more potent than all lower remedies." Ibid., pp. 180–181. It just kept hitting me that Truth was more potent than all other so-called powers. It could reduce inflammation, which I thought of as the rampant fear the attack had induced. It could dissolve a tumor—the hardened hate behind this act. It could heal organic disease—an organization of hate.
As I talked and prayed with the wounded, I was struck with the fact that not a single person refused prayer. I stayed with the fifth section of the Lesson, reading Bible verses like these to the victims: "For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed;" "Unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings;" and "I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord." Mal. 3:6 and 4:2; Jer, 30:17.
Sometimes I'd substitute the person's name in a passage to bring its truth home. Or I'd hold someone's hand and read, always from the printed Lesson I'd happened to have with me, "The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds..."Phil. The individuals seemed to get such a feeling of calm from these messages. Some repeated Psalm 91 with me; with others, I prayed the Lord's Prayer. I also shared this paraphrased line from a hymn: No terror shall confound you, with God at your right hand.See Christian Science Hymnal, No. 77 . They really responded to that.
I was praying with a young man who had jumped from a second-story window to avoid being burned by the fire. He was very distraught and initially couldn't feel his legs, even though the medical team was cutting away his socks and pant legs to splint both legs.
As we prayed, he calmed down. I emphasized to him that nothing could separate him from the love of Christ. Neither height nor depth, nor things present, nor things to come.See Rom. 8:38. 39 . He also prayed the Lord's Prayer and 23rd Psalm with me. When the medical team was moving him onto a litter to load him into an ambulance, he began to exclaim loudly, "Ouch!" Dried prickly leaves were sticking him in the back of one of his legs. There was a moment of joy and recognition as he, the nurse, and I all realized he was now feeling his legs!
After four hours, most of the casualties were out of the building. As I stood there in the area, I kept affirming that there was no reason that there should be a large effect from this attack. Originally, it was predicted that there could be far more casualties in the Pentagon. Roughly 25,000 people work in the Pentagon; that's similar to the population in one of the twin towers of the former World Trade Center. Thankfully, the huge number of losses that could have occurred in D.C. didn't happen.
In the face of what seems to have been a well-thought-out attack, it strikes me that evil really is unintelligent. It can only imitate intelligence. But it's not actual intelligence, because it's not based on divine Love. It's not based on the truth that God is good and that one good never comes at the expense of another.
One of the lessons for me in this was the importance of having prayed the night before, when I first got the intuition about malice. I was also struck by the timeliness of that week's Bible Lesson. The Bible verses I read to the wounded couldn't have been more appropriate. In fact, when the chief of chaplains and a speechwriter for the President learned that I'd been reading from something as I ministered to the victims, they both asked what it was. I sent them the Bible passages and explained that the Lesson they'd come from had been prepared months earlier. Both were astounded that something prepared so far in advance could be so perfectly suited to that day's need.
I've learned from this experience that God communicates to us what we need to know. Prayer and spiritual study prepare us to be receptive to what God is telling us. And it's so important to ask: Are we listening? I know many reporters described this scene as hellish, but people acted in an orderly manner and with great dedication.
