When we speak about sacrifice, we like to wrap it in reassuring words – words like “inspiration,” “courage,” “honor,” and “personal strength.” We dress it up in symbols and stirring orations. The photos of our contemporary martyrs tend to show them smiling, eternally young and strong. In reality, sacrifice can involve choking, blinding, acrid smoke – and searing temperatures that cause sweat to pour into the eyes and under a person’s clothes, which weigh down the limbs and chafe the skin. Sacrifice can demand a full-tilt sprint up flight after flight of concrete steps, while the person’s calves and thighs ache and tremble from the effort. Sacrifice allows for no coffee breaks, no hot showers, and no quick snacks to revive lost energy. In the end, sacrifice can crush the life out of a person’s body and leave the person alone, anonymous, buried so deeply under rubble that it takes six months for anyone to find the body.
Sacrifice is a terrible and ugly thing. Where can a person find the strength to lay down the comforts, the basic human needs, and the one and only precious life anyone ever receives?
The story of 24 year-old Welles Remy Crowther provokes us to ask these questions. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was at his desk on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, where he worked as a securities trader, when American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. As the injured and frightened survivors of the initial crash waited to be evacuated from the 78th floor sky lobby, Welles appeared and told them he had found a staircase. He gave a series of instructions, including, “Follow me. Only help the ones that you can help…” He brought them down to meet up with firefighters on the 61st floor. Once he knew they were safe, he raced back up the stairs to rescue more people from the 78th floor. An eye witness, Judy Wein, told her husband that Crowther worked to put out fires and tend to the wounded. Then he said, “Everyone who can stand, stand now. If you can help others, do so.” After leading survivors to the stairway, Crowther turned and went back into the smoke and heat to try to rescue more people.
Less than an hour later, the South Tower collapsed. When Crowther’s father, Jefferson Crowther, saw the tower collapse he said that his first impulse was to immediately fall to his knees and pray, “Dear God, take me, now. Leave him here. Take me now!”
How significant that a young man who gave his life in exchange for others was raised by a father whose first instinct is to offer his own life in exchange for his son’s!
The capacity to offer a gift of self can only be born from witnessing someone else whose generosity outshines the ugliness, the toil, the pain, and the loss that always color the experience of sacrifice. Not only must we see someone else who takes on discomfort – with evident joy! – in order to ease and assist the lives of others, but if we want to learn how to live the beauty and joy of sacrifice, we must begin to try it and then practice it often. If sacrifice does not become a habitual orientation in reality, when an opportunity for heroism and the ultimate sacrifice arrives, we face it unprepared.
Crowther’s body wasn’t discovered until March of 2002. No one knew he’d given his life in order to rescue others. His parents were filled with questions and had no answers until they recognized a detail in Judy Wein’s account of her rescue: that the young man who had assisted her wore a red bandana over his face as protection against smoke inhalation. This red bandana was a kind of “signature” or transitional object that Crowther carried with him at all times. His parents dug deeper, showed the survivors a photo of their son, and received confirmation that he was, indeed, the one who had rescued twelve people on 9/11.
ESPN created a documentary, The Man in the Red Bandana, which makes much of this object, seeming almost to imply that the red bandana, like Dumbo’s “magic feather,” was the source of his strength. Perhaps the fact that his father had given him the bandana did allow Crowther to feel his dad’s presence through his gift.
But if others want to participate in the beauty of Crowther’s ability to sacrifice, tying red bandanas around their skulls won’t give them the strength needed to lay down their lives for anyone. We will only be able to perceive and to partake of the beauty that Crowther responded to if we make a habit of choosing the good of others over our own comfort or rest or pleasure. And we must begin today. Start small. Give it a try.