09/11/2024
On this day in 2001, Brian Sweeney was a passenger trapped on hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, which was heading straight for the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Facing this unimaginable fate, he reached out to his wife with a final message through the plane’s seatback phone.
“I just want you to know I absolutely love you,” Sweeney told his wife’s voicemail. “I want you to do good, go have good times. Same to my parents and everybody, and I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get here.”
Imagine the terror of that moment 23 years ago. The context of his call could not be more extreme. Yet Sweeney’s words reflect not panic, but calm. Not fear, but love. It calls to mind what Marcus Aurelius wrote in book 1 of Meditations, where he notes the most important lessons he learned throughout his life and the people who taught him those lessons. It was from his teacher Sextus, Marcus writes, he learned “to be free of passion and yet full of love.”
Hearing Sweeney’s voice come through the phone there’s not a trace of frenzy or terror. It’s free of passion—free of anger, free of despair, free of everything except love. Because love isn’t just an emotion—it’s a courageous force that drives out fear, sharpens resolve, and fills us with purpose. “Pure love,” Seneca said, “careless of all other things, kindles the soul.”
So today, on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, let us, as Marcus said and as Sweeney was, be full of love.
Let us tell those we love that we absolutely and totally love them. Let us answer with love to every situation and problem we face. Indeed, there is almost no situation in which passion helps, but almost every situation is made better when it is full of love.
