For Jews, the sacred memory of the Exodus is not a quaint recalling of some event in hoary history, but rather an active and eternal commandment to “know the heart of the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The sacred memory of liberation produces a religious life in which the suffering of people anywhere must be relieved in order to remember the event.

For Christians the sacred memory of the life and teachings of Jesus is not the mere recalling of a Galilean carpenter, but rather an active and eternal commandment to try to love the way he loved.

For Muslims, the sacred memory of Muhammad is not the empty recitation of an ancient life but rather the active and eternal dedication to a life of piety that includes charity ( zakat ) as one of the Five Pillars of Islam. Muhammad becomes a prophet not because of ancient wisdom in a book but because his ancient wisdom inspires in all true Muslims current sacrifice and daily compassion.

And so it is also with Buddha and the Jains, with Joseph Smith and with Guru Nanak. In every religion, sacred memory transforms what we know into what we do.

And for those with no strong ties to organized and ancient faiths, the memories of 9/11 can also be sacred—even if they do not lead to God or traditional faith. The choice is the same. We can remember what happened on that day in a thin and fruitless recounting of death and destruction, or we can make of that day a mandate to action that will both honor the dead and protect the living.

I have no desire to know what remembering 9/11 might make us know. I care only for what the sacred memories of 9/11 might make us do now and into the far future. What might that be? Above all I believe it comes down to one active and eternal commandment: we must remember the names of our enemies. The only consequence of these past five years that I would label as actually obscene is the tragic tendency of ideologically blinded Americans on both the right and the left to view each other as the main enemy while viewing all the assembled forces of Islamic fascism as merely an inconvenient distraction. What we remembered on 9/11 must remain personal and private, but after 9/11 we must remember that our enemies are the ones who want to kill us. Our fellow Americans—of all political stripes—are not the enemy.

I am embarrassed to say something so banal and simple, but I say it because forgetting the real names of our real enemies is the only way we can lose this war. There is an old Masai saying, “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable, but sticks alone can be broken by a child.” In the five years since 9/11 we have become unbundled. We have not become completely unbundled and we have not become, I pray, irrevocably unbundled, but our bonds of patriotism and affection have loosened. To place blame for the unbundling of America would violate my message and my ministry. Suffice it to say that there is blame enough to go around. The point is that we must come together again now, or all the ceremonies of this past week will be just hollow words.

Abraham Lincoln, at the conclusion of his first inaugural on March 4, 1861, gave voice to the American healing needed then—which is precisely the same healing America needs now:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

In the spirit of Lincoln, I offer this prayer for America in 2006:

May the better angels of our nature help us to find each other. Together as a nation of neighbors let us prepare for the difficult days ahead in this struggle for life over death, for freedom over fanaticism and for security over fear. With a respect for dissent founded upon a common and declared patriotic unity, let us respond to the call of sacred memory. Let us speak the name of our enemies with resolve and the name of our country and all its inhabitants with a bundled love.

Amen.