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MEDITATION ON EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Psalm 46 God is, for us, refuge and strength. God is. For us. Even though, this week, the twin towers crumbled, and the nation shuddered, and airliners roared and flared into instruments of carnage, and our hearts trembled with the surging grief, and there seemed to be no place of safety, God was present, God is present in the midst of it all. Does the Most High cause devastation on the earth? No! God makes wars to cease. "Throw down your weapons, they are of no use, they offer no protection, only I can overcome this horror," proclaims The Almighty. God Most High is with us. The God of our ancestors is our security. I do not know what losses you may have suffered on Tuesday, September 11th. My deepest sympathy goes out to all who have been bereaved. To the best of my knowledge no one I knew personally died on Tuesday. Yet all of us, astoundingly all of us, it seems, have been stumbling around in that state of numbness that visits itself upon those whose loved ones have died. We have troubling concentrating. We are easily impatient. Our arms and legs and shoulders feel heavy. We weep, unexpectedly, at odd moments. We need to talk about it. "When did you hear?" What were you doing?" "Did you know that Bill was supposed to be on the plane from Boston, but he got to the airport 5 minutes late?" "My daughter works-worked-at the World Trade Center, the 39th floor. But Tuesday she was working in her Brooklyn office. She phoned at 9 a.m. to say she was safe, but Andy-11-years-old-her son, my grandson, his school is right there by the twin towers. All of us waited for news of him, or his school. We waited all day. Finally she called again with the good news: Andy and all his classmates had been evacuated right away, and they had walked and walked, all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then the teachers had started phoning parents." Those were some of the questions and stories I've heard the past few days. The hours and hours of TV coverage brought us close to the uproar, the chaos, the realities of fantastically hot fire and air thick with smoke and ash, streets and sidewalks crowded with people running away in terror, and rescuers racing toward the ruins, and no way to know who was safe, who was trapped, who was dead. We tuned in again and again, some of us just stayed tuned in, taking in the personal interviews, the cataloguing of details, the visual reminders that this was real: part of the Pentagon is smashed; the New York skyline is altered, there are tons, literally, of rubble in the streets. And then there were the bizarre and terrifying moments of clarity through technology. The man in the Bay area who has his wife's voice on their home answering machine, telling him a bomb has gone off in the tower, she doesn't know if she can make it out, she loves him. The man who phoned his wife from his office on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center just after the first airliner hit the building, saying, "Something major has happened; we don't know what it is; we were going to evacuate but now people are saying to go back to our offices; turn on the TV; see what you can find out." She ran to turn on the television, told him that, yes, there was live coverage, a plane had hit the building, and then she saw the second plane heading toward the second tower, "There's another plane on the way, get out now!" The phone calls from the passengers on the four airliners. Those on the 4th plane learning what had already happened in New York and Washington and quickly assimilating the inevitability of their own death, then taking action to avert greater catastrophe, bringing the plane down in rural Pennsylvania, rather than on Pennsylvania Avenue. I didn't cry until Thursday morning. It was just a paragraph in the Chronicle that set me off-part of an article profiling some of those who had died on the California-bound planes. This one was about the man who was flying to Los Angeles to visit his son before the son's classes began at UCLA. I read the words, "I know my Dad loved me more than anything," and I totally lost it. I understood those words, and that love, and my breath became jagged with the realization that it could have been me, or my daughter, or my mother. We hear about wars and hurricanes, we read about car bombs and military coups, mostly without being viscerally engaged. But we know what it's like to go to work in an office building in a big city in the United States. We know what it's like to get on a plane. Will we ever again walk the halls in a skyscraper without imaging the floor giving way beneath us, or a blast out of nowhere slamming us across the room? Will we ever again take our seats on an airliner and fasten our seatbelts and try to ignore the safety demonstration without our hands getting clammy and our hearts racing; will we be on our feet ready to tackle the first passenger who walks past us on the way to the bathroom? Acts of terrorism capture our imaginations, hold them captive. Beyond the sheer awful weight of the devastation, in addition to the pall of grief, those of us who survive are at risk of being invaded by nightmares and possessed by fear. At risk. But not doomed. There is a force more powerful than fear, more tenacious than terror. There is courage that propels firefighters, police, and volunteers into the howling face of danger in hopes of saving just one life. There is comfort from the wider world: demonstrations of support in Berlin, monks chanting, sirens of solidarity in Korea, respectful moments of silence in Greece and Poland, Finland, Yemen, Kenya, and Iceland, statements of condemnation of terrorists from Pakistan, Palestine, and Iran. There is compassion that rises up closer to the surface of our skins, that responds to the haunted glances of strangers, that embraces acquaintances who talk and weep at the coffee shop. There is tenderness and thanksgiving, for those we love-touches extended, messages sent. Billy Graham referred to the terrorists' intention to cause division among our people and how that was being thwarted by the unity that was swelling up instead. His message echoed the words that Joseph spoke to his brothers as recorded in the book of Genesis. When Joseph's brothers, who had plotted to kill him, who had abandoned him in a pit to die, came to him years later, Joseph said to them, "Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God?.....Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good..." [Gen. 50: 19-20] Does God cause devastation? No. But even the greatest mayhem can be faced, the greatest evils vanquished by placing our trust in the Holy One who shows us the path to life, the God whom we identify as Love. A firefighter, exhausted, sleeping just two hours a night since Tuesday, took a brief break, said he'd be fine in a moment, but that he wouldn't be satisfied until somewhere else in the world there was a scene like this one. A close friend and astute lay leader in the Conference remarked, "My own feeling is at times like these I believe in the Old Testament Warrior God." But it's that "warrior God" who is very clear that only God can sort out the good and the evil, that human weapons provide no security or protection. On a September day over 35 years ago I stood transfixed in front of a grainy TV screen and received my introduction to terrorism. At that time of great turbulence in the United States-politically, socially, racially-a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning and 4 girls were killed. Denise MacNair was one of them. Her father was interviewed by TV reporters. There was a flurry of questions. "Do you want to see your daughter's killers brought to justice? Do you hate all white people for what these men did? Will you seek the death penalty for them if they are found?" Mr. MacNair spoke to the heart of the matter from the heart of his pain and his convictions: Of course I want the killers brought to justice-who could bear to leave them free to do this again? But to have them executed? What would be the point? Their deaths will not bring our children back to life. The only way we could inflict upon them the suffering we are enduring would be to kill their children-and then truly we would all have gone mad. Charles MacNair's reaction to his all too intimate exposure to terrorism, gives us good counsel today. Bring those responsible to justice. But if we, in turn, destroy their loved ones, their neighbors, their country-people who had no part in the attacks, then we will ourselves have become terrorists. Nor will our retribution bring back those who have died. There is a force more powerful than fear, more tenacious than terror. It frightens even us who are believers with its implications, with its claims upon our actions, with its counter-intuitive applications. Yet we can sense the deep wisdom in acknowledging the need to rid the world of terrorists while not becoming terrorists ourselves. God is, for us, refuge and strength. Not hard-edged revenge, or wanton killing rage. God is, for us, refuge and strength. God is. For us. Amen. |
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