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It
was a beautiful, crisp fall morning. I remember thinking how I really
didn’t want to go inside on such a day—blue skies and
golden leaves just have that effect sometimes. But leaving it all,
I entered the building and went to my desk. Seconds later, I stared
at the computer screen in disbelief as the slow-loading CNN homepage
read: “NYC Under Attack—Story To Follow.” I don’t
even recall jumping up and running to the television; all I really
remember is that the beautiful autumn day faded into the darkness
of 9/11.
For
those who lived during the Sixties, where you were when JFK was
shot was the defining moment in our shared national story. But when
the Twin Towers fell, that beautiful and horrifying fall day in
September became our new consciousness. All of us know where we
were that fateful morning.
It was as if Jeremiah were speaking through us that day when we
“looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to
the heavens, and they had no light.” (Jeremiah 4:23) The whole
world seemed to grow dark—physically dark—and with Jeremiah
the doom of prophecy was ours. The events of 9/11 ushered a new
reality into our consciousness: a world torn apart by religious
war, rhetoric, and a growing sense of isolation. Despite being more
connected than ever through the web, email, and cell phones, all
of a sudden we were intimately aware that we were globally fractured
and that our planet was hanging in the balance.
Anxiety could have become our diet. There was so much bad news to
feast upon that after a while, despair could have become our only
meal. The voices of prophets calling in the wilderness seemed to
be saying that a new, terrible, beast-like world was coming into
view. It seemed that cynicism and despair were the new themes of
our lives.
Yet destruction is not the last word, either for us or for the prophets.
We saw destruction when the planes tore apart the blue sky and terror
rained upon New York, Washington, and in a small field in Pennsylvania.
But we witnessed hope when firemen and women ran into smoldering
buildings, when police officers stood atop rubble searching for
survivors, and when countless men, women and children started showing
up at Ground Zero with water, food, and a listening ear. The tears
of destruction had fallen upon our faces but the cries of hope had
risen out of all our despair.
Paul Tillich asked in his sermon The Shaking of the Foundations,
published in the aftermath of World War II,
How
could the prophets speak as they did? How could they paint these
most terrible pictures of doom and destruction without cynicism
or despair? It was because, beyond the sphere of destruction,
they saw the sphere of salvation; because, in the doom of the
temporal, they saw the manifestation of the Eternal.*
The
calling of 9/11 is to see ourselves and the world more clearly,
to accept the faults of our current lives and to let the day be
a sign of the temporal crumbling of the world. But the call of the
temporal crumbling must also live within the voice of the eternal
now—the call to the salvation that God is working within our
lives in the midst of the rubble, dust, and grime that comes to
God’s world.
We
must allow the hard, difficult moments of crucifixion to be real,
but not so isolated that we fixate upon them and miss the song of
God’s faithfulness, of God’s symphony of resurrection.
The temporal day of 9/11 is not an invitation from the doomsday
prophets to get stuck on Good Friday. No, the call of 9/11 is a
call toward the salvation of God that only comes when we are able
to accept the difficulty of “deep gloom that enshrouds the
peoples” (Isaiah 60: 2) coupled with the incredible hope of
“the Lord as our everlasting light.” (Isaiah 60:18).
Can 9/11 be a difficult, crumbling day of despair and at the same
time become a day of salvation? Can we live with the knowledge that
our lives always teeter on the brink of death and destruction but
on the cusp of resurrection and new life as well? Can we, in the
midst of destruction and rubble, see through “the crumbling
of a world [toward] the rock of eternity and the salvation which
has no end?”*
*Quotations from Paul Tillich,
THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons 1950), page 11 |
