Where were you when John Kennedy was shot, we once asked each other? Today, we ask where were you on 9/11?
I had gone early that day to the grocery store to get eggs and milk. I stood on the line at the checkout counter and I glanced at the tabloids. One displayed a picture of a bullfrog and a distraught woman lying next to it in a hospital bed. The headline read, “Woman Gives Birth to Frog.”
I thought the tabloid’s claim was goofy enough to provide grist for a playful essay if I could shape the story into some kind of spoof on America’s insatiable appetite for sensationalism. Going home, I played with the idea. At home my wife, Jo, was watching television. She rarely turns the TV on before evening, and she looked troubled. I knew something was wrong. She told me about the felling of the twin towers.
Quite literally, out of the clear blue and in seconds the illusion of my country’s invulnerability was shattered. We were not the world’s ultimate sanctuary anymore. America officially joined the league of wounded nations.
After personal and national crises, memories dim over time. A few incidents will remain vivid. I recall three from 9/11.
I read an account of how two women jumped from one of the burning towers. If there was a photograph of their jump I never saw it. I could only imagine it. The account told how they were holding hands as they leapt. There was something horrible about it, and at the same time somehow poignant and tender in the image that my mind’s eye conjured up of the two women falling to their deaths. In the face of death they held hands, an act that is one of our more tender expressions of love and intimacy. Knowing you are dying is terrifying enough. To be alone in that knowledge is more terrifying. I hoped they found some comfort in each other’s presence. At least they had one another. They were not alone.
On a different note, I recall sadly how two days following the attack televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were interviewed. They declared how they were praying for victims, statements we expect from celebrity clergy. Falwell, however, went on:
“The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this . . . throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad . . . I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the America Way, all of them who try to secularize America, I point the finger to their face and say you helped this happen.”
Robertson totally concurred.
Some might say Falwell and Robertson’s comments were naive if not insensitive. I thought they were far more than that and deeply troubling. It seemed to me that they had coopted the occasion of America’s suffering to forward their case against those who differed with their moral agenda. It was a transparent exercise in the blame game while at the same time positioning themselves on the moral high ground. The Christian message, as I understand it is radically different. It calls us to bring in the Kingdom of God, to strive for a world where compassion, justice and love guide our dealings. If I were to take Falwell and Robertson at their word, they are portraying their God as one more moral policeman in the vast pantheon of the world’s gods who have punished offenders with violence while rewarding the righteous with protection.
The problem? Their god is angry and vengeful, and ironically exactly like the tribal god that the Islamist extremists worship, a retributive god of vengeance who uses violence as the instrument for establishing conformity.
The tragedy of 9/11 with all its violence and suffering only underscores how destructive this kind of religion can be. Religions like this legitimize and cultivate what’s the worst in us; our proclivity to blame and to punish the “others” with whom we are at odds or do not understand while at the same time feeling righteous.
Jesus’ appeal to the world “to love one another as I have loved you” has been a tough sell from the start. Some expressions of Christianity haven’t made it any easier to embrace. What we desperately needed on 9/11 wasn’t vengeance and blame, but to hold each other’s hands and mourn together.
I have one fond memory left from that day: I saw on television that the Statue of Liberty still stood. She’s symbolic about what’s best about America, the benevolent gatekeeper welcoming the stranger. She has certainly offered refuge to the tired and hungry but also to secularists, pagans, women who’ve chosen abortions, feminists, gays and lesbians. Lady Liberty doesn’t moralize, she’s compassionate. I was relieved that she was still there in the harbor and standing tall. I can’t believe for a minute that her inclusive message ever made God mad.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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