UCF September 14, 2003
© Rev. Sally B. White

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was living in California. By the time I woke at 6:45, the first plane had already hit the World Trade Center, and the day’s horrific events had begun to unfold. By the time I turned on the radio in my kitchen, to keep me company as I made coffee and washed dishes, newscasters were struggling to remain calm, factual, up-to-date and accurate. For what seemed like a long time, I could not comprehend the words I was hearing: fire raging in one tower of the World Trade Center. A second airplane flying into the second tower. The first tower beginning to collapse.

And I said: No. Surely not. Never.

Hoping to find that what I was hearing was some sort of War-of-the-Worlds radio drama, I turned on the television – and found no comfort. On one channel, then another, were the unbelievable, inescapable pictures. Seeing, I began to believe. Believing, I heard reports of another plane, hitting the Pentagon in Washington. And a fourth plane, somewhere to the west. It hadn’t yet crashed in Pennsylvania. I anticipated a rolling wave of attacks, moving westward: Chicago, then Denver, then San Francisco.

And I said: No. Surely not. Never.

My first reaction was disbelief. The second was panic – overwhelming, then quickly stifled. And then the calm set in. Buttressed no doubt by shock, I took a deep, calming breath and began to think how to prepare for the unforeseeable events of the day ahead.

Certain that I needed to be at church, at work, I spent the day at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, which sits on a hilltop overlooking the bay and the city of San Francisco. It was many hours before I could tear my eyes away from the sight of the City, and my mind away from the dreadful expectation that I might, at any moment, see columns of smoke rising from her hilltops and beautiful buildings.

I daresay none of us will ever forget our experience of that day. I daresay the images, and the feelings they evoked, are almost literally burned into our very souls, and we have been changed forever. Summoned by time, and by words and music and silence, I suspect that those memories may be surfacing in you now, rising up through the calm and competence with which you have faced and functioned through the two years since September 11, 2001. Take a deep breath, and let the memories come. Greet them gently. Take a moment now, in the stillness and safety of this sanctuary, to hold and to honor your memories and your reactions, whatever they were then, whatever they are now.

Blessed be your memories, and your responses, then and now.

Three days after the events of September 11, President George W. Bush spoke during a national day of prayer and remembrance service at the National Cathedral in Washington. On the morning of Friday, September 14, 2001, he observed: "It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves." The remark has stayed with me in recent days.

In times of great adversity, and surely these are such times, the most immediate effect is to lay bare our deepest selves. We are stripped down to the very bedrock of our knowledge of who we are, and how the world works. If only for an instant, we confront the deepest truths we know.

These deepest truths lie at the heart of our understanding of the world, and how it works, and how we fit into it. These deepest truths are at the roots of our religious natures, and they constitute, for each one of us, the most basic elements of our theology. Everything else that we know, and everything that we do, hangs on the simple structure of what we fundamentally believe about the world – our theological cosmology.

President Bush’s remarks at the National Cathedral continued with these words: "In this trial, we have been reminded and the world has seen that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave." He lifts up the nobility of our national character, and examines it against the backdrop of a theology of human fallibility and surrender. In his words,

God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own, yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral are known and heard and understood.

There are prayers that help us last through the day or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey, and there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own.

This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end, and the Lord of life holds all who die and all who mourn.

This statement is significantly tempered from the President’s immediate reaction, heard in his first public statement on the morning of September 11. In brief remarks upon arrival at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, he cast the events of the day in much more confrontational terms, saying: "Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts. … The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But …we will show the world that we will pass this test."

Speaking in the name of the United States, President Bush has used similar language again and again, as we moved through the initial days and weeks of disaster response, to the issuing of "specific demands" to al-Quaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and subsequent military action there, and then to similar demands and military action in Iraq.

The metaphors that have informed much of our public language, and shaped our public understanding of the situation and the appropriate response, point to a starkly dualistic picture of the universe and how it works – a theology of good and evil locked in struggle, with no middle ground and no room for compromise.

Such a clear and unambiguous theology offers the comfort of simplicity. It is easy to locate oneself and one’s responsibilities in such a world. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," said the President to a joint session of Congress – and to the world – in September, 2001 – and that theme has echoed through much of public discourse ever since.

It is also an effective leadership tool, serving to unify and focus widely diverse groups in common opposition to a common threat. "Us" against "them" works well to rally defensive energy, whether the arena is politics, business, sports competition or war. And, even more importantly, it points to a course of action (working to defeat "them") which is a powerful antidote to the sense of helplessness, and a powerful channel for the anger, outrage, and fear that that rose up in – I daresay – virtually all of us, in the face of September 11, 2001.

Such a stark, dualistic picture is clearly present in many people’s theology, as revealed by our responses to September 11. But it is important that we not stop there. By September 14, and even by the evening of September 11, 2001, the President began to articulate a theological stance which is more tempered, more complex – and more demanding, in terms of response and responsibilities. I referred to it earlier as a theology of human fallibility and surrender; an acknowledgement that the structure and the workings of the universe are much more complicated than we can easily (or perhaps, ever) understand, especially if we rely on reason alone. Thus, much of what we experience just doesn’t make sense – not airplanes flying into buildings, not fear or hatred that rationalizes the sacrifice of innocent human lives – not even death, or suffering, or adversity itself, if we are honest with ourselves. In the face of our confusion, a transcendent and wiser God may be invoked – a "Lord of life [who] holds all who die and all who mourn."

The existence of suffering and evil has challenged theologies and theologians for millennia. Buddhist cosmology, of course, is predicated on the understanding that "all life is suffering." And central to Christian theology is an understanding of sin and salvation that encompasses people who make small and large mistakes all the time, and a God who forgives, and an imperative that sincere and faithful Christians also work to forgive – to forgive themselves, and one another, and even those who seem to be strangers, or enemies.

The notion of forgiving is undeniably problematical, especially when we feel that we have suffered an undeserved hurt. In the ordinary course of our lives, we construe forgiving to mean that we convince ourselves that the offender didn’t really mean it; that whatever was done to us was really not that important; and that if and when we forgive, we are then honor-bound to forget – to go on into the future as though the wrong had never happened. Furthermore, in the ordinary course of our lives, forgiving is seen as something we do to and for others, although it may confer upon us reflected glory, or at least an appearance of virtue. L. William Countryman, an Episcopal priest and the author of Forgiven and Forgiving call this "forgiveness as melodrama – a complicated competition for moral superiority based on who feels the right way and who doesn’t." (Forgiven and Forgiving, p.8)

Those in any faith tradition who teach forgiveness must first counter these common resistances. The first chapter in Countryman’s book, then, is titled "Why Forgiveness?" and he sets the stage with the words that Julianne read to us; his second chapter is called "Forgiveness – Not Quite What You Thought." An article in the February, 2002 issue of Yoga Journal raises a series of questions under the headline "Should You Forgive the Unforgivable?"; questions that range from "Should you even be thinking of forgiving? Is it unpatriotic?" to "Doesn’t forgiveness weaken the will to respond, and isn’t it seen as helplessness by those who perpetrate such acts?" to "What about your anger, fear, and sorrow? What about all those thousands of lives lost and their devastated families? Isn’t even thinking about forgiveness disrespectful of them?" (p.59)

Yoga Journal suggests that forgiveness "is not about helplessly accepting, giving up, surrendering to defeat, being weak, or avoiding the cost of justice. It is about how you hold in your heart a terrible wrong while you act in the world to correct that wrong and try to prevent it from happening again." (p.59)

And it illustrates this with a story about two Tibetan Buddhist monks who encounter each other some years after being released from prison where they had been tortured by their captors. "Have you forgiven them?" asks the first. "I will never forgive them! Never!" replies the second. "Well, I guess they still have you in prison, don’t they?" the first says. (p. 59) A world filled with such unforgiving people would look much like Grudgeville – and feel much like a prison.