Where was God on 11 September?
James Martin – The Tablet - 7 September 2002
The terrorist attacks on the United States a year ago branded horrible images on to the world?s consciousness. How to come to grips with the mystery of evil and redeem those memories? An associate editor of America magazine seeks an answer.
A FEW days ago in midtown Manhattan, not too far from the offices of the Jesuit weekly America, I bumped into a tourist looking for some sightseeing advice (a common enough occurrence in New York City). What, he wondered, were the most important sights that one should see in New York? I asked where he had already been. “Let’s see”, he said, as he adjusted a heavy black camera bag slung over his shoulder, “I’ve done Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Ground Zero and Times Square.”
I remember blinking in disbelief, amazed at how quickly the area around the World Trade Centre, which only a year ago was a place of limitless suffering, had been folded neatly and apparently effortlessly into one tourist’s list of ‘Things to Do’.
For most Americans, one year after 11 September, the events of that day resist such easy assimilation. The thousands who lost relatives or friends in the collapse of the towers, in the attack on the Pentagon building in Washington DC, or in the crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, still face crushing personal grief, made all the more difficult by the violent and public nature of these deaths. The thousands who narrowly escaped injury as the Twin Towers collapsed, or who raced to escape the choking wall of dust that swept through lower Manhattan, still have to deal with terrifying memories of a near-death experience. Those who were working or shopping in the city that morning, who watched two low-flying aircraft knife through the skies, who stood transfixed on the sidewalks watching buildings collapse, or who, panic-stricken, joined the crowds fleeing uptown, also have to deal with images and memories that are burned into their minds. Finally, the millions of Americans who were riveted to their television sets that day, or who pored over the newspaper and magazine accounts in the months afterwards, now question the hitherto assumed safety of their nation.
These are only a few of the concentric circles of sadness, shock and unease drawn by the attacks of 11 September. Within each of those circles are many thousands of more personal tales of grief, unique, private and often incommunicable.
There is, however, one reality with which almost every American has had to grapple: the experience of looking evil in the face. In a television interview, Mgr Lorenzo Albacete, a theologian and writer in the New York archdiocese, stated that when he saw the burning towers he knew instinctively he was witnessing what Pope John Paul II referred to in another context as the mysteriuminiquitatis, the mystery of evil. Most Americans would agree.
The terrorist attacks were without parallel in the United States and, indeed, the world. At times, however, American commentators spoke as if this were the first time that sudden and violent deaths had occurred on such a scale. Indeed, one disturbing aspect of the public discourse in the following days was a solipsism evidently born of insularity and ignorance. One wondered: had the American public reflected as deeply on other recent disasters around the world, the genocide in Rwanda or the civil war in Sudan, for instance? The answer, sadly, was no; many had not. One was reminded of a young person with no previous experience of suffering suddenly being confronted with news of a friend’s illness.
Overall, Americans, a famously religious group, seemed during the past year to grapple less with the question of evil as such (most believers intuitively understand this can have no satisfactory rational answer) than with a slightly different one: where was God in all of this?
Numerous responses to this question have been given over the past year. Let me offer two: an answer embraced by the general public, and an answer of a more personal nature.
In the public arena, the response most often cited to the question ‘Where was God?’ came through stories of self-sacrifice: the saga of the heroic passengers on Flight 93, who prevented the hijacked plane from reaching its intended target in Washington DC, and most especially the tales of the fire-fighters who selflessly rushed into the doomed buildings.
It was clear that something in the American psyche responded strongly to the story of the fire-fighters. Over and over again, one heard people referring to the image of the rescue workers racing into the burning buildings of the World Trade Centre, ready to lay down their lives, even as others fled. There was even a photograph, widely circulated in the media that showed just that: a young fireman, burdened with his heavy gear, labouring up a staircase, as others made their way down. It was an arresting image that seemed to shock people into reflection.
The image was shocking, I believe, because it was profoundly counter-cultural. In American culture, the self is pre-eminent, celebrity and fame are pursued, and money is the ultimate (if not the only) measure of success and worth. But the fire-fighters’ actions flew in the face of these values. The men who raced into the Twin Towers, at risk to their own lives, were unconcerned with self, not seeking fame, and willing to perform heroic deeds without the promise of reward. Their actions were so deeply counter-cultural that they shocked us.
Moreover, the stories of the fire-fighters spoke to the part of us that recognises the deeply Christian image of the one who lays down his life for others. It is not difficult to draw a clear, bright line from rescue workers moving towards almost certain death in order to save others, to Jesus of Nazareth offering up his life for the salvation of mankind.
This is not to say that the rescue workers who lost their lives at the World Trade Centre were all saints. But that is the point: they were everyday human beings showing us the way that God loves. And something in us instinctively responded to these images of the divine, in the same way that we respond to a parable. God, I believe, was revealing himself in a clear way during a time of intense sadness and confusion.
A parable, wrote C.H. Dodd, the Scripture scholar, is ‘a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, that leaves the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application so as to tease it into active thought’. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was impossible to explain, except with stories. So he offered his followers parables. Jesus’ story of the woman and her lost coin, of the shepherd and the sheep, are parables for his times drawn from his times: designed to teach listeners about God, about selflessness, and about love.
The story of the rescue workers at the World Trade Centre is a parable for our times offered to us by God to teach us about selflessness, and about love.
A more personal answer to the question ‘Where was God?’ came as I worked, alongside many of my brother Jesuits and other volunteers, with the rescue workers at Ground Zero in the weeks following 11 September. It is probably simplest to say that my primary experience was that of a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit.
What do I mean by this? Only that anyone who set foot within the perimeter of the rescue effort, cordoned off by chain-link fences, felt an overwhelming sense of community, of concord, of charity. Here thousands of people were united in a common effort of charity. And the feeling of charity was so palpable, and the fruits of these efforts so good, that I ascribe this to the Holy Spirit drawing people together in a time of intense sadness and in a place of enormous suffering.
Let me offer one illustration. For the first few days after I began working at the ‘site’, as it was called, many of the rescue workers had been encouraging me to eat on a certain cruise boat docked on the Hudson River by the World Trade Centre. Mostly rented by local corporations, these boats ferry passengers around the harbour for daytime and evening parties. At the time, one of the larger ones had been donated to the relief effort as a dining facility. It was certainly the best place for a hot meal and a chance to relax, but I had intentionally avoided it: I was loath to use something that had been set up for the workers. But having worked at the site for a few days, my fellow Jesuits and I felt we were becoming part of the community, and decided to give it a try.
That morning the line of workers waiting to get on to the boat snaked around the dock. They stood in the bright sunlight, patient, talking, in small groups of like professions. After a half-hour’s wait, we climbed aboard the metal staircase and were directed into the main dining area. Decorating the walls of the dining room were paper posters made by American schoolchildren. In red, white and blue, with flags and eagles and drawings of the World Trade Centre, they were similar to others that had been posted around the site. My favourite was from a third-grade schoolgirl to the ‘fire-fighters’ that read: ‘I am sure that whatever you are doing right now you are helping someone.’
The main dining room, warm and redolent of lasagne, roast chicken and coffee, was filled with hundreds of workers clustered around dozens of round tables: fire-fighters eating with government officials, police officers passing sodas to iron workers, counsellors breaking bread with search-and-rescue teams, military policemen making room at their tables for a Red Cross counsellor, truck drivers offering to get a cup of coffee for a physician.
It was a strangely beautiful sight, and I was shocked to be put in mind immediately of a theological image: the kingdom of God. It was strange to be reminded of something like this in a place of such suffering and misery, but the image was unavoidable. Here were people eating together, working together, talking with one another, sharing their stories, encouraging one another, united in a common purpose of charity. It was difficult not to see it as a sort of Eucharistic meal, a breaking of bread in the spirit of sacrifice and remembrance. At the very least, it was a room suffused with the Spirit of God.
For me, therefore, the question ‘Where was God?’ was not difficult to answer. It was not an abstraction. Here was God, in this room.
Disembarking from the boat after lunch, by the way, I turned around and noticed the name of the cruise line, emblazoned on the side of the boat: ‘Spirit Cruise’.
One of the more remarked-upon items at Ground Zero was a piece of wreckage from the towers: two huge steel beams that had fallen from a great height and lodged themselves in the pile of rubble. The two beams were in the unmistakable form of a cross. Perhaps it is not surprising that out of thousands of connected steel beams there would be one such shape found amid the wreckage. Nevertheless, it was quickly seized upon as a sign for the rescue workers of God’s presence. Masses were celebrated underneath it; photographs were tacked on to it; people prayed in its shadow. It still stands.
The cross is an apt symbol for the events of 11 September, but so is another Christian symbol, an even more mysterious one. It is found in the sacrifice of the fire-fighters and police officers who offered their lives for others, in the loving charity of the rescue workers and in the promise of new life that one felt each day at Ground Zero. That symbol, of course, is the resurrection.
James Martin’s book, Searching for God at Ground Zero, is just published by Sheed & Ward, US (UK dist. Columba Books).
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