Category Archives: Terrorism

“We must learn to forget revenge”—Thinking about Gaza

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Palestinian Christian girl in Ramallah (May 1989). I photographed her on Easter Monday 34 years ago. Does she have children? Are they safe? If we could see every face as an icon of God, peace would come.

“[A] contemplative politics will be one that is capable (as seems so unthinkable in public life at the moment) of recognizing and naming our own failure, the hurt done as well as received, and the perpetual slippage toward violence.”

— Rowan Williams [i]

“It is not easy / To believe in unknowable justice / Or pray in the name of a love / Whose name one’s forgotten: / … spare / Us in the youngest day when all are / Shaken awake, facts are facts, / (And I shall know exactly what happened / Today between noon and three) …”

— W. H. Auden [ii]   

After the unspeakable savagery of October 7, how can anyone think? The violence is too visceral, the wound too deep. Dispassionate discourse on causes and solutions risks sounding cold and inhuman amid our “tears of rage, tears of grief.”  Susan Sontag tried it after 9/11: “Let’s by all means grieve together,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what’s happened.” [iii] Sontag’s cool detachment was widely criticized for being tone deaf to the moment. I will try not to be; forgive me if I fail. I have wept and prayed over this violence, but here I want to reach toward lucidity. And hope.

I’m admittedly no expert on the complex region and its conflicts. I was in the “Holy Land” for 40 days and 40 nights in 1989 and for 3 weeks in 1991, primarily on pilgrimage. But I spent some memorable time with Palestinians, and had an illuminating day with human rights advocates in Gaza—it looked like a war zone even then, with overturned trucks and ruined buildings. The Anglican Al Ahli Arab Hospital had performed 79 surgeries in a single day that month. But the day I visited the number was only 4: two for gunshots, two for beatings. I still can’t imagine the effect of living with so much death and violence year after year.

My only personal intifada moment came when I was videotaping a burning tire in an empty square in Ramallah. Two armed soldiers appeared out of nowhere, demanding to see what I’d shot, in case I’d caught the protesters on tape. Fortunately, my footage only showed the tire. I did not want to be the cause of anyone’s arrest.  

President Biden called Hamas’ sadistic violence “an act of sheer evil.” Only the heartless could disagree. The question now is: What do we—Israel, the United States, the Arab states, the whole human race—do about it? South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said, “Level the place” (meaning Gaza). He might as well have said, “Let’s be stupid together.” There are two million inhabitants in Gaza (half of them are children), and the indiscriminate mass slaughter of innocent and guilty alike would not eliminate terror, but only metastasize it. For terrorists, the blood of the “martyrs” is the seed of future violence. 

Sabir was 12 years old when I photographed him in 1989 at the Anglican Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. He had a plastic bullet in his chest, but his spirit was strong, perhaps defiant. He would be 46 now. Was he destined to become a warrior, or did he find another path?

Many of us think of terrorism as an interruption of a normally peaceful world. Terrorists see conflict as a perpetual condition, and insist that their violence, whatever its methods and goals, is in response to something they didn’t start. For a very long time, the Middle East has suffered a seemingly endless cycle of violence and vengeance. To call the attack of October 7 “unprovoked” or “out of the blue” is a case of willful ignorance. It is in fact a particularly monstrous continuation of the cycle. Recognizing historical context in no way justifies the sickening barbarism of specific cruelties, but if we want to find a way forward we need to do better than just point fingers. As the Bible warns, “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves” (I John 1:8). 

The human rights consensus is that Netanyahu’s years-long blockade of Gaza has been a form of apartheid, an attempt to confine Hamas, whose declared aim is the destruction of Israel, within the Gaza Strip’s narrow boundaries. Tareq Baconi, president of the board of a Palestinian think-tank, believes that October 7 has undermined any illusions about the sustainability of that approach:

“The scale of the offensive and its success, from Hamas’s perspective, mean that we’re actually in a new paradigm, in which Hamas’s attacks are not restricted to renegotiating a new reality in the Gaza Strip, but, rather, are capable of fundamentally undermining Israel’s belief that it can maintain a regime of apartheid against Palestinians, interminably, with no cost to its population.” [iv]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism, sees the malign ineptness of Netanyahu’s “strongman” regime as playing its own part in the crisis by oppressing Palestinians and weakening Israeli consensus. Many Israelis wish him gone. The Prime Minister, she writes,

“did not seem to care that empowering his far-right extremist partners (his Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Givr, has been convicted of supporting terrorism) to try and realize their fantasies of a Jewish ethno-state and West Bank annexation could have dangerous consequences for the nation. 

“With a two-state solution off the table for Netanyahu, repression of Palestinian human and political rights has been the default solution, along with giving Palestinians some limited economic benefits. That this was not tenable did not interest him. That typical authoritarian rigidity and hubris is why former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon told Le Figaro that Netanyahu’s government bears ‘a large part of the responsibility’ for creating a climate that Hamas judged propitious for an attack.” [v]

Rob Rogers, “Innocent Civilians” (TinyView.com, Oct. 12, 2023)

Israel, of course, is not alone in its need to reassess the policies and paradigms of power for the sake of justice and lasting peace. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says, we all need to come to terms with “our own failure, the hurt done as well as received, and the perpetual slippage toward violence.” Or as Auden put it, we need to be “shaken awake” and forced to face facts. It is simply not possible to unremember “what happened between noon and three” (the Crucifixion) and what will happen again and again until we choose a better way. 

During last week’s terror, the latest issue of the New York Review of Books arrived in my mailbox. The first article I saw, Suzy Hansen’s discussion of writer Phil Klay, opened with a paragraph that seemed made for the moment: 

“The act of killing people was once taken so seriously, Phil Klay writes in Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, that after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, a Penitential Ordinance was imposed on Norman knights: ‘Anyone who knows that he killed a man in the great battle must do penance for one year for each man that he killed.’ Klay, a forty-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, considers such rituals beneficial not only for the psychological health of soldiers but also for their communities, because after a war the traumatized perpetrators ‘must reconstruct a view of faith, society, and ethics that will not merely collapse into the emptiness of the evil they have faced.’ A nation left flailing in the emptiness of evil becomes one in which that evil never ends.” 

Whether we are Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Russians, or citizens of the American empire, we are implicated, directly or by proxy, in perpetual global conflict, where the only true winner is the technology of violence—along with the few who profit by it. In Hansen’s words, the rest of us are “prisoners of that global technological warship that is always on the move.” 

How do we say no? How do we jump that warship? As Hansen reminds us, 

“The war on terror devastated entire countries, caused the deaths of millions of people, and turned tens of millions into refugees; countless more people were imprisoned, maimed, tortured, or impoverished.”

We might add to that distressing number the 30,177 American soldiers and veterans of the war on terror who have committed suicide over the last 20 years. A soldier quoted in Klay’s Uncertain Ground suggests a cause for such despair when he wonders, “Have I done an evil thing?” [vi]

Are the policy-makers and war-makers similarly troubled? Do they ever have PTSD after the harm they do? Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant” is doubtful on this point. The poem’s last line exemplifies the fatal disconnect between the performative emotions of the powerful and the suffering they either cause or ignore. Whether or not the tyrant weeps, the children go on dying. 

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets. [vii]

Matteo di Giovanni, The Slaughter of the Innocents (Siena Cathedral floor,1481)

In recent days, thousands of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, which is under a state of siege. The severing of access to food, water and electricity is in itself a death sentence for many, especially those in hospitals. Al Ahli Arab Hospital, where I photographed 12-year-old Sabir in 1989, was struck by a bomb as I was writing this. It has been sheltering people displaced by the war, and the number of dead is thought to be around 500.

Israeli forces are preparing for a bloody invasion of Gaza, but there is a glimmer of hope in recent diplomatic moves to secure humanitarian aid and evacuation of civilians, and to win release for hostages. Even so, many more innocents are going to die, along with countless combatants. This war will win nothing but more rage and more tears.

Pete Seeger once said, “We must learn to forget revenge.” In a New York Times op-ed last Sunday, “What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?”, Nicholas Kristof told of meeting “a woman named Sumud Abu-Ajwa, whose home had been damaged by bombing in 2014 and whose husband had been injured and whose children were hungry.

“Do you want Israeli mothers to suffer like you?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she answered. “I hope God won’t let anyone taste our suffering.” [viii]

Jacopo Pontormo, The Deposition from the Cross (Santa Felicita, Florence, 1528). “The Christian’s response to the pain of another is as instinctive and non-negotiable as the mother’s involvement in the child’s suffering. And in this light, sin becomes a refusal to be touched by the pain of others.”
— Rowan Williams

Nothing but evil can come from feasting on revenge. Any further slaughter of the innocents will only produce more rage, more retaliation. So what to do? In the short term, work to free the hostages and aid the desperate. For the long term, practice justice, renounce oppression, and work for peace. Make space for one another. Trade tribalism for human solidarity. See God in every face.

As we approach All Hallows (November 1), the creative folly of saints comes to mind. Keeping their eyes on the prize, they refused the well-worn schemes of a death-haunted world in favor of practices shaped by divine love: self-forgetting and self-offering. Take St. Francis, for example, who went to Palestine during the Crusades. Making his way to the war zone, he crossed the battle line, unarmed, to seek out the Muslim leader, Malek el-Kamil. The sultan received him courteously, they had a friendly conversation about God and, it is said, Francis took time to say prayers in a mosque. “God is everywhere,” he told the sultan. 

I wish I could say that the example of St. Francis so moved the hearts of the adversaries that they laid down their swords and shields to live happily ever after. Alas, not so. But we still treasure that story for the day when the world might actually be ready for such holy wisdom. 

During World War II, when the Christian intellectual and activist Simone Weil was working in the London office of the French Resistance, she proposed a plan to parachute hundreds of white-uniformed nurses onto battlefields, not only to tend to the wounded but also to provide an image of self-sacrificial goodness in the midst of cruelty and violence. She herself wanted to be in the first wave of this non-violent invasion. In submitting her plan to the Free French authorities, she made a visionary argument:

“There could be no better symbol of our inspiration than the corps of women suggested here. The mere persistence of a few humane services in the very center of the battle, the climax of inhumanity, would be a signal defiance of the inhumanity which the enemy has chosen for himself and which he compels us also to practice … A small group of women exerting day after day a courage of this kind would be a spectacle so new, so significant, and charged with such obvious meaning, that it would strike the imagination more than any of Hitler’s conceptions have done.” [ix]

Charles de Gaulle thought her quite mad, and her plan of course went nowhere. What would happen if we tried such a thing in Gaza? God only knows. 

Yes, I can imagine what you’re thinking. But if I haven’t lost you by now, let me offer one final example of holy folly. 

In the 1990s, a community of eight French Catholic monks lived in the mountains of Algeria in a time of civil war and terrorist violence. Their monastery was at the edge of a poor Muslim village, where they lived in harmony with their neighbors, providing the only accessible health care. As the surrounding political violence escalated, the monks were warned by the government to leave the country. But they felt called to remain among the people they served, despite the high probability of martyrdom. Despite their own fears.

Their abbot, Dom Christian, wrote a letter to his family in Advent, 1993, two years before he and his brother monks were beheaded by terrorists. Anticipating his own martyrdom, he insists to his loved ones that he is not exceptional, since so many others in that land were also at risk.

“My life,” he wrote, “is not worth more than any other — not less, not more. Nor am I an innocent child. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have the presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon … and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity him who would attack me…”

What an extraordinary thing to say: Here is a good and humble and holy man confessing his own complicity in the evils of the world. And what does he hope for? He hopes for the presence of mind, in the very moment of being murdered, to ask forgiveness. Forgiveness not only for himself, but for his killer as well. 

The end of his letter is addressed not to his family, his loved ones, but to the stranger who will one day kill him, the stranger whom he calls “my friend of the last moment.” 

“And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father.” [x]

Dear reader, imagine that!

Palestinian Christian girl, Ramallah (May 1989). “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1)

[i] Rowan Williams, Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 194. Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, goes on to say that “we can perhaps begin to understand why Evagrios can say that apatheia, our liberation from defensive and aggressive instinct, is the gateway to love—as well as to a justice that has some claim to be a little more transparent to the just vision that God has for the creation.”  

[ii] From “Compline,” the penultimate poem of Auden’s Horae Canonicae (the Canonical Hours, which take us through successive portions of one particular day: Good Friday).

[iii] Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001.

[iv] Bariq’s organization is Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He was interviewed for The New Yorker by Isaac Chotiner: “Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here” (Oct. 11, 2023):  

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/where-the-palestinian-political-project-goes-from-here

[v] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “What Will Be the Destiny of Netanyahu?” (Oct. 12, 2023): 

https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-will-be-the-destiny-of-netanyahu

[vi] Suzy Hansen, “Twenty Years of Outsourced War,” New York Review of Books (October 19, 2023), 26-28.

[vii] Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant” is rendered in a plaintively sung version by Tom Rapp under the title “Footnote” (Pearls Before Swine, These Things Too). That’s where I first discovered it 50 years ago, and that last line still haunts me.

[viii] Nicholas Kristof, “What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?”, New York Times (Oct. 15, 2023)

[ix] Simone Weil, quoted in Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 155. For more on Weil and war: https://jimfriedrich.com/2022/03/01/we-must-love-one-another-or-die-what-does-the-iliad-tell-us-about-the-invasion-of-ukraine/

[x] The full story and its texts may be found in Bernard Olivera, How Far to Follow? The Martyrs of Atlas (Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1997). The story is also beautifully and movingly told in the film, Of Gods and Men (2010), directed by Xavier Beauvois.

“The only solution is love”—Remembering 9/11

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A decade ago, the 10th anniversary of 9/11 fell on a Sunday when I was the preacher. The Scriptures for that day were strikingly apt, a divine Word spoken directly to us in the turbulent here and now. The questions which 9/11 raised about the American future—and the human future—have not gone away. They have only grown more urgent. The text of my 2011 sermon is below.

9/11 Memorial & Museum, NYC. Virgil’s words from the Aeneid were forged from steel remnants of the Twin Towers by Tom Joyce. The background—2983 unique shades of blue painted by Stuart Finch— is entitled, “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning.”

It was one of those perfect late summer mornings, the sky above an impossible blue, the city below humming with life. Suddenly, without warning, the world ended in smoke and fire and falling dust. 

On that day, a great city, and all of us who watched at a distance, suffered a kind of violence strangely new to American experience. In an instant we became citizens of an unfamiliar, nightmarish world. As a Catholic poet noted at the time, on 9/11 “the united states of america spent a night and a day in beirut… walked the length of somalia… entered the gates of auschwitz.” Or as the writer Don DeLillo said about this demise of American exceptionalism, “Parts of our world have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage.”

On the 10th anniversary of that terrible day, the Lectionary speaks to us with an eerie timeliness. From the Hebrew Scriptures, we hear the story of the Red Sea, where Pharoah’s entire army is drowned by an act of God. 

Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians;
and the Israelites saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.

Thousands dead. An act of God?

Now the miraculous deliverance of unarmed slaves from a pursuing army that wants to slaughter them is not the same thing as deliberate acts of violence committed in God’s name. The Red Sea was not an instance of religious terrorism. But the Exodus passage does raise the uncomfortable topic of sacred violence, where God, whether by proxy or direct intervention, saves some and lets others perish. In God’s defense, such actions are always on the side of the powerless and the oppressed in the Bible. As we recite in the Magnificat at Evening Prayer:

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.

We find a lot of this casting down in Revelation, a book written to encourage persecuted Christians: Don’t worry. The day is coming when mighty Rome will fall. While consoling to the downtrodden, this is not good news for the powers that be. The 11th chapter delivers this chilling line: the time has come to destroy those who are destroying the earth.(Rev. 11:18). 

These words express the eschatological hope for a better world, but they sound uncomfortably close to the kind of writings that informed the pious, angry young men who hijacked those planes to strike a blow against “godless” modernity. 

John Brown, painted by John Steuart Curry in 1939. After visiting the 9/11 Memorial in 2019, I saw this unsettling portrait at the Whitney Museum. The accompanying commentary strikes a chord in the America of 2021: “Brown’s crazed expression suggests the messianic fervor and wrath that fueled his opposition to human bondage through armed rebellion.”

A critical examination of sacred violence—the blood on religion’s hands—and the way such texts are countered with more life-affirming scriptures—these are complicated subjects for another time. For now let us simply note that passionate religious certainty, and the tendency to escalate difference and conflict into a cosmic struggle between good and evil, is not exclusive to the jihadists. We can find it in our own scriptures. 

On a different day, the Red Sea story might be a joyful celebration of God’s defense of the powerless, or an image of baptismal passage through the waters of death. But on this day—ten years after 9/11—it may simply want to pose a troubling question, lest we be too eager to say that God is on our side. We can’t just dance with the Israelites anymore. We must also weep with the Egyptians. 

A litany published the week after 9/11 embraces this inclusiveness, affirming that Jesus is carrying the “dead, the wounded, and those who mourn; the killers and those who were killed; the frightened, the angry, the sorrowful – Jesus is carrying all of this, all of us, every part of us, into the loving heart of God.”

Our second reading offers the comforting assurance from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans that we hear every time we bury a loved one: 

Yet none of us has life in himself or herself.
If we have life, we are alive in the Lord,
and if we die, we die in the Lord.
So, then, whether we live or die, 
we are the Lord’s possession.

The shock of 9/11 inflicted enormous trauma upon the American people, a trauma that still lives in our bodies. We have never fully worked through the grief process, so eager were our leaders to launch into war, short-circuiting the work we really needed to do. 

A recent PBS documentary, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, explored a wide range of religious questions arising from 9/11. And one of the things people talked about in interviews was the presence – or absence – of God in the face of such evil and suffering. There were no easy answers. 

As one rabbi put it, “Since September 11th, people keep asking me, ‘Where was God?’ And they think because I’m a rabbi, I have answers. And I actually think that my job as a rabbi is to help them live with those questions. If God’s ways are mysterious, live with the mystery. It’s upsetting. It’s scary. It’s painful. It’s deep. And it’s interesting. No plan. That’s what mystery is. It’s all of those things.”

The rabbi goes on to say that he resists any answers that get God off the hook, because “right now, everything is on the hook.”

And yet, wherever or whatever God may be in this, and whether we find ourselves among the living or the dead, we always remain inside the divine mystery, enfolded in the loving arms of God. If I make the grave my bed, you are there also, says the Psalmist. Only such a faith can deliver us from the icy grip of fear and dread. 

Martin Johnson Heade, Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859 (detail). Painted on the eve of the Civil War, the figure peers into the imminent darkness with extraordinary calm.

Today’s final text is from Matthew’s gospel, and what a gospel it is for September 11th! “How long should I keep forgiving, Lord?” And Jesus says, “Oh, about a billion times.” The text actually says seventy-seven, or in the math of King James, seventy times seven. But the point is: stop counting. Don’t keep track. Forgiveness isn’t a one-time transaction; it’s a practice, a way of being. 

We exist to forgive, to reconcile, to mend, to heal— 
generously, unreservedly, endlessly.

A recent feature film, Of Gods and Men, tells the true story of eight French Catholic monks who lived in the mountains of Algeria during a time of civil war and terrorist violence in the 1990s. Their monastery was at the edge of a poor Muslim village, where they lived in harmony with their neighbors, providing the only accessible health care. As the surrounding political violence escalated, the monks were warned by the government to leave the country. But they felt called to remain among the people they served, despite the high probability of martyrdom. Despite their own fears.

Their abbot, Dom Christian, wrote a letter to his family in Advent, 1993, two years before he and his brother monks were killed by terrorists. Anticipating his own martyrdom, he insists that he is not exceptional, since so many others in that land were also at risk.

“My life,” he wrote, “is not worth more than any other — not less, not more. Nor am I an innocent child. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have the presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon … and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity him who would attack me…”

What an extraordinary thing to say: Here is a good and humble and holy man confessing his own complicity in the evils of the world. And what does he hope for? He hopes for the presence of mind, in the very moment of being murdered, to ask forgiveness. Forgiveness not only for himself, but for his killer as well. 

The end of his letter is addressed not to his family, his loved ones, but to the stranger who will one day kill him, the stranger whom he calls “my friend of the last moment.” 

“And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father.”

Such faithfulness to the way of Jesus is sheer nonsense to the world, and perhaps to many Christians as well. 

How dismal a contrast we find in the official government reaction to 9/11, when our leaders, most of them Christians, set out to hunt down and kill the “evildoers.” Their violent, retaliatory response bequeathed a dark legacy which continues to poison our common life: the politics of fear and division, the launching of endless war, the shameless profiteering that feeds and encourages armed conflict, the stain of Guantanamo and the worldwide network of secret prisons, and the outrageous authorization of torture as national policy. 

In an article entitled “Did Osama bin Laden Win?” —written just after bin Laden’s death—Mark Sumner offers the analogy of the human body’s autoimmune system, where the worst damage is not done by the original disease, but by the overreaction of “the same systems that fought off and destroyed the invader. Long after the bacteria is excised by the body,” he writes, “the damage lingers.” Then turning to the overactive immune system that gave us two ruinous wars as well as the corrosion of the American conscience by torture and other public sins, Sumner points out that “it wasn’t bin Laden who did this. He could never do this. It’s our response to bin Laden. That’s what has already crippled us, and what may yet kill us.”

But there is an antidote for this poison, and it too rose out of the ashes of Ground Zero. A sample of this antidote is contained in a statement by the Catholic Worker communities of California ten years ago.

The Catholic Worker movement was co-founded by Dorothy Day, one of the true saints of the last century. As an eight-year-old child, she was in San Francisco during the great earthquake and fire of 1906. When she witnessed on the streets of San Francisco the same kind of care and camaraderie among strangers as we saw in New York after 9/11, she asked, “Why can’t people live like this all the time?” 

When she grew up, she explored that child’s question through a network of small lay communities who today continue to live among the poorest of the poor to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and visit the sick and imprisoned. 

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this is what the Catholic workers had to say: 

Even after all this… 

Our grief will not be short-circuited with cries of vengeance nor with acts of retribution. We will not cooperate with incitements to become that which we most oppose, namely perpetrators of violence. 

We will honor the deeper levels of grief, acknowledging the woundedness inflicted upon us, and the woundedness that our nation has inflicted upon others…

We invite you to participate with us in all our wildest dreams and visions for peace. For now we sadly know that our affluence, our power, our possessions cannot serve as protection from harm. We invite you to clamber off the wheel of violence. It is the only worthy legacy we can offer to those who have died…

We are Catholic Workers and we still believe… the only solution is love. 

More love, more love … the angels are calling: Oh children, more love. The love that birthed the universe into being and raised the dead. A love as defenseless and potent as Christ on the cross. 

You can’t build empires with it, 
but it is the only true way out of the abyss, 
the only antidote for evil’s poison.

We saw love at work in countless ways in the days after 9/11: 
So much solidarity, generosity, selflessness and compassion, 
so much courage and resilience, 
so much caring for one another. 

We’ve all been moved by the stories. One of my favorites is of a man in Manhattan’s Union Square. Just as people were filing out of a memorial service, he began to sing: “Start spreadin’ the news…” And one by one, others joined in, until hundreds of people were singing “New York, New York” at the top of their lungs, in streets still swirling with the dust of fallen towers. Who knew there was a resurrection hymn in the Sinatra canon?

Even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! But is this enough? Can love’s fragile flowers break the rocks in the desert of abandonment and lament? Can they get us through the time of trial? Can they deliver us from evil? I will let a New Yorker answer that question. 

At the end of the documentary, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, we hear several voices reflecting on the haunting televised image of two anonymous people, co-workers or strangers, we don’t know, who jumped together from the south tower. Just before they jumped, they reached out to take each other’s hand. Then they fell into space. Holding hands. 

For an unbelieving novelist in the film interviews, this was an image of human desperation and despair in an indifferent universe. For an NPR correspondent, the gesture of mutual touch was a frail sign of hope that we are not totally alone when we face the abyss. 

As we hear these voice-overs, we don’t see the image they are talking about. That would be unbearable. Instead, we are shown nighttime shots of the two vertical columns of blue light that shine every year on September 11th in the empty space left by the collapsed towers. Emanating from 88 searchlights aimed straight at the heavens, transparent twin towers: ghostly evocations of presence and absence, absence and presence.

The voices continue over these shots, and finally we hear from a Catholic writer, Brian Doyle, a New Yorker by birth. His words speak for all people of faith:

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met, and they jumped. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. 

It’s the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It’s everything we’re capable of against horror and loss and tragedy.

It’s what makes me believe that we’re not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them, like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe, against evil evidenced hourly, that love is why we are here.

Summoning the Sanity to Scream

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Painting by Richard Stott (June 13, 2016). Used by permission of the artist.

Painting by Richard Stott (June 13, 2016). Used by permission of the artist.

Investigators at the scene were overwhelmed by the sounds of endlessly ringing phones coming from the bodies, as people continued to call, hoping for their loved ones to answer.

— CNN

We rise and fall and light from dying embers
remembrances that hope and love last longer,
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
cannot be killed or swept aside.

— Lin-Manuel Miranda[i]

 

The Orlando massacre is the 179th mass shooting so far this year in the United States of America.[ii] It will not be the last. There’s too much madness, too many guns, too much hate to hope otherwise. We are angry and we are sad, but then what? Gun worship seems the most powerful religion in America. From presidents to schoolchildren, the blood of countless victims stains its altars. And however much we rage and moan we feel powerless to stay the hand of sacrifice.

Each time it happens, causes are discussed, solutions proposed, and we cry, ‘Never again!’ The pundits wring their hands, the NRA and gun-makers pause briefly to reload, Congress turns a blind eye, and then rat-a-tat-tat! More bodies strewn across our public spaces. The cycle repeats itself endlessly.

Why? Mental illness, social pathologies, alienation, racism, resentment, homophobia, hate, terrorism, profiteering by gun-makers, violence as entertainment, social media copycats, an American predilection for the quick fix and the fast draw—probable causes multiply exponentially.

Songwriter Dan Bern summarized the search for answers in his powerful “Kids’ Prayer,” written after the Springfield, Oregon school shooting in 1996:

And all the world descends to offer up their condolences
And offer up their theories what went wrong
And who and why and when and how:

It’s all the killing day and night on television
It’s all the movies where violence is as natural as breathing
It’s guns and bullets as easily obtainable as candy
It’s video games where you kill and begin to think it’s real
It’s people not having God in their lives anymore
Or it’s all of it, or none of it, or some of it, in various combinations …

As a hate crime directed against the LGBT community, Orlando adds a disturbing new dimension to the plague of gun violence. Whatever blend of madness and calculation drove the killer, he didn’t invent homophobia. He just fed off of it. It is still, sadly, in plentiful supply.

Decades ago, James Baldwin, who was both gay and black, wrote about the American capacity for self-delusion as to the extent of its own sickness. Facing up to our social pathologies, whether racism, bigotry, nativism or gun violence, would endanger the national myth of innocence. Better to remain silent and pretend everything is fine.

“But if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (I John 1:8). A sin unconfessed only makes us sicker. In a 1961 conversation with Malcolm X, Baldwin said:

If I know that any one of you has murdered your brother, your mother, and the corpse is in this room and under the table, and I know it, and you know it, and you know I know it, and we cannot talk about it, it takes no time at all before we cannot talk about anything. Before absolute silence descends. And that kind of silence has descended on this country.[iii]

In a gesture of protest, a Connecticut Congressman has vowed to abstain from the “moment of silence” which seems to be the only Congressional response to mass shootings. “Our silence does not honor the victims; it mocks them,” said Rep. Jim Himes.[iv]

Or in the words of Dan Bern, how many Orlandos will it take before we “summon up the sanity to scream?”[v]

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Note: The Pieta image is by British painter and Methodist minister Richard Stott, a member of last October’s Venice Colloquium. He painted it in response to Orlando. Thanks to Ric for letting me use it here. Check out his website, “I ask for wonder.”

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[i] Miranda delivered his “sonnet” during the Tony Awards, the night after the Orlando shooting.

[ii] Mass Shooting Tracker

[iii] “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” in Nobody Knows My Name, quoted in Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin and the Fear of a Nation,” The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2016, p. 42.

[iv] @jahimes, 5:45 pm, June 12, 2016

[v] Dan Bern, “Kids’ Prayer”

Keeping the faith in a time of terror

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The Deposition (early Gothic; Leon cathedral on the Camino de Santiago)

The Deposition (early Gothic; Leon cathedral on the Camino de Santiago)

Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

— Staretz Silouan[i]

Ah, children, ah, dear friends, do not be afraid of life!

— Fyodor Dostoevsky[ii]

How do we sing the Lord’s song in the shadow of terror? In solidarity with all the victims of Brussels and the whole human family this week, I protest, I rage, I grieve, I pray. But I must also try to think.

Indiscriminate terror has long been a scourge on this earth, but its globalization through television and social media has now made it emotionally inescapable. Were I to dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, I could not flee from its presence.[iii]

So as we try to absorb the terrible news from Brussels, how do we “despair not” even in the face of monstrous evil? No simple task, and easy answers seem disrespectful in the time of weeping. But I do believe the antidote to despair is to keep the faith. We must never forget the sacred story we belong to. Even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.[iv]

The terrorist, on the other hand, belongs to a story which for most of us in inconceivable. Terror is “the language of being noticed,”[v] a kind of performative rhetoric designed to bring a neglected or disregarded worldview into the open by subjecting others to the violent norms of its alternate reality. They see themselves as global victims, in search of a global audience for their cruel narrative. Mark Juergensmeyer, in his study of religious violence, explains this terrorist rationale:

If the world is perceived as peaceful, violent acts appear as terrorism. If the world is thought to be at war, violent acts may be regarded as legitimate. They may be seen as preemptive strikes, as defensive tactics in an ongoing battle, or as symbols indicating to the world that it is indeed in a state of grave and ultimate conflict.[vi]

In the minds of many terrorists, the war they are so eager to wage is apocalyptic, a cosmic conflict of good and evil in which there is no compromise or bridging of differences. They are, in Don DeLillo’s term, “lethal believers.” And the very worst thing we could do in response would be to play the part they have written for us: satanic enemies in a cosmic struggle. The proposals of certain American presidential candidates to “bomb the hell out of them,” or bring back the good old days of torture, would play perfectly into the terrorists’ hands, conceding the primacy of their deadly story.

However, I choose to belong to a better story, the one enacted and embodied in the powerful liturgies of Christ’s Passion. Step by step on the Way of the Cross this Holy Week, Christians will bring to mind and heart the saving journey which Jesus made, without weapons, into the abyss of suffering and death.

Renouncing all violence and hatred, Jesus remained faithful to the end. After pouring his whole life into a ministry of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation, he continued to show us the face of love even as he was tortured on the cross. “Father, forgive,” he said with his dying breath. To the last moment, in his most bitter hour, he remained the human who shows us God by doing what God does.

Which story do we choose to live in? The story of terror and violence, or the story of self-diffusive love? Both are costly in the end, but only one leads to new and unconquerable life. Even after Brussels, the word remains: Be not afraid! Love makes the abyss into a Way.

The cross shows us how it is possible to absorb evil and neutralize its effects, rather than pass on the anger and live in bitterness. Turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, giving away your coat to the robber who steals your shirt, loving enemies, doing good to those who hate, blessing those who curse us – all this turns out to be an intelligent and intelligible Christian way of living.[vii]

When medieval women mystics contemplated the cross in prayer and vision, they saw not death’s triumph but a kind of birth. The crucified Jesus was like a woman in labor, enduring pain and travail in order to bring us all to birth: Ah! Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw a mother suffer such a birth! For when the hour of your delivery came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross and … in one day you gave birth to the whole world.[viii]

To see such a death and call it birth is the central act of Christian imagination. It is why we declare victory at the cross. We don’t wait for Easter Sunday. We declare victory at the cross, because the Passion isn’t just a story about violent powers that always trample the weak and kill the prophets. It’s also a story about the Realm of God, where dry bones breathe and lost hopes dance, where the prodigal is welcomed home and the tears are wiped from every eye. The Love that makes such a realm was nailed to a cross, but was not consumed by it. Death did what death does, and God did what God does.

And on the outcome of that story, I stake everything.

 

 

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[i] Staretz Silouan (1866-1938) was a Russian monk on Mt. Athos in Greece. Appearing as an epigraph to Gillian Rose’s book, Love’s Work, I found this provocative saying in Andrew Shanks’ Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith (London: SCM Press, 2008), 9. Rose herself added this typically intense comment: “What Staretz Silouan is talking about is the subjective experience of God-forsakenness,” and even there finding God. “I want to sob and sob and sob,” she says, “until the prolonged shrieking becomes a shout of joy.”

[ii] From Alyosha Karamazov’s final speech in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991), 776

[iii] cf. Psalm 139:6, 8

[iv] Burial of the Dead, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, 499

[v] Don DeLillo, quoted in Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 ), 139

[vi] Juergensmeyer, 10

[vii] David Wood, in Consuming Passion: Why the Killing of Jesus Really Matters, eds. Simon Barrow & Jonathan Bartley (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007), 118

[viii] Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310)