10th Anniversary of 9/11
Don’t you
sometimes find it irritating when you are quite clear what punishment is
appropriate for a crime only to see the judiciary get it wrong yet again? Last
month’s riots provided an incredible range of views from petitions demanding
that those involved must lose their homes and benefits through to protests
outside Brixton prison against unnecessary criminalisation and harsh
sentencing.
Take time to
think about it all in a Christian context and you can find yourself even more
annoyed to think that God may have different standards of judgement to many of
us as well. Our readings carry warnings against instantly turning to what seems
the obvious reaction to a certain incident, there’s a real chance that it will
be a wrong choice if we don’t stop to think what God wants for the world.
Take the
parable that Jesus tells about the forgiven slave. He’s relieved that his
master has showed extraordinary generosity in forgiving his considerable debt
so he decides to use this opportunity to get himself financially secure for the
future so he never finds himself in such a sticky situation again. Instead of
spreading the generosity and forgiveness he had benefited from, instead of
learning what forgiveness in action looks like, he aggressively pursues the
debt he is owed to the dismay of his fellow slaves. They report him to the
master who then holds him to his own standards until the debt is repaid.
Talking of
debt there’s a man called Larry Silverstein whose company paid The Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey
$3.2bn dollars for a 99 year lease of the World Trade Centre site just 6 weeks
before the horrific events that unfolded on September 11th 2001.
Quite rightly
the focus was solely on the human loss and suffering caused by the19 hijackers
who flew planes into the two towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon
not forgetting the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania as passengers attempted to
overcome the terrorists.
Yet as time
passed it became increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that beneath all
this pain and tragedy something was going to have to be done with the 16 acre
site in downtown Manhattan,
one of the world’s most valuable pieces of real estate.
There are a
huge number of stories about the individuals caught up in the events of 9/11,
Silverstein himself was nagged by his wife to keep a medical appointment that
morning but would otherwise have been in the World Trade Centre as he was most
other days. An old school mate of mine was unusually away from his office that
morning as well.
Whilst
fortune favoured a few it’s hard to know exactly how the vast numbers who lost
love ones felt once the situation hit home and their grief became a daily
reality. The obvious reaction for many is to declare war on the perpetrators of
the acts of terror, to do anything else may have felt unnatural. How could such a course of action, motivated
by a desire to protect loved ones, values and civil society be the wrong one? It’s
so hard to know whether all that has been done since, much of it at great cost
to our armed forces and their families, really has been the right course.
There seems
little logic to the attacks carried out, whilst the buildings were capitalist
symbols can you imagine for a moment that the terrorists had sincerely
investigated what they were being brainwashed into doing. They appear guilty of applying their own
version of a bitter and ill considered justice, one which doesn’t line up with
the God that most of Islam recognises. There’s a message to us all to use our
brains our bible and to have a true desire for justice which God will recognise
if we are not to follow a similar course.
Were their
targets described to the terrorists as loving parents enduring the daily slog
to support their families, were they told that they would be attacking the
citizens of 90 different countries not just the USA, would they have considered
that dozens of Muslims would be killed including a pregnant woman and some who
died trying to rescue others. Were they told that there would be inevitable
suffering over many years for large numbers of innocent citizens of Islamic
countries as a result of their actions? It seems impossible to consider such
things as a compassionate human being, let alone before God and still pursue
such an evil course.
I’m not sure
that we will ever truly understand the minds of the terrorists and it will take
many years before the reaction to these attacks can be rationally considered in
the context of history.
Several years
after the events Sally and I took the children to New York. As well as doing all the typical
tourist stuff we visited St Paul’s
chapel which had served as an emergency centre immediately following the
attacks. Inside the church there were still tributes to the 343 fire fighters
who lost their lives in the events. The thing that I shall always remember was
the incredible range of foreign sounding names. Surely it was a sign of hope
for the future that such a cross section of humanity had died working together
to do all they could for their fellow human beings at their time of greatest
need.
A priest
ministering to rescue workers described their work as selfless, considerate and
loving, recalling this time as one of the most profound experiences of the Holy
Spirit he had ever experienced.
He stated that ‘all of their work, of course, was
deeply informed by the sacrifices that had already been made by the
firefighters and rescue workers who gave their lives as they raced into the
burning buildings on September 11. For me, it was as if God was offering us a
parable. In the Gospels, when people asked what God or the Kingdom of God is
like, Jesus offered them a parable, a story drawn from nature or everyday life
to help them understand things more deeply. Jesus would say: God is like the
father welcoming back his son. Or: God is like a woman sweeping her house.
And here was God offering us a parable today. As I
looked around at the rescue workers, I thought, what is God like? God is like
the firefighter who rushes into a burning building to save someone. That's how
much God loves us. And I saw this love expressed in the great charity of all
the rescue workers who gathered at the American Golgotha.’
Outside the church we also visited the ‘Bell of
Hope’ a bell cast at Whitechapel bell Foundry which was sent to the people of
New York from the people of London on the first anniversary of the attacks,
part of the inscription reads ‘forged in adversity – September 11 2001.’
It’s become a symbol of solidarity and
rememberance for all who suffer and we were not to know that it would be rung
for our own victims of the London 7/7 bombings in 2005 as well as attacks in
Madrid, Mumbai and Moscow and most recently the victims of the Norwegian
attacks.
If we go back to the Genesis reading we heard that
Joseph’s brothers treated him terribly, in their case they can reflect that
whilst their annoying spoilt little brother irritated them their
disproportionately angry actions were totally wrong. They therefore find it
hard to believe that he can forgive them and that they can have a future
together.
The bell of hope will toll today as it has on
every anniversary of September 11. It’s up to us whether the hope for a better
future becomes a reality. If we can see that God loves us enough to run into a
burning building we know that he also wants all his people to share in a hope
that brings life out of death. He calls upon us to show that love cannot be
destroyed by the evil acts of a minority.
The terrorists who committed the acts of evil on
9/11 are our fellow human beings, even though a more distorted example it is
hard to imagine. The process of reconciliation can only start when we are able
to recognise them as such.
The grief, pain and anger of all who have suffered deserve to be
respected for what they are in each individual’s case.
For many it
will be too much to expect us to follow Jesus parable, recognise the debts owed
to a God who loves us without limits, who has forgiven us without limits that
we might forgive others out of our gratitude. Yet this is what we are called to
do.
At ground zero Larry Silverstein has finally got
planning permission for redevelopment of the land he bought with the first new tower
up to 66 floors already. At age 80 Silverstein laughs as he says’ he doesn’t
have a clue’ what the financial returns will be. Circumstances have changed and
he’s most interested in seeing a gaping hole filled both economically and
physchologically. It’s an important element in the long term healing process.
I sense that God see’s a gaping whole too, between
faiths and nations and it’s for us to consider how we try to bridge this and
the shared future which will result.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment