Although it happened last Tuesday, it has been replayed on television again and again, and my mind and my soul refuses to accept it even now. One of the first names listed as confirmed dead was the Chaplain to the firefighters. The towers collapsed, taking with them the illusion that there was a chance that the swift, the lucky, the strong might have escaped from the carnage that once was a building. I find myself unable to think about the mall below the building, the subway stop below that, because I just don't want to let Michael go to work in downtown Boston. His building is a high rise. It is in line with Logan's runways. I cannot bear to face the threat of losing him as so many families have lost loved ones.
I ache, and I pray. Fear takes possession of my gut. Adrenaline makes me quick to anger. Reason argues against the insistence of my physical need for flight or fight. I walk fast along the Bike Path, walk a bit longer on the treadmill, and mull. And the questions come - over the phone, and the through my email, from friends, colleagues, family. Where was God? How could God let something like this happen?
Well, I know where God was. God was right there. There is no place where God is not, even in the midst of great tragedy, God is right there. God was with every person who died. God was unfailingly present with each one, and received their spirits into God's vast comfort. I can say this is true because that is the nature of God. It has nothing to do with the state of the soul of an individual. Human beings cannot deserve or earn the presence of God. It is a given.
Christian Scriptures tell us that Jesus said "I will never leave you or forsake you. When you have seen me, you have seen the Father. I go ahead to prepare a place for you-were it not so would I tell this to you?" God was right there. And I know what God was doing. God was sustaining and fulfilling God's creation in whatever way possible. There is not one person who was injured, not one person who was burned, in whom the healing process has not begun. We truly are wonderfully and fearfully made, for every cell has a function, every process of our bodies has a pattern, and these cells yearn for health, press for health, and restore themselves under all sorts of conditions in remarkable ways. Firefighters carried the living and the dead from the ruins, paramedics did triage, nurses and doctors worked as if fatigue was nonexistent to save the injured. A "bucket brigade" of human hands is removing debris, passing it from person to person, hoping against hope to rescue those who might still be alive. God is right there. Lines of blood donors are in front of Red Cross facilities in cities across the nation. God is right there, sustaining and fulfilling God's creation.
I know this was not an act of God. It was an act of terrorism brought about by human beings that so misunderstood the world that God created that they must be called evil. They believed they could use human beings for their own ends, they believed that others were the same as things, like boxes or pieces of plastic. They gave up their humanity when they reached that conclusion, for to be human means to nurture, support, and revere God's creation, contributing to its success and wellbeing. These were people who lost their humanity and have illustrated their inability to understand what and who God is.
I am sure this was not a "holy war." That term comes from the Arabic term "jihad" which means to undertake a military action declared a sacred obligation by Islam. I know that we use the term loosely, and apply it to crusades for ideals or principles that require great self-sacrifice. I cannot dignify this event with the word holy. It was the act of fanatics, self-defined interpreters of Scriptures that have the potential to convey the sacred. Their inability to understand what the holy is and how it demands justice, wholeness, love and compassion makes it impossible to use that term. I know this was not God's will. God does not use terrorists to communicate with us. For Christians, one of the ways voice of God comes to the world is as Jesus Christ, whom we believe died to save us. It is preposterous to imagine a God that would kill a certain number of us in order to let us know his opinion of us was.
God is not punishing us. God does not kill thousands of people in order to stop us from bad behavior. God is not mad at us for being capitalists, having open minds about issues that at one time were considered obvious, or for not going to church, mosque, or synagogue on Sundays. I believe that Jesus Christ died two thousand years ago to tell us that nothing can separate us from the love of God. God is not in the business of thinking up uniquely painful punishments for human beings.
I am certain this is not the beginning of the end. For centuries, false prophets have made great profits from prophesying the end of the world. Natural disasters have been proclaimed as evidence of the "beginning of the end." In the past whole nations have been subject to plagues, famine, droughts, floods, earthquakes and fires, and not a single incident of that sort has been the signal that the end is here. People in Rwanda, Jerusalem, Kosovo, and Sarajevo all know the feelings we are experiencing, and their trauma was not pronounced as the end of the world. No one knows when or even if the end time will come-I am not ready to declare the activities of fanatics are capable of bringing it about.
Having said these things, it is appropriate that we mourn. One of the oldest forms of mourning is the lament, and it is the words of the Hebrew Bible that give voice to our lostness, our inability to understand, our shattered sense of being safe and secure. It is also within these words that we find the human will to survive, to identify hope in the midst of suffering, to understand that, though we suffer, God is with us.
Sharon P Burch