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September 11th, In Retrospect |  |
It was five years ago but I can still remember the musty smell of the sheets when I woke up that morning. It was 9:15 a.m. and the phone was ringing. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and looked out the paned-glass window at the early autumn sky, cornflower blue and alive with sunlight. I picked up the phone and heard my father’s voice. He did not mince words. “They’ve flown planes into the World Trade Center. The towers are burning.” My mind took a minute to engage before I felt the first kiss of dread. “Who?” I finally asked. “Terrorists maybe. No one knows yet.” I looked at the floor and shook my head in disbelief. “When did it happen?” My father replied: “The first plane hit around 8:40 a.m. They thought it was an accident. The second hit just a few minutes ago. It wasn’t an accident.” I swallowed hard. “There must be ten thousand people in those buildings at this hour.” My father was silent for a long moment. “I know.” Standing up, I said to him, “I have to go find a television. I’ll call you later.”
I threw some clothes on, got in my car, and headed toward the Law School. It was my first semester at the University of Virginia School of Law, only the fourth week of classes, and I was still in the process of getting to know my classmates. But there was a guy from my first-year section—Craig was his name—whose apartment I had been to before. He had a television. Craig answered the door on the first knock. The television was on behind him. The Twin Towers were aflame and hemorrhaging oily black smoke. I entered his apartment in a daze. I took a seat on his couch and he said little to me except: “All I want to know is where I can enlist.” The footage of the second plane crashing into the South Tower played with the nauseating regularity of a broken record. The wan light of the television made the monumental explosion look surreal. The announcers talked of people jumping from eighty stories up in the North Tower to escape the flaming jet fuel. Cameras all over New York City captured the smoke streaming eastward on a stiff wind. The news came in that the Pentagon had been hit and that a fourth plane had been hijacked. A little later they told us the fourth plane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania. There were no survivors. They speculated that the plane had been targeting the White House or the Capitol building in D.C.
Then the South Tower collapsed. I remember how it folded upon itself and then imploded in a hail of cement and steel. A building nearly as tall as four football fields standing on end was reduced to a vast warren of rubble in a span of seconds. It looked like a disaster film. But it wasn’t. The North Tower took longer to fall, but eventually its upper floors canted and crumbled in much the same way. The news anchors were transfixed and stumbled over their words. The supreme horror of those moments was authenticated by the announcers’ unprecedented loss of composure. Together, in real time, we had watched the sudden annihilation of thousands of Americans no different from us. All of us hoped against hope that the towers had been evacuated. But none of us was prone to delusion. Though the lower floors might have been empty when the buildings collapsed, there had been people high up in both towers above the raging infernos, huddling together against the terror and praying for a miracle that never came.
Questions assaulted my mind in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse. What were the people in the upper floors thinking when the planes hit? What must have crossed their minds when they discovered the elevator shafts and stairwells below them were impassable with flame and debris? What did they think when they heard the wails of tortured metal as the massive structure around them, so redoubtable against wind and storm for decades, began to fail? And for those in the nightmarish midst of the conflagration, what must it have felt like to choose between death by the searing heat of flame and death in the embrace of terminal gravity? What does a human being think when faced with such a decision? Blind, incomprehensible fear no doubt. But also pristine clarity in the raging tempest of adrenaline. In the face of holocaust, only four impressions survive—fear, regret, hope and love. And the last often shines the brightest. Thus the cell-phone calls of the doomed from the burning floors. They had to tell their spouses and children one more time (for some, perhaps, for the first time in far too long): “I love you.” And they had to say goodbye. When the towers fell, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, friends and foes, fell with them, their tiny bodies obliterated by the monstrous weight of millions of tons of metal and mortar cascading to the earth out of a cloudless sky. It was a terrible death.
My classes at the Law School were cancelled that day. Many of my professors had friends or acquaintances who had worked in the towers. Some were missing. Others were surely dead. I left Craig’s apartment when I could no longer stomach the endless reruns of devastation and the insipid commentary of news anchors no more capable of making sense of the cataclysm than I could. I walked up the hill to the Law School and breathed in the fresh Virginia air. It was not long before I began to think, began to ponder, began to traverse that age-old, tired path in the clutches of the most pressing of all philosophic obsessions: Why? It is the perennial question of faith assailed by doubt in the face of evil. Looking back, I wish I would not have conceded the moment to the abstractions of theodicy. I wish I would have allowed myself to feel the pain holistically, to experience the horror in its awful fullness, and to weep as Jesus wept at having beheld the inimitable beauty of God’s world once again ravaged by the claws of violence. The people who had died before my eyes did not, in their last minutes on earth, need an answer to the greatest of all unanswerable questions. They needed the promise of hope. And I, surviving them, needed the same.
Yet it is perfectly human to demand explanations for tragedy. All of us do it. We cling to reason to make sense of the senseless. We strive to salvage purpose from the random chaos of twisted wreckage. As people of faith we are experts at such postulating. We feel the need to defend God and, even more insistently, to justify our own belief. And we do so with indefatigable zeal. In the weeks following September 11, Christian luminaries of all stripes weighed in on the question of God’s reasons for the sudden, indiscriminate death of thousands in the towers, at the Pentagon and in an unremarkable field in Pennsylvania. If I may be honest, the vertiginous swirl of well-intentioned theories made me sick. Far too few who contributed to the media dialogue had the courage and humility to admit ignorance. I wish everyone had been so brave. Because we are ignorant. The inherent limitations in our understanding are an inescapable fact of human existence. And evil, especially the unspeakable sort, paralyzes us every time. There is simply no explanation sufficient to satisfy the hunger of the war-torn soul to know the purpose of the violent ages.
September 11 was the darkest day my generation has ever known. But across the epochs of history there have been a thousand other days just like it. As Eugene Peterson has memorably put it, from the dawn of fallen time, history has been lubricated by tears. Nation has preyed upon nation, tribe upon tribe, village upon village; men have raped women and slaughtered children with depraved creativity; nature has convulsed in terrors of wind and wave, eruption and earthquake, plague and drought. The suffering has been enormous and unrelenting. “Where is God in the midst of such torment?” we are desperate to know. Yet all our attempts to answer this question with the implements of logic and biblical exegesis come out sounding harsh and insensitive, even intemperate and cruel, in the wake of terror. By now we should know better. The world will never need another editorial by a Christian pastor, theologian or philosopher confabulating from a place of safety about some purported divine purpose behind the suffering of others. Instead of fending off our own doubt and that of the world by offering speculative explanations, we should follow the command of Jesus and engage the pain of a torn universe in all its existential dolor and ignominy. We should weep with those who weep; we should mourn the desecration of creation; we should plead with Heaven to have mercy upon those who have suffered tragically; and like the saints of old who were fed to the lions, whose bodies were used as wicks to light the byways of Rome, who were crucified and tortured and ravished and enslaved, we should cry out for redemption, for healing, for the coming of the Kingdom and the righteous rule of the Son of God.
Although we seem prone to forget it, hope is the message of the Gospel in the face of evil. Hope for today, knowing that Christ himself has endured suffering at the hands of evil and can identify with us in our pain, and hope for tomorrow, trusting in a sovereign God of love whose benevolent purposes for the cosmos will not be thwarted by the machinations of the principalities and powers of the age, visible and invisible, and who will one day inaugurate on the earth an age of everlasting righteousness where the history of tears will be no more. In the five years that have passed since September 11, I have discovered as never before that explanation is a cheap suit beside the eternal garments of hope. I, for one, am tired of pontificating when the path of Christ-like empathy, compassion and intercession, and its extraordinary witness to the world, is only a thought away.
Comments:
I know how to teach him of hope, I teach him of Christ and his love for us. Nothing trumps that.
09/11/06 @ 17:37 Comments are closed for this post.
