September 11, 2001. 9-11-01. 911. The Emergency number. The unbelievable has ripped apart the veil of hopeful illusion. We try to wrench meaning from the feelings that lie like the rubble of the World Trade Center in our guts. We will soon begin to search for pathways out of the basement of this anguish, even as the dust of our immediate experience clouds our eyes.

As our brains try to sort it out they perceive events that lie somewhere between infamy and tragedy. In the middle lies the horror. We could have been in that plane or that office. We know someone who… We know someone who loved… My son was in the shadows of those buildings the night before… How could they choose between death by jumping and death by smoke and fire…?

In what sense infamy? The perpetrators lie in the shadows, their warnings just one rattling saber among many. They are not a nation that has violated a border or defended one. They are not a state that has declared war. But they are not criminals in the ordinary sense, because they served a Cause for which they sacrificed their lives, even as they sacrificed the lives of countless others. Even as they may have seen themselves as angels living beyond ordinary human cares, they became demonic, because they could not recognize the claims of a common humanity. In escaping the ordinary categories of guilt and wrong they also now become impossible either to hate or to forgive. They are simply the face of a mysterious other that has invaded our ordinary world, what we call civilization or human community. And we must defend this world. We must find a way through these events in which we remain what we were in order to achieve what we might become. We have to tie the cloth back together or reweave it of the same threads.

Amid a cacophony of reasons for perpetrating this horror we hear the drumbeat of anti-globalization, anti-capitalism, and anti-Westernism. In the shadows we see, or think we see, a titanic battle between the caricatures of Islam and Christianity, struggling like two Balinese puppets behind a whited screen. If, as many hold, this act does flow from the radicals personified by Osama bin Laden, then some pieces of the tragic begin to frame and shadow the face of infamy.

The tragic - a horror perpetrated in unknowing by persons who only seek the good, but who suffer from a fatal flaw they share in some degree with all humanity. On the one side may stand those who seek to defend their ancient ways under the symbol of Islam. They struggle against a force that seeks through money, arms, and culture to strip them of their heritage and dreams. But it is a force that they neither know or understand. Their Taliban hosts conjure up specters of evil from a Bible they have never read. They live in a bunker of hostile ignorance. They seek to eliminate an unknown source of all their woes. There is, then, something of us in them.

And more. Where has such an abundance of wealth come from that a band of warriors can amass the resources to launch such attacks? It is from our money for their oil. To feed our desire for cheap energy we have unwittingly fed the bubbling rage of those who seek to destroy us. Their strength would not exist without the spoils of the global capitalism they despise. We have not known what we do - the fate of every mortal. Even more, we know not whom we have fed. We suffer from an abyss of ignorance about the cultures of Arabic, Persian, Afghan, and Egyptian Islam. What are the fractures and faultiness that make a human mosaic out of the shapeless uniformity we see form afar? We do not know about the struggles between oil monarchs and displaced, resentful youth. We do not know what struggles for power may flare out from the friction of internal struggle. Is their attack on us simply displaced from the potential struggle with their own fathers? What seething turmoil lies beneath the sands of an oppressive and seemingly arbitrary order? We do not know how men and women in these places come to terms with their desires for peace and justice and their fall into violence. We do not know the Book they claim to adore, the complex yarn of tradition they try to make into one whole cloth. We do not know.

We did not know that the creation of the state of Israel, which Westerners saw as their solution to the protection of a people they had tried to destroy, would become the seed and setting of new oppressions and new genocidal impulses. And so today the weeping in Jerusalem has also become the tears of New York and Washington. We are entering a new exile from a world of infantile self-aggrandizement. We have come to the end of the oil age, its last advocates still seeking to prize the last barrels out of Nature's pristine refuges. But are we truly at the beginning of a new age of information, where even the secrets of The Attackers and The Defenders are laid open in the public court of world inspection and opinion? Are we really at the cusp between the age of fossil beds and the age of electromagnetic fields? Are we really entering a faith that cares for our descendants and our creation more than for our ancestors? Or are we entering a new age of darkness, with Vandals at the gates, tearing down even the basis for their own well-being?

We know we are at a crossroads where the intersection of ages may be the wind and sun but the steps are our decisions. We face the challenge of trying to fix our path on the stars of common humanity, mutual persuasion, and ecological responsibility while at the same time resisting the bitter winds of retribution, violence, and blind greed. It is a time to pray our way forward, knowing that we don't know, but knowing that we are known by the One who seeks our peace.

William Johnson Everett
September 12, 2001

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