LOOKING BOTH WAYS
by Forrest Church
September 12, 2004
Do you remember when you were little, skipping down the sidewalk a step or two ahead of your Mommy or Daddy? Across the street a friend catches your eye and bang, off you pop like a shot. Waving, yelling, tearing blindly forward, you rush toward the street, at which point your Daddy or your Mommy goes absolutely berserk: screaming frantically, "Stop. Come back here this instant;" lurching after you and grabbing your arm, twisting it and you back onto the sidewalk for a VERY SERIOUS AND IMPORTANT pow-wow about safety. "When you get to the corner always, always wait for me. And what do we do when we get to the corner together. We stop and look both ways, don't we. And then we hold hands while we cross. You could have been killed. You know that don't you? You could actually have been killed"
And do you remember how you felt right about then? Scared to death, right, by your own mother no less? Scared and startled and teary and angry and embarrassed and hurt and guilty and self-righteously indignant all at once, all together. Only a parent can do that to us. Only a parent has that kind of irrational power over our psyches. In fact, there really ought to be a word for how we felt as children when our parents went crazy and screamed and forgot that it was OUR little arm they we squeezing harder and harder and harder and OUR little egos they were crushing in public and THERE WASN'T A CAR IN SIGHT!
"Let go, Daddy, please let go of my arm."
"Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said?"
"Yes, please let go of my arm."
"What did I just tell you? What have I told you a thousand times before."
"'Stop-and-look-both-ways-before-you-cross-the-streeet!'"
"And?"
"And 'Hold-my-hand.' Now, please, let go of my arm."
Teaching the basic rules of safety is part of a parents' job, of course. Stop and look both ways. Wear white at night. One evening a couple of weeks ago, I was driving down a country lane in Eastern Long Island and out of nowhere this man materializes in the road right in front of me. I wasn't speeding. In fact I was poking along, but I had to swerve to miss him nonetheless. The first thing that jumped into my mind—how deeply this stuff is engrained in us—my very first thought was, "That guy didn't listen to his mother!" Not a patch of white anywhere. He wasn't even wearing white socks!
I wonder, if we were we to take all our parents lessons and wrap them up in to a single lesson for living, what we would end up with? Might it not be something like this: Remember to do everything your mommy or daddy told you and you will always be safe (not to mention happy, successful, and good). As we slowly discover through hard experience (not that we pass these findings on to our children) there is only one problem with this all-purpose reminder. It's a lie.
I remember the exact moment when I came to recognize just how great a lie. I was walking my children to their last day of school. It must have been fifteen years ago now. We were crossing the street together, the light in our favor, all dutifully holding hands, having looked both ways, and BANG, a cars bursts out of nowhere, hurtling around the corner at breakneck speed, ricocheting off the curb and swerving into our past. I was frozen, absolutely helpless. I could only watch—wide-eyed, mouth agape—as the car skidded toward us, fishtailed back into control, and disappeared down the street. I could barely breathe, my knees buckling, my heart pounding like a pile driver. In stark contrast, my seven-year-old and nine-year-old just laughed, romping blithely down the sidewalk, jumping from tree to tree as they always did, trying to touch the leaves.
So what did I do? I got angry, of course. But not at the driver. I blew up at my innocent children, who clearly had learned nothing from our recent scrape with death. Reigning them in, grasping each tightly by one wrist, I kicked into high parental teaching gear. "Did you see that car? It almost hit us. It really did. We could have all been killed. Never, never let your guard down when you're crossing the street."
Now, how stupid is that? The actual, complicated truth—the only lesson worth learning on that particular hair-raising occasion—is that we're not in charge here. Practicing every safety rule in the book won't guarantee our safety. Even holding hands, wearing white at night, and looking both ways.
Three years ago yesterday, the sky fell in on Lower Manhattan, snuffing out 3000 precious lives in a matter of minutes and changing if not the world itself, certainly the world as we know it and the assumptions we make about how it works. Millions of man-hours have since been dedicated to the proposition that, had we been paying attention, this tragedy could have been avoided. In short, if we had been looking both ways before crossing we wouldn't have been hit. Among those who have been blamed are the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, and all the Intelligence services.
A tragedy this life-changing demands the kind of post-mortem we have been giving to it. Even though the primary blame must on the shoulders of those who planned, financed, and carried out this grotesque mission, turning four passenger liners into death stars, certainly we have much to learn from mistakes that were made, especially if we can figure out how to draw the right conclusions from them.
Like December 7th—Pearl Harbor Day—9/11 is not an official national holiday, but it will live on into the future as a day of infamy. The rhetoric that usually accompanies the commemoration of infamous days is the rhetoric of "never again." History answers this rhetoric with a sobering half-echo. "Ever again," history answers. History answers with the voice of a realist, not the voice of a fatalist, but also not that of an idealist. We can learn from the past, history reminds us, but we cannot control the future. We can make the present better but all attempts to make it perfect—perfectly safe, perfectly righteous, perfectly moral—will often make it worse. That is to say, guarantees of the "if we win, it will never happen again; if they win, you'd better watch out" variety are vain, vain in both senses of the word, both prideful and empty.
On the third anniversary of 9/11, we cannot help but call to mind new risks we now face because of the terrorist attack, not only new risks to our physical safety but other risks as well. A full and spirited debate will continue for years about the best way to enhance security while preserving liberty. Public servants can in good conscience disagree about how best to strike the proper balance. I, for one, am deeply concerned that certain of our government's attempts to establish what will almost certainly be, no matter how rigorous, a false sense of security, are being made behind a smokescreen of fear at far too great an price, namely at the expense of our cherished liberties. I have expressed this concern many times, both in my writings and from the pulpit, and will continue to do so. But this morning, looking both ways, looking back at 9/11 and forward into a future still darkened by the shadow of those two great fallen buildings, I am not convinced that the amplification of this argument is the best way to commemorate that memorable life-changing and death-delivering day.
So this morning, to commemorate the 3rd anniversary of 9/11, I shall be looking both ways in a different sense: not to guarantee our future safety—many experts looking to their left and right are avidly engaged in that particular enterprise—but to guarantee our humanity. I do so in the conviction that as long as the lessons we draw from 9/11 remain primarily designed to secure our safety, our humanity will continue to be jeopardized.
How then should we commemorate 9/11? Why not begin by looking back, by looking back and remembering.
How vivid a day it was, vapor trails against a preternaturally blue sky, white smoke and ash billowing over south Manhattan. And how vivid our soulscapes were as well. How conscious we suddenly became of life's fragility,
If only we will open them again, everything we need to know about how best to commemorate that fateful day is present in our hearts. Remember how we become one people in our grief. How we looked into one another's eyes and saw our own tears. Remember too, how we admired (and so rightly) the courage and valor of the men and women—fire fighters, police officers, emergency technicians—who dedicate their lives every day to our protection. How for once in our lives we didn't take them for granted, but instead were conscious of and therefore grateful for their sacrifice and dedication. We're already forgetting this aren't we? Anniversaries are for remembering, for reopening our hearts.
Can we ever forget the e-mail sent by a doomed employee in the World Trade Center, who, just before his life ended, wrote the words, "Thank you for being such a great friend."? Can we ever forget the man and woman holding hands as they leapt together to their death? Looking back on 9/11 and looking forward, images and moments like these as well we must recommit to the memory of our hearts. The pain won't go away. Nor should we try to wish it away. Grief, and anger too, can be sacraments, animating our conscience, forging our determination, inspiring us to be comfort givers and light carriers, charging us to live in such a way that our lives will prove to be worth dying for.
In this same spirit, to commemorate this remarkable day, we must remember another thing as well: how we ourselves hearkened to the better angels of our nature. How solicitous we were of one another's feelings and needs. How we asked complete strangers, our upstairs neighbors, say, if they were okay and if their families were safe. How we placed a temporary statute of limitations on our case against life, suspending all petty grudges, closing for a blessed time our book of grievances. The honking stopped. Crime slowed to a snails pace, though the police were off their regular beats. Life's every routine was suspended, disbelief mingled with amazement, anger transfigured by shared grief.
Remember this as well. The dust that covered tens of thousands of New Yorkers when the World Trade Towers collapsed obscured all marks of distinction: race, economic status, faith. We got a rare glimpse of how much more alike we are than different, our lives equally precious, equally fragile. We can acknowledge this any time we wish, of course, yet we so rarely do. How much commoner it is to stand apart than together, to stand divided rather than united, to stand against rather than for. Yet for all the things that divide us, we share ever so many more in common. Alike mysteriously born and fated to die, the mortar of mortality binding us fast together, the same sun setting on each of our horizons, truly we are one. We are even more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. In that insight lies the very essence of Universalism. One light through many windows; one God with many names; one mystery with many truths, all partial to our eyes; one precious well of life from which we all are blessed to draw; one common fate; one common destiny.
For an ongoing memorial to the victims of 9/11 and of violence throughout the world, we should all be particularly grateful for the many here who have dedicated so much of your time, energy and spirit to the All Souls Peace Task Force and to those who serve in other ways as light carriers and comfort givers. They know in their hearts and demonstrate by their deeds that the only persuasive answer violence is not more violence, but works of love and the work of peace.
If we look both ways at 9/11—at it not only as a tragedy sparked by violence and hatred, a horror that we must somehow prevent from recurring, but also as a reminder of life's fragility and the redemptive power of human love—if we look at it both ways, will we be any safer going forward, any more secure? I would hope to think so, but we can't be sure. The landscape of the future is strewn with hidden trap-doors, most of which no amount of vigilance or due-diligence on our part will do anything to disarm.
I suppose what I am trying to say is simply this. Looking back on 9/11 only to wring our hands in consternation at how the political world turned on its axis that day may be intellectually necessary as we look forward, but it is not spiritually sufficient. The burden of that day carries a more universal message. Life is fragile. And life is precious. Every day we live—however dark it may seem, however daunting—to be worthy of life's gift, we must extend our gratitude through works of love and deeds of praise.
Or, put in a single sentence: Unless a reverence for life informs the many struggles, individual and shared, by which we define our priorities and express our humanity, our struggles will be in vain.
Or, more simply still: Even if it doesn't make us one whit safer, holding hands is never a bad idea.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.