September 11 and the Children of Abraham

What shocked you about September 11?" I ask my students, and the question is still alive to them today, six months later (a long time in American memory!). Among their responses: "The shock of North American vulnerability, I didn't know we could be attacked"; "The brutality of the attacks, the fact that people driven by beliefs and ideals could act so cruelly"; "The shock simply of so many innocent lives lost and such destruction"; "The burst of awareness that what goes on in the rest of the world can go on here too, and that our actions may have such negative effects over there, and their actions such negative effects here"; "The shock that I don't now know what to do with my career. I hadn't counted on this; I thought all that mattered was what I wanted to study and what profession would be fulfilling. But what shall I do now? The rest of the world matters more than I realized"; "The shock that religion could matter so much, for good and for evil."

"And will this shock lead to lasting lessons or changes in the American character?" I ask for a show of hands: two-thirds of the students vote "no," one-third, "yes."

Is the American character profoundly changed by the events of September 11? Or was it a momentary opening—like the opening of the Red Sea for Ancient Israel—and now the waters have quickly closed over and very little has changed? Or was it a brief opening during which some significant numbers actually passed through, from a kind of bondage to a kind of freedom—as, for those few Israelites in the Exodus narrative, it was a moment of opportunity, to pass from physical bondage to that liberty that enabled them to stand at the foot of Mount Sinai and learn how to serve God instead of Pharaoh? Well, I don't know what September 11 meant for the United States. I don't know if it was a momentary interruption in the normal business of our economically driven patterns of social exchange and if the moment has already passed and what matters again are our individual salaries and family needs and a lingering irritation that we still have to think about military matters in foreign places. Of course, it might be unfair to think that, unless it is brought on, God forbid, by cataclysms far greater than the events of September 11, any significant societal change would have to be such a dramatic one to count as significant change. I don't know if, sometime later, we may look back and see that some necessarily small but significant transformation took place in certain social and religious institutions in the United States or the West—nor do I know if these will have been changes for the better or the worse.

I don't know all these things, but, for better or worse, I don't assume I need to understand things on a large scale in order to have something to say. To have something to say, as I understand it, is merely to find that some event has interrupted one's life in some way, that the interruption has itself stimulated some inner outpouring of words as if they were somehow going to fill the gap caused by the interruption, and then somebody else has asked to hear those words. So, yes the events of September 11 have interrupted some aspect of what I do and of what my community of thinking and worshipping does; and yes some words have by now arisen in me and my communities in the space of this interruption; and yes, Hauerwas has asked to hear those words, so I offer them. Here are four of these "words," or topics of response, each one linked as well to an image that evokes the topic for me.

 

1. An "Event" is what shocks me to...