Broken World

My memories of September 11, 2001 are probably different from those of most Americans.  I watched the same videos, had the same images burned indelibly into my mind, and alternated between stunned silence and tears for a couple of days.  But I did so while spending a year with my family living in Mexico.  I remember walking into San Pablo Seminary that morning for worship and being told by a friend that something bad was happening in the U.S.  My Spanish was only good enough at that point to pick up some of what the radio news was broadcasting, so I couldn't really tell how bad things were.  I stayed for worship, where participants prayed for the situation in the U.S.  Then I went back to our house and picked up my wife.  We went to the house of an American friend who had CNN in English.  That's where we watched the videos, where the horror became more clear.

But it wasn't until a few hours later when we went to the school where our boys had recently started that the immensity struck me; how could I explain to them what had happened?  They were still pretty young - 6 and 8 - and had a fairly sheltered view of the world (as I wish 6 an 8 year olds could always have...).  How could we explain that people did this to other people?


I guess you could say that for me, in some ways, this is where the "rubber meets the road" in theology.  What we believe about God and how God is (or isn't) involved in the world become pretty important when we try to understand horrific events.  Natural disasters are one thing; the fact that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was a natural disaster, but the inadequate response of government was unnatural.  Both resulted in suffering.  Should we just chalk the whole thing up to the presence of evil in the world and be done with explaining and understanding?  Somehow we have to take responsibility for some of the suffering.  And with the events of 8 years ago, our theology was put to the test.  Could we blame evil for twisting the minds of these men without seeing any connection between their brokenness and our own?  Because the truth as Christians see it is that we are all broken in some way.


Yet while some branches of our faith tradition say this brokenness is permanent, the one in which I've been nurtured says that even now God is working to fix it, to reconcile things.  And Jesus was what made the repair possible.  You might say that Jesus is a kind of "suture," bringing the wounds together to enable healing.

I don't know how much healing has occurred since September 11, 2001.  Some potential reconciliation was given up in favor of anger and violence, a kind of lashing-out.  We're still paying the price for that response.  One of the things I try to remember about that day was the response of our Mexican friends; they embraced us, cried with us, took care of us, suffered with us, even while they had long experienced such suffering themselves with little empathy from their northern neighbors.  They allowed their brokenness to make them more caring, more deeply feeling, rather than less.  That seems to me to be WWJD.  Know what I mean?
Peace (Hopefully),
Dana