Immediately after the dastardly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I sat at a computer screen — in the secretary’s office of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, far from home — for the better part of a day trying, desperately, to write something that made sense of this tragedy. It unfolded not only as a devastating body count but also a grievous psychic wound to our national self-image.
This changes everything, I wrote.
I was soon chided for that remark by Ray, a Canadian friend — a theologically astute and socially aware friend — who responded that such tragedies are multiplied many times over in many parts of the world on a regular basis.
Ken Sehested
My purpose was not comparative, singular tragedies, I responded. In fact, the country of Chili has its own 9/11 woebegone memory: Of the September 11, 1973, coup d’etat overthrowing the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, bringing to power a right-wing military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet who ruled — with support from the U.S. — for 27 years, killing or “disappearing” more than 3,000, torturing most of the other 38,000 political prisoners.
It’s the context of our terror memory that makes this such a grievous wound, in this one country (my own): Being the wealthiest in history, and being the most heavily armed, and having one of the most extensive colonial influence-peddling operations in the world (accomplished more by economic penetration and financial manipulation than by gunboat diplomacy), the U.S. would likely undertake retaliation for a generation or more.
Sure enough, on the heels of 9/11, Congress passed a revised “authorization of use of military force,” which allows the president almost unlimited use of military force by simply saying “terrorism.” For the first time, legal justification for preemptive war. (And remember: The U.S. never has made a no-first-use policy regarding nuclear strikes against our enemies. That preemptive option never has been ruled out.)
I remember a comment made by Gen. John Abizaid, then head of U.S. forces in Iraq, a few months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He admitted his troops faced “a classical guerrilla-type campaign” and said troops might have to double their expected tours of duty in order to pacify the country. After that, a special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense under President George W. Bush, said about the unrest in Iraq: “This is the future for the world we’re in at the moment. We’ll get better as we do it more often.”
“The recoil of that abominable day has spawned the ravenous and ruthless administration of our current president.”
A generation after the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., the recoil of that abominable day has spawned the ravenous and ruthless administration of our current president, his molesting cabinet and his duplicitous judicial, legislative and social media enablers.
Not to put a too theological spin on it, we are in deep doo-doo.
As a nation-state, certainly. Small-d democrat institutions, rules and norms are crumbling. Political commentator Ezra Klein recently said, “This is not just how authoritarianism happens. This is authoritarianism happening.”
As communities of faith, clearly, the public posture of Christian congregations is not only dwindling but increasingly devoid of reference to Jesus (except as a mascot).
As former Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow wrote: “War is rich and vivid, with its traditions, its military academies, its ancient regiments and hero stories, its Iliads, its flash. Peace is not exciting. Its accoutrements are, almost by definition, unremarkable if they work well. It is a rare society that tells exemplary stories of peacemaking — except, say, for the Gospels of Christ, whose irenic grace may be admired from a distance, without much effect on daily behavior.”
The time of testing is upon us. The day of judgment will be disruptive. As William Shakespeare’s storm-tossed characters in The Tempest cried, “All is lost, all is lost, to prayer, to prayer.”
“The courage needed for the facing of these days comes from beyond human facility.”
Such is, I would argue, the truthful claim that the courage needed for the facing of these days comes from beyond human facility. Which is to say, transcendence is involved. A firmer footing, a deeper clarity, a capacity beyond what is thought possible.
Such transcending prayer, however, is not an escape hatch, not a head buried in the sand, not a “Hail Mary” (a desperation football play), not whistling through the graveyard.
Rather, prayer is the portal available to grace-shaped lives to envision another world, an earth cradled in heaven’s kinship, a recreated future when all shall linger ’neath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid, the day when “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
The call to prayer is not merely reclusive. Sometimes the center to which our “centering prayer” calls us is smack dab in the middle of the world’s decentered, disoriented, disabled and dysfunctional life.
Despite all apparent odds and most available evidence, hope is our rightful posture, rooted in a beatific vision, the provision of buoyancy in the midst of drowning billows. Ours is a faith that history is not fixed, that the future is not fated, that creation is not abandoned to its violent, predacious habits and corrupt predilections.
“To prayer, to prayer.” But, no, in the end, all is not lost.
Ken Sehested is the author and editor of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.
Related:
I was there on 9/11 | Opinion by Mara Richards Bim
The fight behind the 9/11 vow to ‘Never Forget’ | Opinion by Christina Stanton