By Amy Butler
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. That day I was working in the office at my previous church, in New Orleans, when the news first broke about the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Like everyone else in the world, the staff turned on the radio, tried unsuccessfully to log onto CNN’s website or to contact friends and family in Manhattan, and felt both individually and together this great sense of fear and uncertainty that the safe reality we’d constructed for our lives was shaking at its core.
I recall all of those feelings and activities in the church office that day, and I distinctly remember the moment the staff all looked at each other with what felt like a shocking realization that we, the religious professionals, were supposed to know how to respond. The church, after all, is the institution regularly called upon to step up in moments of crisis; we do it all the time when people die.
But, I would like to ask: Who knows, even among religious professionals, the very best way the church should respond when everything we hoped for our humanity is suddenly and violently assaulted?
I thought of that morning in 2001 this week because I have watched the news and read the newspapers in the wake of the terrible shooting at a political meeting in Arizona last Saturday. I suppose, as I did on September 11th, that local congregations — the church — also have a holy obligation to help the community they serve respond, make some sense of, find a spiritual framework in light of, the Arizona shootings. And, as I did in 2001, I feel once again that sinking feeling that, as the pastor of the church, I should probably know the perfect way that a community or an individual might respond to such violence.
I felt it all over again: I should know the perfect prayer; I should compose, at the drop of a hat, a tear-inducing litany; I should be able to pull out the very best Scripture passage (read from the Bible I carry with me everywhere) as the congregation tries, somehow, to make sense of what has happened.
The raw truth about tragedies like the recent shooting in Arizona, however, is that they have the power to bring all of us suddenly back to a stunned silence, a wrenching despair, as we recall again the fact that we are human, that our sin stalks us relentlessly and that we have a terrible potential for darkness. And when that realization hits, distinctions between us are hard to perceive. We’re all in the same boat, all humans together, lamenting how very far from God’s greatest hopes for us we can sometimes stray.
All of us, mystified and dismayed together. Even the religious professionals who are supposed to know what to say.
If I recall, back in 2001 our church staff somehow cobbled together a last-minute memorial service after the attacks. We racked our memories and our concordances for appropriate Scripture, we recalled prayers that seemed to work well in personal grief situations, we wondered aloud what rituals or worship styles might best fit the situation. And, on the Sunday after Sept. 11, we offered prayers, written with the help of others who have also voiced prayers during times of dark human experience.
At the end of the day, if I recall, the best thing was that we hugged each other, all of us, and tried together to remember that God stands with us as we reach for God’s dream for all of creation.
I am a religious professional. But I don’t know what to say when things like the Arizona shooting happen.
So I will, again, hug the people who best embody the peace and hope God has for this world as we echo together the words of so many who have faced down the darkness before us: Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.