I returned home that evening, numbed by the enormity of what I had witnessed, but anxious that Christopher, my three-and-a-half-years-old son should not have to look into such a dark pit. Christopher does not watch television at all, other than an occasional carefully screened cartoon at bathtime. I knew that my wife had turned the set on briefly as the tragedy unfolded, but she said he was playing by himself and seemed not to be watching. When I came home the first thing he said was “Daddy, there’s been big bombs in buildings!” He knew. I made a mild reply and we went on to the usual play before bedtime.
Sunday, September 16, we attended the annual Sharpsburg festival, held at the little town in the middle of the Antietam battlefield park–site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. On the way there, as we paused at a traffic light, Christopher suddenly said “I want to talk to that man.” From his booster seat perch he buttoned the window down and leaned out toward the pickup parked next to us. “Excuse me, sir,” he trilled in childish tones. The man looked over at him.
“There’s been bombs, fires in buildings . . .” said Christopher with his usual animation. The man nodded. There was a pause. Then Christopher said “Are you sad?” It was more of a statement than a question. “Yes, I am very sad,” said the man.
On our cover this issue is a sad-eyed lady Liberty. Yes, we have had our shocks and sorrows before: the anguish of civil war, a Great Depression, presidents assassinated, citizens and soldiers held hostage, murdered and defiled by howling mobs. But the scale of this latest act, the symbolism of the targets and the realization that we have been violated in our own home has been devastating. And while we weep for the lost and their families, so much of the grief is for ourselves. The priest poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his 1918 poem to a young child tearful at the loss of foliage in the fall, “It is Margaret you mourn for.”
And in the aftermath so much rage and blame setting.
One Christian leader appeared on national television and said “God is angry with America. We must put religion back into our government.” Let us not fall for that version of God. It is too reminiscent of the mind-set which produced the terrorists and the regimes which support them. Jesus himself, when asked to comment on those who had recently died in the fall of a tower in Siloam, asked “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you No,” he assured them (Luke 13:5), while reminding them that all men should repent of their selfish ways and follow him.
In a fine opinion piece written days after the terrorist acts, Chuck Colson quoted from this passage; calling it a “hard saying” of Jesus. But it is not problematical at all in context. Jesus was discussing the coming of his Kingdom and the need to prepare. He dismissed the idea of such incidents as signs of God’s personal malice. But he did enjoin his listeners to be sensitive to the times. And he did promise security amid crisis. Earlier, during the same teaching session, he said “Fear not, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
Since I travel hours each day to get to work, I listen a lot to C-SPAN and other programs that allow call-in opinions. In the aftermath of the attacks, caller after caller said they would willingly give away freedoms to gain security. Curiously, it was an Arab-American who has lived most of his life here who called in and tried to call a halt to such talk. “It is an oxymoron to give up freedom to protect freedom,” he reminded. But the howls for control and intrusion rise with each passing day.
The founding fathers could scarcely have imagined the technological colossus targeted by the terrorists. But we sell short the experience of men who lived to see the upheavals of the French Revolution and their grasp on the essential nature of freedom if we think Liberty can be bargained away in a devil’s pact to “protect” it.
I think of Thomas Jefferson’s powerful reminder given during his First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801. He pointed to “Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of persons under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial by juries. These principles,” he maintained, “form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation . . . and should we wander from them in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.”
Yes, this surely qualifies as a “moment of alarm.”
The Sharpsburg festival, next to the silent sentinels of the Antietam conflict and the civil war trauma, was a heartwarming few hours amid the prevailing sorrow. It was a step back into the basic goodness and uncomplicated love of freedom that characterizes America. Street stalls sold funnel cakes and popcorn, freshly ground wheat and various home crafts. Many people had dressed up in the homespun “finery” of another era. Folk bands played aching songs of immigrants and their search for freedom.
It was a scene festooned with flags, children and bantering small talk. But no moment was more revealing than when “Abraham Lincoln” stood up and presented the Gettysburg Address–with a few modifications to apply it to the trial of the moment. My spine tingled to hear again of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty.” And even without adjustments, when Lincoln said “Now we are . . . testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” I heard our cry for help. I can only pray that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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