The Transformation of Suffering
Reflections on September 11
& the Wedding Feast at Cana in Galilee

A Christian Perspective on September 11, 2001

The Unity of the Human Family

    There is no doubt in my mind that we are in an extraordinary period in which the most basic values of humanity are being challenged and are at stake. In addition, our personal relationship to those values is being challenged.

    Just as there has been a gradual buildup of horror and terror through the wars and human tragedies I mentioned above, so there has been an increasing attack on the human family. The attack on the Twin Towers is a deliberate rejection of the oneness of the human family that the gospel and most other religions proclaim.

    The human family is essentially a single species. In fact, biophysics, quantum mechanics, and other contemporary sciences are now affirming that everything in the cosmos is interconnected and interrelated, especially all life forms.

    The basic structure of the universe, the stars and planets, the possibility of life--the very possibility of our being here at this moment--were all present in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second that can now, so science tells us, be calibrated. Scientists explain that the material that came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang was so incredibly dense that the force that spread it apart and allowed the universe to expand must have required inconceivable power. Nobody has an explanation for what force blew apart the original energy when it was all in one place, in a size so tiny that it boggles the imagination.

    Just as it is hard to conceive of the beginnings of the universe, it is equally hard to grasp that everything--from the smallest subatomic particle to us human beings--emerged by stages from that source. We are thus embedded in the structure of the universe. All life, moreover, contains the same basic cells--so much so that there is little cellular difference between a mouse and us. There is even less difference among us as human beings. Contemporary science reinforces the biblical claim that the human family was made out of the dust of the earth. The Book of Genesis and the gospels emphasize the unity of the human family.

    Just how deep this unity actually is is still to be grasped by most of us. For one thing, it would not have been possible for Christ to take the whole human family into himself, as we Christians believe he did in the Incarnation, unless the human species itself was integrally one. Only in this way could Christ, by taking one human nature to himself, take to himself the nature of everybody--with everybody's personal history, suffering, joys, and failures.

    Christ's identification with the human family as evolving or as fallen, whichever way you prefer to look at it, is central to our Christian faith and to the redemption. If we were not one as a race, Christ could not have died for our sins. And St. Paul teaches that if Christ has not died for our sins, we are still in them.

    This understanding of the unity of the human family is central to Christianity. Our spiritual journey, especially contemplative prayer, together with its practices for daily life, are processes of becoming aware of just how profound that unity is with God, ourselves, other people, other living beings, the earth, and all creation.

    We are taught in theology that God is infinite. If God is infinite, there is no room for anything else. In this perspective, everything created remains in God, and God dwells in everything that exists. The omnipresence of God tells us that the most important element of everything, especially of every human being, is not us, but the presence of God in us.

    In the development of our spiritual journey, each of us is invited, as Jesus put it in Matthew 6:6, to enter our inner room. Our inner room is the place of encounter with the Divine Indwelling, with the God who dwells within us. It is the spiritual space where God interacts with us at levels that we do not fully understand but may sometimes intuit. Through contemplative prayer, this relationship deepens and develops into the capacity to perceive God in everything, especially in other people. We begin to see beyond our superficial judgments of others to the reality of the divine presence that underlies everyone's existence, including the people we most dislike and consider our enemies.

    Yes. God loves our enemies, too. This thought may make us somewhat uncomfortable at first, but we may as well get used to it. The feelings of retaliation and revenge that we all normally feel to some degree when we have been mistreated are regressions to the primitive level of human reactions. In a crisis, we either go forward with the challenge or, looking desperately for some form of security, sink back into forms of response that were familiar and expressed at earlier periods in our life.

More information can be obtained by reading the book The Transformation of Suffering by Fr. Thomas Keating.  It is offered in our Book Store.