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

A Christian Perspective on September 11, 2001

The United States and the World

    Let us briefly explore the background to the tragedy of September 11 and how other parts of the world see the United States. All countries, communities, and even churches suffer from the accumulation of what might be termed the false self ("the old self" in St. Paul's terminology). By the false self I mean the self developed in our own likeness rather than in the likeness of God. It is the self-image developed to cope with the emotional trauma of infancy and early childhood. It seeks happiness in terms of the gratification of the instinctual needs of survival and security, affection and esteem, and power and control, and bases its self-worth on cultural conditioning and group identification.

    When these emotional programs for happiness or group identifications are frustrated, off go the afflictive emotions of grief, anger, fear, guilt, shame, humiliation, discouragement, and despair, to name only a few. Commentaries increase the intensity of these emotions and plunge us into emotional binges lasting hours, days, weeks, or months, often leading to personal sin to get away from the pain.

    Social sins have been increasing in the last few centuries, just because there are more people who are capable of pouring their personal negativity into the atmosphere. The collapse of the Twin Towers is an image of the collective crucifixion of the human family that has been gradually gathering momentum through wars, social upheavals, and the increasing disregard of the innocent.

    Consider Rwanda, for example. Most of the people who died and those who killed them were Christians who turned on each other because of ethnic over-identification. Estimates of the number of the dead vary, but as many as a million people, according to some sources, were massacred. When we think of the numbers who died in the Twin Towers, three thousand seems small by comparison. Yet the visibility of what happened on September 11 has brought into focus the enormous horrors that the past hundred years have inflicted on the human family. September 11 warns us that the way we lead our lives has to be profoundly challenged and changed.

    One of the reasons for what happened on September 11 is our unwillingness to respond adequately to those in great need. This expresses itself on national levels in governments seeking only their private interests and not the interests of the larger global community. Obviously, governments have the obligation to defend their people against violent attacks. But along with the need for self-defense is the need to remember that resorting to violence has never solved any situation. It always leads to more violence. Therefore, we--or at least and certainly those in authority--find ourselves in an enormous double bind in which we feel called to heal unjust situations for which we bear collective responsibility, and at the same time to protect innocent people from ongoing attacks.

    How nations and their citizens are going to resolve this dilemma, as we can see from the response to the September 11 attack, is an enormous challenge. As I traveled in South Africa in the immediate aftermath of September 11, I noticed that most people had huge sympathy for the United States. But I have observed that, as these individuals have continued to see pictures of men, women, and children who are not involved in military campaigns injured by stray bombs, that sympathy is beginning to wither. In addition, fomenting a reaction within the Muslim world against the United States is one of the hazards that our government has to face. To extremists within Islam, the materialist and consumerist culture of the United States, which was represented by the Twin Towers, was something that they had to destroy. They feared that the process of globalization, which up to now has been driven mostly by economic or informational motivation, will undermine their religious culture and moral values.

    Another fundamental issue for Islamic extremists is that they do not relate to the concept of the separation of church and state. In many Islamic countries, the real force behind the throne is the clerics. These clerics and their followers do not have much interest in talking to Western politicians. The only people with whom they might be willing to engage in serious dialogue are the spiritual leaders of other major religions. The need for the latter to reach out in genuine dialogue with the spiritual leaders of Islam is urgent. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in a confrontation of cultures that may become very destructive.

    These are the narrow political meanings, as far as I see them, of September 11. What we turn to now are the larger global issues. What lessons for the future of the planet have been manifested by the destruction of the Twin Towers?

    The first is that we may be reaching a point in history that some anthropologists have called an axial period. This term, invented by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), refers to a historical period in which there is a paradigm shift in human consciousness that leads to a new set of values or ways of conceiving human existence. Thus, when I say that we may be at the onset of a new an axial age, I focus primarily on the possibility that we may be entering a new level of understanding regarding the oneness of the human family. As a result, the need to establish a new world economy that can distribute the goods of the earth to all its members, much more than has been done in the past, has become urgent, if not the top priority of the world community.

    Secondly, there is the fact that terrorism on the global scale is a new kind of war-one that has not been faced before. The perpetrators of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, without using any military weapons at all, destroyed buildings that were built to be indestructible and the symbols of American financial and military domination. They shook our materialistic culture to the roots and dented a certain amount of our pride in the predominance of our financial success and power. The destruction was accomplished in a couple of hours with a rudimentary knowledge of flying and some box-cutters. Through this carefully planned act, the trillions of dollars put into conventional and nuclear weaponry by this nation were rendered almost laughable, while ordinary objects that no one would consider weapons were turned into artifacts of enormous destruction.

    I wonder if we in this country have fully comprehended the significance of the message of September 11, if we still hope that bombs can resolve the problem of terrorism. It is far from clear whether we have alienated the Muslim world through our bombing campaign in Afghanistan, even though every effort was made to avoid civilian casualties. The terrorists have a weapon that is virtually irresistible--this is what is so dangerous. These individuals are prepared to lay down their lives in order to destroy us. Against this disposition, there is no defense.

    The result of this mindset is that no place is safe, no person is safe. A terrorist attack could happen at any time and any place, wherever we happen to be in the world. This kind of terror does not only affect Americans. All humanity is realizing that we live in a world that is much more hazardous than most of us thought.

    It might be argued that the world has always been this way. What has changed is that now, at least in the U S., we have been forced to confront it in a way that requires a response--in particular, action on our part to right the imbalances between the well-to-do and the impoverished nations of the world.

    In addition to this geopolitical situation, a vast number of the world's scientists believe that the current practices of our industrial cultures are using up the world's resources and bringing us to the very brink of an ecological crisis that may make it impossible for many forms of life to continue to exist on earth. The vitally important issues of resource consumption and global warming have slipped into the background in the face of the terrorist crisis. In any case, for the past several decades many outstanding scientists have been saying that we cannot continue to pollute the oceans, the forests, and the atmosphere without endangering the survival of life itself on the planet.

    Thus, two major events are occurring together at this moment of history--and have been, as it were, focused by the Twin Towers disaster--to invite us to reevaluate the way we live and the way we respond to people living in other parts of the world. A kind of midlife crisis has come upon us, and we are questioning the values of the things we thought were important and worth living for before September 11.

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