As I write, it’s September 11, and I’m thinking about how
impossible it is not to mark
anniversaries like this, year by year. You see bumper stickers and facebook
status updates that say “never forget,” and I’m not quite sure what that means. I don’t think anybody’s in danger of
forgetting. Someone commented about how September 11 is a dose of perspective:
to always value the ones you love, to be aware of the precariousness of life. I
also hope that it can generate perspective in a different way: to also be aware
of how the security we normally feel in this country is an abstract fantasy for
so many all over the world. We are called to compassion and solidarity as well
as gratitude.
Sitting down at my computer, I don’t know what else I could
possibly think about other than that morning in New York City twelve years ago,
the blue blue of the sky, a fall chill under the late summer sun, the sense of
expectation and promise of beginning seminary. I am also aware of how many
times I’ve written this exact account of those days; how my now-husband Noah
and I had moved to New York a few weeks earlier for school, not married yet and
still figuring out who we were individually as well as together. Each year on
this day, I remember kneeling in the seminary chapel hoping, praying, for
violence to stop, and each year I remember that day and add up another year of
violence. Afghanistan, then Iraq,
Libya, Syria. Our violence against ourselves: Islamophobia, the erosion of our
civil liberties, the billions that could have relieved poverty and instead
funded war. Our polarized political
landscape. Guantanamo. I go back to
where I was September 11, 2002,
passing through a border checkpoint in the Holy Land on the first anniversary
of that day: again, violence.
In the Gospel last Sunday we heard Jesus lashing out at the
crowds who were following him—he’s fed up with their desire just to see the
next big thing, watching him do a healing here, an exorcism there. The crowds
seem uninterested in real transformation: they want entertainment. Are you in this for real? Do you have what it takes to follow me? Do
you? “Whoever comes to me and does not
hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even
life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow
me cannot be my disciple.” You can’t, Jesus, says, just come along for the ride.
You have to be in it, all the way, asking hard questions and making hard
choices.
By that standard, nobody can follow. And I do think Jesus
was being a little sarcastic—I have a calling from God as a parent and a spouse,
and I’m sure I’m not called by Jesus to abandon those I’ve made a life with. And I do have to commit. Still, the truth is
that real discipleship of Jesus is impossible on our own. Our somewhat clunky prayer for this Sunday
begins, “O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully
grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.” The subject/object/agency in that sentence is
pretty convoluted: the Holy Spirit moves in
us, prays in us—but as we are made in
the image of God, there would be no “us” at all without our Creator.
Forgiveness is certainly impossible on our own. If it’s the life of God within us that makes
it possible for us to follow God, it is certainly the life of God in us that
enables us to forgive. It is the
providence of God, too, to forgive where we just aren’t ready at the same time
as it’s the providence of God to enliven our anger at injustice and oppression.
So there’s the muddle for today—grief and pain, hope and
righteous anger—all one holy stew of God’s presence with us and God’s being
intertwined with ours.
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