Naming the terror

Christian Century, Sept 26, 2001 by Jon Gunnemann

OUR RESPONSE to human horror and tragedy moves inexorably outward as if through concentric circles, beginning in the gut and the heart, moving to the head, and finally taking shape in the form of shared social responses. Planes exploding into buildings, bodies falling from the top floors, people running and screaming before an avalanche of debris, dust and smoke: There is first a symbiosis of suspended belief and identifying empathy, a "this isn't happening" reaction combined with a sense of the terror and chaos experienced by the victims, an unreflective knowledge that this could be me, it could be you. Onlookers turning away, covering their eyes: That's the gut response of tears and churning nausea, of too much to bear.

Then there is a movement of sympathy and imagination, a bit of distance, that's no less terrifying: What if one of the victims is someone you know and love? A friend or a member of your family? That's the heart, aided by the head, aching with pain and anxiety, driving us to telephones, to a desperate search for reassurance. And then the head tries to take control in an attempt to understand what is actually happening: Where, when, who, how? we ask. But finally the heart and the head come together in the question Why? And when we try to answer this question, we move toward the outer ring of the social imagination that orders our common lives.

We want to name the horror, give it meaning, domesticate it in the narrative of our lives. The search for meaning has been under way for days now, by the media, by government officials, by people on the street, all groping to recast a horror that rained from the skies into something we can understand. There are the adjectives and adverbs: outrage, infamy, cowardly terrorism; the metaphors: an attack on freedom, an attack on democracy, an act of war, an apocalyptic event. We search for historical allusions: Pearl Harbor has topped the list, the only other attack on American soil, but one New Yorker with a larger heart added Hiroshima. And finally, there is blame and the promise of retribution, the naming of the cause as evil with the solemn promise to punish it.

The president of the United States has now given official sanction to some of these interpretive framings: the attack was an "act of war"--that's necessary official language, connecting his responsibilities to the social meanings of the U.S. Constitution and the NATO treaty. We have seen a new kind of enemy who is dangerous and works from the shadows--that is a metaphorical and reasonably accurate interpretation of new forms of threat to national security both in the U.S. and elsewhere, inviting perhaps a rethinking of what security means in the modern world. We are engaged in a "monumental struggle between good and evil" and make no mistake about it, "good will win." That is cosmology, and comes close to a neat reversal and mimicry of the demonizing mentality that flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Blame and the desire for retribution are natural first responses to the pain and suffering of innocent people caused by a willful act, apparently plotted over months and carried out with no evidence of sorrow or feelings of common humanity. And offering a narrative promising a courageous struggle against an evil act arises understandably from the sworn duty of elected officials to defend innocent people; it rallies a nation suddenly proven vulnerable; and it helps do justice to the courage of those who have worked heroically to save lives in the midst of the horror. But the language of the battle between good and evil can give rise to inappropriate or disproportionate military response; and, even if unintentionally, it feeds the all-too-widespread social imagination in this country that sees Muslims as fanatics and enemies of Christianity. It shapes the impulses of the heart toward hatred.

As Christians and as those called to be theologians for the church, we have other language and texts to command our loyalty, to shape our interpretations, to resist demonization, and to form the impulses of our hearts. Some of these we know well enough to recite from memory: Love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you, obey the ruling authorities, for they are ordained by God. But some are less well known and less comforting to the heart in pain.

Such is the lectionary text for September 16 from Jeremiah (4:11-12, 22-28), with unsettling historical parallels to our circumstances and a deeply disturbing interpretation of them. Judah has been conquered, Jeremiah is in exile, and the aggressor is Babylon, pagans from the east, hostile to Jewish religion and practice, threatening Judah's religious and civic culture. Prescient foreshadowings of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? But does Jeremiah blame Babylon, calling it evil? On the contrary, he blames Judah's lack of faithfulness to the covenant with Moses, its turn toward a religion based on royalty, its foolishness and stupidity! And he calls for Judah's repentance.