God and evil: PBS documentary gives voice to those who cursed or called on God when the towers fell - Television - documentary Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero - media coverage a year later

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 27, 2002 by Raymond A. Schroth

Marian Fontana, a writer, now speaks and writes the eulogy for her husband--a fireman, sculptor, loving father. On a recuperative visit to Hawaii, confronted with the glory of sunrise, she is shattered rather than consoled. How could God kill "this beautiful man ... turn this loving man to bones"? Sept. 11 has weakened her faith. But we have a sense she'll still give God a chance to prove himself ... sometime.

An occasional agenda surfaces. The Iraqi exile scholar Kanan Makiya, author of The Republic of Fear, reminds us that Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds. A Holocaust survivor connects the death camp victims with the victims in the towers.

And the voice of President Bush reminds us that here we have seen "evil." This is evil personified in our declared national enemies. And the implication is that he, having been chosen by God to save us, has a mandate to stamp out evil everywhere. Has God chosen him to invade Iraq?

History's list of divinely appointed leaders and politicians is long, including Osama bin Laden and the hijackers who imagine that Allah was their co-pilot when they smashed their planes into the symbols of Western materialism a year ago.

Atheists and artists have their say. Novelist Ian McEwan says there is no God and no devil, only people behaving monstrously. This is not the most spectacular event in the history of human cruelty; but the artist's task is to explain it in human terms.

NPR correspondent Margot Adler warns us that the culture of violence, of which we are part, can "make us lose our sense that a human being is there." The main point of liberal religion, she says, is that we are all human beings. Yet the terrorists felt great killing 3,000 human beings because they knew what was "good." Then once you accept the invitation of evil to join in the cycle of vengeance, you--we--too are sucked in by the ocean's undertow. It grabs our feet and pulls us out.

The implications of this for our "war" against terrorism are almost obvious; but "Frontline" does not linger to develop them. Nor does "Frontline"--perhaps because it concentrates on local participants--reach out to leading modern theologians who could offset the village atheist caricature of a know-it-all God who pushes heavenly buttons, ties his own hands and watches towers crumble.

Contemporary theologians influenced by process philosophy portray God like my friend, Jesuit Fr. David Toolan, a journalist who died of cancer in July, did. Toolan wrote in At Home in the Cosmos that God is "not wrapped up in himself," but is involved, changing, suffering along with the world he created and is calling into the future.

As Genesis makes clear, God has set us free; and in Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, the Flood, the suffering and death of Jesus, world wars and genocides, we responsible humans have made our own mistakes, spread death by our sins.

The night before he died, the synoptic gospels describe Jesus sweating blood in fear and confusion. If Jesus had been in the World Trade Center a year ago he wouldn't have understood it either.