To live long is to be astonished often.

That’s the way I felt about the terrorist attack last week. Of course, I also experienced the other emotions felt by my fellow Americans – pity, fear, horror, indignation, and sorrow. But astonishment that such a thing could really happen dominated my psyche.

The prophet Joel in the Hebrew Bible says, “Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men will see visions.” For drama and vividness, the catastrophic events in New York and Washington go beyond the dreams that I can recall having in later life.

When the life of a man or woman stretches over many years, it bears witness to events that no one would have thought possible. The swift collapse of the Soviet Union, the rapid reunification of the two Germanys, the end of South African apartheid, a man’s dramatic walk on the moon – of these welcome events, most fooled the experts as well as the rest of us.

Of the horrible events –the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, the sudden fall of France in World War II, the Cuban missile crisis – these, too, caught just about everybody by surprise.

Like many others among my age peers. I have given up saying what cannot happen. All of us have been fooled too many times. The human capacity for bringing about massive changes or engineering acts of unimaginable destruction against all odds has made us wary of confident prediction.

I did not imagine it possible to knock down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It seemed unthinkable that terrorists could highjack four planes on a single morning. The events of that day had to be judged likely material for a Hollywood script, not real life. September 11th was Hollywood turned into awful reality.

The hellish scenes in lower Manhattan as the towers first caught on fire, then burned and imploded will take their place among the searing images of a lifetime, along with such others as the London Blitz, the liberation of the death camps, and the landscape of Hiroshima after the bomb.

The brightness of that cloudless September morning with the fateful jet moving into view, the huge dark billows of cloud, the devastation of the landscape below – these features of that scene will stay engraved on our memories, part of our old men’s dreams, or rather nightmares.

As one introduced early in life to apocalyptic images in the page of the Bible, perhaps I should have been less surprised by encountering them in real life. Stars falling from the sky, mountains toppling, the seas rising, and other catastrophic events as depicted by the biblical writers might have better prepared me for the devastation wrought by terrorists.

But nothing can prepare us for the shock of a person hurtling out of a window a thousand feet above the ground. And to watch firefighters walk toward an inferno from which they will never escape fills one with dread. This real-life apocalypse has an ability to inflict continuing horror.
 
The response that my wife and I made at noontime on that fateful day last week was to walk to our parish church and take part in the Eucharist. This gesture was admittedly an intangible response to crisis but we saw it as a chance to express in community our grief for those who died and suffered injury as well as for those who love them.

By listening to the word of God and taking part in the sacred meal, we also sought strength for ourselves at a time of mortal threat. We needed spiritual reassurance that evil, no matter how devastating, would not ultimately triumph over us all.

We also wanted to pray for our national community and its leaders. Our hope remains that these leaders will not stir up in us the desire for vengeance against our enemies. And, if we ever yield to the temptation of searching for scapegoats among those of certain ethnic origins, this sin could diminish every one of us.

Whatever little wisdom I can find in this crisis focuses on values held dear for a lifetime. The precious quality of family relationships emerges more clearly than ever at a time of so many personal losses. The heroism of New York’s firefighters, police officers, medical personnel and many others, both those who perished and those who have survived, shines out as a summons to hope.

The primacy of the spiritual as a response to the mystery of evil seems to me essential.

Our nation must find some wisdom too at this time of transition toward the unknown. This is the time to cultivate solidarity with other peoples. (We can take heart from the editorial headline in the French newspaper Le Monde last Wednesday, “We are all Americans.”) It is also opportune to renew awareness of the need to share our resources with people living in poverty and wretchedness. And it is now, and always, time to treat one another with compassion.

Richard Griffin