Appealing to Our Better Angels

It would be difficult not to know the significance of this day. For weeks, maybe months, we have been building up to it – the 10th  anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our nation.        

Among the events today were the dedication of a memorial at the World Trade Center site. But memorializing the horrors of Sept. 11 is not just the job of architects and craftsmen.

As an editorial this weekend in "The New York Times" puts it, “We tried, almost immediately, to understand how the morning of 9/11 would change our future. A decade later, we’re still trying to understand, looking back and looking ahead. It is not enough simply to remember and grieve.”

Memorializing something means transforming the literal facts of an event into a symbol, investing the past literal event with contemporary meaning. Symbols both reinforce and create new meanings beyond the event itself.

 As Christians, we are well attuned to memorials and symbols. We invoke them every Sunday as we gather around the altar, and remember that at supper the night before he died, Jesus said “do this in remembrance of me.”

Jesus instructs his followers to turn future meals into a memorial and symbol, to transform the events of his life, death, and Resurrection, to imbue them with his continuing presence with us around Eucharistic tables of inclusion, hospitality, and peace.

We’re also familiar with symbols and memorials as a nation. I recently reread Gore Vidal’s historical novel, "Lincoln," which includes the moving account of our country’s most famous memorial speech, the Gettysburg Address.

Only four months after the horrific Battle of Gettysburg, while the Civil War still raged, Abraham Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery at the battlefield, transforming a place of death into a symbol for rebuilding our nation on “the proposition” of inclusion and equality.

Part of what the original Constitution left out, Lincoln now included. We were no longer, he insisted, a grouping of aggregate states.We were transformed from these united states to The United States, and dedicated to working for a “new birth of freedom for all.”

After Gettysburg we began to understand ourselves differently, a task of memorializing and symbolizing that continues to this day as we struggle politically and morally over who is included, and who is excluded, from our national dream.

Memorials and symbols have power. They “re-present” realities and make them meaningful and present again.

We are doing that today across the nation as we remember the tragedy of Sept. 11, a tragedy not only for our nation, but for the world.

Today we remember the actual events, the lives lost and those forever changed. But we also remember that this tragedy symbolizes the dangers of intolerance and religious extremism, not just of Muslim extremists, but of all religious extremists.

Our scripture readings today tell us once again of the nonnegotiable demand on Christians to forgive.

Again, I think of Lincoln, both at Gettysburg and in his famous Second Inaugural Address. In neither case did he gloat or demean those with whom the Union was at war. There were no demands for vengeance.

Instead, Lincoln humbly asked for God’s forgiveness of the entire nation — North and South — for both the blight and sin of slavery, and the awful and violent means used to end that evil.

Throughout his presidency, Lincoln called upon our “better angels” to help us understand catastrophe of civil war and what it would mean for our future.

We must humbly call on those same better angels today as we remember September 11.

We also have to remember that there is always risk and danger with symbols. One risk is that we rest in their symbolic meaning alone and forget their literal origin — where they came from and what they might lead to.

Symbols cannot be separated from the literal facts of what happened, and what might happen again.

I heard an example of this danger in the news recently. To commemorate the 150th  anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, the Sons of the Confederacy have erected enormous rebel flags on roadways around our state.

They claim the flags are a symbol of their heritage. But for many Americans, black and white, the heritage symbolized by that flag is one of racism, cruelty, and inhumanity.

It is important to remember that those sins are part of our history, and that we must continue to be vigilant in fighting them in ever new forms. But to uphold them by displaying the rebel flag with pride is a dangerous distraction from that evil.

Contrast that with the Japanese response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

The memorial to that tragedy in Hiroshima is a park dedicated to peace. We are to remember the tragedy, yes, but to let it be a symbol calling us to rise above the evils of war to the highest calling of peace.

Certainly, symbols “can re-present” evil as well as good. Hitler and his Nazi party were masters at producing dangerous and demonic symbols.

Days after September 11, National Public Radio commentator Marion Wanik broadcast a warning on the dangers of setting up this tragedy as merely symbolic, removed from the events themselves.

“How does this sound?” she asked. “’Mothers Against Symbolism;’ ‘Mothers Against Religion and Ideology;’ ‘Mothers Against the Afterlife,’ and, finally, ‘Mothers Against Indiscriminate Revenge?’”

“’Mothers Against Symbolism,’” she said, “is dedicated to the proposition that the World Trade Center was a building, not a symbol of American power or riches or world domination.

“It was a big building, full of people. So, for that matter, was the Pentagon.

“If the terrorists wanted to destroy a symbol, they should have gone after the Statue of Liberty — at night. They could have paint-balled the Washington Monument.

“But even if they destroyed those symbols, they could not have destroyed the ideas they stand for. What can be destroyed are buildings and people, and that’s what they have done.

“By this act, the terrorists have destroyed what is most sacred to me — that is, human life. To me, any ideology or religious belief that makes something more important than human life is anti-sacred, and I am against it.

“If the belief in an afterlife makes people more inclined to kill and die, I am against that, too.”

The New York Times editorial made this same life-affirming point, and remembered that along with the shock, grief and fear of the days following the attacks, there was also something surprising in the national mood.

“It was an enormous, heartfelt desire to be changed. People wanted to be enlarged, to be called on to do more for country and community than ordinary life usually requires, to make this senseless horror count for something.

“It was also a public desire, a wish to be absorbed in some greater good, a reimagining of possibilities in our national life.”

Certainly there have been instances where this has happened, but they have been outweighed, I think, by a growing political rhetoric of fear, anger, and resentment.

But the final chapters of what the day means in our history has yet to be written. As The Times said, “We are still learning about the events of 9/11, and in truth, 10 years is a short window to assess the consequences of those attacks.

“Perhaps in time we will realize that the full meaning of what happened on 9/11 resides in the surge of compassion and hope that accompanied the shock and mourning of that September day.

Again, our country’s greatest president can help show us the path to memorialize and symbolize such national and human tragedies.

At the close of his Second Inaugural Address, a little over a month before his assassination, Lincoln said these words:

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”