by Fred Moleck
9/11: Part Two
The commemoration of last year's catastrophe provided an opportunity for Americans to formulate rituals to mark the day. What was surprising was the consistency in the services that I heard about, read about, and saw.
The happiest surprise was the strong emphasis on peace and not rampant patriotic "Let's go get 'em." The President supplied that element.
The music ranged from at least one thousand bagpipe renderings of, yes, "Amazing Grace" to the Verdi Requiem on PBS and innumerable performances of "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me." (Am I the only one left in the world who thinks that this text is heretical? Peace does not begin with me, but it begins and ends with Jesus.) Well, none of those were surprises!
Liam Lawton's "The Cloud's Veil" appeared frequently on campus ministry programs. Young adults and some of us old adults are fond of this chaste anthem of hope.
Candles were ubiquitous. Red, white, and blue were the color choices of the day. But just how far can one take red, white, and blue and not commit flag desecration? I saw a picture of one choral group with the jackets made out of the patterns of the flag.
Then there was a cookies-and-punch reception at a fire hall in the Midwest whose tablecloths were American flags. The sheet cake was decorated as an American flag. No one knows if the tablecloths were burned after the party or simply sent out to be dry cleaned.
No doubt, hundreds of choirs sang Peter Wilhousky's "Battle Hymn of the Republic." "God bless us America" is still the real national anthem.
There were some impressive prayerful moments.
A Roman Catholic cathedral east of the Mississippi dared to follow the mandate of Jesus and pray for one's enemies. In the reading of the names of those who died on 9/11, the list included the names of the terrorists who went down with the planes.
That took guts.
Several places included readings from the Koran placed right beside the Beatitudes and the Psalms. It is easy for us to forget that Muslims are also people of the book, like Christians and Jews. It's equally easy to forget that life must go on and has gone on.
The great miracles of care and comfort that happened during the rescue efforts were enormous. Please God we can continue this miraculous human intervention of humans helping other humans.
Let's see now if we can get beyond all of the commemorative services, which spent so much time on reflection of 9/11, and move on to the 9/12s and the 9/13s.
No matter how much I was taken up into the crescendo of commemoration and celebration, I couldn't help but feel that sometimes some of the speeches and music selections were bordering on idolatry.
A sure sign of idolatry is the exaggerated attention given to a symbol and the expectation of that symbol to somehow "make the world safe for democracy."
Then there were the historic campaigns to insure Christian dominance of the world (remember the Crusades?) or to protect correct Scripture interpretation (remember the Scopes "monkey trial"?-you probably don't, but it dealt with the teaching of evolution in the schools in the early part of the twentieth century).
Anyone interested in forming a vigilante committee to move us onward?
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net