9-11 Revisited

                              A Still Small Voice: General Revelation in the Tragedy of 9-11

            Ashes. Thick, colorless, black and grey ashes methodically descended from the skyline covering the city in a blanket of confusion, fear and doubt. I remember the clouds of smoke billowing from the sides of this post-modern tower of Babel. Smoke so thick and dense it seemed to suck the very light and color out of the morning sun and send this Unreal City into the premature darkness of night.

            Driving over the Mid-Hudson Bridge exactly 10 years latter, September 11, 2011, I find a small, yet somewhat morbid sense of poetic justice in the dark and dreary weather. It seems only fitting that the earth too would snap out of its melodic melees of summer glory and if only for a brief moment, mourn with the rest of us, shedding tears that slowly fell into the Hudson River. It was as if the almost silent reverberations of water on water were a cosmic dirge from whence the rain proceeded like a funeral procession slowly and surely to the ocean.

            It is in moments and hours such as that fateful September day 8 years ago that the world stands up and joins the philosopher in his tirelessly, unceasing chorus of “WHY?” To steal from T.S. Elliot, events such as these “force the moment to its crisis” (Prufrock). On a day when mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, were so unexpectedly and publicly executed, even the most jaded, mediated, agnostic soul faces an existential crisis. The universal “why?” was spoke forth only to get sucked into those cursed black clouds of smoke, before it could even reach the ears of God.

            In Elliot’s “Ash Wednesday” he writes, “Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.” On September 11, 2001 there was a nation-wide silence, and the word that resounded, piercingly loud and clear was DISORDER. Surely the poet had been mistaken, September, not April, was the “cruelest month.”

            On that early September day there was no struggle to find disorder. This is a world of disease, famine, plague, terrorism and death. As Bob Dylan sings, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” In a world of disorder we are posed with the same question that Elie Wiesel faced in one of Hitler’s death camps. Wiesel, in Night, recounts the story of walking past Jewish prisoners hanging:

                            But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…

                                And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and

                                death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close

                                range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes

                                not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God’s

                                sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where

                                he is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.”

                On days like 9-11, and in a post-modern world where more than ever this disorder seems to assert Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead”, we all are faced with what Heidegger called Geworfenheit. Geworfenheit is a German word that essentially means “throwness” or a having been thrown. In an age post mortem dei (after the death of God), the whole of humanity is stricken with a sense of Geworfenheit. Man is not at home in a world without God. At the very core all of mankind is confused, alone and disordered. The human experience, which Heidegger describes as one of “dasien” (being there) is a constant and perpetual state of disorientation. With out the existence of an eternal deity, man does not know where he came from or where he is going. We have been thrown into this universe where we find ourselves existing before we know what it means to exist, and the heavens and the earth continue to proclaim “disorder.”

            This disordered state of affairs, brought to the forefront by events such as 9-11, calls for a Cartesian-like crisis; a reexamination and questioning of our fundamental beliefs. In an age of reason Descartes sought after scientific and mathematical-like certainty in all fields of study. He wanted an indubitable starting point upon which he could build a new house of knowledge. However, in order to build a new house we must first tear down the old one. Let us then take up the Cartesian torch and try and search for a semblance of certainty by reexamining the way we look at our world.

            In the Platonic dialogues Socrates constantly preached the importance of examining the things that we learned at our mother’s knees. In today’s day and age the mother referred to throughout the Platonic corpus is completely analogous to the public school systems.

            In Chemistry we were all taught, and believed with 100% mathematical certainty, that atoms were the smallest unit of matter. That is however until scientists cracked the atoms and found a world of electrons and protons. Then, years latter, scientists discovered the quark, and quickly it replaced the atom as the smallest unit of matter. Finally, certainty! That is however until scientists cracked the quark and discovered that at the root, the core of all substance is energy. Energy, you say, scratching your head. Energy is not tangible enough. It is not corporeal. It has no extension.

            So what is it then that give form to all substances. What is it that makes something water rather than gold, or dirt or a chair? We have now found that the essence of all corporal, physical things, the thing that makes a thing a thing is relationships. Substance and form is intrinsically and explicitly relational. It is the arrangement and the relation of the electrons to one another that gives form.

            To take this one step further, I would assert, however political incorrect it may be, that the pinnacle, the crowning jewel of physical substance is the human being. Just as we questioned what makes a physical thing the thing that it is, what gives it its form, let us turn the question inward and ask what makes a man the particular man that he is.

            We must first look at the human condition and realize that even as individualistic as this technologically driven age may be, we do not exist as individuals in a vacuum. Our existence is a “field of being” (Heidegger). What makes a person who they are is one hundred percent relation based. I am only a teacher because I have a class. My father would not exist as a father without his children, nor I as a son without my father and mother. The human condition, at its core is relation based. Just as inanimate corporeal things gain there substance from their relations, we too find our essence, our meaning in relationships.

            To dig one last step further into the murky waters of the metaphysical, let us examine the essence of God. St. Augustine was once posed with the question of “what was God doing before he made the universe?” He snidely replied, “He is making hell for people who ask stupid questions.” In his work on the trinity however, Augustine answers the question in a much less sarcastic tone. Before God created the universe, he was in communion, in relationship with himself. The triune God of Christianity exists as three persons in one. The Father is only the Father in relation to the Son and the Son the Son only in relation to the Father. The essence of the three person God-head is relational.

            What great symmetry! What great order! After the clouds of billowing smoke have dissipated and dispersed, after our ideas have been reexamined we find the universe cries out order! Design! Peace! From the atoms, to the person, to God himself there is a divine order of relationships. This is an order and symmetry so divinely orchestrated that even in the midst of the most horrific of days, after the ashes settle, in that brief moment of silence the word resounds, and like music to the ears it pronounces “Peace”, “Order.”