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Archives
9/11 Homily
Fr. Victor Clore
The Scriptures today are singed with fire and
smoke. When Moses went up on Mount Sinai, thunder
crashed and lightening flashed; there were earthquakes, fire and smoke.
The people cower in
fear. They comfort themselves by making a golden
calf. When Moses sees what they are doing, he explodes in anger. He
and God discuss wiping
them off the face of the earth. Let them follow
their golden calf. Let’s
see how far they get in this desert, bleating
after their helpless, impotent idol!
Jesus tells us a parable about a family
reeling from an explosion. This ungrateful Younger Son brashly demands
his share of the inheritance, and the old man is not even dead yet.
Incredibly, his father breaks up the patrimony, and hands over half
of the fractured estate to his reckless son. The Older Son is seething
with anger.
Paul makes a confession to his young protégé Timothy. He admits he was a blasphemer, a persecutor and a man of violence. As a young man, he had been a serious student, he lived by every jot and tittle of God’s Law. But he became consumed with fury at the blasphemous followers of Jesus. He wallowed in rage; he began acting like a criminal.
Years ago, wise scholars set these three readings for the Sunday After September 11, 2001. They had no idea what meaning this Word of God would have for us today. They had no idea that we would be cowering in fear, smelling smoke and seething in rage here today. But we are. That’s why we need this Word of God.
Two questions keep blaring out: "Why did this happen?" and "What can we do?" With things as awful as this, we cannot give good answers all at once. But a fragment of an answer to one question may give us a hint about the other. And then back again.
For one thing, we need to keep reminding ourselves not to act out of fear or revenge. That’s what the people huddled in fear at the base of Mount Sinai did. Think back to last Tuesday at about supper time. You might have had the TV on. Did you happen to see that live report from Afghanistan? It was about 3 or 4 in the morning, and there were shells exploding over the capital city. The reporter was speaking over a phone line, and he had no idea who was firing the shots.
What did you feel right at that moment? I am ashamed to say it, but I must confess this is what I felt: I felt a twinge of revenge in my gut, an actual contraction in my belly, and instantly I said to myself, "Good! We got them!" It turns out that these shots were being fired by an internal resistance movement, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader. Of course, here in America, we were not even aware of that struggle. It just goes to show how dangerous it is to act out of revenge. This is what the Older Son is doing.
What is the Father doing? The Father is lavishly loving his Younger Son, even more outrageously, more prodigiously, than the youth himself had been with his father’s property. The father is responding in healing rather than in revenge. Of all the commentaries I heard over the past five days, one insight stands out. I have no idea who said it, but I think he is on target. He pointed out that most of our responses to "What can we do?" are in terms of warfare. But we are better advised to use the image of curing an epidemic.
Some of us can remember the scarred faces of smallpox. When I was 12, I had a friend who died of polio. What did we do? We tried to figure out what was causing these diseases. We devised inoculations, and we promoted hygiene. I stood in line for my three sugar cubes, and I made sure I always washed my hands; I was scared I would die. The way to wipe a disease off the face of the earth is by inoculation and hygiene, with passion and commitment.
Curing terrorism will require the same kind of fire in the belly, the same passion, the same discipline that soldiers have. And the same hygiene. We need to look at our own practices, wash our own hands, clean our own house, as well as inoculate those infected. In the long run, the healing model is more effective than the warfare model. Maybe the Father realized that he had some changes to make himself, as he talked with his Older Son. So if President Bush calls me, this is what I will suggest.
Meanwhile, what do we do, here and now? We do what lots of the people have been doing. We do what we can. Consider the guys in the plane over Pittsburgh who decided to take back control of their plane, even though it meant their own sacrifice.
Consider the little group of seminary students, who went to Ground Zero just to pray. They happened to meet a distraught fellow who was holding a picture of his brother. They had not seen his brother, but they offered to pray with him. He spoke Spanish better than English, so they prayed in Spanish. They sang hymns, gentle hymns, soothing hymns. Passersby joined the huddle. Then more. Before long, two hundred or more people were standing there, praying, hugging one another, some of them not even knowing who was at the center of their spontaneous little communion.
Consider our teachers and religious educators. We are commissioning you today in your ministry. What are you doing? You are forming an environment in which our children can learn to love one another as Jesus loves us. You are building communities of love that are the antidote to cells of hate. This is what we can do. And if we keep doing it well, we will heal the reasons why this horrible thing happened. And we will begin to become Peoples of the same God.
Fr. Victor Clore
clorevi@udmercy.edu