Television
God and Evil
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
One U.S. senator declined to express
enthusiasm for the idea that Congress was moving for a day to New York’s
historic Federal Hall, where the first Congress had met, to make speeches on
the meaning of Sept. 11. He figured that everything that could be said had
already been said. He may have been right. But in the media world, nothing has
been heard -- little will sink in -- until it has been said a hundred
times.
So, especially in New York, we relived those days with the
publication of dozens of books, at least three dozen TV specials, and the
editors of the newsweeklies, The New York Times, the Newark Star
Ledger and the New York Daily News determined that this time the
journalists’ “first rough draft of history” would be closer to
the last word than the rough draft.
The most-asked question was: What has changed?
From where I stand -- on a Jersey City hilltop -- I see the hole
in the New York skyline, but I walk the bustling streets of lower Manhattan.
The city is very much alive.
Nationally, President George W. Bush has declared a police action
against terrorists, a “war” in order to achieve his
administration’s original goals: abrogate international treaties; plunder
the environment; and consolidate corporate wealth and economic power
permanently in the hands of the 1 percent of the population who financed his
election.
According to The New York Times and the New York Daily
News, Bush has also told friends that he has been “chosen by God”
to take command of this “war.”
Which leads us to the most challenging question posed by the PBS
“Frontline” documentary, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero”:
Where was God that morning when those two planes came hurtling through space
aimed at the more than 2,000 men and women about to perish?
This is not a new question.
We hear it in our own families when a parent or dear friend --
especially a good, innocent, saintly person -- loses a kidney, is diagnosed
with ALS or pancreatic cancer. When a child dies at birth or a young man or
woman keels over on the football field or dance floor and does not get up. Why
her? Why me? For the existentialist literary philosophers -- atheists like
Camus or Christians like Dostoyevsky -- the suffering of children was the
greatest challenge to religious belief.
For the middle-aged fireman or policeman -- the majority of whom
are Catholic -- the irrational “scandal” is the loss of the
fireman/policeman’s son, the handsome young fellow with a wife and
2-year-old child who will grow up thinking of his or her father in images of
the Twin Towers crumbling in fire and smoke.
“Frontline,” broadcast twice, needs to be seen at least
twice to begin to deal with its questions. And it is best reviewed in tandem
with the A&E/New York Times documentary, “Investigative
Reports: Anatomy of September 11th,” a highly technical, rational analysis
of why so many people “had to die.”
They didn’t all have to die. Some died because they
heroically took risks to save others. More died because architects who designed
narrow stairways and so on did not foresee planes that big or that fast
slamming into the walls. Police and firemen died because their respective
communications systems were not designed to talk to one another. They could not
broadcast: “Get out. Your tower is about to fall!”
So A&E dealt with human responsibility. “Frontline”
gave voice to those who blamed -- or thanked -- God. They talked, for the most
part, with victims mourning their losses; then with ministers, atheists, Muslim
scholars, rabbis, artists and a few priests touched by the tragedy who
struggled to say something consoling to people so hurt that an attempt at
consolation was almost a denial of their grief.
And who is this God they kick around? He is the great puppeteer in
the sky. He is Providence, the Big Planner. Our resumés are in his head
before we type them. He simultaneously knows past, present and future, and
pushes the buttons that send otherwise free individuals marching like
mechanical figures in a medieval town hall clock to do his will.
To them, God is personally responsible for whatever goes wrong.
How come if he’s so great he didn’t see those planes heading for the
towers and reach down out of the clouds and swat them from the sky?
An Episcopalian priest, 31, in his black suit and high collar, who
pre-Sept. 11 saw God as the one who could be “counted on” to
“keep things in order,” describes himself now as cynical and
“alone in a cruel world.”
To others, God is the family patriarch or next-door neighbor best
friend who let them down and they are confused and teed off. In fact, the depth
of their anger affirms their belief that he is there to absorb their sense of
betrayal. We can’t “hate” someone and deny his/her existence at
the same time.
A security guard, Tim Lynston, who knew 30 victims, is filmed
walking the beach in the evening, the surf washing around his footprints, as he
tells us he “cursed” God. He is “having a rough time.” This
God is a “barbarian.” “I believe in the Son,” he says,
“but not the Father.”
Marian Fontana, a writer, now speaks and writes the eulogy for her
husband -- a fireman, sculptor, loving father. On a recuperative visit to
Hawaii, confronted with the glory of sunrise, she is shattered rather than
consoled. How could God kill “this beautiful man … turn this loving
man to bones”? Sept. 11 has weakened her faith. But we have a sense
she’ll still give God a chance to prove himself … sometime.
An occasional agenda surfaces. The Iraqi exile scholar Kanan
Makiya, author of The Republic of Fear, reminds us that Saddam Hussein
gassed the Kurds. A Holocaust survivor connects the death camp victims with the
victims in the towers.
And the voice of President Bush reminds us that here we have seen
“evil.” This is evil personified in our declared national enemies.
And the implication is that he, having been chosen by God to save us, has a
mandate to stamp out evil everywhere. Has God chosen him to invade Iraq?
History’s list of divinely appointed leaders and politicians
is long, including Osama bin Laden and the hijackers who imagine that Allah was
their co-pilot when they smashed their planes into the symbols of Western
materialism a year ago.
Atheists and artists have their say. Novelist Ian McEwan says
there is no God and no devil, only people behaving monstrously. This is not the
most spectacular event in the history of human cruelty; but the artist’s
task is to explain it in human terms.
NPR correspondent Margot Adler warns us that the culture of
violence, of which we are part, can “make us lose our sense that a human
being is there.” The main point of liberal religion, she says, is that we
are all human beings. Yet the terrorists felt great killing 3,000 human beings
because they knew what was “good.” Then once you accept the
invitation of evil to join in the cycle of vengeance, you -- we -- too are
sucked in by the ocean’s undertow. It grabs our feet and pulls us out.
The implications of this for our “war” against terrorism
are almost obvious; but “Frontline” does not linger to develop them.
Nor does “Frontline” -- perhaps because it concentrates on local
participants -- reach out to leading modern theologians who could offset the
village atheist caricature of a know-it-all God who pushes heavenly buttons,
ties his own hands and watches towers crumble.
Contemporary theologians influenced by process philosophy portray
God like my friend, Jesuit Fr. David Toolan, a journalist who died of cancer in
July, did. Toolan wrote in At Home in the Cosmos that God is “not
wrapped up in himself,” but is involved, changing, suffering along with
the world he created and is calling into the future.
As Genesis makes clear, God has set us free; and in Cain and Abel,
the Tower of Babel, the Flood, the suffering and death of Jesus, world wars and
genocides, we responsible humans have made our own mistakes, spread death by
our sins.
The night before he died, the synoptic gospels describe Jesus
sweating blood in fear and confusion. If Jesus had been in the World Trade
Center a year ago he wouldn’t have understood it either.
I did not love those buildings as architecture. They seemed to
violate the symmetry of the Manhattan skyline, like steelyard bullies. They
inevitably suggested the Tower of Babel, the hubris of capitalism and
technology reaching beyond normal limits.
But several times a week I was thrilled to take the PATH train
from Jersey City and emerge into the vast underground complex of silver,
gleaming escalators lifting thousands of commuters every second into a sunlight
of commerce, competition and Old New York. I would take visitors to the top
deck where we would lean out over the awesome abyss of the city and imagine
that if we were to fall we would land right on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Faith and Doubt” also tries to talk to us about God in
the usual cinematic images -- ocean waves on rocks, roiling, scudding clouds,
storms, lightning, mountains shrouded in mists and jutting to the stars. Dawns.
Sunsets. And the sound of Kyries.
But for me, nothing matches the story of the fireman who lost his
24-year-old fireman son. Like many a biblical hero -- Abraham, Noah, the
psalmists and even Jesus -- the father has tried to bargain with God. Take me.
He is not content with God’s silence; but he believes the boy is with God,
watching over the family. The younger brother says he visits his brother now in
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because “that’s where he lives.”
They talk for a while. And when he leaves the church he drops a few dollars in
the poor box -- to buy his brother some beers.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth, professor of humanities at St.
Peter’s College, is author of Fordham: A History and Memoir,
recently published by Loyola Press.
National Catholic Reporter, September 27,
2002
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