The American Inquisition

If asked, my parents could tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing the day JFK was shot.  Likewise, I can tell you exactly where I was on the morning of September 11, 2001.  It's something that never leaves me. At the time, I was a senior at Hampden-Sydney College, and like most college students, managed to roll out of bed late and head to The Commons for breakfast, half alert to the comings and goings of the wider world.

I didn't even make it upstairs to the dinning hall that morning.  Walking inside the Tiger Inn, the campus watering hole, I saw scores of other students surrounding the televisions inside.  And there it was on the tube, the smoking twin towers of the Big Apple red hot with tragedy billowing from within.  Shocking does not even begin to describe the feelings going through my body.  The live video feed had a numbing, disorienting affect on me.  The eerie silence of the usual bustling restaurant hit each student as they opened the doors on that crisp September morning.  Something was horribly and unusually wrong.  It was palpable.

Later that day, the Dean of Students called and asked me to accompany him on a visit to a mutual friend and administrator who had just learned of his beloved aunt's death in the World Trade Center attacks.  As we sat with Ryan, it was clear to us that no words could bring back his aunt;  our presence was simply that of loving compassion.  The usually large former football player sat quietly smaller on the edge of the sofa.  Nothing made sense anymore.  

While I was safe in central Virginia that day, the events of our national tragedy are forever burned into my conscience and it still haunts me.

Hope, however, did find a way.  By sunset, students from Hampden-Sydney organized a massive prayer rally on the football field for those who needed to begin their own process of understanding.  It started first with prayer.  Standing hand-in-hand, the college community surrounded the entire field in a unified prayer for peace, reconciliation, and healing.  I was proud to be apart of a community that was willing to struggle in corporate unity for Christ amidst the day's horrific events.

More recently, the news surrounding a proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero in Manhattan reveals that the Nation's wounds have not healed. Pogroms, of sorts, erupted across the country in sacrilegious protest.  How bold of them, some opined, it's the enemy right in our back yard! The hysteria and media hype that ensued for weeks was akin to ripping the band-aid off fresh wounds still deeply felt by millions of Americans.  Christian extremists were quick to charge that God had demanded Islam's holy book, The Qur'an, be burned in protest.  Pundits spun the stories and debate on every possible side grew to an alarming pitch.

It also reveals that the soul of America is too cramped.  Too narrow and claustrophobic, America's capacity for healing and reconciliation needs to be widened, stretched out.  The western mind categorically rejects weakness and vulnerability in order to champion a form of social Darwinism that inevitably does great harm to the soul.  Christ said as much.

In the post-resurrection narratives of Jesus found in the Gospels, he disarms and assuages his scared disciples with the words, "Peace."  Retributive justice is not on Christ's mind.  Visibly bearing the wounds of the crucifixion, Jesus' glorified body does not erase the painful lacerations inflicted by his death sentence.  They are there, unambiguous to the human eye.  Why?  Because God does not erase the course of human history--it's too incarnational.  Even Francis of Assisi prayed to receive the blessing of Christ's wounds because they were to serve him as the sovereign reminder of God's power to heal through brokenness.

I fear, though, that history is beginning to repeat again in the twenty-first century.  The Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century sought to control and maintain Christian orthodoxy under the sentence of death.  Conversion by the sword is fleeting and fickle, history proves that this is not how we celebrate progress.  And now in 2010, the orthodox standards are being drawn from a clouded state of mind tantamount to an inquistion on American soil.

A narrow and cramped soul disavows anything contrary to what a pollster statistically proves.  American ingenuity has all but disappeared, and the financial markets are reeling for the time being.  "In God We Trust," is the motto found comically on our currency.  More Americans, I suspect, place trust in the almighty dollar than they do with The Almighty One. We blame politicians and political parties for not fixing our problems.  Changing the parties in charge of either the White House or Congress since 9-11, so it seems, has not solved much of anything.

Still, I don't lose heart.

Simply put, we should not put our faith in this or any government for salvific results; we should look to our faith communities to process through the hurt and anger of our woundedness to find answers for our way forward.  We have to reconcile ourselves to ourselves and to others.  Healing takes time.  It is clear that in the space of the past nine years, very little healing has occurred.  This can change and we can serve as instruments of that process.

Wounds, thank God, can and do heal.  They can serve as painful reminders of the past, or they can transform us into blessings for the future.  That decision, for now, is ours to make.