Almost three weeks have passed now since the terrible atrocity in America. While the intensity of the media coverage has diminished somewhat, the story still dominates our newspapers and TV screens. And, if it is dominating our media to that extent, it is a fair guess that it is still dominating our minds also. Given the context, I think it would be a rather futile exercise to preach today on the gospel of the day, Dives and Lazarus. While you are all physically present here in this church in Galway, it is my guess that the mind of many of you are still in Manhattan. I'm sure some of you still find your minds playing and replaying over and over again that gliding plane followed by that towering inferno. The mind seems to insist on retaining that awful image, stubbornly chaining our spirits still to that awful disaster. That seems to be nature's way of connecting us to reality. Our spirits lag behind reality. If reality is too unpleasant, we block it out, push it to the back of our minds. But, through playing and replaying the image, nature seems to be insisting that we catch up with reality. It insists that we absorb the full horror of what has happened. If it is like this for ourselves who were so far removed from the scene, how much more is it true for those who were directly involved, or who had family and relatives directly involved?
The Irish-Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan wrote that every human being goes through four stages if he or she is to successfully come to term with or grasp any event in life. Its irrelevant how trivial or how enormous that event may be. It may be the loss of an All Ireland semi- final, or the fact that you got sick after a bad pint. The nature of the event is irrelevant. Four steps are negotiated in coming to terms with it. The first step is the experience of the event itself. We experience this happening. It may boost us to the heavens with joy, or cast us to the hells of numb despair. In time, Lonergan said, our spirits are created in such a way as to absorb the initial shock. The more enormous the event, the longer it will take. But, in time, we move on from that state of shocked absorption towards the stage when we struggle towards some understand of what has happened. We strive to put the pieces of the shattered jig-saw together. We find ourselves reading incessantly the history of the suspected perpetrators, their background, what brought them to this point. We find ourselves reading biographical details of the unfortunate victims, what were they doing on the morning of the tragedy, who did they last speak with, all seemingly irrelevant information that really has nothing to do with the event itself. But Lonergan holds that this is the way our spirits are programmed to operate. This is part of the whole process of understanding.
The next step is one of judgement. Having experienced the event, and having grappled towards some semblance of understanding, we now bring our own moral compass to bear on the he event. With this moral compass, we make a judgement. We arrive at a personal decision as to the rights and wrongs of the event. If we refuse to make a moral judgement for ourselves, according to Lonergan, we are destined to learn nothing from the event itself. We remain morally untouched by it.
Having arrived at a moral judgement, we are in a position to extract some meaning. What does or did the whole thing mean for me? And it is only when we have extracted some meaning from the event for ourselves, only then are we in a position to say that we have gone some small way in coming to terms with this enormity. The event wasn't wasted on us, lives were not lost in vain, humanity learned something. This, according to Lonergan, is the daily pilgrimage of the human soul and spirit.
In the final stage of the process, that of meaning, some elements are all too obvious. The most obvious one of all I suppose is that human life is so fragile. Ironically, as the unfortunate American people discovered, the more powerful you are, the more fragile and vulnerable you are. No one will be as aware of this fragility as the survivors of the atrocity. And as Michael Berenbaum, writes in that piece I put in the missalette today, no one survived the World Trade Center or the Pentagon because of his or her virtue, strength or wisdom. Most often, survival was random.
The question is what to do with the very fact of survival. Here the experience of Holocaust survivors may be instructive. In the immediate days ahead, the task of going on with life will be all-consuming. It will take time energy. Shock will be replaced by numbness and depression. There will be persistent fears. But over time, survivors will be able to answer that question not by a statement about the past but by what they do with the future.
Because they have faced death, many will have learned what is most important: Life itself, love, family and community. The simple things we have all taken for granted will not be taken for granted. They will be treasured and appreciated anew and the survivors will bear witness to that reality.
The survivors of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings will not be defined by the lives they have led until now but by the lives that they will lead from now on. For the experience of near death to have ultimate meaning, it must take shape in how one rebuilds from the ashes. Such for the individual; so too, for the nation.
A prayer poem by Michael Hartnett captures the fears and the faith of these days. The poem in prayed more in hope than in confidence, but it is prayed nonetheless: It is called: