The Church of Ireland
Diocesan Press Release

The day that changed the world

Armageddon

The war of the two worlds

Apocalypse

Declaration of war –

These are just some of the headlines which looked back at us from our newspapers on Wednesday morning of this week past after the unutterable events of Tuesday in New York and in Washington and also in the countryside of Pennsylvania. They refer to events which we never wanted to hear or see. They point to a happening which will always draw us back into itself because we will always remember where we were when this news first broke on us. As we meet on this Feast of the Resurrection, which is every Sunday in our church’s year, in the comfort and security of this Cathedral Church which as we say so often now – and it is true – witnesses to well-nigh 1400 years of worship of Almighty God in this place we seek the presence of Al-loving God in a climate of distress, despair and destruction. We do so also with the expectation of more than 1400 people propelling us to be, to do and to say, 1400 people who came here on Friday to express their sorrow and solidarity with those who are suffering - and they came also to hope for peace.

We have been battered by the experiences of life and death of thousands of individual human beings at work, in school, on the street, in the air. There certainly is something which has changed radically for ever. Something of a sense of security, something of a soaring confidence, something of the global village has gone. For some of us the place where it happened is real. For others the people caught up in what happened are real. For so many of us, though, we are at the mercy of the direction taken by the media in their re-presentation to us of what happened and of their premature analysis of it all. And we are now at the mercy of an international national policy-in-the-making which makes us fear greater loss of life.

But we have taken huge leaps and bounds if we are already swept along by any or all of this. The human reality of the event, the experience and the individuals themselves – this is where we must be and where we must begin to start and where we must stay for a very long time. The images and the interviews impact with our own human spirit again and again to make us live with the anguish, the anger and the absence of life itself as we are brought back by footage new and old to the very place where it all happened. We dare not let those images drive this human spirit to vindictiveness, to warmongering and to assumptions that what has happened is a past event. Let us not forget that it is something which is still happening to individuals lost to others and lost to themselves.

I wish to say very little today as much as anything because I cannot package this horror either for myself or for you. A question which has come to the lips of some people whom I have met in the week past is : Why did God allow this to happen? This is the sort of question for which I am supposed to have an answer. To this question neither you nor I has an answer which will satisfy our desire for explanation. We have to be honest and see the hand of humanity in all of this – on one side and at some stage on both sides.

I myself have to ask a different question : Where do we see God in this happening? I see God in the anguish and the pain of all who suffer in this tragedy, on an old cross in a new place. I see God in the need of everyone to grieve, like the Magdalene, in the longing for love - to give and to receive – which each individual feels and which the world feels. I see God in the grace of members of the rescue services who responded to one disaster by walking – unknowingly – into their own death. I see God in the following words of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales, who was 200 yards from the World Trade Centre on Tuesday morning : It was a terrifying morning for all, especially the children who were with us. We shared very briefly with people in Jerusalem or Baghdad or Kosovo a little of what it is to be confronted with real fear and massive violence. I see God in the words of Imam Hussein Halawa at the weekly prayer in The Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland in Clonskeagh : I call on the world today to think thoroughly and rationally, not to make of Islam and Muslims an enemy and not to punish the innocent for the crime of the guilty.

The greatest fear we all have - and rightly – is for humanity, set against the backdrop of the nature and the character of the response to this horror and the reactions which it will evoke. The greatest hope we all have – and rightly too – is that human solidarity, in the face of what Rowan Williams calls : real fear and massive violence, will hold on to what I want to call : real love and massive peace. We begin to learn seriously for the first time the hard lesson:

that The Global Village is not a Fly in/Fly out Shopping Mall,

that The Global Village is not a series of Coach Stops in a World-wide Hotel and Holiday Complex,

that The Global Village is not a Casino which gambles with a whole range of different currencies and commodities,

that virtual possibilities have irreversible and concrete outcomes.

But more than this we can begin to learn that The Global Village is a world of individual human beings like ourselves, that its children, women and men do matter as persons, that its local communities matter, count and register and that its leaders have a lot of work ahead in consultation with victims and perpetrators alike if the globe is to rotate to the glory of mankind and of God.

We need to learn from our fellow-children of Abraham – Jew, Muslim and Christian alike - what we learn from early in Genesis – that God’s word is God’s deed and also what we learn from early in John – that God’s word and God’s deed is God’s child. What we say, what we do, who we are – this is all the same thing. This simple truth will lead us by the hand along a road which is everywhere and which goes everywhere in love, in grace and in reconciliation. It can only lead us forward.