Where was God on 9/11?
Posted on Friday, September 8, 2006
On September 17, 2001, David Letterman
returned to the stage of the Ed Sullivan
Theatre on Broadway and to the airwaves. Four shows the previous week had been cancelled in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Rather than attempt a comedy monologue, Letterman sat behind his desk and gave an anxious nation a sense of things. “It’s terribly sad here in New York City,” he said. “We’ve lost 5, 000 fellow New Yorkers, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can see it. It’s terribly sad. Terribly, terribly sad.” The early casualty estimates proved wrong, but Lettterman could not have been more right about the palpability of the sudden disappearance of thousands of human beings. “We’re told that they were zealots fueled by religious fervor,” Letterman continued, shaking his head. “Religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you ? Will that make any goddamned sense ?” Such questions—and many, many more like them—were among the most unsettling of those provoked by the events that day in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Parents, brothers and sisters, devoted sons and daughters, lifelong friends, lovers and the betrothed, cheery co-workers... all vaporized by flame, smothered by smoke, crushed to dust in the space of minutes—in the name of God ?
But the claims of the fanatics to divine sanction are but one religious dimension of the tragedy. In a deeper and much more personal sense, what does September 11 say about the deity worshipped by loving, kind, innocent people—by the very people who died that day, by those who escaped the towers and the Pentagon, by grieving loved ones and by those of us who happened to be nearby or who watched and listened electronically, our hearts torn and hurt nonetheless ?
One year after September 11 on PBS, a two-hour “Frontline” documentary called Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, produced by Helen Whitney, probed these profound, elemental questions. In the program’s opening moments, the unseen narrator establishes the context for the scenes to come:
“Almost everyone has a moment,” she says, “when they feel lost in darkness: a loved one snatched away, disease, natural disaster, human cruelty. Almost everyone at some point asks the question, ‘Why me ? Why her ? Why, God ?”’
Faith and Doubt, which is being rebroadcast by PBS in connection with the five-year anniversary of the attacks, is a deep and difficult program. Many of those it interviews are people in pain, whether from grief, anger, depression, psychological disorientation or a combination of emotions.
A woman whose husband, a firefighter, died in the attacks is clearly sorrowful that she no longer speaks with God. “ I can’t bring myself to speak to Him anymore because I feel so abandoned,” she says. “But I guess deep down inside, I know He still exists and that I have to forgive and move on. But I’m not ready to do that yet.”
Yet the father of another firefighter who perished came through his darkness differently. “I found myself closer to God because of wanting—picturing, in fact—that my son is with him.... And now he’s going to help me.... I tell my friends, ‘I got to be good. My son’s watching me now,’ you know ?”
There are interviews, too, with writers, artists and philosophers; with Christians, Jews and Muslims; with clergy members of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish denominations and an atheist—all of whom offer challenging questions and, mostly, no clear answers.
Among the program’s great strengths is its commitment to let people speak at length; this is no snappy-sound-bite, cut-and-paste job. And while producer Whitney doesn’t hesitate to use the iconic still images and taped sequences of the attacks and their terrible consequences, she also finds ethereal footage that conveys a sense of the larger ideas and concepts at play in discussions of faith and religion. I can not imagine a program more deserving of your time than Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.
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