9/11 Twenty Years Later (9 December 2001) 

Friends crossing the divide following the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

This is the third, and last, republication of my responses to the 9/11 events and aftermath.  As I read this I am struck by the final paragraph: in the first post I remarked on how the attack hit me, personally, as an American. Just three months later I became aware of the gulf that had opened between me and 'home' in my responses. Twenty years later that gulf has become fixed in the cultural warfare of the US in these times. It continues to be painful to me.

It has been a long time since I have written in this forum. The last messages were written in the immediate aftermath of September 11, in first attempts to come to terms with that horrendous event, and the subsequent reactions and responses. 

It is not that there has been nothing to write about. Life goes on, and there have been things I have thought about relating to you. But, they seemed somewhat trivial in comparison to the events going on in other places. I could not write without acknowledging those large and momentous events. And, I could not think of what could be written. 

I posed the question last time of what it would be like if the Western response, and our own, were to be based on the Love Command. That thought has become a part of my daily thinking and prayer. I have had occasion to preach a number of times in the past couple months—in chapel, and in different churches including Longsight—and have pursued that thought in my preaching. It has been a part of my deliberation in committee meetings of the church. It has stuck in my mind and heart as the main question for Christians today. If this ‘war against terrorism’ is not to become a war of Muslims versus Christians, then Christians must live and act as Christ would have us. I have been trying to articulate how that might have feet put to it. It is not easy. It does not mean trying to create warm feelings for terrorists; but it does have to mean putting the other’s good above our own. 

This is a defining moment in history, and critical for the gospel in relation to the Muslim world. How will they see Christ in these times? 

Another reason for not writing has been not knowing how to start up again. The feedback I received, directly and indirectly, to my first attempts to articulate my feelings and attitudes threw bright light over a new facet of our lengthy sojourn outside our native land. A chasm seemed suddenly to appear between my perspective and that of so many of you ‘back home’, that had not been so clearly visible before. Suddenly, it seems, we have found ourselves speaking different languages; or, at cross-purposes. This has been an unexpected and painful by-product of September 11. Is the chasm real? Can it be bridged? Have we been ‘gone’ too long? 

Well—I am still Dwight.