New Yorkers Wonder if US Heard Spiritual 'Wake-Up Call' of 9/11

New York City, N.Y., Sep 4, 2011 / 06:42 pm (CNA).- When Robert Harding saw the World Trade Center collapse four blocks from his Manhattan loft on September 11, 2001, he felt God calling people of every nation, race, language, and religion to repentance.

“When I saw the Towers come down, I didn't think 'God is punishing me' – but I did feel that it was a spiritual event. I literally felt the presence of a tremendous spiritual power. It was almost like a wake-up call, to me: 'Look at what you're doing, humanity. Take stock of yourselves. This is where you are, so wake up.'”

But many Americans who hoped for a new era of national purpose and unity after 9/11 find themselves disappointed. Harding, an internationally exhibited artist and lifelong Catholic who grew up during the Second World War, now thinks America might have missed the worldwide “wake-up call.”

Harding serves an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, one block from what's now known as Ground Zero. He and his young son were at home in his loft near the Twin Towers on the morning of the attacks, while his wife had traveled uptown for the day.

“It was quiet. Not much traffic, suddenly,” he told CNA on September 1. “In the distance, about three or four blocks away, I could see paper – it looked like confetti – falling out of the sky.” He didn't know that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the landmark near his loft.

A group of Harding's neighbors, mostly fellow artists, started gathering outside. “As we looked south, we could see the North Tower had a big hole in it, and smoke was coming out.”

“Some guy came running up from the west, and said: 'A plane hit the tower! I saw a plane hit the building!'”

Around nine o'clock, Harding – still holding his two-year-old boy – was discussing the report with his neighbors. “Suddenly, the South Tower exploded in a huge plume of black smoke, and flame, and debris flying out of the building. That was the second plane.”

Debris from the explosion hit the roof of Harding's parish. Meanwhile, the World Trade Center “looked literally like it was going to fall down on us. And from where we were, that would have meant it was going to fall pretty much on top of us.”

He was standing on the street with a group of people that happened to include Mayor Rudy Giuliani, when he heard “a rumbling behind us … We saw that the North Tower was coming down. It took only about 10 seconds.”

Trailed by a cloud of “volcanic-like ash,” Harding made his way north with his son, making contact with his wife later that day. One of his friends worked at the South Tower's Windows on the World Restaurant, but hadn't gone into work that morning. “As it turned out, all of her friends were killed.”

Harding, who was born in 1938 and lost his father in World War II, says he felt less shocked by the events than many younger Americans. For him, the attack by radical Muslims was “the extension of a long history of the United States … being a target of tremendous resentment or competition from other sectors in the world,” as it had been during the Second World War.

But he believes the U.S. lost its way in some respects after 9/11, rather than rising to the occasion. He is struck by the “failure of leadership in America,” on the part of politicians he says are “exploiting our differences for narrow political ends of getting re-elected,” and “not really talking to America and the world about very fundamental things.”

Harding also believes Americans gave in to fear after the attacks, placing their trust in morally questionable tactics in the interest of national security.

“I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would hear people on television debating whether, and what kind of torture, we should be using. Didn't we have the (Imperial Japanese) Bataan death march? What is going on here? This is crazy … It's fear. Where there is fear, there cannot be faith.”

For Harding, the most profound lesson of 9/11 is that people around the world “have to be humble, and accept that reality is ruled by a power greater than ourselves.”

Harding's pastor, Father Kevin Madigan, had just finished hearing confessions and offering Mass at St. Peter's on September 11, 2001, when his secretary told him a plane had hit one of the towers. Later that day, wounded and dying people were brought to his church en route to the hospital or morgue.

After the attacks, Fr. Madigan found that many New Yorkers needed “a deeper, more expansive vision of God, and a deeper relationship with God, that's able to be sustained even when things are not going my own personal way.”

Fr. Madigan recalled noticing other positive, but fleeting, changes in the city during the fall of 2001.

“In the weeks afterward, I saw a great change in people. Just the average person on the street would be much more compassionate, much more caring. People seemed to be more tuned in to what were the important things in life.”

“But I think one way of putting it, is that the alarm went off – and people hit the 'snooze' button soon afterwards. They went back to sleep.”

As the U.S. marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as well as United Flight 93, Fr. Madigan also wonders whether American Christians are prepared to consider the event in light of their faith.

“We've been in a state of perpetual war for the past ten years – in Afghanistan, in Iraq, now in Libya. And is it going to be someplace else, maybe Yemen, next?”

“As Christians,” Fr. Madigan wonders, “how do we begin to work toward the way of peace?”

A recurring thought. You know, WWI was the "war to end all wars".

It may not be to your taste, but the theme of the "Watchmen" graphic novel and (with a slightly modified plot) the movie of the same name, is that humanity would come together and the Cold War would end if everyone were convinced that we all faced imminent destruction from a non-human adversary.

This stuff never works. Not in fiction, not in reality. The takeaway for me is that Human Nature is what it is. We are violent and sinful and we cannot change that. We can try to control ourselves, but we cannot redeem ourselves. That redemption must be given to us, although we cannot earn it and do not deserve it.

Utopia on Earth cannot be achieved, and trying to do so is simply missing the point. It is the great lie which humans have been falling into from the beginning.

“As Christians,” Fr. Madigan wonders, “how do we begin to work toward the way of peace?”

Certainly not by starting with lies. Peace is built upon truth, not lies.

The first truths to admit concern the source and goals of the attack. The truth is there whether people admit it or not. If I say that 2 + 2 = 5, that does not make it true; meanwhile, 2 + 2 = 4 is still out there, true as ever and I can't do anything to change that.

The 9/11 attack was a battle conducted by one group in a century-long war being waged on the forces of good by an alliance of various forces of evil. This war continues without the forces of good acknowledging and declaring war. The mooselimb brotherhood was founded about 80 years ago and has sought isslamic dominance of the world since then. Communism, being at war with God, the concept of personal property and the right of people to the fruits of their own labor and to self-determine was active before that, with the modern incarnation of it's theories being developed over 100 years ago. The theories of communism directly defy the sovereignty of God, in that they refuse to admit that the success and failure of each man proceeds, as all things do, according to the sovereign will of God. Those who espouse communist theories think that man has devised a more fair way of determining the outcomes of men's lives than subjecting them to the will of God; in essence, communism is a modern-day tower of Babel. Another "dark force" group is broadly labeled "anarchists", which have probably always been around somewhere; they simply want to destroy things because they're idiots. There are atheists who may not feel strongly about those ideas but who are vehemently opposed to all things religious. All of these forces consist of a motley collection of groups that have formed sundry collaborations throughout this long war with coordination ranging from none to formal strategic alliances. Much (but not all) of the strategy of these "dark" forces has turned to avoiding direct military conflict in favor of becoming embedded within their enemies - the free nations of the world - and toppling them by using their own liberal (in the classical sense) principles against them.

This modern day war traces it's political roots to the end of the last great monarchies, brought about by the "great experiment" of implementing representative government, or government by the people. The model for these was classical Greece and Rome, of course, and the great tumult of the birth pangs of trying these again, but in Christian civilizations instead of pagan, rose in the development of the modern British Parliament. If one reads British history, one sees the questions of executive versus legislative power flogged about in a most dramatic way and yielding hard-won knowledge of the fundamental principles of self-government.

The Biblical scholar can not help but think back to the Israelites asking for a king, thus ushering in the age of legitimate monarchy in the Judeo-Christian world and ending it's reliance on government solely by prophets and judges of the Lord's choosing. They wanted kings like other nations had. Thus in Britain, after milennia of experiencing difficulty in having absolute monarchies that could be incompetent and cruel, the Christian world took it's first steps towards the next request, that men should govern themselves, according to the classical Greco-Roman model. So Britain and then America set up a civil government model based on Christian moral law and implemented using the classical representative forms. But as the monarchies faded in the 19th century, another alternative besides representative government was forming in the minds of over-educated intelligentsia: the communal model, where the monarch is replaced by, in essence, a committee with absolute power. Various parts of this theory contradict Scripture, so it is necessarily accompanied by a rejection of God, which implies a rejection of truth and therefore an embrace of lies and deception. And thus the stage is set for the two governmental theories to be at war: statism versus true representative government with it's law grounded in Biblical moral law. Statism is really absolute state control without the legitimacy of both a) the aim of Scriptural conformance of the monarch and his government and laws and b) the inheritance of the throne whereby the interests of the monarch and nation have at least some alignment and the selection of the monarch is at least by design intended to prevent control of the nation to be wrested by power alone.

Those who advocate the forces of good employing "nation-building" techniques and the "spread of democracy" have not analyzed history along the lines of comparing wars between nation states within a culture as opposed to wars between different cultures. The two types of wars are entirely different in their purpose, scope and resolution. IMHO.

“As Christians,” Fr. Madigan wonders, “how do we begin to work toward the way of peace?”

Step One, stand up for Christ rather than backtracking, hemming and hawing, and trying to be "inclusive". God is putting a challenge to His Son on our plate and looking for peace by walking away from the challenge will bring ever increasing misery rather than the peace our human understanding is aiming for with the same old failed methods.

Both WWI and WWII were started when people who had made vast alliances in order to insure peace were pushed into war by the very avoidance of conflict and existence of alliances they were relying on to ensure peace. Sept 11th is as much the result of the Clintion crowd avoiding the truth of our situation at all costs as it is the result of planning by those who did it. More problems in the history of the world have been solved by war than by any other means, deal with it. Sometimes war is the only way we can stand up for what we believe and without standing up for what we believe we're doomed.

It's no accident that when Islam spread by the sword it halted at just about the same borders the various widespread Christian heresies halted. Areas that had already begun the process of compromise with the world fell quickly while what stood for Christ remained and remains to now be once again challenged by the very same evil. We wrestle not against flesh and blood and until we as a nation realize that we won't succeed.

JHMo

Regards

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