Nine elevens past - and the future

This morning I woke up to the sound of President Obama's voice reading Psalm 46 at the 9/11 memorial in New York. I must admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of lead-up coverage in the last several weeks, especially since my memories are so vague surrounding the actual day. I've not quite known what to do with the impending anniversary. This is in part because I know that, before September 11th was 9/11/01, it was 9/11/73 in Chile, the date on which the US overthrew Salvador Allende, who was properly elected by Chileans. Their September 11 and its bloody aftermath were every bit as horrifying as ours was.



Knowing this, and having lived through the not-altogether-becoming US response to 9/11/01, Psalmd 46 still seemed right, comforting. "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God" - that is an easy idea for a Minneapolitan to identify with. I wanted to look over the whole psalm again this evening, and out of my bible fell a note card that I picked up some years ago at St. Martin's Table. It is a prayer card from Pax Christi that holds a prayer by Sister Diana Ortiz, an Ursuline nun who was held and tortured by US and Guatemalan agents in Guatemala during the civil war there. Today is election day in Guatemala and it looks rather likely that the winner will be an ex-general intricately involved in the tortures and massacres that went on throughout the 1980s and beyond. ("Guatemala's 'iron fist' party leads the polls") In light of this coincidence of three 11 de Septiembre, I want to share the prayer:

Jesus, Our Tortured Brother Today

Jesus, our Tortured Brother,
In this world, so many are
forced to walk your path today --
the suffering and pain, the
humiliation, sense of betrayal and
abandonment,
for those with power, the
Romans of today, continue to
condemn others to modern crosses.

You said that what was done to the least of these was done to you and so each day,
You are tortured anew.

Jesus, our Guardian of the Wounded and Tortured,
Bid us to look into the secret prisons -- the unmarked
graves -- the hearts and minds of the torture survivors,
Bid us to wipe the tears of the families of those whose
decapitated bodies were cast into the open sea,
Bid us to embrace the open wounds of the tortured.

Jesus, Guiding Spirit,
Teach us to be in solidarity with those who hand from
these crosses,
Call out to those who torture, "Know the evil you have
done and repent."
Call out to the rest of us, "What meaning does love have
if you allow torture to continue unopposed?"

In the name of the tortured of the world, give us the
strength, give use the courage, give use the will to bring this
horror to an end, in the name of love, justice, and the God of
us all. Amen.

Nineteen years before 9/11/73 (in July, not September), the US did the same thing in Guatemala that we later did in Chile - we toppled a democratically-elected president because his policies were not convenient for US companies. We created the first banana republic at the behest of the United Fruit Company. And almost 60 years later, Guatemala is still suffering the consequences, as is all of Latin America, to an extent, since Guate and Chile were far from the only places this happened. It is easy, clear to see the ways in which Guatemala is still reaping the deadly harvest sown there, but it isn't always as obvious how our own souls are impacted in the States. We continue to topple and to torture, believing it to be a method of extracting information, when in reality, torture is a means of control of a given population.

"God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns." A lot of the coops that you can visit in Guatemala use the words amanecer or esperanza in their names. If we want those two thoughts - "dawn" and "hope" - to be so compatible and correlated, we must - we must - learn to call to ourselves toward change as easily as we call on others. We must ask ourselves, What meaning does love have?

This isn't a "9/11 post", or at least I don't want it to be. But it seems like if there is anything we can learn from ANY of these 9/11s, much less the three of them put together, it is that peace - in all its forms - is indeed the most important goal to strive for. For me today, that peace took the form of making sauerkraut and jalapeño hot sauce with some cabbage and peppers we were generously given this past week. Then Melissa (a housemate) and I went to a queer-themed open mic at Spirit of Hope over which, at the very end of the evening, a rainbow formed from the last rays of sun above the horizon.

It seems fairly simple, and not very revolutionary, to posit that there will continue to be 9/11s of varying scales as long as _______ something. The problem is, that something is hard to identify. So while we try to figure out what it might be, let's not spend nearly as much time on that as we do on creating love. The more we do that, the less important (perhaps) it will be that we identify specifically what it is we used to spend all our time trying to hate.