The paradox of 9-11-01

Sept. 11. This is the anniversary we don’t want to remember, but can’t forget. That paradox contains a good chunk of what makes us human. And what both challenges and encourages us to be believers in a faith we cannot always understand.

Sept. 11. We struggle to blot from our minds images of events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. We want to forget the pain, the destruction, the tear in society’s fabric and move on. Instead, we memorialize the victims, celebrate the heroes, confront the aggressors and we rebuild.

Sept. 11. Everything has changed. And yet, nothing has changed.

As the anniversary was drawing near, my wife and I drove west into the heartland to visit the touristy Field of Dreams in eastern Iowa where the movie of the same name was filmed. That 1988 film was a whimsical bit of fantasy celebrating all that was good in the human spirit—especially as it related to baseball—and offered the hope that good would always conquer what was evil. (Unless there’s a strike, of course.)

You’d have to be blind to miss the parallels, albeit secular, to the hope and promise of faith.

Sept. 11. Everything has indeed changed. Lives have been re-ordered; security concerns challenge our travel, media and politicians are full of war talk, military buildup and lives disrupted.

Yet on this day, at the Field of Dreams, nothing had changed.

Kids in baseball gear frolicked on the field where actor Kevin Kostner frolicked with Shoeless Joe and the others from the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Parents smiled as their children disappeared into and reappeared from the tall cornstalks. Truth be told, more than a few adults ducked in and out of the stalks like ghost baseball players themselves. I certainly did.

A late-summer afternoon in the warm Iowa sun, surrounded by good Midwestern corn and celebrating that most American of all sports makes the troubles of the world seem far, far away.

But those troubles aren’t very far at all. Especially on the eve of Sept. 11.

And fun and concern, hope and fear, joy and pain are still all jumbled up together. So on Sept. 11, we don’t want to remember, but can’t forget.

A hefty part of this issue of The Catholic New World reflects that truth, and tells how we will mark the date.

Being a believer in Jesus Christ does not, as some occasionally think, make us citizens of another realm. The challenge always is to make certain our faith reflects in our citizenship—in how we serve our fellow humans, how we incorporate the truths of faith into our everyday lives. Yet, when we are attacked both for faith and for citizenship, lessons come hard.

The mission of faith is sometimes overlooked. Immigrants, who built the church, are sometimes oppressed. Those of other faiths become objects of distrust as some Catholics circle the wagons in fear and ignore the hope.

Baseball, quintessentially American, is perhaps not the best metaphor. Faith is better. Our freedoms, like our faith, are more important than we are.

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One of our tasks is to tell the good news of faith, and of faithful people. An advertisement from Parkside Chapels, Chicago, (Page 41) seeks to accomplish the same thing by celebrating good things about clergy. If you want to recommend someone, pass the word along. We’d like to help honor them.

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And as long as I’m calling attention to advertisers, whom we hope you’ll patronize, occasionally I’ll welcome another who is relatively new. This time it’s Aquinas Tutoring, a firm which works with children to help them learn (Page 8). Now, that’s an appropriate message for our back-to-school issue.

Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager