WHERE WAS GOD ON SEPT. 11, 2001?

This past Friday, September 11, we made a good effort (somewhat successful, I think) to acquaint our 800 students with what "Nine-eleven" is all about. A colleague said to me in  a conversation that the way you can tell that this day is important is that twenty-five years later Americans over the age of thirty-five can tell you where they were on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. 

In this post, though, I'd like to ask not "Where were you?" but rather "Where was GOD on September 11, 2001?" Countless numbers of believers have asked themselves that question, sometimes in anger, sometimes in bewilderment. I'd like to offer the following essay by a monk, Aelred Graham, excerpted from his book, Zen Catholicism. Parts of it are a bit dense, but it may be of some help to you.

Among the factors that turn the existence of suffering into a "problem," even for religious people (perhaps especially for them), is a tendency to apply to God their own notions of good and evil, right and wrong. The expectation that the Almighty will conform to a moral pattern laid down for him in advance by his creatures still endures, despite the whole weight of biblical evidence to the contrary. The assumption that if one's conscience is clear God must be on one's side explains the self-righteousness that usually characterizes this or that "crusade" -- "we" being in the right, “they” hopelessly in the wrong — in which the participants are confident that they are fighting the battles of the Lord. 

A Christian truth which, often to our great detriment, we are for some reason reluctant to face is that God is implicated in created evil. Does disaster strike a city if the Lord has not sent it? I make the light and create darkness. I make weal and create woe. I, the Lord, do all these things. These texts from the inspired scriptures are to be explained in the light of a consistent theology, but they are not to be explained away. God has created a universe in which his positive action, the generation of things, implies a corresponding negative corruption or destruction. In order that human beings may live, part of the animal and vegetative world must die. Even moral evil, ť sin, falls within the divine plan. Though sin, being a defect in a creature's will, does not require God's causality, sin could not happen unless God permitted it. God, having created a race of frail human beings, takes account of the fact that large numbers of them will prove their frailty in action. God's universe contains the built-in realities of physical and moral evil. 

A commonly felt reluctance to face the fact that evil enters into God's scheme of things is due to a mental confusion. God is supremely good, we rightly say: therefore he can have no part in evil. But the conclusion does not follow. There is a distinction to be drawn between the ontological goodness, which is one of God's attributes, and moral goodness, which is based on conformity to an external norm. God is infinitely good because he lacks nothing of being, but his actions are not regulated by any norm other than his own inscrutable wisdom. God's holiness, which means "wholeness," includes all that is positive in moral goodness as we understand it; but what he sees as beneficial to the universe as a whole may involve evil to individuals. If we are to discover our true self, which is our being as harmonized with God, then we must learn to look upon areas of evil, not with approval, but calmly and dispassionately. What God tolerates we have no business to find intolerable. Or, to state the same point in more positive terms, we should seek to become increasingly identified with the attitude of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and equally on the good, his rain to fall on the just and equally on the unjust. 

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