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What Can We Do?
by Thomas Keating
The basic oneness of the human family, intuited by the
mystics of all religions, is reinforced by the discoveries
of particle physics, bio-physics, quantum mechanics, the
Big Bang, the chaos and string theories. Reality manifests
the unity in diversity of the Ultimate Reality.
Anthropology reveals the evolution of the human
family from pre self-conscious states to full reflective
self-consciousness. Higher states of consciousness are
now a possibility for every individual. Is it also possible
for the human race as a whole, or at least a major
portion? If so, it may require a series of crises on a
global scale to force us to relinquish narrow, limited, and
self-interested goals in order to venture into the world
of inner freedom, mutual concern and transformation.
This is the goal of the spiritual disciplines of the world
religions, especially the Christian path as understood by
the Fathers of the Church and contemplatives
throughout the Christian tradition. The Greek Fathers
boldly spoke of divinization in their ordinary homilies.
The witness of the Algerian Martyrs of the Cistercian
Monastery of Atlas is significant for our contemporary
experience. These were monks from several European
monasteries who went to Algeria to live the monastic life
as a witness to Christ’s love for the Muslim people. Their
dialogue of presence to the impoverished Arabs who
lived around them might be called dialogue unto death.
They forgave those who killed them in advance. They
fulfilled the most profound social meaning of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ: forgiveness of everyone and
everything as well as a practical caring for all their
neighbors. One of the consequences of this teaching is
the conviction that the sufferings of others are our
sufferings. It can also be said that the needs of everyone
are our needs. From the perspective of the Gospel,
these needs are also God’s needs. “As long as you did it
to one of the least of my little ones, you did it to me”
(Matt. 25:40).
Those who died in the wreckage of the Twin Towers
may not be martyrs in the strict sense of the term.
Martyrs are those who lay down their lives for a cause.
Jesus did not lay down his life for a particular cause. He
laid down his life for the sake of the whole human family.
The victims of the Twin Towers have entered into the
same broader dimension. They had no time to think of
a cause to die for. They were mostly concerned about
their loved ones and about the ordinary lives that they were
on the point of losing. In a sense they pioneered a new
kind of martyrdom without even thinking about it. They
were called to submit to the dark side of human
transformation, which is death. But this is what Jesus
did in his own person—suffering death without any
power to rise except his absolute trust in the Father’s
faithfulness. Even that as a psychological support was
sacrificed in the apparent abandonment he experienced
on the cross and his subsequent descent into hell.
These were the inevitable consequences of his
identification with the human condition, especially with
personal and social sin and the natural sanctions which flow
from them: guilt, shame, isolation, desolation,
loneliness, alienation. Contemplatives of all times have
been called to participate in this collective anguish and
to rise with Jesus to the inconceivable union and unity
that is God’s plan for each individual and for humanity
as a whole. The victims have contributed to the great
awakening that God may have planned from all eternity
for us fragile human creatures. In any case, the death of
the innocent victims of war and violence is the Passion
of Christ extended in time and space.
Our collective sufferings, including the shock, grief,
anger and shattering of our expectations and support
systems, may be a necessary part of the preparation for
the ultimate healing of the individual and societal wounds
of the human family and its collective resurrection.
The Twin Towers’ destruction was man made. It was
not a natural disaster. Hence it is a lively symbol of the
devastation that is the consequence of sin, especially
social sin, the collective evil accumulating from millions
of people seeking to escape from their personal
emotional pain. Inflicting pain on others is a
characteristic response to this experience. The desire
for revenge always accompanies feelings of intense
anger or long-simmering hostility. Retaliation, if given
free reign, adds to the violence already inflicted on the
human family by the original perpetrators. The need for
a vindictive triumph, so often touted in war propaganda,
must be sharply distinguished from legitimate measures
to defend innocent people from brutal attack. At the
same time we owe it to the dead not to take the low road
of merciless vengeance, which is basically what
destroyed their lives.
The Twin Towers, at least to third world countries,
were symbols of unbridled capitalism, economic
domination by the United States over the rest of the
world, the search for wealth reaching to the skies and
the power to impose our materialistic culture on everyone
else. It was a symbol of pride, arrogance, greed, vanity,
and the apotheosis of financial success and domination.
Yet for most who worked there, it was a way of earning
a living, supporting their families with a good job and
“hope” for the future. As a world catastrophe, it is a
kind of culmination of the escalating insensitivity to
human life that characterizes the wars and violence of
the last eighty to a hundred years of human history.
The people who worked in the Twin Towers were
from eighty different nationalities. The perpetrators of
the event had as a clear intent to destroy not just the
buildings with their symbolism, but as many innocent
people as possible. Anyone who lived in the USA and
especially those who passed through those towers was
an enemy totally beyond consideration, sympathy, or
pity. Thus the attack is a denial of what is most
fundamental about human beings, namely, their
common unity, a oneness rooted in our common
Source. We are individual and social in our very being,
manifesting the unity and diversity of the Trinity and its
boundless creative activity.
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