Today is the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Looking back I don’t think any of us would have guessed how the following five years would have taken shape. Before 9/11 America was virtually untouched by foreign terror. Before 9/11 George W. Bush was seen by many as a lame-duck one term president. Before 9/11 you could scarcely find any editorializing on the “Muslim street”. Now we are living in a climate of fear, we are engaged in two ongoing foreign wars with more conflicts possible. Nearly 3000 American troops have been killed (and over 20,000 wounded), and over 40,000 Iraqi civilian casualties are estimated. Osama Bin Laden is still at large, and middle-eastern forces friendly to him are gaining influence and power.

Did it have to be so? I argue that there could have been a wiser path forward from the devastating attacks. For a brief moment the world grieved with us and for an even briefer moment we held the ability to make sensible and moral decisions to make us (and the world) a safer place to live. I feel we have since squandered those chances, and the president following Bush will have a long and hard road to travel.

I write daily about religion and faith, and if I learned anything from the 9/11 tragedy and the aftermath I learned that I couldn’t remain silent. That one of the best individual responses to fundamentalist terror is pluralistic involvement. While some in America sought to blame our very existence for the attacks, our own community raised voices of sorrow and hope for the future. Here are some of those voices from shortly after the attacks.

“At this time, it is all that I can find to say to the larger Pagan/Wiccan community as well – except perhaps to add a simple observation: Those of us who have lost a loved one know that there’s hole in your heart that never goes away. But with time, you grow a larger heart around the hole. The impossible happened this week – cruelty, death and destruction on an inconceivable scale opening an abyss of despair. And now we are forced to acknowledge that anything is possible. But if anything is possible, then it is possible for us to conceive and create a world in which another kind of impossibility is possible. We can choose to create a world in which the madness we have now experienced does not exist. So while others speak of revenge and war, we must focus on changing a world that gives rise to such terrible madness and terrible responses.” – Phyllis Curott, Wiccan Priestess, New York (click here for entire article)

“Like my kith and kin near and far, I am angered and frightened by what has happened. I crave security and a world safe from the terrible violence of the recent past; a world where no creature need be concerned about loss of life, health, home, or the means to pursue happiness. My instinct is to hide, to retreat, to find safe harbor from the atrocities, if such haven exists, or to fight, to lash out, and thereby make the cause of my distress vanish forever. However, my conscience screams that now, more than ever, I must have courage. I must face the flames in my heart, and deal with them, lest the demagogues use them to ignite far more dangerous fires.” – Rick R. Johnson, “A Vigil Through The Night”

“I have had a very long ritual relationship with the World Trade Center. For more than two decades it has served as my own personal/public shrine, an urban Stonehenge for an urban shaman…I wonder about the fates of all of the building staff people whose names I never knew who have helped to set up and facilitate our public seasonal ceremonies over the years – the guards, the sound guys, the helpers with ladders and brooms, the woman with the key to the bathroom. I pray that they are all safe. And I pray for the thousands of people in those buildings who have added their soulful energy to our celebrations over the years. I bless them all, I bless us all, alive and dead, ancestor and antecedent, with eggs, with seeds, with sanctity, and with solemn promises that their tragic loss will propel us to build the sort of world where people don’t blow each other up. Shall we do this in their names.” – Donna Henes, Urban Shaman

“Hecate sits on her tripod at the crossroads in the underworld. She holds aloft her torch to light the way for those souls who have died. We send our love and compassion to them, their friends, and family. Her light also illumines this situation, enables us to see it clearly, and reveals the truth. We look deeply at the crossroads, and feel the tide pushing us toward a road of more war, militarization, and repression. We hold open the possibility that there is another way. We pour out every drop of love, compassion and hope we can and stir it into her cauldron clockwise, stirring counterclockwise to release negative forces. We let the waters of her cauldron rise and create a great, flood current that can carry us down the road of hope.” – Starhawk, “A Letter From Starhawk”

“There is a Norse Pagan teaching about the disir, the local land-spirits, and their relationship to humanity. This old belief is that these spirits are naturally benevolent, and tend to be helpful to men and women. But, it was said, that changed in any place where blood had deliberately been shed. Where one human had slain another, the disir grew bitter, untrusting, and suspicious of us. When humans have killed one another, the story goes, the very land cries out in pain. I am writing these words on September 13, 2001, two days after the annihilation of as-yet-uncounted thousands of human beings at the World Trade Center and elsewhere by terrorist piloting hijacked commercial airplanes. Though most of my personal friends are now accounted for and are safe, some are not. With the telephone traffic jam into New York, and the transportation problems still cutting off parts of New York City from others, it’s going to be several days more before most of us hear from all of our loved ones. I cannot really imagine what the disir of Manhattan must now be experiencing. But I have some idea of what my species is experiencing, in the aftermath of the most appalling terrorist act of all history.” – Cat Chapin-Bishop, “An Essay For Pagan Clergy”

Finally, Ellen Evert Hopman wrote this a year after the attacks. I feel the message is still relevant today on the fifth anniversary.

“The most primitive response to the memory of 9/11 is to react with rage, demanding vengeance. For many this will be the most immediate and lasting response. Another understandable, but no less primitive, response will be denial. There are those who refuse to watch television, or read newspapers, or listen to the news, preferring to “stay happy” and focus “only on the positive”, in a kind of New Age never never land. Growth cannot occur in this walled off state, nor will this numbness spurr us to take the necessary compassionate action. Pain and suffering are evident all around us, as they have been continually in the last year. The bombing of civilians in Afghanistan, the deaths of children in Iraq, brought on by sanction driven deprivation, the tit for tat violence in Palestine and Israel, are all aspects of our common crisis. It is only by facing these events directly, and by allowing the full horror to penetrate, that we can finally respond with compassion and begin the steps to change our present circumstances.”

I’m hoping that we can move forward from this anniversary wiser and ready to make real change in the world. War and paranoia has failed to change our terror-haunted nation for the better, one can hope that a new way will be chosen. A way that doesn’t politicize the tragedy for political gain, a way that lives up to the very best of our country’s history.

Tags: Paganism