FOR- Fellowship Magazine -"Why Do They Hate Us?"

Journey on Holy Ground

by Dan Buttry

September 11. That date will mean so much for the rest of our lives.

Let's focus our thoughts on the World Trade Center in New York, aware that people also died at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. But the World Trade Center was the site of the worst catastrophe that day. Ground Zero was the pile of wreckage and rubble and bodies that took months to clear. It became a pilgrimage site, as millions of people stopped by to somberly watch and reflect and grieve. Plans are unfolding for memorializing the horrific events of September 11th at this site. Ground Zero has become Holy Ground.

I have not been to the Holy Ground that is Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. I did go up in one of the World Trade Towers many years ago. I, like you, have watched TV footage, read articles, looked at pictures, transfixed by the horror and sorrow. But I have been to some other places of Holy Ground, sanctified by human suffering. At those places I encountered both the sanctity of sorrows and some disturbing shadows. Those shadows throw some light onto our experiences of Holy Ground, light we may need on this awful anniversary.

So let us take a reflective journey to Holy Ground. Holy Ground: Ground Zero.

The first Ground Zero. As I stood in Hiroshima's Peace Park looking at the stark skeleton of the domed building over which the Atomic Bomb exploded I sensed a bit of the horror of that August day in 1945 when nuclear weapons were first used against other human beings. There is a statue there of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who died from leukemia following the bombing. Thousands of brightly colored paper cranes lovingly laid at the base of the statue commemorate her prayer for peace and healing. A mass grave with the ashes of ten thousand people stretched my imagination beyond its capacity to grasp meaning. The most emotionally ripping moment for me was to look at a burned empty school uniform, knowing in an instant the terrible fate of the child who put the uniform on that morning. As an American walking through this Japanese park, grief and tears were my constant companions. I was on Holy Ground.

Holy Ground, Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The eternal flame burns over a stark black surface with the names sculpted in metal: Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Terezen Stadt, Babi Yar, Dachau, Treblinka, Ravensbruk, Buchenwald. Six million Jews perished in an extended and systematic act of genocide, but each one was a person with a name. Each one was a person, who was loved by other people. Names are important at Yad Vashem, part of the remembering. There is a special place for families and friends to list the names of their loved ones in the memorial. The pictures in the historical museum were familiar to me, but it was the art that revealed the heart of both the horror and the determination to survive. "All That Remained" is the title of the work that tore my soul: a sculpture of a pile of shoes, women's shoes, men's shoes, children's shoes. All That Remained. In the museum a single shoe of a child made the work of art even more graphic. That shoe was not a work of art, but an artifact, the shoe of a real child with a real name who vanished into the ovens. The shoes had been removed not in respect of God but in brutal violation of God's image in Jews and in the millions of others viewed as unfit to live by the Nazi regime. For all its horror, I was standing on Holy Ground.

These places, and so many others like them, are Holy Ground, for from these places there is an echo heard from an ancient patch of soil. From these places we can hear the blood cry out even as it cried out from the ground when Abel had been murdered by his brother Cain.

Holy Ground cries out with the blood of the slain.

Places of death are also holy places, because here God’s image is seen. God’s stamp has been placed upon our humanity: it is the essence of our very being as humans. And so when violence seeks to erase a human being by acts of murder, the reflection of the glory of the Creator cries out. God’s image within us will not be silenced, no matter what Cain and all his violent progeny may do.

Holy Ground. New York City. Smoke pours out of a tall square tower. Another plane flies into its companion tower, blossoming into an orange and black flower. The sky rains bits of metal, paper, plastic, people. One stream of people tumbles down the stairs, while another stream, firefighters, trudges up. Do they know what terrible sacrifice they are about to make? Then the slow crumbling of each tower, the billowing of smoke and dust down the steel and glass canyons. The Pile, the smoldering pile beyond our hellish imagining. Holy Ground.

But there is a shadow over Holy Ground. These holy places are not pure places. The shadow comes not from the violence that shed the blood, but from the human beings much like ourselves who raised the memorial.

Holy Ground: Ground Zero.

At Hiroshima, twenty thousand Korean slave laborers perished in the bombing. Japanese racism toward Koreans had led to the invasion of the Korean peninsula, the exploitation of Korean people, and the sexual enslavement of tens of thousands of Korean women. Thirty thousand Korean slave laborers worked in Hiroshima that August in 1945, and twenty thousand of them died. Following the bombing of Hiroshima, the Korean dead were not buried, but were piled up to be left as carrion for the birds to devour. When the Koreans wanted to build a memorial for their dead in Hiroshima, it was not included in the Peace Park itself; it is across a river from the park. Though the intersection is on the tourist maps and many less significant points of interest are noted, there is no indication of the Korean memorial on any of the guide maps. The shadow of racism has crept into the holy ground where a hundred thousand human beings were slaughtered by the Bomb.

Holy Ground. Yad Vashem. The historical story of the Holocaust in the museum at Yad Vashem concludes with the achievement of independence by Israel. The awful story of genocide against Jewish people finds its ending in the establishment of their own homeland. But there is silence on the cost of Israeli independence for Palestinian people. Palestinian villages were razed, one on the very site of Yad Vashem. Hundreds of thousands fled into exile or into refugee camps. Massacres took place to create the "empty" land into which Jewish settlers could move. None of this is mentioned at Yad Vashem. For many people it seems the power of the Holocaust memory drives the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, an occupation that continues to see Palestinians driven from their land, imprisoned without charge, tortured and killed, an occupation that still covers the majority of Palestinian territory. Yad Vashem speaks eloquently of the horrors inflicted upon Jewish people in Europe, but for Zionists seeking to expand Israeli territory, the memorial feeds the current horror inflicted upon Palestinians. There is a shadow over this holy ground.

September 11 was proclaimed to be Patriot Day. I must say that feels like a shadow to me. The Holy Ground of remembrance has been made captive to nationalist pride, arrogance, and revenge. We are invited to remember by jumping on the jingoistic bandwagon. We’ve already waged two wars, and are moving into a state of perpetual war. In answer to the terror attacks on this land we have pursued phantom enemies and bombed real people at random. The civilians we killed in Afghanistan and Iraq nearly triple the innocent body count of September 11th. We call these ruined human lives “collateral damage,” sing “God Bless America,” and prepare for yet more war.

The shadow smolders on the bare hole left in Manhattan.

What do these shadows over holy ground say to us? What do these places in their complexity tell us about the roots of violence? We want the roots of violence to be like a dandelion root, one big long taproot that may be deep and tough, but you can dig down and yank it out with one big pull. We want to identify the evil ones, whether great historical figures like Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, or our local figures of evil, the gang-bangers and muggers and wife-beaters and rapists and killers in our schools, or our current national villains like Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

A national news magazine ran a cover with the photo of a tyrant labeled “The Face of Evil.” But the shadows over holy ground reveal a far more complex picture. Rather than a simple taproot for violence, I see a massive tangle of roots reaching in so many directions into our souls and our society. The roots of violence are entwined around so much, not just what is blatantly evil, but also around much that we hold in high esteem.

Wherever we see the Face of Evil we might also see the Image of God. This is true of each and every one of us. We all wear both labels: Face of Evil and Image of God. The root of violence grows deeper, however, when these two labels are ripped apart, separated.

Osama bin Laden is only the Face of Evil. So our bombers and troops are the divine agents of God’s justice to root out terror, they're the Image of God on earth. Saddam Hussein is only the Face of Evil. So our invading and occupying army is God’s liberating army, carrying with it the Image of God on earth.

Mohammad Atta made this same split, this theological separation, as he drove that jet into the World Trade Tower. He saw the US wearing the Face of Evil. Those he was killing were unbelievers. He, Mohammad Atta, was God’s agent, a messenger from Allah, to bring divine judgment.

Our means may vary, our targets may differ, but have we done what Atta did in our hearts?

The first act of violence is denying the image of God in another human being. We create the enemy, and the enemy is not fully human. The enemy have lost the stamp of God’s image, leaving them subhuman or demonic. We create names and stereotypes and distorted pictures that erode or even expunge the image of God in the other, at least within our own minds. And that’s where our violence begins. Once we have separated the image of God and the face of evil, and we have slapped that label of evil upon our enemy, what are we left with?

Why, we are the image of God. We are righteous in whatever we do. Because of the evil of the other and the rightness of ourselves, we are justified in whatever violence we do against the enemy. I have removed the humility that comes with seeing my own propensity to evil and all I’m left with is the arrogance of playing God.

So the role of divine judge is one I am justified to take up. We can nuke the Japs because they bombed Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack. We can gas the Jews because they are vermin controlling our money. We can gun down Martin Luther King because he s a commie agitating nigger. We can bulldoze Palestinian homes because they’re terrorists. We can throw the poor on the street because they are crackheads and welfare cheats. We can kill gays because they’re perverts. We can slam kids into lockers because they are geeks or goths. We can shoot classmates because they are dumb jocks. We can execute criminals because they are cold-blooded killers. We can ram planes into buildings because they hold unbelieving oppressors. We can do whatever we please because we are justified by our own righteousness in the face of the evil of our enemies.

That’s the shadow that haunts me from these places of Holy Ground. If our sorrows blind us to our sin, then Holy Ground, sacred as it is, can become the justification for new evil.

So how do we find the way through all the violence and shadows to the holy ground where repentance, healing, justice and peace can grow? I find the answers back along the way of our journey.

Holy Ground: the Maruki Gallery. The Maruki Gallery is a small art gallery outside of Tokyo. Iri and Toshi Maruki are a married couple, both artists. The grounds of their gallery include both their home and an exhibition of their work. The major exhibit is a collection of fifteen wall-sized paintings on folding screens of the experiences of those in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The Marukis traveled to the smoldering city a few days after the bombing to search for missing relatives. Their paintings capture the horror, the disorientation, the anguish of the people of Hiroshima.

But two paintings brought in a theme absent from the peace park. One depicted the crows feasting on the piles of Korean dead left unburied. The other portrayed the fate of American POWs who survived the bombing only to be torn limb from limb by their enraged captors. The Marukis' poetic comment beside their depiction said, "Our hands tremble as we paint." In an adjacent room was yet another large painting, this one of the "Rape of Nanjing,” recalling the terrible three-day orgy of violence where some 300,000 Chinese people were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers. The Marukis vividly presented the suffering caused by the Bomb, but they also could recognize with profound grief the violence in which their own society had played the leading role. Their sorrow did not blot out the sorrow of other victims, including those labeled as "enemies."

Here is the beginning of the path to hope and redemption. We can begin to pull out the tangled roots of violence only when we all recognize the other side's suffering and our own complicity in evil. When we have learned the humility to bring together those two labels, Image of God and Face of Evil, both for ourselves and for our enemies, then we restore our full humanity.

Every time we create an opportunity for people to understand the suffering and pain on the other side, we help this redemption to unfold. Every time we create a safe place for people to begin to unwrap and grieve over their own complicity in violence, we help this redemption to unfold.

Holy Ground. A modest apartment of a rabbi in Jerusalem was holy ground to me. The apartment is home to Rabbi Isaac Newman and his wife. Rabbi Newman was the chair of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel. Out of the fundamental values of the Jewish faith, Rabbis for Human Rights have resisted the abuses of Israeli authorities against Palestinian people. They speak of God's sovereignty over all humankind, of Abraham's legacy of compassion and generosity, of the Levitical concern to show love and respect to "the stranger" and of the infinite worth of every human life. These tenets of faith are fleshed out in acts for justice and human rights for all people, but in their particular situation most especially toward Palestinians.

During the first Intifada, when the Israeli government deported over four hundred Palestinians accused of being Muslim extremists, Rabbi Newman and other Jewish Israelis joined Palestinian people in an act of prophetic solidarity by living in tents pitched in front of the Knesset building for a couple months.

Yad Vashem honors those few Gentiles who sacrificed to save Jews during the Holocaust by planting trees along "The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations." Rabbi Newman is one of the righteous among the Israelis who is sacrificing to save Palestinians facing their own historical travail.

To take the road of redemption we must move to action. We need to flesh out the tenets of our faith in acts for justice and human rights. We need to stand in solidarity at the places where violence is taking place around us. We can’t do everything, but we can do something.

Holy Ground: Ground Zero, Manhattan. Construction workers and firefighters work on the smoldering pile. Police officers with their rescue dogs search with diminishing hope for signs of life beneath the rubble. Volunteers provide water and food to exhausted, bleary workers.

James Martin is a Jesuit priest who wrote the book Searching for God at Ground Zero. James Martin found God on that terrible Holy Ground as heartbroken and weary people shared their pain with each other. He had come to counsel those grappling daily with horror beyond imagination, only to find one worker ask him how he was doing. There was a community of caring. Firefighters would hide in the wreckage so that the dogs who had grown frantic at not finding anyone alive could be encouraged. God was working on the Pile with tear-stained love and care.

Holy Ground, Afghanistan. In January, 2002, relatives of people who died on September 11th, members of Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization of victims’ families, traveled to Afghanistan. There they met with families who had lost loved ones to the US bombing. Derrill Bodley, whose twenty-year-old daughter Deora perished on United Flight 93 in a Pennsylvania field, wept together with Abdul and Shakila Basir, whose five-year-old daughter Nazila was killed when a bomb missed its target by a mile and fell among playing children.

Those who are faceless to most of us, victims from both sides, met face to face. In their shared sorrow, they created a community to say: this must stop. No more killing will be done in our name. Out of the shared tears of grief upon Holy Ground can come community that raises up new visions, new hopes, new commitments.

We can hallow Holy Ground by how we journey through the suffering around us. If we recall our own complicity in evil, so that all we do comes from a humble spirit that recognizes our common bond with all human beings, even with our enemies, then we will hallow this ground. If we live in solidarity with those who are oppressed by violence, joining in their struggle, doing the things we can do, then we will hallow this ground. If we lift up the vision of nonviolence, a community of grief that determines to bring new life out of our shared sorrows, then we will hallow this ground.

May we bring humble, healing light to dispel the shadows over Holy Ground.

Daniel Buttry, formerly Pastor of First Baptist Church, Dearborn, Michigan, is now a global specialist for peace and justice with International Ministries of the American Baptist Churches. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.