Children add an urgency to our hopes
You begin the day at All Saints, a Catholic school on Spokane’s southeast side, because a friend has two children in school there. You want to be near children – healthy, alive children – because the images from Russia cannot be shaken away.
Those Russian children streaming out of the school with only underwear on, their eyes forever beyond innocence. And those Russian children who never made it out, killed by insane men and women in ways too painful to read about. It is only later that the name “all saints” resonates, when you pray that the innocent children who died end up in a safer, sweeter heaven somewhere.
At least this is your hope. And if you cannot hope, then life is simply absurd.
Since Sept. 11, three years ago today, ever-optimistic Americans could no longer jolly themselves away from this fact: Humans suffer in horrible ways in every place on this Earth. And some who suffer are children, impossible to distance from. They are not insurgents, not terrorists, but children – connected to us through the children we know close to home.
The pundits say that the terrorists who took over the Russian school sank to a new, unspeakable low because they killed and maimed children. Didn’t care. Didn’t connect the doe-eyed children they wired with explosives with their own doe-eyed babies. But then you remember that throughout history children have never been safe from the madness. Never.
You reread a scene from Elie Wiesel’s book “Night.” At a Nazi death camp, a child and two adults are placed in nooses to hang. The chairs are kicked away. The adults die immediately. But the child, lighter, does not. One of the prisoners watching wonders, “Where is God now?” And another answers: “Here he is. He hangs on the gallows.”
It is easy to despair now about this world in which we grow our children. Even some who hated Michael Moore’s movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” could not shake away the scene of the injured Iraqi boy being carried by his father after a bombing. The child has wet his pants in terror. He looks about 8 years old. And you know this boy because of all the 8-year-old boys who have passed through your life.
At this age, they are stepping from junior to senior childhood. And wetting their pants at 8 would be a humiliation. This Iraqi boy is a world away and still you want to find him and hold him in your arms, just as you wish to rock in your arms those Russian children who survived. And weep at the funerals of those who did not.
So, closer to home, you watch the scene at All Saints on Thursday morning. The parents drive the children into the parking lot. The children pour out of vans and cars. Some carry musical instruments taller than they are. They all wear backpacks that look like rainbow-colored power generators, propelling them into their busy worlds.
You walk into the kindergarten with the 5-year-old friend. Find her cubby, her name tag, her chair, as tiny as a star in the sky. Later, after you leave, the children will “crisscross applesauce” their legs on the floor and listen to a story. Just a little later, when these kindergartners are in their 20s, you will find the photos from their first week in school, and the photos will break your heart in as many pieces as there are stars in that sky.
You wonder if it is just a coincidence that, since Sept. 11, television commercials have increased dramatically for prescription drugs that offer instant relief from depression and anxiety.
But there is no pill to take against the suffering in our post-9/11 world, the suffering that gives no passes to the children of our Earth. And to try to escape it is a selfish desire. Theologian Johann Baptist Metz writes: “We have a duty to face these catastrophes and remember them with a practical-political intention so that they might never be repeated.”
Because of the children, then, because of all the small saints, you make the choice to hope against hope that the terror we’ve seen might never be repeated. And these are your thoughts on this somber anniversary of suffering, Sept. 11, 2004.