One of the big questions we ministers have to answer in times like these and perhaps the overwhelming question for many people is: where was God in all this? How can God, whom we refer to as Our Father, allow such an atrocity to take place? While we can just about understand how individual personal calamities might escape God's attention, surely something of this magnitude should have been averted by divine intervention.
Alas, to think like this is to forget our history, and the broader picture of our contemporary world. Innocent lives are lost by the thousand every day as a result of war, famine, natural disasters and preventable disease, and our past is littered with examples of human cruelty and terror too awful to contemplate - the Somme, the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima.
There are no glib answers. All I can say is that my instincts tell me to stay with the idea that, despite the suffering and the tragedy, there is some point to all this, that human life is still worth living, that it is moving somewhere however obscure that goal seems to be, and that God is with us even though the pain and the sorrow seem to point towards His indifference and, at times, even towards His absence. And that's where I want to leave it.
Philosophical questions like this can wait til we have the time to reflect upon them. Much more pertinent matters need to be addressed.
First, there is the issue of the vilification that Muslims throughout the Western World are receiving. Even though Muslim groups and Muslim countries have unreservedly condemned the outrage, there seems to be emerging a completely unwarranted identification of Islam with terrorism. There is nothing intrinsically aggressive about Islam, any more than there is anything intrinsically aggressive about Christianity.
Islam has given the world some of its greatest religious thinkers, and the sages of Islam kept the flame of learning lit throughout those centuries referred to as the Dark Ages. When religion is hijacked for political purposes and isolated texts are twisted to suit the personal ends of individuals the problems begin, but this is no more true of Islam than of any other world faith.
Ambition, violence, hatred and greed are not just found in one little corner of the world, easy to identify and easy to amputate. Where else do those evil powers manifest themselves in our free, democratic civilisation? And what about the concepts of freedom, democracy and civilisation about which we shout so loudly?
How genuinely applicable are they to the world we inhabit? Does freedom mean licence to consume and compete and pillage the earth in search of commodities and markets? Does democracy just mean putting a cross beside the name of a self-selected politician every five years or so, while we allow the real control to be exercised by more sinister and self-serving agencies?
We have been opened up at great and tragic cost. We feel an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability. But this very vulnerability now challenges us to re-evaluate our priorities, to question our assumptions about the nature of our life and our relationship with the world and with each other. If we could genuinely begin some such process of self-examination, the tragic events of September 11th will not have been in vain, and generations to come will thank us for our wisdom.
One final question remains: What are we to tell the children?
Individual parents will have to decide on this for themselves in the light of the particular questions asked and the aptitude and age of the child doing the asking. But I would suggest that we embark on a much lengthier programme of instruction for our children.
We must tell them that a human life is incredibly fragile and vulnerable and that, according to the Muslim tradition, to take even one human life is to destroy the world.
We must tell them, in the words of the Buddhist scriptures, that never at any time did violence put an end to violence.
We must tell them, in the words of Jesus, that a human being is more than what he or she looks like, or dresses like, or owns, and that the measure of any person transcends these purely external categories.
We must tell them that any idea they may ever have about religion may be completely wrong, and that no metaphysical speculation should ever be the cause of violence or hatred.
And we must tell them these things diligently and consistently. To borrow some words from the Book of Exodus, we must speak of them when we sit down and when we rise up. We must wear them as frontlets between our eyes and write them on our doors and on our gateposts. We must speak to our children of these things as if nothing else matters. Because nothing else does matter.
Bill Darlison is minister at Dublin's Unitarian Church