Suffering on the scale of September 11th last year can appear unanswerable even for those who believe in God, writes John Scally
In the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles the eponymous king of Thebes tears out his eyes, unable to look any more on a world that is damaged beyond recognition and repair. He would surely have felt driven to the same reaction by the events of September11th last year.
The date will remain forever a template of humankind's experience of evil, a black symbol when the world was convulsed by a destructiveness that seemed to have no rational explanation.
Ours is an age where in living memories Auschwitz still lingers powerfully. On our own island we have been seared by a litany of atrocities such as Bloody Sunday and Enniskillen. Yet we were still chilled to the core by September 11th. Unlike Auschwitz it was a shared experience because of television.
It ensured the event belonged to everyone. The grief too, like that for Princess Diana, was communal. We were united in mourning, but in a private place, with millions of other viewers. Even in that darkest moment we clung to the comfort of knowing that we were not alone in feeling disconsolate, sombre and perplexed. It was beyond nightmare.
For once those words of Isaiah had uncomfortable resonance: "Thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of tremblin." The loss was not just of people but of the very security of our daily lives.
Yet the most unbearable personal loss can be a source of redemptive meaning. While grief cannot be avoided or ignored, it can be incorporated into a deeper understanding of the human condition.
Ours is an age obsessed with youth. So many seem petrified of ageing, let alone dying. We need a new culture of dealing with these realities, especially death. The Christian tradition has many insights to offer in this context. Death, it teaches, is not an end of the story, but another phase in the soul's journey. It is entry to a wider life, endlessly stretching out.
As Christians we ought to be to the forefront of the development of this "culture of death", because we profess to believe that the eternal life wherein we pray to be resurrected has long since begun.
In the past we have been marvellously eloquent on the joys of eternal life but we have not done justice to the biological reality of death. This is largely because we do not take death - as the God-ordained boundary to human life - seriously enough. Nor do we adequately reflect on death as a comprehensive and total end to human power. As the theologian Karl Rahner has pointed out, death is the natural experience of the end of our life. The biological dimension of our death is critical to our understanding of the death and resurrection of Jesus, as the basis of our hope in eternal life.
God chose to be definitively revealed in the human person Jesus of Nazareth - a marvellous affirmation of the dignity of the human person.
The Incarnation illustrates as nothing else the full measure of human responsibility and human destiny. The unknown God who, as Lord of the universe, discloses to people that, if they want to know what God is like, they should look at a human life. Jesus did not die metaphorically. He died in a most awful way on a cross.
His resurrection was not a clever by-pass of the laws of nature. It was an expression of God's fidelity to Jesus, by glorifying the Son who had been powerless as the first-born of a new eternal order of relationships. Without serious consideration of the totality of our death we cannot begin to adequately appreciate the mystery of Jesus's resurrection.
Easter Sunday has not liberated us from the reality of death, but from a neurotic fear of death, for a life of freedom and creativity in God's presence.
The events of Holy Week and Easter highlight the reality that human life is of prime importance to the God who raises people up to the glory of eternal life.
At the moment when Jesus's powerlessness was total God intervened in history to gift him with a new beginning.
While death is in a very real way an end to life, it is not an end to the story. It is, rather, an opening to a new relationship with God, which has already begun in our lives.
Suffering, particularly on the scale of September 11th last year, often appears an unanswerable conundrum for those who believe in a Christian God and it often rouses us to anger. As Graham Greene famously remarked, in a cri de coeur, "you can't conceive of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." While September 11th reverberates in our heart we must find a way to live on while not forgetting. We are left with many troubling issues. Yet we also believe that God is present in our suffering, hanging on a cross of contradiction, and that life flows from this dark mystery.
On Good Friday Jesus reached into the depths of sorrow, when this God/man experienced physical agony and mental degradation. It is as if he deliberately entered the most painful dimension of being human, plumbing it to the depths.
Tragedy is at the very heart of Christianity. Its narrative of affliction covers nothing up. While there are no saccharine comforts, our faith ensures that Christians do not mourn forever in a valley of tears. We believe that those who fell last year in the sun on September 11th will rise with the Son.
Dr John Scally is a lecturer in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical, and Theological Studies at Trinity College, Dublin.