America on the Offensive
The world joins in prayer—and in attacking Jerry Falwell.
Ted Olsen | posted 9/01/2001 12:00AM
Between Friday's National Day of Prayer and Remembrance and Sunday's National Day of Mourning and Prayer, the newspapers are full of religion coverage. And for good reason: from all reports, churches around the country are seeing attendance levels that dwarf even Christmas and Easter figures. The New York Times reports that Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, had about 6,000 more attendees than usual for its six weekend services, bringing its total to 23,000. Wednesday and Thursday services, normally attended by 6,000, saw a 50 percent increase. At Trinity Church Wall Street, which had to move its services away from its damaged structure that used to stand in the World Trade Center's shadow, vicar Samuel Johnson explains why so many are attending: "Human words are inadequate, and so we come together to turn to the word of God."
Some see the attendance as a sign of possible revival. "It strikes me that this whole country, in order to learn to stand again, is going to its knees," Alex Joseph of St. Teresa of Avila parish in Perrysville, Pennsylvania, tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Other media reports suggest people are turning to God not looking for solace, but for blame. "Many may be angry with God this morning," Johnson said. "That anger is all right. God can handle it. God expects it. That God would permit evil is a mystery. But evil is real. If you doubt it exists, just walk up the street."
With millions of people asking where God was on Tuesday, The Boston Globe puts the question to several local religious leaders. Their consensus is generally that God was where he always has been—it's people who've acted on their free will and turned away from God that are the problem. It's true, but it doesn't necessarily ease the pain, as the Baltimore Sun reports:
As the Rev. Brian Jordan walked back to his friary after comforting the wounded and blessing the dead at the World Trade Center disaster site Tuesday, he was confronted on Sixth Avenue by a frantic man.
"Why did God permit this catastrophe to happen?" the man screamed at the brown-robed Franciscan priest.
Jordan tried to calm him. "God did not do this," he said. "It was evil acts done by men."
The man, uncomforted, turned and walked away, cursing God.
Indeed, for the ministers themselves, the answers didn't come easy. "This was the hardest sermon I've ever had to write," Don Harp of Peachtree Road United Methodist tells The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "I had to put aside my personal feelings; I more or less agree with (U.S. Sen.) Zell Miller that we ought to just bomb them. But that's not what a Christian minister should be telling his congregation at a time like this." (According to The Washington Post, some ministers disagree: "Prayer services also allow laypeople and clergy to contemplate the prickly question—from a religious point of view—of whether the United States should retaliate with military force against any country found to have supported the terrorist acts or harbored their planners," reports Bill Broadway.)
Other pastors drew from experience. At Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, where Larry Gene Ashbrook killed seven people almost exactly two years ago, the congregation sang (hesitantly at first), "He's got Osama bin Laden in his hands."
Meanwhile, almost every newspaper in the country sent reporters to church yesterday, and reports are available from Atlanta, Baltimore (also here), Boston, Denver, Detroit (also here), Houston, and San Diego. There are several roundups of services around the country—and around the world—as well. Some media note that a choir sang that great hymn of the faith "Blowin' in the Wind" before Pope John Paul II's Sunday sermon in Frosinone, Italy.
September (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45
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