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September 11, 2001, taught us that sin is alive and well on Planet Earth. Last year's attack on civilians was sin at its most vile. When two planes hit the World Trade Towers, we flew into a black hole of human making. Designed as an attack on American "symbols" of commerce and power, it really was an attack on human sanctity. Terrorists saw a building's collapsed steel frame as more significant than the lives of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Passengers and employees became pawns in journeys of hatred.

Sin is dark because it is blind. Seeing its own selfish objectives so clearly, souls become ghosts not worthy of care or preservation. Sin is dark because unchecked it births horrific acts like 9/11/01. As such, the attack of September 11 was not primarily an attack on the United States, it was part of an ongoing homicide on humanity. We have been in this war a long time, but are slow to admit it. This attack was rooted deep in something within all of us that needs to be checked. One place where freedom fails is where sin reigns freely in the human heart directed against others.

Our reaction is that we must stop such vile sin. But to stop sin, one must change the selfish heart, both in the individual and in society. One must quench the unregulated, lawless quest for power and control that spurred such an act. One must quell the hatred that sacrifices people for political statements. One must calm the anger that causes me to turn my neighbor into an enemy, to turn one made in the image of God into an object of hate. One must embrace the standards of human sanctity that God created as a part of us all, a potential that is there until sin's hatred and blindness extract it.

Those who undertook this mission were taught since childhood to hate. So hate they did. That is the world we live in. Last year we shuttered as the freedom of unchecked hatred exploded and imploded in dark, living color.

An event like this gives pause. It exposes our ultimate lack of control. No amount of machismo can overcome our inherent frailty and mortality. We must take care that an act of vile machismo is not replicated in an act of vengeance-seeking machismo, where violence begets more violence, a dangerous and escalating spiral. Nor should we forget—and pretend we can return to life as it was—that would be to deny the crime, and more importantly, the value of precious lives lost.

As tragic as 9/11 was, events like this also show what people can be—if we only turn another way, with a fresh dependence on God and an appreciation of how God created us and how God has sought to redeem us, taking on sin himself through the suffering of his son and the forgiveness and enablement he offers.

The spiritual war against terrorism is the war against the sinful heart and its allegiances. God must fix it his way. Hatred's destructiveness is overcome by the way of loving one's neighbor. My faith calls on me to love God completely and love my neighbor as myself. Jesus made the same call and was the example. In 9/11's aftermath, New Yorkers gave us a small glimpse of this other way, much like the Samaritan did to the wounded man on the road. They gave of themselves and risked their lives to help their neighbor. In that rubble, what mattered was not one's ethnicity or political agenda. Human suffering and need met caring outstretched hands.

Around the country, people gave blood to help pump life back into our bleeding, global soul. Once the monument of steel crumbled, the steel of human hearts touched by pain and properly invoking the divine image in each of us served with another kind of heart, one that saw and cared. Our world needs more of this. It is our best monument to the fallen Twin Towers.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46