Spirituality and 9/11

As the anniversary of 9/11 draws near my email inbox has been filling up with variations on this question: “What meaning do you find in the horror of 9/11?” My answer is simple: No meaning whatsoever.

The murder of almost 3,000 people in New York City, Washington DC, and outside Shanksville, PA, held no meaning for me then and holds no meaning for me now. Even as the death count rises to include the first responders and others who died in the months and years after the attack, I still find no meaning in it.

Meaning isn’t something that one finds; meaning is something one makes.

[Read: “Ceremony at Death: Do Nothing.”]

The meaning I make from the evil of 9/11 is a warning: We humans are so alienated from one another and from nature that we see in the other—however defined—the embodiment of everything we fear and hate. And because this is so, we are easily manipulated into perpetrating acts of violence against the other in the name of all we call holy.

The meaning I make out of 9/11 is a radical call to liberate ourselves from all gods and clans, all religions and political parties, and all isms and ideologies that pit person against person and person against planet. To employ 9/11 as a rallying cry for further sectarianism is not to learn from what happened but to perpetuate it.

Silence is no balm, and instead leaves us raw and broken and shattered which is the only true response to this anniversary.

Given this, how shall we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of this tragedy? Certainly, making time to recite aloud the names of the fallen—and here I would include all those first-responders who died from their efforts to rescue the living and reclaim the dead—is appropriate. And to this I would add the tolling of bells, the sounding of shofarot (despite it being Shabbat), and the blowing of conch shells, calling us to lift our faces away from our screens and toward one another to see not the “other” but the Self manifesting as every self. But at the heart of our commemoration ought to be silence.

Silence offers us no escape from the horror of 9/11. Silence doesn’t explain or excuse or invoke some deity who will tell us that despite everything, we are loved. Silence is no balm, and instead leaves us raw and broken and shattered which is the only true response to this anniversary.

Sadly, what I suspect will happen is that we will fill the air with noise: mindless sectarian chatter hailing some and damning others; empty political rhetoric stirring nothing but self-righteousness; vacuous bleating about thoughts and prayers; performative acts of piety; and vacant blather about martyrdom that mask the devastation felt by those whose loved ones died that day and in the months and years that followed.

Pundits will seize the moment and make shallow analogies between the attack on America and America’s surrender to the Taliban, and cable television will bury our dead and our fears and our despair under endless video loops that reduce the actual event to mere representation.

I will do my best to avoid all of this.

Instead, I will walk outside in nature and be reminded that there is no other, only us; that there is no god, only God; that there is no escaping human madness, only the hope for human transformation. Meaning or no meaning, it is this transformation from duality to nonduality, from us and them to all of us together, that will occupy me this Saturday.

I invite you to make time for this as well.

Discover more practices for dealing with grief. Read: “Holistic Practices for Grief.”