I dreamed I fell from the highest building,but that highest building was me.

For my work took me to the ninetieth floorby the glittering, glittering sea.

Donald Gardner
From The Glittering Sea, Hearing Eye, 2006

This early September the media has been full of the anniversary of 9/11.
I don’t want to see the images of that day again; the visceral physicality of the planes crashing into the buildings is too much for me. I must be getting soft.
It is a terrible mirror of our times, both in the grandeur of the image, the vast buildings enveloped in smoke set against the blue Manhattan sky, and in the minutest detail; the man falling, suspended forever in our minds-eye between life and death.

I spent some time recently at a Ministerial Fellowship retreat working with the activist and writer Alastair McIntosh. He asked us to re-consider the outmoded religious term ‘Righteousness’, its overtones so forbidding and part of the old paradigm of religion that we no longer have much truck with, but as McIntosh pointed out, righteousness in its proper sense is equivalent to terms that we may be more comfortable with, like ‘right-relation’, ‘deep structure’, ‘true value’, – and it struck me that it must be contrasted with a twin concept that is necessary to understand in the context of this attack and the western response to it: self-righteousness, the moral hypocrisy that the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures so forcefully descry.

This year’s late summer warm spell calls to mind lines from another war:
“…the evening is warm and silent.
The windows are dark and the mountains are miles away.
And the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform. An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.”
Weldon Kees from June 1940 in the Collected Poems of Weldon Kees Ed. Donald Justice, Faber 1960

The reason this twentieth anniversary of the attacks is more than the PR exercise for the Western allies the papers want to portray is that we are still involved in the fall-out of that crash, we are still falling through the many storied aftermath of those attacks. The response to the undoubted atrocity of that terrorist outrage was the so called War on Terror, a war that explicitly reneged on western values and set about trashing international law wholesale – it is hard to imagine the sight of the Home Secretary of this country instructing coastguard boats to risk the lives of refugees, effectively throwing people including elders and children back into the water, if our understanding of moral value hadn’t been so degraded. Refugees who have been pitilessly forced into flight ever since the conflagrations that began with the War on Terror escalated relentlessly into the second Iraq war, Libya, Syria, Isis, Afghanistan.

The powerfully self-righteous War on Terror reframed the west’s struggle to re-establish its own boundaries as an ideological battle, but immediately betrayed its own terms of engagement in moral collapses such as those in Abu Grahib and Guantanamo Bay; these horrifically toxic incidents (I think of the androgynous GI smoking and smiling next to a heap of naked and degraded prisoners, or the men chained into stress positions in orange jump suits in the noonday sun) destroyed any concept that this could be a moral advance. Yet consider also those new-atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Pinker bragging that we are on the side of progress, modernity, reason, whilst they are on the side of barbarism (quite aside from the obvious implied racism) theirs is an expression of the worst kind of self-righteousness.

I ‘ve not heard too many people recognise the interconnection between what is considered to be the biggest crisis facing humanity, the environmental crisis and 9/11 – but yet it seems inextricably linked to me. Project Everlasting Justice (or whatever phony Biblical name the phony Biblical President Bush gave to his war on terror) is an Orwellian ‘never ending war’. War and capitalism are mutually co-dependent, put bluntly; war makes money, conflict is the financial engine of the current system.
So while our environmental concern is played out in terms of consumer choices; we can go vegetarian or vegan, fly less, buy less, walk more, recycle, use bamboo toothbrushes and so on (and while these are important ways to help of course, yadda-yadda…), our consumer choices are dwarfed by comparison with the reality of an ongoing systemic war which maintains the oil industry, strips the earth of resources and visits firepower of astonishing savagery on whole regions.

Both the attacks on the twin towers and the responses to it are, I would argue, the outcomes of religion gone wrong – they are both fundamentalist expressions of self-righteousness, where we need in fact a clear eyed understanding of genuine righteousness.
Because righteousness, like grace, resides beyond the self, it is something we discover and respond to, not something we invent and boast about.
Righteousness is a deep structure inherent in life. In Taoism, Tao is called ‘the way’, in Buddhism; Dharma. Righteousness is a way of coherence and collaboration with the unfolding way of the universe, that lets us co-exist in right relationship. Righteousness is one of the callings of religious life; coming into relationship with that which is beyond the self, so that we can understand better the way of the world and our place in it.

Consider those two poems I read today; one microcosmic, The Glittering Sea considers the perspective of a single person, like that falling man, a man in amber, endlessly falling down to the glittering sea, and the other Try to Praise the Mutilated World a reflection in wide focus calling us to consider our true responsibility to praise in despite of all that we know is wrong:

You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.

from Adam Zagajewski from Without End: New and Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2002

If only poets could have led the response to 9/11.

I think of the displaced people that it has been my privilege to know, people displaced by the never ending war, lives lived within conflagration.
And I commit to praise and bless the mutilated world.