An Address reflecting on 25 years since 9/11
Let’s start with poor Job…
By the time Job’s friends arrive, almost everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. His animals have been stolen or destroyed. His servants have been killed. His children have died when the house they are in collapses. Then Job himself becomes ill, covered in painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. He sits in the ashes and scrapes at his skin with a broken piece of pottery.
And then his friends come. They see him from a distance and barely recognise him. They weep. They tear their clothes. They throw dust over their heads and sit down on the ground beside him for seven days and seven nights. Nothing they do can help. They cannot give him his children back. They cannot restore what has been destroyed. They cannot take away his pain. They cannot explain what has happened because there is no explanation that could possibly be enough. So they sit there anyway.
And when Job finally speaks, after those seven days of silence, what comes out of him is terrible. He wishes the day of his birth had never existed. He wishes darkness had swallowed it. He asks why he was ever born if this was what life could become. There is no neat spiritual insight in his words. He is devastated. He wants the whole story of his existence unwritten.
I think his friends understand something extraordinary in those first seven days. They understand that there are moments when you cannot make things better and you should not pretend that you can. They let Job be where he is. They stay close enough to hear what eventually comes out of him. To be fair they lose that wisdom later. Once they begin talking they become increasingly determined to explain Job’s suffering, to fit it into a religious system, to tell him that somehow the world must still make sense. At times they are difficult, judgemental and profoundly unhelpful. But here, at the beginning, they get something right. They come, they sit down and they stay.
I get where his mates were coming from… I don’t think any of us really knows what to do when something terrible happens. There are certain events and moments when the whole magnitude of the day suddenly shifts. Something happens and the world we thought we were standing in is no longer quite there. What we thought we knew crumbles.
I have been thinking about that a lot this week. We have been remembering twenty-five years since September 11th, a day when thousands of ordinary people suddenly found themselves inside something almost impossible to comprehend. What do we do in moments like that? I don’t think there is a clever answer. Sometimes there simply isn’t anything that can make the thing that has happened unhappen.
And yet, in the middle of these moments, something else happens too. People turn towards each other. They search. They carry. They bring food. They open doors. They sit beside someone. They stay long after there is anything useful left to say. Fred Rogers’ mother used to tell him that when something frightening was happening, he should look for the helpers. It’s helped me to see the helpers, as it did when Dunwich Heath was on fire. And I think helping helps the helpers too. When something is far bigger than us, doing the next small useful thing gives us somewhere to put our love and our fear.
There is an old wisdom in the Jewish practice of sitting shiva which takes this seriously. After a death, people come to the house of the mourner and sit with them. Traditionally the visitor waits for the mourner to speak first. Perhaps they want to talk about the person who has died, perhaps they want to cry, perhaps they want to say nothing at all. The person who has come to comfort them follows their lead. There is something here that Job’s friends understood before they started trying to explain everything.
I find that deeply moving because so much of helping is simply showing up. It can feel inadequate, perhaps because we have such a strong idea that helping ought to change something. Sometimes all we have is the chair beside someone, the cup of tea, the meal left at the door, the lift to the hospital, the message that says I am here. There is remembering to ring again next week, noticing who has gone quiet, making enough room for somebody to tell the truth about how things really are. Sometimes what we can offer is simply company in the ruins.
I want to be careful though, because “look for the helpers” can become one more comforting phrase we reach for because we cannot bear the reality of suffering. We have all heard them: everything happens for a reason, something good will come of this, at least… and then whatever comes after the words “at least”. There is a kind of toxic positivity that rushes towards hope before grief has even had time to speak. Sometimes terrible things happen and they remain terrible. Sometimes people do everything they can and it is still not enough.
There are limits to what any of us can do for another person. We cannot protect everyone we love, repair every loss or carry another person’s pain away. What we can do is stay close enough to hear the truth of what they are living through, help where help is possible and, when it is not, offer our company.
I have tried to develop a spiritual practice of paying attention, especially when I notice my mind trying to switch off and pull me away from the painful parts of life. If I hear about someone’s pain, I try not to resist it. I sit with them, wherever they are, and I say out loud, “I am here with you. You are not on your own.”
And somehow, when I do that, I can stop resisting. I can sit there for a while and feel what I need to feel, and then I can put it down and get on with my ordinary day. It is when I try to ignore these realities, when I turn away from them, that they seem to come back and find me in anxiety and in a kind of nameless sadness.
So I say, “I am here.” I don’t know if that makes a difference. Perhaps it only makes a difference to me. But I wonder. I wonder if a million people being there with you in a moment of suffering might touch you in some way we do not yet understand.
Or what if it wasn’t just an inner practice… Trommer’s poem makes me wonder what would happen if we treated even our ordinary greetings as a kind of ritual moment of recognition and attention. If, when we met another person, we stopped for a moment and really saw them. Not just their face or their name, but the whole mysterious life they are carrying. Perhaps this is one of the places where the sacred becomes real between us: in the recognition that there is something in you I cannot fully know, something precious, something divine, and I am paying attention to it.
Hope, for me, begins there, in paying attention. In looking carefully at what is actually here, at who is carrying what, at who has gone quiet, at the hands that are already doing the work of repair. What we notice changes us. And sometimes, if we pay carefully enough attention, we begin to see what is ours to do.
Helping is not always rescue; often it is the quiet, unhistoric work of noticing, carrying, accompanying and refusing to leave one another alone.
George Eliot writes at the end of Middlemarch:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
