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Kinney Littlefield |
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ON SEPT. 11?  Grieving over those lost on 9/11 |
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'Frontline' documentary
raises questions of faith
By KINNEY LITTLEFIELD
of TheColumnists.com
Did God abandon America on September 11, 2001? I still
haven’t figured out my feelings about that. But it’s
a crucial question. A question that public television’s
“Frontline” asks urgently in its unsettling but carefully
crafted documentary “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.”
The two-hour program premieres 9 p.m. September 3 on PBS, in
advance of the anniversary of 9/11.
Be prepared to cry your eyes out when you watch.
Produced by Helen Whitney and written by Whitney and Ron Rosenbaum, “Faith and Doubt” is clearly thoughtful. It tries mightily to find spiritual meaning in disaster.
But after I finished watching it I didn’t feel edified or even comforted. I just felt bludgeoned by shock all over again. All it took was a few video clips of the first plane hitting the first tower, the towers crumbling, people jumping.
Compared to that, few of the program’s well-considered words seemed to matter.
What grabbed me were the primal feelings--pain and loss and anger. And a desperate, cosmic howl: Where was God on 9/11 and how could He--how could He!--abandon us?
As you might expect, the program’s thoughts on God’s whereabouts are as varied as its interview subjects--clerics, academics, firefighters. A few who were in the World Trade Center and survived. Relatives of many who perished.
Some of them find hope in the memory of 9/11.
To Rabbi Irwin Kula, God was there in the oneness and connectedness that led so many firefighters and cops and emergency workers to rush to the aid of others.
To banker Brian Clark and trader Stanley Praimnath, September 11 was a kind of inexplicable miracle.
On 9/11 Praimnath watched as a plane crashed into the doorway of his office in the World Trade Center, about 20 feet from where he was. The walls collapsed, trapping him. Clark heard Praimnath and pulled him to safety. They both walked away from Ground Zero, alive and intact.
But to others, God has not existed in the same way since the towers fell.
“It was too barbaric the way the lives were taken,” says Tim Lynston, who knew almost 30 people who died. “I look at Him now as a barbarian and I probably will and it’s a sad situation. I think I am a good Christian, but I have a different view and image of Him now and I can’t replace it with the old image.”
Says Rev. Joseph Griesedieck, Episcopal priest, “After September 11, the face of God was a blank slate for me. God could not be counted on in the way I thought God could be counted on.”
Many blame religion as the cause of it all.
“Religion drove those planes into those buildings,” Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld says. “It’s amazing how good religion is at mobilizing people to do awful, murderous things. There is this dark side to it, and anyone who loves religious experience, including me, better begin to own that there is a serious shadow side to this thing.”
There’s the inevitable discussion of how Islam could spawn such murderous hatred.
There’s talk of the nature of evil itself--whether it is man-made or a force larger than any individual.
This is sticky stuff to
discuss, given America’s religious and ethnic diversity.
“Faith and Doubt” is careful not to trade in religious
fervor or even moral righteousness. All the men of the cloth
who weigh in--be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish--sound rational
and reasonable.
Only once does “Faith and Doubt” wander off course.
It spends far too much time with Kirk Varnedoe, a former curator
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as he compares the open-mindedness
of art with the absolutism of religious faith.
Otherwise “Faith and Doubt” doles out a lot of intriguing thoughts about infinitely intriguing questions that can’t be answered anyway.
Woven throughout, there’s much talk of the way strangers reached out to hold hands before they jumped from the towers to their death.
That’s when I finally lost it and started crying--when I saw the jumpers for the last time, near the end of “Faith and Doubt.”
I can’t even think about what they did. My mind closes down. It’s unimaginable.
Truly, I don’t believe much healing will come from re-living September 11. Our job is not to heal, I think, but simply to stay alert and aware. Our world has changed forever since 9/11, in ways we don’t fully know. In ways that “Faith and Doubt,” however smart and sincere, can only hint at.
© 2002 by Kinney Littlefield.
The Littlefield caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.The photo
from "Frontline" is courtesy the PBS "Frontline"
website.
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