A Diverse Look at the Spiritual Challenge of Responding to Terrorism

“Instant books,” hastily put together to take advantage of major news events, often lack depth, perspective and insight. But “From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America” manages to succeed with a collection of thought-provoking essays, prayers, letters and interviews with some of the world’s greatest religious thinkers drawn from a rich array of faith traditions.

The collection was assembled by editors of the multifaith Internet site Beliefnet, and all profits will go to disaster relief charities. Nine chapters explore such issues as justice, evil, fear, repentance, Islam and the question “Where was God?”

In the chapter on teachings and traditions, the book offers essays on “What Would Jesus-Buddha-Moses-Goddess Do?” along with insights from Native American and Hindu traditions and messages from Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama. Such diversity is the book’s greatest contribution to the public debate on the attack and its aftermath, giving a platform to voices that have not often been spotlighted.

Questions of justice have been well aired, often through debate on whether the U.S. military response in Afghanistan is justified under Christian “just war” doctrines. The book contains more of this, with Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention voicing the popular view that an all-out war on terrorism is just, and “the resort to armed conflict is the price human beings must periodically pay for the right to live in a moral universe.”

The book includes several writers on Islam. Karen Armstrong, the author of several books on the three Abrahamic religions, uses Koranic passages to demonstrate how terrorism is antithetical to true Islam. Islamic scholar Ingrid Mattsen describes the “double bind” of American Muslims caught between two worlds: trying to explain to Americans that Islam is not as bad as it may seem, and to Muslims abroad that Americans are not bad as we may appear.

But there has been less public debate on the spiritual challenge the attacks present, or questions of repentance--for us, not the terrorists. The essays and interviews on these topics are among the most thought-provoking.

Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu of South Africa challenges us to forgive, reminding us that there is no future without it.

“Forgiveness is not to condone or minimize the awfulness of an atrocity or wrong,” Tutu says. “It is to recognize its ghastliness, but to choose to acknowledge the essential humanity of the perpetrator and to give that perpetrator the possibility of making a new beginning.”

Tutu--whose nation offers an extraordinary model of magnanimity in its efforts at reconciliation with apartheid regime leaders rather than revenge-- challenges us to practice justice that is restorative, not retributive. That means seeking primarily to heal the perpetrators rather than punish them.

The Buddhist viewpoint offers similar challenges in the appeal to seek cause, not blame. Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese Zen monk, says the first thing he would do with Osama bin Laden would be “deep listening” without judging or blaming to clearly understand the causes that created the raging hatred in his heart. Understanding opens the heart to compassion, and compassion is ultimately the only answer to hatred and violence, he says.

This year, the monk says, he brought a group of Palestinians and Israelis to his Plum Village monastery in France to learn the art of deep listening. After several days, he says, the two sides were moved to realize they were both primarily driven by the same underlying emotion: fear.

On the perennial question of “Where was God?” the book offers answers ranging from the traditional (God gives humans free choice to commit evil or good) to the edgy. The most provocative response comes from Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose essay “The Theistic God Is Dead” bluntly calls for a new concept of God.

“The image of hijacked planes crashing into buildings killing thousands of people gives us no hiding place for theological pretending,” Spong writes. “The skies are empty of a protective deity ready to come to our aid.” He argues for a vision of God not as an all-powerful, all-knowing protective deity managing human affairs but as a flowing life force of love made visible on Earth by acts of human kindness.

A few of the essays offer little more than boilerplate religious piety. More of them seem to present a liberal view, a selection that evangelicals or fundamentalists may find troubling.

But, as media reports focus on the growing horror of anthrax attacks and the violence of U.S. military campaigns, the book provides a welcome place of spiritual repose and reflection.