Soul Food

Michele Marr

You plotted evil against me, but God turned it into good, in order to

preserve the lives of many people who are alive today because of what

happened. Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, from Genesis 50:20

Today is the one-month anniversary of our nation’s day of terror.

The tallest towers of the World Trade Center are no more. The ruins

that sprawl where they once stood still smolder. A great hole in the

Pentagon gapes. A field in Pennsylvania is scarred. Our emotions smolder,

too. Our hearts are scarred. Day after day our eyes still gape, trying to

comprehend what has come to pass.

We look for meaning and comfort. The sales of Bibles and other

spiritual titles have burgeoned. Worship attendance has swollen. Many

churches have added additional services to meet the demand.

The dead and the missing cry out for justice. Their families and the

survivors cry out, too. We are all survivors. Like all who escaped the

inferno of Sept. 11, we know it could have been us who perished. We know

it could have been our loved ones lost instead of those whose families

now grieve. We know that, next time, it might be.

Thirty days ago the unimaginable happened. If we did not know before,

we know now, that it was not unthinkable that jumbo jets could be used as

bombs to take out a nation’s icons, or even a vast part of one of its

largest cities. That had been conceived and tried before. But it failed.

In 1994, on Christmas Eve, four members of the Algerian Armed Islamic

Group hijacked an Airbus bound for Paris. They killed three passengers

and forced the plane to land in Marseilles to take on more fuel. Their

intent was to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower, or to explode it, a

flying bomb, above the city of Paris.

This evil against France was spawned over long decades of strained

relations between France and Algeria. The airbus was stormed on the

Marseilles tarmac. Disaster was averted. All four hijackers were killed.

Yet it was only a matter of time before such a plot succeeded. The

unimaginable is that it succeeded on U.S. soil, our soil, on the soil of

America the invincible.

There is no doubt that the hijackers of American Airlines Flights 11

and 77 and Uunited Airlines Flights 93 and 175 -- like the brothers of

Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, who sold him into slavery -- plotted

evil against us.

Joseph was the favored, and youngest, son of Jacob. His pampered

existence incited envy and anger in his brothers. An arrogant and

imprudent Joseph fanned the flames of their jealousy with intimations

that he was destined to lord over them.

His brothers worked hard as shepherds, spending long months away for

home, wandering and bedding in the harsh and dangerous terrain of Shechem

and Dothan, while Joseph stayed home with his father. Then came the day

that Jacob sent his young son to check up on his brothers.

Apart from the protection of his father, they seized the moment to be

rid of him. They first thought to kill him, but finally settled on

selling him into slavery for a tidy profit of 20 pieces of silver.

In his oppression Joseph was humbled. He was stripped of his

self-importance, but did not become embittered. He trusted God and sought

God’s purpose in his misfortune.

In time, Joseph prospered in his slavery in Egypt and was appointed a

ruler there. In this way, God used Joseph’s suffering to save the lives

of many people, including those of his own family. His godly wisdom

averted starvation during a famine that could have taken the lives of

countless people, including the lives of his brothers who had sold him

into slavery.

Like Joseph, we are in a position to work with God to turn evil into

good. As Tony Blair put it in his speech on Sunday, Oct. 7, as the US and

Britain embarked on our military campaign in Afghanistan, “Out of the

shadow of this evil should emerge a lasting good: destruction of the

machinery of terrorism wherever it is found, hope among all nations and

between faiths, and, above all, justice and prosperity for the poor and

dispossessed.”

But for this to happen, we must, like Joseph, trust God and we must be

willing to see the truth about our enemies -- and ourselves.

The hatred of those who wrought terror on our nation on Sept. 11 is

not a blind or impersonal hatred of freedom and democracy. It is not a

hatred without motive perpetrated by a “barbaric” people as some of our

leaders and pundits have chosen to call them.

It is a hatred for us informed by decades of our tangled, sometimes

twisted, relations with the Middle East. Relations of which many of us

have been, and many remain, ignorant. We have sometimes put our interests

-- economy, shipping routes and the protection of Israel -- above human

rights and freedom.

Before we bombed Saddam Hussein we backed him. Before we bombed the

Taliban, we helped them come them to power and to drive those rebels of

the now Northern Alliance to the edges of Afghanistan to live in poverty

and death. Our economic sanctions against certain Islamic nations have

aided the starvation of hundreds of thousands of children.

The hatred of our enemies is a hatred of people who hunger and bleed,

no less than we do. They seek a good life for themselves and their

children and they see us as their oppressors.

Nothing in this world justifies the taking of the innocent lives that

occurred on Sept. 11.

We cannot dehumanize nations of people, or people of other nations

living among us. We must like Joseph, seek the truth about ourselves and

find compassion for our enemies.

We must pray that God will turn the evil plotted against us into good.

We must pray that the lives of many people who are alive will be

preserved, and not destroyed, because of what happened a month ago today.

It is the best memorial we could give our dead and their survivors, to

know that their lives, and their deaths, were not in vain.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

[email protected]