Response
of Elizabeth Castelli
Assistant Professor of Religion, Barnard College
I have to confess to being rather at a loss
in the wake of what's happened, to feeling not
very wise. However, I'm grateful to be part
of this conversation, and there are two things
I want to offer for reflection and discussion.
The first one is this: in the days following
the events of September 11, I've heard some
people raise the question: "Isn't religion the
real source of the violence and destruction
here? Isn't religion to blame?" Meanwhile, I've
heard other people trying to separate the terrible
events of last week from "true religion," in
order to keep the category of "religion" itself
sacrosanct and unmarked by what's happened.
One position blames and demonizes religion;
the other seeks to protect and exonerate it.
It seems to me that both blaming and exonerating
are attempts to frame, contain, and restore
-- to restore the world in its meaningfulness
to itself. That we try to do this through either
condemning or protecting the category of "religion"
is, it seems to me, worth further consideration
and reflection. That we do not condemn or protect
"politics," "economics," or "philosophy" as
a category says that we think "religion" is
somehow different. But I don't think we're very
clear about what precisely that difference is
and why it matters so completely in a situation
like this. I would like for us to think together
about this question.
The
second thing I want to say intervenes in the
conversation at a different level. It has to
do with who we choose, individually and collectively,
to be in our current situation. I don't know
about you, but I've been having a lot of trouble
with focus this week. It isn't just that I can't
concentrate. It's that I can't seem to keep
the machinery of vision and perspective in control.
I sit and read every one of those little vignettes
the New York Times publishes about the
lives of the individuals who have been lost,
and I cry over the intense particularity of
that loss. Then my lenses immediately refocus,
taking in the widest possible view -- seeing
the globe as a whole. My vision keeps slipping,
focusing on the smallest details and taking
things in in the widest possible perspective.
But I don't feel as though I'm controlling the
mechanics of my own seeing.
But
I have been repeatedly drawn to one set of images
that capture both the particularity and the
enormity of our situation. I've been haunted
by the images of the search and rescue workers
who descended upon the scene almost immediately
after the catastrophe last week. I've been especially
haunted by the images of their smallness in
relation to the enormity of the ruins of the
buildings. And I've been thinking a lot about
the character of their task: to dismantle the
chaotic remnants of the destruction -- eventually
to restore some semblance of order, but more
immediately to enact our collective hope that
there might be survivors who could be saved,
to honor the dead and their survivors by recovering
their bodies, and most importantly perhaps,
to be sure that whatever they do in the service
of those goals doesn't do any more damage or
create any more injury. For the steel- and ironworkers,
this task involves a radical reorganization
of their skills, of what they know how to do
- which is to build. For everyone working there,
it's a task of unprecedented collaboration with
strangers, in the service of other strangers
and out of a deeply felt sense that they simply
cannot do otherwise. It requires unfathomable
levels of steadiness, fierceness, compassion,
and love for those people to go back day after
day, to put their own bodies on the line, even
as hope recedes.
It seems to me that this image is a useful metaphor
for helping us to think about who we might be
in the current global situation. For if we can
bring ourselves to see our whole world in that
pile of rubble, immense and overwhelming and
incommensurate with anything we have ever thought
or imagined before, we can also see in very
sharp focus who we would want to be in this
situation: rescue workers - workers who labor
alongside other strangers, who honor the enormity
of the loss through the most meticulous and
delicate gestures required to dismantle the
ruin and recover the remains, who make a commitment
that almost goes without saying because it's
so obvious not to do more damage. We
each will have to determine how to enact such
a stance in practical terms in our own lives,
but I believe that we must each ask the question:
how can I best perform acts of rescue and recovery?
how can I enact this ethic, embodied in the
fierce commitment of those rescue workers, of
doing no more damage?
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