WHAT KIND OF GOD?
The toy plane comes out of the blue
and zaps the tower as it would do
in comic or cartoon, but this is true.
A hundred storeys up, stick people
wave little banners of forlorn humanity,
already fatally diminished
to their gawping fellow-kind
before the crumbling hell engulfs them.
It's said the terrorists' god
unfazed by death of innocents
will take his fanatics to unending bliss.
What kind of god is this?
Lesley Duncan, poem first published in The Herald, September 13, 2001
I remember exactly where I was when the news came on the TV after the first plane – I watched the second plane.
The world changed that day.
For those of religious faith, religiously justified violence, distorted and destructive devoutness, was from that day seen as blasphemy writ large;
for those of no religious faith, the events of that morning was a powerful persuasive that the idea of God is dangerous, inhuman, and when fuelled with hatred combusts in an evil worse than any secular ideology.
Today analysis and comment on 9/11 seems unnecessarily presumptuous – better to remember, and to learn, and to pray. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself…." What kind of God is this?
Leave a Reply