“So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”
Dear friends,
On Saturday, the news that we started a major conflict with Iran was, for many of us, a horrible déjà vu. I’ll get to my visceral response at the end of this message, but the words I wrote for this email on Friday fell short, and I found that I could not write anything helpful, so I’m going to reprise a portion of an email I wrote on 9/11 in 2021.
***
I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the horrible news broke that a plane had intentionally crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. I’m sure you remember where you were and what you were doing, too.
I was substitute teaching at the school that three of our sons attended at the time. Algebra 2, believe it or not. I remember it like I remember hearing, while on the road to Nashville to see my dad for one last goodbye, that he died. Like I remember my then-fiancé’s phone call the day after Christmas to tell me he didn’t have mono; he had cancer. Or like I remember the call 15 years later telling me he’d had a heart attack and the mad scramble to get our children, who were 2, 4, 7, and 9, cared for so I could rush to the ER to be with him. The point is I remember it in a deeply personal way.
On September 11, my first thought was, “Where are my boys? How are they hearing this?” followed by, “Where is Bill?” Followed by, when we heard that a plane had also crashed into the west side of the Pentagon, “Is Lamar okay?” I thought of the only human being I knew who was close to the tragic facts as they unfolded, and I wanted to make sure he, our dear friend, was okay. (He was.)
I imagine you are like me. If you were the age to do so, you thought of your people. You had an urge to find them, to hold them, to—unrealistically of course—protect them.
Like you, some of my people are living in the very center of death, illness, and many other varieties of loss. I also know people whose homelands are experiencing 9/11-size trauma right now. Eritreans. Ethiopians. Congolese. Afghans. And today, Iranians. Every fiber of my being wants the barrage of bad news to end for them and for me.
But there is something that happens in trauma that I long to preserve. I want to normalize the experience of that crystallizing moment when I look for my people. When my most pressing urge is to hold them. To protect them. I believe the world would be a different place if we—all of us—could take that moment and make it our daily practice. Could we move the part of us that loves first to the forefront and keep it there? Could we love that fiercely? That urgently? And to whom does that extend?
Today I simply echo the ancient words of the Apostle Paul and affirm them as perhaps the most difficult and necessary ever written:
“Follow the way of love.”
The way of love, I believe, pushes me to widen my definition of “my people.” When the rampage of ISIS became globally known, my people included many families who fled Syria. I saw firsthand the way they were excluded from the safe “my people” zone in most people’s minds simply because they were Muslim or Arab.
The sum of “our people” is simply too large for any of us, which means that, for the way of love to prevail, we’re all required to take up the mantle.
***
Now, today, the whole world is aware of a conflict none of us saw coming. And I am the same: A mom. So, I thought of my son David who, just a few years ago, was deployed at a base in the Middle East where his job was to diffuse bombs (!!). My first reaction on Saturday was to think, “I’m so glad David isn’t deployed right now.”
On the heels of this thought was this one: “I wonder how many moms on both side of this conflict are terrified for their children or already grieving?” and then I thought, “This is how people become refugees.”
David told me what he’d be doing if he was still there. He said everyone on base would, in orderly fashion, get into Jeeps and drive out into the desert. They drilled it over and over, but this time it would be real. This time the likelihood that their temporary home was obliterated was real. And yet, they have the privilege of a place to go and a way to get there.
Although I’m not dismissing how difficult it is for soldiers and their loved ones to go through these realities, it strikes me that this is a microcosm of displacement. It mirrors the first step in a refugee’s journey… a tiny step. And I’m reminded once again that my first step in following the way of love is to widen my definition of “my people” to those who, when they are displaced, have no place to go and no way to get there. I am fully aware that expanding our definition of “our people” can become a crushing responsibility.
So, armed conflict anywhere in the world puts us in a predicament if we are to follow the way of love. It is a predicament we gladly embrace, with all its tensions and challenges and questions and sorrows. It stretches our definitions, and in turn, stretches us. And the beautiful part of a stretching created by love is that it actually increases our capacity. I think you’d agree that the way of love is worth the perplexity it creates in its wake.
Grateful to be on this way with you,
Kitti
