God /Terror and 9/11

 

What is the significance of discussing Volker Kuster’s book God /Terror: Ethics and Aesthetics in Contexts of Conflict and Reconciliation today on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11? For me the significance is that we gather to remember, to make sense, and to search for meaning.

Two unforgettable images stand out for me on this day. One was people jumping to their death from the Twin Towers on 9/11. The image elicited the feeling of terror and horror. The second image was the image of two children I saw on TV, a boy and a girl, at the Kabal airport last August, waiting and not knowing what would happen to them and their families in the US evacuation from Afghanistan. I saw terror and horror in their eyes.

On this twentieth anniversary, what have we learned as the human community? What have we not learned? How might we learn anew and again? Kuster’s book helps us to remember, to look forward by looking back.

The book records Kuster’s intense dialogues with artists—painters, installers of memorials and museums, novelists, and writers—to search for meaning and to search for what is possible.

For indeed when language reaches its limits, when we are at a loss of words, we turn to the artists among us. When theodicy seems to fail, when all sorts of theological gymnastics seem to lack the power to explain, to make sense, we ask those who can see, who can still feel, who can come up with shattering beauty in the midst of terror to guide us.

The book speaks of an aesthetic turn in theology. What does it mean to turn to aesthetics to make sense of theology? In what sense is theology aesthetic? On the one hand, What is it about the aesthetic that can turn theological thought? On the other, what is it about aesthetic that theology itself may turn on it?

With numerous images, Kuster’s book is divided into two parts. The first part is “Terror, War and Violence: God Talk in the Memory of 9/11.” The second part is “Guilt, Reconciliation, Grace: God Talk in the Political Conflicts in Germany, South Korea, and South Africa.” The second part is a contrapuntal reading of the first part. The first part has a section on the “conflicting images of God”; the second juxtaposes this with “in conflict with God.” This juxtaposition reminds us of the fact that God/Terror is not only found in one locale, in 9/11, but also in pivotal moments in other histories and timelines.

The book has some of the most striking images depicting terror and horror, the absurdity of life, and tragic memories of history. The aesthetics in the book deconstructs the classical understanding of aesthetics as the study of beauty and taste. Rather, as Volker writes, “The strenuous reconstruction of the relation between aesthetic and ethics is not about an aesthetization of suffering in the sense of its glorification but about its disclosure, its treatment and the preservation of memory” (p. 73).

The book raises the question of how we can bring art in dialogue with Christian theology. Kuster challenges the boundary between the secular and the sacred. He discerns religious meanings in “secular” art and culture. The artworks in the book reveal life and death. Christianity talks about suffering, healing, reconciliation, the cross, and resurrection.

But we have to avoid superimposing a Christian framework on art. We need to ask, How might art reveal and challenge us to think about and reconstruct Christian symbols in new ways.

I want to use two paintings in the book to illustrate. The South Korean artist Hong Song-Dam (b. 1955) depicts a woman’s violated body in a pool of blood in a woodcut titled “Blood and Tears 7.” Women were raped and brutally killed during the Kwangju massacre in 1980. The image of the suffering woman’s body requires us to think about why Christianity has focused on male suffering to the neglect of women’s suffering.

The other image is from Hong’s oil paintings in the series “The Twenty Days in Water” (8 pieces, 1999). The series depicts the agony of a political prisoner who is tortured. The torturers tie him on a chair and presses his head under water. The following painting portrays his close to death experience: imagining that he has grown fins and swims with a fish forming like a yin-yang symbol. While Christians have talked about resurrection, this artwork offers another idea: metamorphosis. How might metamorphosis challenge or supplement our understanding of resurrection?

I am grateful to Kuster, whose dialogue with arts helps us remember the burden of history, the burden of memory.

·        Presented at an international panel on September 11, 2021, for the launching of the book.

Praying for Japan

Watching the videos in which the cars, houses, and fishing boats were blown and carried away by the tsunami in Japan was like watching a horror movie. How could we fathom the huge loss brought by the biggest earthquake in Japan’s history? Thousands of people have died and many are still missing.

Where is God in this? And where can we find the manifestation of God’s love at moments like this?

It always seems cruel to me to find moral and religious lessons out of somebody else’s tragedy. At moments of loss and uncertainty, we rely on the ancient wisdom of people who have experienced and survived many tragedies throughout history.

I remember listening to a rabbi talking about the Holocaust many years ago. When asked, “How can the Jews believe in God after so much loss and suffering of the innocent?” The rabbi said, “We don’t know how, but as Jews, we have been questioning and demanding God for an answer for a long time.”

Throughout the Bible and especially during the exodus, the Jewish people had been calling out to God, demanding God to justify God’s own action. I found comfort and solace in that God allows us to ask these soul-searching questions.

It is not a lack of faith when we argue with God and demand God for an answer. It is precisely faith seeking understanding, a vocation for all of us who are learning and doing theology.

In the Jewish magazine Tikkun, there is a section called “Ask the Rabbi.” After the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia in December 2004 killing more than 220,000, a reader asked how could God have allowed the tsunami to happen. Rabbi Michael Lerner responded: “I don’t know and there are no answers, but only responses to the question. The difference is this: an answer seeks to dissolve the question, a response recognizes the ongoing validity of the question and seeks to remain in connection with it.”

The Rabbi suggested that we should stop thinking of God as a big man in heaven deciding our fates and controlling nature. Instead, he wrote, we should understand “God as the force of healing and transformation in the universe, the aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social justice, peace and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all being.”

Last Sunday during worship, pastors in Japan tried their best to provide solace for the frightened and anxious people. My friend the Rev. Claudia Genung Yamamoto, a pastor of the West Tokyo Union Church, focused her sermon on Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”

Yesterday in my spirituality class, we used the ritual of “touching the earth” introduced by the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. We bowed down, touching the ground with our foreheads, and remembered our ancestors and our spiritual teachers. We bowed and sent our loving energy to people in Japan.

After the disaster, we saw the outpouring of prayers, love, and compassion for the victims and for those who care for the injured, the sick, and people who have lost their loved ones. The orderliness and strength of people lining up for long hours for food, water, and basic necessities impresses us.

We pray for mercy that the nuclear reactors will not explode and spew a radiation crowd like the disaster in Chernobyl. We pray for strength and courage when the Japanese people need to muster their energy to rebuild their society for years to come.