About eight or nine months after 9/11, my wife told me that my anxiety and anger over what happened was eating me alive. She asked me to see a counselor about it. I agreed to, and had a few sessions with a Catholic counselor in Manhattan (it ended very badly, but over an issue having nothing to do with my feelings about 9/11). Early in the therapy, the counselor told me that my anger could destroy me if I didn't put it down, and that I couldn't do that until I could see that within my heart, I had the ability to do exactly what Mohammed Atta and his confreres did.
To say I resisted that thought is an understatement. I thought it absurd. I hated it. Now, six years later, I see that the therapist was exactly right. But not at the time. I was offended that he could even think that I was capable of such evil. But I was.
There is a phrase used in Orthodox prayers and devotions, in which one calls oneself "the chief of sinners." Before I was Orthodox, I thought that was a form of vanity, of pious claptrap. What does it mean to call oneself "the chief of sinners"? Sure, I'm a sinner, but am I worse than Saddam Hussein? Worse than a child abuser? Worse than a wife-beater? Come on!
But then I read a passage from "Death on a Friday Afternoon," a book by Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic priest, meditating on Christ's suffering on the Cross. In it, Fr. Neuhaus explores the meaning of the phrase "chief of sinners," and the tendency we humans have to think of the sins of others as worse than our own. It goes back to Adam, trying to shift the blame onto Eve. Fr. Neuhaus says that of course some sins are worse than others; it is worse to murder a child than to steal his candy cane. But all sin is abhorrent in the eyes of God, and no individual has the knowledge necessary to pass judgment on another individual's soul.
Writes Fr. Neuhaus: "About chief of sinners, I don't know, but what I know about sinners I know chiefly about me." That is to say, we can only speak with certainty of judgment about our own sin, not the sins of others. We don't know what was in their hearts and minds when they did what they did. For all I know, God will hold me more responsible for having told a malicious story about my neighbor than He will hold Atta responsible for 9/11, given the way Atta was raised, and his own ignorance of the truth. Maybe God won't. All that I, Rod Dreher, can say for sure is that I know what sin is, and I freely chose to sin. As far as I know, I am the chief of sinners, and shouldn't hesitate to humiliate myself before the merciful God by calling myself that. And it's not just a figure of pious speech; if I treat it as such, then there's something important I don't understand about humility. As Fr. Neuhaus beautifully explains in the book, if we are not prepared to say that, and mean it, then we are not prepared for the redemption of the Cross.
This is a hard teaching -- and extremely hard teaching for people like me -- but the truth is, it is only humility that can save any one of us. Only the humility that can recognize we are worse, as far as we know, than our oppressors (remember, Jesus found a Roman centurion and a tax collector, oppressors of the Jewish people, to be more worthy in spirit than his own people, because of their humility). Christ commanded us to love our enemies. Did I love Mohammed Atta and his people? Oh, hell no. Do I love them now? No -- but I'm getting there, though I'm stubborn and proud, and it might take a lifetime. Christ's command is right there in the Scriptures: I don't have an excuse for holding on to that hatred. I know the Truth, and if I don't let the Truth set me free by embracing it and living it out, I am a slave, whether I know it or not.
I bring all this up because I am bothered by the idea that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright passes off his hatred of oppressors as somehow Christian, and the idea that we should indulge it in light of what he's been through. It is addictive, but it is poison. But look, I am a bigger sinner than Jeremiah Wright, because even though I would never do as he does, and present hatred of a particular sort as in some sense holy, it is possible that the Rev. Wright is so blinded by his own experience of oppression -- which was far more real and embittering than anything I have ever experienced -- that he cannot understand what he's truly saying. His culpability may be, in the eyes of God, mitigated.
What I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that while I would never, ever be able to preach what Wright preaches about Islamic extremists of the sort who committed the 9/11 atrocities and who celebrate them, I have failed to love them as the man I call Lord and Saviour commanded. And in failing Him, I sin, and open up a chasm between my failure and his transcendent goodness. Truth to tell, when I think of Obama sitting there listening to this garbage from Wright without protest, had I been sitting in a church at any time in the year following 9/11 and heard a pastor excoriate Arab Muslims in the same way Wright excoriates whites, I can't say that I would have protested in any way, no matter what my personal misgivings.
For all I know, Wright has a good excuse. For all I know, I do not. I am the chief of sinners. And there is nothing left to be done but to repent, and ask for mercy, and try against my own prideful nature to extend mercy, every day of my life.
You too. We're all in this together.
UPDATE: A reader below links to Mike Huckabee's interview about the Obama-Wright controversy. At the end of the clip, Huckabee says that white people should cut some slack to blacks who grew up under the humiliation of segregation, because had we been made to suffer the indignities that they had to endure, we might have had an even bigger chip on our shoulders.
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Thanks, Susan, but first I've got to live that life.
It was a good post, on an important topic. I'm glad more people will get to see it. I wonder how it will work in a secularized version, though - maybe you could post that as well?
Pat
Best post I've ever read here. I'm honestly surprised. I didn't expect this from you, Rod.
One thing:
"Did I love Mohammed Atta and his people?"
Let's not paint an entire group of people-- and this is assuming that you mean Muslims or Arabs, not Islamic terrorists-- with the same brush.
In the case of Muslims, that's on the order of ONE BILLION people.
Per Rod: "I pulled my scheduled Sunday column today and replaced it with a rewritten (and more secularized) version of this post."
This was a great post, Rod; your more secularized Sunday column version, not so much: It contained a strong implication that those of us who don't believe the President spouted "lies and foolishness" to get us into war are, unlike you, still "angry, blind and stupid."
I waited to comment until this thread had played itself out because I didn't want to rain on your parade.
"But I have said before that my disagreement with gay marriage isn't based on the sinfulness of homosexual acts but on the fact that to redefine marriage in a way that it has never been defined before fundamentally and radically restructures society from its most basic level onward. Yes, serial divorce and rampant cohabitation have had deleterious effects, too, but in neither case has marriage been redefined to have nothing whatsoever to do with the inherent duties and obligations a man and a woman have toward their own biological offspring, and the State's interest in seeing that as many people as possible accept those duties and obligations instead of leaving their offspring on the State's hands, so to speak."
In point of fact, the definition of marriage for thousands of years before our era was an arrangement between extended families to form an economic alliance for the presumed benefit of both families by requiring the prospective spouses to produce children and continue (and enrich) the families. In some cultures, this is still the case. For instance, in some cultures, the bride and groom don't even show up at the wedding. It is a celebration of a contract between the male elders of the two families, period.
When, in the industrialized West, marriage became an arrangement between two people to share sex, household duties, economic obligations and benefits, and the engendering and care of children, that was a major change which some societies have still not signed onto (most notably in Asia and Africa.)Are we supposed to respect their traditions and go back to doing things their way? Could we, even if we wanted to?
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