The World Trade Center has collapsed, but life goes on.

The Pentagon is smoking, but classes here in Angwin will start next week.

On radio and television exhausted reporters cover nothing but this tragedy, yet we here at Pacific Union College must still meet as usual, on this Thursday after the Tuesday, to discuss our mission, and retention, and the chapel attendance requirements, and all the other business of running a college. Yet somehow this time it is different, because even as we sit here three thousand miles away, in the sweet air of these foothills above the Pacific, in the back of every mind, inevitably, looms a dark vision: an airplane dashing itself into a huge glass tower, doomed people dialing cell phones, crushed bodies beneath countless tons of steel and concrete.

We meet in the Dining Commons, and through the big windows we watch the early fog gradually disperse as we try to make some sense again of this world, weaving the heaviness of this event into the already-planned agenda, making connections, making sense. One faculty member tells of a recent alumna who worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center. When he heard the news, saw the news, he e-mailed her and waited for two days, breathlessly hoping to see a reply in his in-box. This morning it has come: she has escaped without a scratch. Our new president reminisces about vacations spent in New York, about Broadway and the Rockettes and Friday evenings watching from the twin towers as the sun went down.

We move ahead with the day’s discussion topic: the power of stories, and the need for a shared narrative in the Adventist Church. We sing "I Love to Tell the Story," all four verses, and the jazz pianist in the English department tames his fingers and plays it straight, mostly. Yet I am still thinking, we all are doubtless still thinking, about Evil. Reminding ourselves that God doesn’t cause these things. Doesn’t even "allow" them, exactly, except in the broadest sense. The sense in which God allows everything, all the time. And this is where that "old, old story" really does begin to help us understand this newest story.

Because one of the things that the Seventh-day Adventist tradition has given us, we discover, along with Ruskets and the Wedgewood Trio and the Bedtime Stories, is the reason why these horrors happen: because God values our freedom above all, even above the life of his only Son. Because without freedom there is nothing: no creativity, or curiosity, or love. No Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, no Paradise Lost, no Sistine Chapel, no Golden Gate Bridge or Taj Mahal—indeed, none of the reasons for which we have a liberal arts college. But also no destruction or boredom or hatred. No Hitler or Stalin. No Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden. We may not like this bargain, but it was never ours to make. This is the kind of world God chose to give us: a world where choices are real, where we can really really love each other—and also smash each other to smithereens.

Our morning’s discussion continues with more about stories. This quotation from Elie Wiesel, who knows about hate, appears on the screen before us: "God made man because he loves stories." It occurs to me that God got a new story this week. But along with this new story of hatred and fear and death are the newer stories that are following hard on their heals: stories of rescue, and sacrifice, and courage, and love. Made possible by the oldest story we know: "God said: Let us make humankind, in our image."

September 13, 2001

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