The day slips itself into our calendar again. In the limbo of early September — no longer summer, not yet autumn — it shows up. Sometimes I think it’s going to be an ordinary day, and then I read something about it in the damn New York Times and it comes back: the way the day felt, smelled, sounded, tasted.
But most years, my need to react against others’ feelings warps my own. If I try to ignore the media force field, I realize I’m aggressively doing so, which is the opposite of ignoring. If I write about it on the blog, I’m following the Approved Party Line, because We All Must Remember, and I hate doing that. But if I don’t write about it, then that, too, is giving in.
I resent people who weren’t here that day, people who merely watched it on TV in the middle of America and have tried to take ownership of it away from me for the last seven years.
And then I realize I’m being a 9/11 snob.
I shouldn’t discount the feelings of a Kansas grandma who watched it on TV. She has as much right to her feelings as I do.
And there are people who experienced it much more firsthand than I: those who lost a close relative, those who had to escape from the buildings, those who were in the financial district. Compared to them, I’m the Kansas grandma.
We are all allowed to feel what we feel.
So I try to resent the 9/11 sentimentalism only when it comes from people who love America but hate New Yorkers. Or when it’s exploitative. Things like this, or, you know, this.
Doug would probably be married today and he’d probably have a couple of kids. But those kids will never exist. I wonder if unconceived children have souls.
Since I already wrote about my own feelings, I’ll stick the nice safe speculative theological question.
It all depends, of course, on how one defines “soul” and what it means to “have” one. Catholicism would say no, because souls are created at conception. The Jehovahs Witnesses would say no, because souls don’t exist.
Buddhism and Hinduism would say that we don’t have souls but rather our souls have us as their present incarnations. So, while the souls that could have potentially inhabited the bodies of those unconceived children most like exist, those bodies are available for them to have been reincarnated into.
Judaism, of course, as 13 million different opinions on the subject. I myself would say “Yes and no.” I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in any kind of individual soul. Rather, I believe in only one life-giving animating principle (which could very well just be nothing more than an abstraction created in the human mind) that I call “God.” If there is anything like a “soul,” then I think it’s part of “God” (like everything else) and so the unconceived children would have had the same “soul” as everyone else.
I’ll never forget that awful day; I was in New York, but fortunately working on the upper east side, so I was never in any danger and didn’t see anything particularly upsetting, other than that small, distant column of smoke, a tiny smudge that appeared suddenly over midtown, that grew and grew and grew and spread eastward toward Brooklyn like a sign of the apocalypse. Seven years and 3,000 miles away, I noted with melancholy that the weather here in Portland today is exactly as it was that morning in Central Park when I suddenly looked up and noticed something amiss: warm and pleasant, the sky a deep, brilliant blue, and everything sparkles in the clear air with vibrant sunshine.
It’s right to acknowledge that everyone is entitled to their own feelings, but I’m inclined to agree that those of us who were in the City on that day share something special.
To your more theological question, as an Episcopalian I would have to say, short answer, “No,” long answer “Definitely not.”