If you’ve been reading Beyond Blue loyally, I need not introduce you to Larry Parker, perhaps my most, um, vocal reader. I was very moved by his comment to my post on 9/11 and Tumbling Towers. Like Madeleine L’Engle and her mom, he has learned a great deal from his suffering and (if I am to believe what he writes) has used it to evolve into a better, kinder person. It’s about time I gave him a post of his own.

Therese:
As you wrote so poignantly, when we contemplate the horror of 9/11, we are faced with the ultimate mystery that the Cross IS the Good News. Is it a coincidence that an enormous cross of iron and steel beams was found to have survived the ruins of the World Trade Center? You don’t even have to be religious (I’m attracted to the theory of Jungian synchronicity, myself) to wonder about that.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that I read about your four-story apartment today. Because, after all the thoughts about how it related to my own health (posted above), I also found myself thinking — IS THAT ALL THERE IS? I mean, is a humble four-story apartment all we have to hope for in a world that can give us World Trade Centers (and Petronas Towers and Empire State Buildings)?

Then I realized something. Your OP’s, of course, speak of the lessons we learn from our depression (and grief). One of the lessons I have very clearly learned from mine is that depression has made me literally incapable of my formerly ruthless ambitions toward power and money — and that I don’t like that kind of ambition very much, in myself or others. (Also, despite what I perhaps not-so-humbly would say is my intelligence and drive, I’m — mercifully I suppose — just not very good at it. If I ever even tried to be a tycoon, I’d be Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, trying to hold the entire world ransom for “one MEAL-YOAN dollars,” LOL.)
Today is 9/11. The Bible, in Genesis 11 (interestingly), speaks of the ultimate folly of humanity’s ambitions toward power and money, a folly that has sad echoes in both the World Trade Center and Iraq, now tied in such a twisted way in the lives of every 21st century American — the Tower of Babel. When the human tendency to want to build something larger than ourselves dissolves into constructing self-aggrandizing monuments TO ourselves, the result is chaos that divides rather than unites us. You don’t have to be a member of one political party or another (Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Con” blog here on Bnet speaks to this every single day) to see the results in our own world, and not (just) in “Babylon.”
I paid (and keep paying) a terrible personal price to (re-)learn that lesson, to realize four-story apartments are beautiful, too — yet it was and even is, in some ways, a gift. In my faith, Jesus suffered the excruciating (literally) pain of every sin ever committed and ever-to-be-committed by humankind in his death on the Cross — yet that was and is “good news.”
They say G-d never gives us more than we can handle. But that’s fatuous cant on a day when the survivors of 3,000 people who died so terribly (some of whom, I dare say just from the nightmarish pictures frozen in all of our minds, might have traded places with Jesus Himself) are mourning those unspeakable losses all over again. At least a few survivors, news reports indicate, have committed suicide in the last six years in their agony.
G-d (or, to keep this discussion more broad for those not in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Universe) often gives us far, far more than we can “handle.” The question is, does the intense suffering that we go through in either succumbing to that pain or in somehow, even in a tiny way, transcending it into a gift (and we all do both … we all do both) have a larger meaning?
The Serenity Prayer says, “G-d grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Despite my prayers, G-d has not granted me — or, I suspect, many people at all in this world — that kind of ultimate wisdom. Perhaps because, if you read the prayer closely, on these questions the best we can hope for in this world is serenity and courage — which are enormous gifts in and of themselves.
May G-d bless the souls of those who passed away so tragically six years ago, and may he comfort their loved ones — not to end their suffering, since not even G-d has that power, but to weep with them in their grief.