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20 September 2001
Dear Friends:
Consider me a fly on the wall. Next month I will have completed
24 years of mission service in Latin America. So if one has the
sense to shut up and listen, one hears things.
Today the whole world reflects on the recent terrorist attacks
on the United States. People talk. Middle-class professionals.
Folks on the margins. Single mothers. Friends, young and old.
Students. Pastors. Colleagues. Most, over the years, have had
considerable direct contact with us gringos. So their immediate
heartfelt response is one of solidarity. The horror of it all.
Did you know any of the victims?
And the relationships built with thousands of you in the United
States over the years have been deep and mutually enriching. Your
mission study tours, delegations and work groups have made these
relationships possible. They have also made you part of perhaps
the largest displacement of believers from a center to a periphery
of economic and political power in human history.
You have shared together profoundly human moments: tragic illness,
the birth of a child. You have broken bread together and been
accepted into their homes. You have gladly returned the hospitality.
You have sought to influence public policy in light of your experience.
You have worshiped together and sensed in each other the presence
of God’s Spirit.
But there are things most of you have not been able to truly
understand, at gut level. How terror becomes an ever-present undercurrent
in daily life. Will the kids witness a murder today? Will they
be kidnaped on the way to school? How impunity and the absence
of the rule of law gnaw away at our common humanity. The paralysis
born of corruption. How it feels to have no recourse. How violence
has become woven into the very structures of society.
(Or maybe this is an accurate representation of your life in
the United States. But if so, you are less likely to have participated
in a delegation to Latin America).
So there is another moment. People generally agree it was bound
to happen sooner or later. So much power and wealth. Such naive
arrogance. Such disregard for history and for "collateral
damage."
Some gloat. This is not a function of their position on the
ideological spectrum. Those on the right, left, and center are
just as likely to have
expressed a fleeting, visceral "high five" at this devastating
expression of U.S. vulnerability.
Some now offer a new kind of embrace. With the pain of knowing
in their eyes, they recognize that some of you have made a rite
of passage. You have come to understand the fundamental insecurity
of life on this planet. You have tasted the arbitrariness of terror.
The taste will not go away.
Yet, they say, we know through the mystery of faith that in
life and death we belong to God. Thus, we look forward "to
the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is
God" (Heb. 11:10).
The time has come, perhaps, for a declaration of interdependence.
Our common vulnerability can make us one. What other way to overcome
terror than by affirming our frailty and our faith?
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Oh. And a word about the enemy. Whatever happens in the next
few weeks and months, the enemy is not some guys with scraggly
beards who live in tents in the desert. The enemy is a guy who
knows us well. He is upper middle class, resourceful, deeply spiritual,
energetic. He had been to our universities and has seen all the
gadgets and pleasures our world has to offer. He has found them
to be fundamentally corrupt and corrupting. And he has a sense
of history. His reading of history unveils centuries of indescribable
atrocities against his people and against his faith. His lived
experience says the atrocities continue today. Rightly or wrongly
he lays that at our door.
Can our interdependence come to include these guys too?
Under the Mercy,
Dennis A. Smith
The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 241
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