Born on Nine Eleven (a late thought on Tucson and Egypt)

by guest blogger Chris Halverson

As has been widely noted Christina Green was born on 9/11, she was featured as a “face of hope.” That her life was bracketed by violence in such a way has some spiritual significance; it also says something to and about our present reality! I believe it says something about a whole generation born into a world that has been set on edge by violence and threats of violence their entire life. Their lives have been enveloped in the War on Terror—worry about religious radicals and dirty bombs, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture at Abu Ghraib, easily accessible videos of Richard Pearle’s head being hacked off, the Mumbai attacks—they have never known what it is like for America to be at peace! Having entered into young adulthood when Christina was born I can only feel an echo of what this time we live in does to the impressionable and young by these events certain cynical scaring of my own soul. Four days before the shooting in Tuscon, Salmaan Taseer, the Governor of Punjab province in Pakistan was assassinated for standing up to extremism. I felt bad for the loss of a good man, yes, but it fit into the larger story of this last decade—the triumph of violence, so I simply shrug and thought, “Violence is essential to being human. Hobbes was wrong, it is not that the state of nature is nasty brutish and short—it is that we are.” Yet, when I first received a text about the attempted assassination of Representative Giffords I was still shocked and sickened, and I thank God for that! My shock means my heart is not entirely recalcitrant to violence. And now that we know more fully what happened that day in that parking lot I am impressed by the counterweight that this particular story has to the larger story of violence Christina’s generation has lived with.

There were too many instances of people laying down their life for another—spouse shielding spouse—to ignore. I see soul force meeting physical force. I am reminded that self-sacrifice—sacrificial love—too is embedded in our soul. For the entire post visit Luthermatrix .