It is an eye, ear, mouth, and nose for a tooth. Thankfully, over the past several years these interventions have slowed. The U.S. has even begun to back away from places like Syria, Libya, and Iraq. But not before creating a great deal of instability and uncertainty in those places. One tenet of Just War Theory is that the end state should be better than what came before it. Another, to which I've already alluded is proportionality.
The potentially endless nature of the so-called War on Terror makes it eerily akin to the perpetual state of war the exists between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in Orwell's 1984. In terms of government expenditure, this has huge impacts domestically.
When Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans quotes the Law, which asserts "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord," he highlights that vengeance is just another way human beings like to play at being God (see Romans 12:19; Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 32:35). One tip-off for this is that the first name for U.S. operations in Afghanistan was "Operation Infinite Justice."
Nonetheless, American Christians love to talk about Jesus angrily overturning merchants' tables in the courtyard of the Gentiles in the Jerusalem temple. There is no table Jesus overturned with more force than the one we might call "natural morality," from whence arises the lex talionis.
None of the above detracts from or diminishes the horror of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 nor does it imply in any way that the people who were killed or who subsequently died from the effects of the attacks in any way deserved what happened to them. They did not. Ordinary people going about the daily business of their lives murdered in an unimaginably horrifying way. I remember them today and I pray for them as well as for those who survive them. What happened that day is almost unspeakably evil and can in no way be justified, especially by an appeal to God. How one responds to evil matters a great deal.
I typically take a break from social media on 9/11. Today is Friday, which for Christians is traditionally a penitential day. Morning Prayer for Friday in all four weeks of the Psalter begins with Psalm 51. Known among Western Christians as the Miserere, Psalm 51 is penitential. The composition of most of the psalms have historically been attributed to King David. Of course, it was David who forcibly slept with the wife of one his commanders and then had the commander, Uriah the Hittite, killed. Hence, David had serious things to be penitential about.
Praying Psalm 51 this morning with a bit more intention and attention than I sometimes pray it, I was struck by this:
Rescue me from bloodshed, O God,The last sentence of this passage, of course, is used to start all the offices in the Liturgy of the Hours after the first office of the day, which begins with an invitatory Psalm (traditionally Psalm 95).
God of my salvation,
and then my tongue shall ring our your righteousness
O Lord, open my lips
and my mouth shall proclaim your praise
Choral versions of Psalm 51, which is usually called in Latin after its opening line Miserere mei, Deus, have been a feature of the Καθολικός διάκονος Friday traditio for years, including not many weeks ago when I re-started it. Today it seems most fitting.
The version I chose as today's traditio is a recording of King's College Choir from 1963, making it even older than me! But then sin and sorrow are as old as humanity:
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