BLOGGING-THOMAS

This Saturday, October 1st, the St. Thomas community will be furnishing an apartment for a District family through the Transitional Housing Corporation’s (THC) Adopt-an-Apartment program.

Please join other volunteers from St. Thomas’ Parish to lend your time and hands to help out with the move this Saturday morning. Contact Gregory Zitterkob for more information or to volunteer.

You also can help make this apartment a comfortable home for this family by making a financial contribution to help defray the costs of purchasing new mattress sets. (Checks can be made out to the parish and placed in the plate, just make sure to write “Outreach THC” in the memo line.)

THC is a faith-based, District-based, non-profit that provides housing and comprehensive support services to homeless and at-risk families so that they can make transformational changes in their lives.

Opening up the newspaper or going online for news recently has been far more of an adventure than even many news junkies and sensationalism mongers could have expected.  I was on vacation, but couldn’t get away from news about

• the country, if not the world, teetering on the verge of an economic cliff
• hurricane Irene and an earthquake on the east coast in a single week

And then this morning’s headlines warned of a “specific but unconfirmed threat” of a car-bomb terrorist attack in New York or Washington this weekend. 

The economic crisis was a human- not a natural-disaster, and could have been avoided by different decisions being made.  And the hurricane and earthquake, we must remember, were natural-disasters, but not vengeful “acts of God.” While the Weather Channel let us see the former coming, despite the fact that we couldn’t do much but hunker-down until it passed, the earthquake caught absolutely everyone by surprise, leaving Washingtonians and others up and down the east coast literally as well as psychologically rattled in the aftermath.

Terrorism, however, is a very different beast.  It is the result of human actions, and at the heart of any act of terror is the desire to remove all of the potential victim’s sense of control from the victim, leaving no action that can be taken to prevent it.  Whenever “they” threaten to strike, “we”  feel helpless to do something in advance to guarantee a lack of success.  In spite of this, there’s no way to hunker-down until the threat is gone, like in a monster storm, because by its nature the threat of terror is ongoing – it does not pass us by to move on elsewhere.   Yet like earthquakes, acts of terrorism catch us off guard, and once we’ve experienced one, they leave us with varying degrees of PTSD responses.

So what are we to do?  Make preemptive strikes against potential terrorists?  Close off streets around public buildings or install detectors that seek to ‘see’ a threat before it materializes into action?  Be on guard against ‘them’ by racial- or ethnic- or religious-profiling?  Install walls and fences at our borders to keep ‘them’ out?

The fact is, we have as a people tried all of these, and many people still find such responses ‘necessary’ even if ‘unfortunately’ destructive of the very patterns of normalcy that terrorists’ themselves wish to bring about.  This is what I’ve come to think of as “the terror trap” – becoming so paralyzed by our anticipatory anxiety that we lose a large measure of our quality of life, even as we “succeed” at temporarily forestalling the next attack.

“The Terror Trap” is what happens when we allow ourselves – consciously or unconsciously – to internalize the strategies of terrorism into our daily lives with one another, for example, through bullying behavior or actual domestic- or societal-violence.  We walk around trapped in our fears of others.  And we also use our financial or social or political power to entrap others in their fears of us and what we might do to them, such as stealth drone attacks in the night in Afghanistan.

However, “evil,” according to the great western Christian theologian Augustine, is not some “thing” with it’s own reality that needs defending against because “it” may otherwise get us.  “Evil” instead is what is left when we remove the “good” from our own lives or the world around us.

• The absence of intentional acts of goodness entraps us in the void of what we experience as “evil” — those places where love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, and radical hospitality no longer empower who we are or what we do.
• The “evil” of terrorism is that it threatens to entrap us in places of suspicion, rather than love; self-interest rather than compassion; retribution rather than forgiveness; unfairness rather than justice; and exclusion rather than hospitality.

“The Terror Trap” isn’t really something that “they” control; it is a trap that we build inside ourselves that captures the goodness that resides in each of us and holds it hostage to fear, doubt, suspicion, and anger.  We have a lot more control over this than we usually realize, but we hesitate because it means changing the habits of our hearts to free the goodness that we allow otherwise to remain trapped within us.  Terror is a trap, whether external or internal, that sucks the air out of the room and leaves us smothering in the void; and in the absence of the good, we begin to create the very terror we abhor.