From John Guzlowski at Everything’s Jake: Poems about God after 9/11
The following is the preface I wrote to a gathering of poems about God written in the aftermath of September 11. The preface and the poems by American, Polish, and Hungarian poets were published in the Scream Online in 2005:
Before 9/11, I didn’t think much about God, and I hadn’t thought much about Him for a long, long time.
Oh, of course, I thought about Him on occasion. I thought about Him at Christmas time when my daughter Lillian was young and she’d ask me about who baby Jesus was. And I thought about God when I got interested in Isaac Bashevis Singer and started writing a series of articles about him. You can hardly write about Singer without writing about God—but there, I was thinking about God in a different sort of way. It was the way I thought about Him when I taught the great religious writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and T. S. Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky. God was an idea, a concept, that I was seeing through a lens and trying to make intellectual and academic sense of.
After 9/11, all that changed. When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came down, I discovered that God was no longer academic. He suddenly became important in my world. Not in the sense that I’ve come to believe what my father believed when he knelt every night and prayed in the darkness, nor in the sense that I came to believe what the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Christian Brothers taught me as I was growing up and attending grammar school and high school.
God became important in the sense that my world was suddenly touched and continues to be touched by those who believe in him firmly and absolutely…
In reflecting on this solemn day, we should recognize that the God we represent is more than our feeble attempts, and a greater sum of love than all our petty squabbles, and dangerous hatreds. We should recognize that He is not the God of the U.S., or of Israel, or Mecca, or Rome, but of every nation, and ultimately, of His heavenly Kingdom. We all belong to the same call, His call. His call leads to the cross, to service in the here and now, and to a resurrected life that surpasses today to eternity. If we place our desires and demands before His, and want it all now, and need our pound of flesh now, we will reap only the fruit of our faulty humanity. We will only blaspheme His call to love.
For centuries, olive trees have formed the backbone of Palestinian agriculture. Yet, as part of its illegal military occupation, Israel has systematically uprooted them by the thousands to clear land for illegal Israeli settlements, apartheid fences and walls, and to dispossess Palestinian farmers of their lands and livelihoods.