I was gathered around a family dinner table with two adults and two young children. Together, we started having a conversation about our projections for the future. We asked the kids what they thought the future would be like when they are our age. (And by the way, I don’t mean any sort of doomsday scenarios or apocalypses — just what daily rhythms might be like.) It was fun to hear their imaginative answers.
Then we started talking about what we thought, expected, or imagined. Not long after this, the children got up and went into another room to play. Our conversation moved in a deeper direction.
Initially, I said that when I was coming of age in high school, we believed that things were going to become progressively better throughout our lives. That was the assumed trajectory.
Last Friday, marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and as my friends and I talked about this, I realized that that day and that era greatly interrupted that belief that we carried. It’s not that we thought everything would only go downhill, but now, we expected deep challenge. We didn’t feel invulnerable. We knew that massive movements and days of historical pain could throw us off what we expected from our daily lives.
That’s when I told my friend a story I haven’t voiced out loud in a while.
On the day of 9/11, I was a sophomore in college, and that morning, I was scheduled to take my first music history exam. Segments of musical pieces would be played and we would have to identify the piece, composer, and era. It was going to be a very hard test. After the planes hit the World Trade Center, that test became a take-home test, and I remember feeling so guilty at how relieved I felt.
But beyond those initial details, around the dinner table, I also told my friend that that day, I went back to my dorm room and turned on Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club.
Most of my readers will probably recognize that name, but if you don’t, he was a Pentecostal televangelist who blended fundamentalist teachings and news segments told through that fundamentalist lens. I had moved away from this theology a long time ago, but for a few weeks, or maybe a month, I started watching this show daily.
Pat Robertson had been a mainstay of my childhood experience, and truth be told, I had a very problematic and painful relationship with his show. It was often on in the evenings at my home. During that show, in addition to talking about fundamentalist theology and telling news segments through that interpretation, there was often a time toward the end when they would air segments of people who talked about being physically healed of chronic illness and disability as Pat Robertson and his fellow co-hosts prayed.
After sharing one of those stories, they would move into that time of prayer and begin naming maladies that were being healed in the moment. They would say things like, “There’s a person out there who can’t hear out of his left ear, but right now that ear is being opened and healed in the name of Jesus.” I completely believed it.
During my fourth-grade year in particular, I would sit on the floor watching this show, hoping that somehow Pat Robertson and his co-hosts would say the right words to let me know they were healing my childhood epilepsy — but perhaps not use the most obvious medicalized terms (epilepsy, seizure, etc.) because I would feel so embarrassed in front of my family member who was also watching. We didn’t use those words in my house, though I knew what they were, and they affected me daily. “Maybe just have some secret words between me and you, Pat. That would be just fine.” I prayed about this often.
Of course, that never happened. That is why I had a very problematic relationship with this show.
But here I was now, 19 years old in a post-9/11 context, somehow returning to it for a month of my life.
Why did I do that?
I think I was looking for some narrative that let me feel as though it was easy to tell what was wrong and what was right, what was clear and what was not, what was truth and what was untruth. I can’t deny that there was something appealing about those hard lines in a time of great uncertainty.
Why did I stop watching?
About a month later, I stopped watching in horror because I began to be appalled at how Pat Robertson and his co-hosts were talking about Muslims, their faith, and utterly stereotyping them as people intent on violence.
I can’t tell you that my upbringing was diverse. It wasn’t. At this time, even in college, I did not know a single Muslim person. Later, I would meet people whom I cherish, but I already knew that this scapegoating was wrong. So it took me a month, but then I moved away for good.
Here I am 25 years later, and I’m wise enough to know that the world does not progress neatly in an upward, linear fashion. I know we ride this roller coaster at times.
I also know we’re not only at its disposal. We can act. We can change. We can support one another. We can keep building the world we wish we had.
We don’t have all the power. We don’t even always have the neat lines. But we do have each other.
Maybe certainty isn’t the only thing that can hold us when the world feels uncertain.
Smuggling Grace 