Reflections on a Death – by Cynthia Holder Rich

The impact of one execution through the lens of my life

I heard the news when I got up early to help our teenage children get to school – Osama bin Laden had been killed in the night by US forces in Pakistan.  My personal experiences, a few of which are shared here, frame my sense of events; this one fills me with an overwhelming and complex set of emotions and thoughts.

• When my husband and I served parishes in North Dakota, the closest major city was Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.  We visited a number of times, leaving ND by two-lane roads where unstaffed shacks sat at the international border.  Now, many of those are closed off and the roads left are highly secured and much harder to cross.
• We moved to Madagascar in 1998 with our three young children, and came home on leave in 2001.  On 9/11, a beautiful early fall day, we were out to breakfast when the attack on the World Trade Center began.  We went home in time to see the second tower hit.  Much of Chicago went into high alert, with fears of continued attacks that might penetrate the Midwest and barriers hurriedly built around public and federal buildings.
• The Sunday after the attack, we went to church and heard white liberal Christians, people who worked for peace and advocated for justice on other days, utterly reject any sense of rationale for the attack and decry the actions of the attackers and the celebrations seen on TV from various places in the Middle East.  When we tried to talk about how this might be seen internationally, we were completely rebuffed and told we had become unpatriotic through living outside the US for too long.
• Meanwhile, we were receiving many emails from our growing group of expat American friends, who spoke with one voice with the hope that finally, the US would “get it”.  We were seeing very little evidence that that was happening.
• I had been asked by Chicago Presbytery to give the mission moment at the stated meeting that took place a few weeks after 9/11 of that year.  I was on the docket immediately following worship, which was a memorial for those who had died in the attacks.  People were in tears and the sanctuary was filled with grief.

As part of my remarks, I shared that at that time, more than 10,000 children were dying every week in Africa from preventable causes, and that their deaths were not mourned in this way.  Further, inaction made clear that many Americans and the US government had deemed these acceptable deaths.  I closed with my gratitude that our church was working to prevent child mortality in places like Madagascar.  People were gracious in response, and some were affirming, and others responded quizzically.

• Returning to Madagascar was a chore.  We had a luggage allowance of 35 kilos apiece; that is, we had around 380 pounds of luggage and we were picked for extra security review.  Every single piece in the bags was removed and inspected and returned to the bags.  Subsequently, this happened every single time we left the US.  We were a white woman, a white man (who is 6’7” – that is 2m – tall), a black baby girl, and two little boys, one white and one black.  We didn’t go anywhere without attracting notice.  Nevertheless, we were ALWAYS picked for extra security.  We learned to take our three young children to the airport at least 3 hours early; our children learned to enjoy long periods of time in airports.
• Our return to the seminary where we taught was marked by a service of gratitude to God for our safety in the midst of international crisis.
• As I travelled to South Africa for doctoral studies, the sight of my blue US passport seemed to give total strangers permission to share their disgust with Bush’s “you are for us or against us” stance.  US colleagues teaching in Africa were taken aside by colleagues and asked why “we” were taking this stance.  My husband and I were both engaged by colleagues in the same way.
• I was in South Africa when the 2003 attack on Baghdad began.  Being American overseas at such moments is a tricky and delicate endeavor.  Again, the sight of my blue passport made accosting me in airport lines acceptable; again, fellow students, some professors, and all of our colleagues felt compelled to share their dismay with “our” response.
• People coming and going to and from Madagascar received even more heightened security, as it became known that members of the bin Laden family lived on the island.

Since our return to live and work in the US, our experiences have impacted all of life, faith, and witness.  If we ever could, no longer can we perceive events like the killing of a terrorist leader in simple ways.  Life has always been complex, particularly for we who follow Jesus.  I don’t really believe life has become more complex – rather, I think that we in the US have come to understand some of the complexity and interconnectivity of life through our experiences of events in which Osama bin Laden had a hand.

I pray this morning for expat US citizens, as I know this increases the difficulty of their lives.  I pray for peace and for justice, two goals so hard to achieve, which this death may well make harder to attain.  I pray for the people celebrating, for whom 9/11 continues as a primary wound, that a broader understanding of how most people in the world live might be bestowed upon them.  I pray for increased wisdom for the leaders of the world.

And I pray for the church in the world, including particularly in Pakistan this morning, which may well be persecuted in response; and for all of us who follow Jesus, help us to be the salt and light Jesus called us, in the midst of a very complex world where suffering and death is the daily norm – and where many, here in the US, have no sense of the privileged safety in which we live.  Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy; Lord have mercy.