From South Africa comes a powerful statement on peace and reconciliation and repentance, in a letter from Bishop Peter Storey, professor of the practice of Christian ministry. His fight against apartheid in South Africa has made him a powerful symbol of justice in South Africa.

He wrote this letter two days after the Sept. 11 acts of terrorism.

Dear Friends in the United States,

We mourn with you. Because we know and love so many of you, and have lived long enough among you to feel at least a measure of your hurt.

We continue to spend most of our days watching the layers of pain unfold across your land. From time to time, my mind closes down from overload, unable to hold the measure of horror, then some image brings it back to sharp focus again. The small things do this, the things one's mind and heart can grasp. A woman, showing pictures of her husband to anyone she can. A brawny, bone-weary fireman sluicing the dust off his head. Crowds shouting their thanks to convoys of grim construction workers, driving their rigs into the disaster area. Another crowd in another land, weeping as, for the first time in history, a "foreign" anthem is played in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.

We have been moved, as always, by the response of so many, acting so rapidly, and with purpose, to bring succor, ministering to the nation's wounds. There is something deeply stirring about the capacity of the American people to mobilize communities for good.

There have been some unlikely heroes too. That rough diamond, Rudy Giuliani, has stood out for me as the one who has ministered truth and compassion to the people of New York. No shallow bravado, no cheap pieties, but unsentimental, tough love that has come across as extraordinarily human and pastoral - parenting New Yorkers in their time of trial.

By contrast, it has been troubling to see how shallow and shaky have been the first moves of the President, and how unsafe he becomes when caught without a script. We must pray that this man will be helped through this without taking the world deeper into disaster.

Sadly, at the invitation-only service at the National Cathedral, the Church did not help him, nor further the Gospel. It was sad to see the Church (and other religious traditions) laid so supinely at the disposal of Caesar and his chaplains. It is one thing for the Church to invite the leaders of the land to come like any others, to pray, to seek God's healing and the guidance of God's word. It is theologically an entirely different matter to provide a pulpit to the head of state, enabling him to use a house of worship to rally the nation for war, exactly contradicting some of the Scriptures that were read. When uniforms and flags crowd God's house, it is hard for God's word to be heard. A British TV reporter said afterward: "This morning, in quick succession, President Bush got approval for his war, first from Congress, then from the religious leaders." Did it occur to anyone just how much this action resembled the use made of mosque pulpits by the political leaders of some extreme Muslim fundamentalist states?

After that carefully choreographed exercise, faithful preachers will not have an easy task. As my preacher son said, "It will be very difficult to balance the personal and pastoral on one hand, and the political, or prophetic on the other."

Yet, as always, both dimensions exist in this atrocity. To weep with Jesus over the city's wounds is our pastoral imperative. To do so without asking his deep questions about why we "do not know the things that make for peace," is a dereliction of our calling.

In the midst of the weeping for the pain, which has given way so rapidly to cries for vengeance, should we not listen for another note - that of repentance?

Some of the questions that leap out at me right now, are these:

How is it that we continue to be defrauded by the false security of military might? The capacity to build an anti-ballistic-missile system, and to "project power" across the globe, seems almost ludicrous right now. The greatest military power on earth has been struck at its heart by three of its own commercial airliners, held to ransom by a handful of knife-wielding fanatics. Yet, nothing in the rhythm of human stupidity is likely to change. The saber-rattling will grow louder, the outworn weapons of war will be dusted off, and soon, somewhere in the "third world," - the world I live in -many more people will die, adding to God's tears. More hatred will be stored up in the ruins of some dusty country. We must bear witness to another way - the Jesus way of nonviolence. This is never more difficult than when we feel our loved ones and ourselves to be under attack, yet that is surely the time when such a witness is supremely relevant. 

When will we have the courage to identify all fundamentalism as the well from which hatred drinks? The perpetrators of this horror will most likely be found to come from Muslim fundamentalist ranks, but even as some outraged people take revenge on innocent Muslim-Americans, we remember that it was Christian fundamentalists who perpetrated the second worst terrorist attack on American soil. McVeigh was the extreme product of the theological poison that masquerades as Christianity in hundreds of churches, and which we tend to shrug off as "misguided, but sincere." Witness the hatred toward a whole slew of scapegoats that came from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson while the flames in Manhattan and Washington DC still burned. Fundamentalism - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, whatever - is surely the enemy of each of these faiths and will continue to turn them into instruments of division and death instead of unity and life.

While it is right to ask in horror, "What kind of people can perform such hateful, deranged deeds?" there is another question: "What have we done that anybody can hate us so much?" This is a hard question to ask at a time of such pain, but we pray that out of all this horror, there may be a better capacity to hear it (although I fear the opposite). Part of the response to that question may be simply that the big boy on the block is always disliked by all the little guys who wish they were as big. But it's not as simple as that. There is a myth, cherished by the vast majority of Americans, that their nation's foreign and economic policy is both moral and benign. From other vantage points it is viewed very differently. I think of our anger in South Africa at the American unwillingness to engage the issues of slavery and Israeli oppression in Durban recently and their attempt to torpedo the whole conference because they could not dominate it. How much more resented in the Arab world, which has endured nearly a century of humiliation at the hands of the West? The unquestioning support for Israel, led now by a man whose past includes military atrocities against Palestinians, and who orders extra-judicial executions of their leadership every day, is beyond our comprehension. It goes far beyond ensuring Israel's legitimate right to survive. US-driven economic "globalisation" has enriched the shareholders of Wall Street beyond their dreams, but its destructive impact on the poor of "emerging economies" goes unacknowledged and unquestioned in Congress, and the increasingly angry demonstrations against it are swept aside with teargas and disdain.

The cone of silence around these questions needs to be broken. With mainstream politicians fearful of even appearing to address them surely the Church must do so? It will be difficult, but to the degree that this nightmare of terror is related to those questions, is this now the time to ask them?

I have often suggested to American Christians that the only way to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman Empire. Certainly, when I preach in the United States, I feel as I imagine the Apostle Paul did, when he first passed through the gates of Rome - admiration for its people, awe at its manifest virtues, and resentment of its careless power. American preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose, and confront, the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all.

All around the world there are those who believe in the basic goodness of the American people, who agonize with you in your pain, but also long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.

With love and solidarity,

Peter Storey