On September 1, an American bomb killed five people, including a child, and wounded sixty-seven others who were preparing to celebrate a wedding in the port city of Kuhestak in Iran. These senseless deaths immediately recall the Radda airstrike in Yemen in 2013, where four Hellfire missiles launched by a US drone killed twelve people and wounded fifteen others who were part of a wedding procession. Five years prior to that, US airstrikes in Afghanistan killed forty-seven and thirty-seven civilians, respectively, who were also gathered for weddings.
The gospels are replete with nuptial imagery. Christ chooses a wedding for the site of his first miracle. He refers to John the Baptist as “the friend of the bridegroom” (John 3:29) and compares the kingdom of heaven to a wedding banquet (Matt 22:1-14). His teachings build on the rich symbolism of the wedding in the Hebrew scriptures, from Isaiah (“And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you” [62:3]) to the royal procession of the bridegroom described in the third chapter of the Song of Songs. A well-known Talmudic teaching states that if a funeral procession and a wedding procession happen to meet at an intersection, the funeral procession must yield the way—love triumphs over death.
These biblical and theological motifs lend another level of poignancy to the tragedy at Kuhestak. When we see the victims in the light of Scripture, we recognize that they were partaking in the universal desire to love and be loved, and to formalize that desire through the rituals, ceremonies, and shared sacred stories of matrimony. Torn apart by a bomb, their day became a sordid inverse of Psalm 30:12: instead of their lament being changed into dancing, their dancing became a lamentation.
As we pause to reflect on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks this week, we mourn the loss of life on that most tragic day while remembering what Pope Francis found amid the grief of Ground Zero in 2015: the “heroic goodness which people are capable of, those hidden reserves of strength from which we can draw.” We mourn the fact that it took such a traumatic event to bring our fractured and distracted nation together, and we mourn how swiftly that feeling of solidarity soon dissipated. We mourn the hunger for vengeance within ourselves that led to ill-considered invasions abroad resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and we mourn how abstract these cycles of violence have become—something that happens at a distance, perpetually now for a quarter of a century, with the world no safer and our own nation deeper in economic, moral, and spiritual debt.
This Sunday’s reading from the book of Sirach offers a clear warning against carrying resentment:
Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
The vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance,
for he remembers their sins in detail.
These words can be difficult to hear when we are angry, tormented, or hurt. Sometimes it can be easier to forgive on the macro level, where things are impersonal and achieve a philosophic distance, than on the one-to-one level where we feel we have been wronged. Yet those smaller acts of forgiveness are the seeds of a transformed culture, one that reflects the image of the Lord’s Prayer beautifully adumbrated in the following lines from Sirach:
Forgive your neighbor’s injustice;
then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.
Twenty-five years on, we still carry the scars from the awful wound inflicted upon us, just as we carry the weight of a quarter century of retaliation, a “forever war” that seems never to bring us any closer to the peace and equilibrium implanted in the human heart. Deep down, our inherent goodness grieves for this, and we lash out as a way to stay this grief, telling ourselves that this time the final enemy will be vanquished and everything set to rights. But that day never comes—violence just begets more violence, and we are forced to invent new reasons and justifications to sublimate our pain.
If we are serious about following the gospel, we find that Christ offers us another way: one where he has wed the world in the particularity of his incarnation as a human being, and again in the paradox of the cross that grants us refuge even in the furthest ends of our alienation from him. We stand between this wedding, this opportunity to transform and be transformed, when we choose the “snares of death” (Ps 116:3) that bind us to our own blind will; we share in it when we begin to find our wounds, our hurts, our pain in him, and see how the harm we do to others comes back to harm the Christ in us.
Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic
Different Ways of Doing Theology
Matthew Shadle is a Catholic theologian, author, speaker and educator. For seventeen years, he has been a professor of theology, most recently at Marymount University. He is the author of Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford, 2018) and The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown, 2011), as well as numerous essays and articles that have appeared in America Magazine, Church Life Journal, Commonweal, and Public Discourse, among other outlets.
Matthew currently serves as a volunteer representative for the United States Conference of Bishops at the Faith and Order Convening Tables, the ecumenical theological dialogue of the National Council of Churches. He is also the creator of the Window Light newsletter, a publication that provides commentary and reportage on issues pertinent to the church and offers a Catholic theological perspective on current events.
Our conversation with Matthew ranged from his reception into the Catholic Church and focus on the theology of Catholic social teaching, through the development of Window Light and his understanding of the role of the public theologian. We discuss at length the experience of the Synod on Synodality and the ways it has helped foster a global perspective, and Matthew shares his thoughts on Pope Leo XIV’s “leadership of listening.” Along the way, he offers reflections on figures who have shaped his theological vision, from John Duns Scotus to Peter Auriol, and explores the “deep spiritual longings” that are drawing people to the church and how this might transform our approach to evangelization.
“ we lash out as a way to stay this grief, telling ourselves that this time the final enemy will be vanquished and everything set to rights. But that day never comes—violence just begets more violence, and we are forced to invent new reasons and justifications to sublimate our pain.”