Ex. 32: 7-11, 13-14
1 Tim. 1:12-17
Luke 15: 1-32

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I'm beginning to reach the stage now where I wish I could forget the images we've all seen this week. You know the ones I mean: the plane, the fireball, the people jumping to their death, the buildings collapsing. Not only do the TV networks run those loops over and over again, but so does my mind's eye. They cannot be forgotten. Indeed all of us - even now the very young - carry with us a mental file of images that have been burned into our consciousness. For me this week's events jarred open that file that contains the Challenger disaster, the assassinations of 1968 and '63, the riots in our streets in the '60s, and the violence of Southeast Asia. It is not hard to understand why someone once remarked that memory is the most terrible of human faculties.

How many people have remarked in these aftermath days, "I just want to do something. What can I do?" Thousands on our campuses gather to pray, yet it seems not enough. So we donate blood, contribute to relief efforts, link hands with friends, family, or community to find some measure of strength and comfort. And still it seems too little.

Memory does indeed carry with it responsibility. It must move us to action - it cries out that we "do something." But, my friends, I submit to you that how we now rise to meet this responsibility will make all the difference in the world. The choices we make in these dangerous days, with our hearts awash in grief and anger and fear, could have far-reaching consequences.

Two roads open before us now. One, the clearer and more well-traveled of the two, is marked "the Descent into Hell." Here reason, love, compassion and virtue itself are cast off. Anger ripens into hate. Our speech and soon our actions become filled with retribution, revenge, retaliation, violence. And soon our TV screens and our mental screens will be filled with still more images like those of Tuesday.

A second road beckons to us, but it is shrouded in mist, and its exact destination is unmarked. It is the one we will take if we are determined not to become that which most frightens us.

Remember we must. But where the first road harbors only a distorted, selective memory of the hurt inflicted, the second road insists that we remember all of it: the killed, the wounded, the grieving, the offense, the offenders, the rescuers, the courageous, the people of New York and the people of the Middle East, the Jew, the Muslim, the Christian - and the God who is pleased to dwell in them, the God who watched the events of Sept. 11 unfold with us. We gather at the Table of Remembrance, with Our Lady of Sorrows, at the foot of the Cross, that horrible tragedy that stands at the very center of our faith. And we must remember it all, and remember it well.

These are days of looking: sifting the wreckage for survivors, sorting records for evidence, combing those awful pictures for comprehension. And the gospel today tells us that God is looking too. Like an attentive mother, aware of our tiniest loss, God lights a lamp and sweeps the house in search of the missing. God remembers. Like a patient father, in spite of being terribly spurned by his offspring, God waits, scanning the horizon for any sign of his child's return. This father grieves too, but chooses to remember all of it anyway. He cannot forget his own. He holds fast to his love for his son, believing that at any moment the boy might indeed "come to his senses." God remembers.

We must remember today that God is looking for us, searching for us amid the rubble of the world as we knew it, upon the piled-up mountains of pain and sadness, within the dark or fiery recesses of rage in which we are trapped. God remembers, and so God is looking for us, longing to clasp us in an embrace of compassion.

But we must remember something else: God is looking for our enemies too. To bring them to justice? Yes, but much, much more: to bring them home also. God never forgets God's own. God remembers a world free of that injustice which maims hearts and curdles lives into sour hostility. And as God suffers with us, God is also actively conducting a rescue effort, unseen, to restore all of us to health.