On the Square Today

In her latest On the Square column , Elizabeth Scalia wonder if our nation is holding to tightly to 9/11 grief:

As I watched the 9/11 Memorial Service at Ground Zero, I couldn’t help wondering—a decade after that unprecedented attack—are we holding too closely to our grief, allowing ourselves to entertain it beyond a point that is healthy—and in danger of falling in love with the dark? This is asked with all due respect. I have no wish to in any way trivialize the pain and loss so many people live with each day; the scope and scale of the 9/11 attacks were something wholly new in our experience, and the hours-long naming of the murdered is a dramatic illustration of just how many people we lost on that day. If the emotions ran high in noting the passage of a decade’s worth of grief, perhaps that is because, before this past Sunday, so many of these families had no grave to visit beyond this new garden at Ground Zero, which is very much a kind of cemetery.

Also today, Matthew Lickona interviews Gavin O’Connor, director of the new film, Warrior :

ML: In a lot of movies, God is either not a factor at all, or else He becomes sort of a central figure. Here, you have the opposite of both in a way. Tommy hates God, but he hates Him for not being there. He wishes there was a God, but he can’t believe, not after watching his mother die while she begged Jesus to save her. And not after his own father offered such a sad representation of what a loving father is supposed to be.

GO: True. Tommy was a believer. But after losing his mother and then going to war and seeing some horrific things, he’s become, in essence, Godless. I even have his father say that to him—during the scene in the hotel room, Paddy calls Tommy Ahab, and he calls him Godless. The whole MMA fight between Brendan and Tommy and the end of the movie is really spiritual warfare—it’s fighting for Tommy’s soul. In a metaphorical way, Tommy needs to die at the hands of his brother so that he can be reborn again, become a believer again. I never wanted to preach, but there’s a spirituality, a religious kind of a thing, bubbling under the surface of the film.