A good picture

By Elizabeth Richards

"I want a good picture of the towers, Mommy, not a bad picture."

This is what my eight-year-old daughter Dilly asked for the night of September 11. She didn't ask me to explain the attack, to tell her why people would plan and carry out such a terrible thing against other people, to assure her that she was safe. She simply wanted an image of the World Trade Center intact, the New York skyline the same, our world unaltered.

I promised her I'd go in search of a postcard the next day on my lunch hour.

Of course, all of us in this city—this country, this world—wish we could blink September 11 away, replace the images of destruction with the good picture my daughter was talking about.

This is not unlike wishing for a good picture of a person with whom we may find ourselves in conflict, or a good picture of a group of people who, for reasons we don't understand, have decided that destruction is the means to an end they deem "holy."

In the following days, that good picture has been scrambled by invasive signals, interruptions we must strive very hard to keep from altering our vision of a world in which good reigns. We must block the channels delivering repetitive warnings and threatening imagery that suggest we live in a changed-forever, scary place. These should not tempt us away from good news, or "gospel."

I went to several stores in search of the postcard my daughter wanted, only to find that there weren't any left. This fact offered another opportunity for bringing the good picture back into focus: I would have to do it in words. I told Dilly that so many people had the notion of getting a "good picture" of the WTC that all the pictures had been bought. I told her I thought it was a hopeful sign that everyone preferred the good picture to the bad one. I said we could just as easily draw a good picture of the towers if that was the one we kept in our minds.

Through all of this, I must admit I have been scared from time to time. I've even lamented my lot as a single parent in the chaos, losing my way to fear, thinking that processing the changing world might be easier if I still had a husband with whom to share my worry and outrage.

Then I thought about God, the quintessential "single parent," comforting those who have suddenly become single parents and those who, like myself, need His/Her help to be reminded of the good picture.

"The perfect and immortal are the eternal likeness of their Maker," Mary Baker Eddy said in Science and Health (p. 246).

With such a reminder, we can all become the architects of good.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

Grief and mourning overcome

October 22, 2001

Contents

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit