On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams, recently elected Archbishop of Canterbury and former Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, was preparing to tape a program on issues of spirituality at Trinity Church, Wall Street, two blocks from the place where the Twin Towers stood. At 8:45 a.m. the taping was interrupted. Like countless thousands, Williams and the people at Trinity found themselves caught up in events the full meaning and magni-tude of which remain elusive to this day.

Writing in the Dust: After September 11 is a remarkable, though deceptively small, volume that Williams wrote in the weeks and months following September 11. Eluding easy cate-gorization, it is neither a text of academic theology nor a memoir of the moment. It is rather a series of brief reflections that attempt "to draw out how faith might begin to think and feel its way through the nightmare." The question that fuels this meditation, for want of a better word, is this: Post 9/11, what are we prepared to learn? Regardless of our politics or the outcomes of military operations, regardless of our assess-ment of the wisdom or effectiveness of our government's programs or policies, regardless of our religious sensibilities or commitments, a single task lies before us -- as individuals, as faith communities, as a nation: What are we prepared to learn from the events of September 11? Can anything "grow through this terrible moment?"

Sandwiched in between a Prologue and an Epilogue, Writing in the Dust engages five areas of reflection. "Last Words" is an exploration of the limits and power, the use and abuse of reli-gious language; "Answering Back" is a meditation on "responsible" emotions; "The End of War" ponders the phe-nomenon of terrorism; "Global Neighborhood" is a careful consideration of the effects of globalization; and "Against Symbols" examines the dehumanizing potential and effects of turning living realities into symbols.

This stunning and haunting text deserves careful and con-sidered study. Yet a sense of what Williams is about in this quiet gem can be concisely illustrated by looking a bit more closely at a portion of his second chapter, "Answering Back."

Williams posits that an act of violence is a form of communica-tion. In a single act, someone is both telling me something and placing before me a decision. A single act of force discloses and conceals something fundamental about the character of both the perpetrator and the victim. But what is disclosed, what concealed? Answers do not come easy and they do not come fast. Only the long, arduous work of careful elucidation can yield genuine insight. First, what exactly is being com-municated by a violent act: courage, cowardice, envy, contempt, hope, fear? Like all human communication, the meaning of an act of violence is not self-evident. It must be interpreted. Struggling with the what of a violent act matters mightily because what I learn from that struggle will inform both how I choose to respond and what I choose to say by that response.

Secondly, as a form of communication, an act of violence requires me to make a decision. Having been "spoken to," do I respond? And if so, when? How? If I choose not to respond, what does my silence communicate? In what language am I going to respond? If I choose to respond in the same lan-guage, the language of violence, I have allowed the other to dictate and determine the means of communication. My response-in-kind is likely to solidify the manner in which the "conversation" will continue.

But what, Williams asks, if we pause before we respond? What if, in that space we choose to create between an act of violence and our response, what if we ask ourselves: Is this the language in which I want to continue this conversation? Is this the language in which I am best conversant? Is this the language that will likely yield the most fruitful, the most constructive outcome? What would happen, Williams wonders, if we thought of violence as a "foreign" language, one in which we were either ill-equipped to converse, or one in which the conversation would soon go beyond our understanding, our capabilities, or our desire for a constructive outcome? Can we find an action, a means of communication that changes the terms of the relations so that our response might break the awful spiral of violence rather than escalate it?

For many, in the early aftermath of 9/11, once the initial numbness had worn away, the primary emotions were anger and outrage, a passion to strike back. In this first moment, one can recognize the language of Psalm 137: Let their children die a horrible death; let them know humiliation. While acknowledging this as an honest moment, Williams asks: Is this the moment in which we must forever live: anger, outrage, a desire to inflict pain beyond even that inflicted upon us? Or ought this first moment be acknowledged but then replaced by another, more constructive one? Have we no resources to assist us through these first emotions and move us to consider a broader range of responses? "The point at which we need to show more footage of collapsing towers or people jumping to their death, when we raise the temperature by injunctions never to forget -- that is when something rather ambiguous enters in. We are trying to manipulate and direct the chaotic emotions of victims. There may be something like a dreadful innocence about the first surge of anger; there is no inno-cence about the deployment of images to try and revive it."

You can see, I hope, something of the way in which Williams goes about his work. Let me offer a word about how the book's title functions. One of Williams' recurring themes throughout Writing in the Dust is that we have the resources not to be at the whim of our first passions, our initial emotions. Acts of violence require us instead to be thoughtful and considered, lest we become uncritical victims, this time by our own hand, of our own unruly passions. To this end, Williams offers two images that function as leitmotifs for his reflections. The first is that of the great sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks for festivals, made to be broken up. Paradoxically, these extraordinarily intricate works celebrate the beauty that our combined creativity can generate and acknowledge the inescapable transience of every human creation. Of Writing in the Dust Williams writes: "This isn't theology or a programme for action, but one person's attempt to find words for the grief and shock and loss of one moment. In the nature of things, these words won't last, and I need to acknowledge and accept that."

Williams' second image comes from the story, preserved only in the Gospel of John, of the woman taken in adultery. When the accusation is made, and the punishment of stoning noted, Jesus is asked, "Now what do you say?" Jesus makes no reply, but bends down and writes with his finger on the ground. Williams writes: "What on earth is [Jesus] doing? Commenta-tors have had plenty of suggestions, but there is one meaning that seems to me obvious in the light of what I think we learned that morning. He hesitates. He does not draw a line, fix an interpretation, tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be. He allows a moment, a longish moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently pre-cisely because he refuses to make the sense they want ... So this is writing in the dust because it tries to hold that moment for a little longer, long enough for some of our demons to walk away."

I encourage you to sit with this remarkable book. Read it through again and again. Live with the questions it raises, the insights it offers, the challenges it poses. This is not an easy read, but it is one to be savored and treasured. If you prize courage over feel-good comfort, if you prize wisdom over cheap and easy answers, Writing in the Dust is for you.