I am hiking in the Cascade wilderness of central Oregon. The sun just rose over peaks that surpass 10,000 feet. These peaks are my goal today.

There are few sounds in the chilled air, but overhead I hear a jet. Normally, I would consider the sound annoyingly intrusive in the wilderness, but today, ten days after September 11, it is a reminder of society's return to a kind of normality.

Last night, I began teaching my death and dying course. My students are angry and bewildered as they talk about the mass deaths inflicted on the innocent by terrorists. How did this happen, and why? Why is America so hated by others? How do these events fit with a just, wise, and loving God?

I tell my students that I think the "blaming the victim" views, expressed by some in the conservative right and the liberal left, are both mistaken and callous. God does not use commercial jetliners as human missiles against buildings to punish America for its descent into atheism and immorality, as Falwell contended. Nor were the attacks something we deserved because of a sometimes oppressive foreign policy, the refrain of many academic colleagues.

Lincoln delivered the greatest eulogy in a little over two minutes; why do we need 24/7 analysis to tell us the significance of these events? As I hike, I am glad to leave behind such rationalizing voices, to hear only the chirping of birds and my labored breathing.

Music plays in my mind, a customary mental companion. But this hike, the music is different. It is not U2 or Sting, but "America the Beautiful" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I was deeply moved when they were sung on the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance less than a week ago. As cameras panned across the audience, I could see the veterans, the members of "the greatest generation," who confronted the challenge of preserving freedom, even at the cost of life. My generation took this legacy as a given and thereby evaded the challenge and the responsibility. On September 11, the challenge was passed to the Generation Xers and the Millennials, to my students and my children.

At a stream crossing, I rest. The stream begins in the glaciers high up the mountain. It splashes down through the rocky slopes, strewn with lava, gurgles through alpine meadows, flows through forests, bringing nourishment and life. Our civic life needs something right now that is equally renewing and sustaining. As I sit by the stream, I decide there is something I can do to witness to empowerment and against paralysis. I can contribute to the stream of knowledge so that my students will be better prepared for the challenge of citizenship they now confront. I have expertise in comparative religions, in ethics, in just war and revolutionary war. I will volunteer my expertise to the university's students and offer a class on these topics, not for any money or even out of the goodness of my heart, but rather out of the anguish of my soul. Though altruistic, this is hardly heroic, but the true heroes I've seen and read about in the past week have inspired me. I think they have their place among those "heroes proved in liberating strife," as the song goes.

My progress up the glacier, the largest in Oregon, is slow and gradual. I am bathed in sunshine and awash in stunning color—the stark white glacier, the deep blue sky above, and enormous dark rust volcanic cliffs to either side. A song of praise to God streams into my mind, "How Great Thou Art." Yet, I cannot help but think about the immensity of the evil so recently witnessed. We may turn to God for consolation, inspiration, hope, even justice, but the question of theodicy remains.

With no answers from the gods, a bleak despair opens before us. Yet people give of many things, but most symbolically of their blood. Blood has been shed in this evil; now blood is donated so that others live. Blood witnesses that we are not helpless in the face of oppressive evil, but in fact united in community and human solidarity. At home, common services are held where Buddhist, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Orthodox, Protestant, and others join together, witnessing to human goodness in their prayers for peace, justice, and healing.

My students say they know virtually nothing about other religious traditions, and stereotypes about Islam are especially embedded. Why is this? We have traditions of tolerance for other faiths, philosophically defended by a Locke or politically enacted by a Jefferson. We accommodate difference, but we seldom focus on what is common or come to understand what is behind the differences. I think this kind of religious parochialism leads very quickly to misperceptions of the "other," and even dehumanization or demonization when the other is "enemy." By meeting together, the faith communities humanize and personalize the stranger; in sharing our blood we share ourselves, symbolizing that what unites can overcome what divides.

Though the glacier is the source of several different streams below, I discover that at its origin, it is unified, pristine, with no crevasses—an ocean of white against the blue sky. Different streams, one source, a metaphor if we are teachable.

Finally . . . the summit. The popular nickname for this mountain, two vertical miles above sea level, is "Hope." The surrounding peaks are "Faith" and "Charity." Having witnessed the fires of evil, I cannot think of a quality I need more than hope. Hope in contrast to despair, hope in contrast to the pervasive cynicism of academia.

At the summit, my only companions are a crow perched precariously on a ledge overlooking the glacier and a flittering butterfly. All my struggle and exertion, preparation and courage, culminates in a breathtaking panorama of the world anew. This vista, for hundreds of miles every direction, stirs hope.

I climb not simply because the mountain "is there," but to see. The minutiae of the mundane induce a myopia that is challenged, corrected, and refocused by this expanded vision. Therein, for me, lies the connection of the existential and the ethical.

A colleague last week penned a poignant op-ed piece, "An Ode to Evil." But I think our moral vision must be trained to see only evil. I recall that William James wrote that violence is sustained by a failure of human imagination, aesthetically and morally. Cultivating hope for humanity requires a tutoring in moral vision. Expanding our vision, especially in a world so broken, requires recovery of the vocation of healing. What is broken must not be fixed, but healed, made whole.

A holistic medicine invites new ways of seeing persons. No amount of analytic, rational argumentation will persuade that many people to donate that much blood. Symbols and emotions move people, save lives, and provide a healing presence in the midst of evil. It is a witness of hope in a future.

On the summit of Hope, I find myself in awe of gifts: a body that can be trained to climb, sight and vision, feeling even the cool breeze that chills the sweat on my back. On this windswept volcanic peak—my body hearing, feeling, seeing—I know I am alive, that my self is more than my mind. And I am in awe of the gifts I have seen offered strangers: blood, financial donations, empathy, relationship—even life, what Lincoln called the "full measure of devotion." The answers to our prayers are incarnated in these acts of devoted giving. This is my ode to Hope, that beneath the discriminatory divisions we construct, there are moral bonds that unite and sustain. And I must begin my descent to enact my commitments.