Moment of catharsis and death

I was listening President Baraka Obama telling us about the death of Osama Bin Laden. Soon I to different voices on my television - whooping, cheering, bellowing voices from the streets outside the White House, from Ground Zero and from a baseball game in Philadelphia. All across the country and indeed around the world people danced in the streets and cheered the news.

Many of my fellow clergy denounced the celebrations of a man’s death just as we all denounced the death of over three thousand people ten years ago. I would agree that it is wrong to celebrate anyone’s death. But I think that these celebrations are different than celebrating a death.

These celebrations are much more than that it is a moment of catharsis and a release of a decade of pent up anger and frustrations that the one who led the attacks on 9/11 had eluded capture and still planed new attacks. Osama Bin Laden was a continuing menace to the world and America in particular. He was the driving force behind the terror and we have had him on the top of the ten most wanted list for almost ten years.

The jubilant celebrations were a spontaneous release of joy that the hunt for this killer was over. It is the same kind of catharsis that greeted the end of World War Two.  This catharsis is something we all needed.