This extract is taken by permission from 'Writing in the Dust' by Rowan Williams. Click the book cover above to order your copy. Each book you order by clicking here raises money for Christian Aid projects.

Reflection on September 11th, 2001

by Archbishop Rowan Williams

Last words. We have had the chance to read the messages sent by passengers on the planes to their spouses and families in the desperate last minutes; and we have seen the spiritual advice apparently given to the terrorists by one of their number, the thoughts that should have been in their minds as they approached the death they had chosen (for themselves and for others). Something of the chill of 11 September 2001 lies in the contrast.

The religious words are, in the cold light of day, the words that murderers are saying to themselves to make a martyr's drama out of a crime. The non-religious words are testimony to what religious language is supposed to be about – the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged.

It should give us pause, especially if we think we are religious. You don't have to be Richard Dawkins to notice that there is a problem.

On the morning of 11 September 2001, I was getting ready to spend a day talking religious language with a group of clergy and spiritual directors. I am still thinking about what it meant to be interrupted like that; and to be presented with the record of a solemn and rich exhortation cast in evocative spiritual terms designed to make it easier for some people to kill others.

We'd better acknowledge the sheer danger of religiousness. Yes, it can be a tool to reinforce diseased perceptions of reality. Muslim or not, it can be a way of teaching ourselves not to see the particular human agony in front of us; or worse, of teaching ourselves not to see ourselves, our violence, our actual guilt as opposed to our abstract 'religious' sinfulness. Our religious talking, seeing, knowing, needs a kind of cleansing.

Someone who is about to die in terrible anguish makes room in their mind for someone else; for the grief and terror of someone they love. They do what they can to take some atom of that pain away from the other by the inarticulate message on the mobile. That moment of 'making room' is what I as a religious person have to notice. It isn't 'pious', it isn't language about God; it's simply language that brings into the world something other than self-defensiveness. It's a breathing space in the asthmatic climate of self-concern and competition; a breathing space that religious language doesn't often manage to create by or for itself.

God always has to be rediscovered. Which means God always has to be heard or seen where there aren't yet words for him. Saying something for the sake of another in the presence of death must be one place of rediscovery. Mustn't it?

Careful. You can do this too quickly. It can sound as though you're gratefully borrowing someone else's terrible experience to make another pious point. And after all, not everyone dies with words of love. There will have been cursing and hysteria and frantic, deluded efforts to be safe at all costs when people knew what was going on in those planes. And would anyone want their private words of love butchered to make a sermon?

It proves nothing. But all I can say is that for someone who does believe, or tries to, the 'breathing space' is something that allows the words of religious faith for a moment not to be as formal or flat or self-serving as they usually are.

Breathing. A bit paradoxical to talk about that. When we finally escaped from our building, it was quite hard to breathe normally in the street: dense fumes; thick, thick dust; a sort of sandstorm or snowstorm of dust and debris; large flakes of soft grey burned stuff falling steadily. In the empty street, cars with windows blown in, a few dazed people, everything covered in this grey snow.

It can't have been silent. There must have been (I know there were) shouts, sirens; a few minutes later, there was the indescribable long roar of the second tower collapsing. But I remember it as quiet; the very few words spoken to each other, the ghostliness of it all; surreal associations with Robert Frost's lovely poem, 'Stopping by woods on a snowy evening' ('The only other sound's the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake'). Or a 'heart of the storm' feeling.

In that time, there is no possibility of thinking, of explanations, of resolutions. I can't remember much sense of panic, much feeling about the agony going on a couple of hundred yards away, let alone much desire for justice or vengeance. It was an empty space. I don't want to forget that, as feeling returns in various ways. We don't fully know what goes on when, in the middle of terror or pain, this emptiness and anaesthesia set in (it happens in plenty of contexts). But somehow the emptiness 'resources' us. Not to run too fast to explore the feelings and recover the words seems important.

Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void. The more closely we bind God to our own purposes, use God to help ourselves avoid our own destructiveness, the more we fill up the void.

It becomes very important to know how to use the language of belief; which is why the terrible simplicity of those last messages matters so intensely. And why also we have to tread so carefully in not making some sort of religious capital out of them. Ultimately, the importance of these 'secular' words has to stand as a challenge to anything comfortingly religious that we might be tempted to say. This is what human beings can find to say in the face of death, religion or no religion. This is what truly makes breathing space for others.