What comes to mind is a memorial service — a sunny Spring day, women and men dressed in white or bright colors. The priest wore a white cassock, a minister a white linen suit, a bearded rabbi covered his head with a white tallis. Hundreds gathered in the court-yard of a church, not inside the church but outside, under a beneficent sun. Little girls in stiff white dresses stood in ranks like a first communion choir close to the spiritual leaders and a small podium set up for speakers. The little girls held white flowers — white lilies. Much of this ceremony would be spent listening to them joyously singing.

This was not a funeral. This was a celebration for our dead whose bodies had never been found, even the certainty of whose deaths would never be known. After years of looking for them, interviewing witnesses, searching through archives, hunting down evidence, this is how our Barrio Norte neighborhood near San Miguel church in Buenos Aires finally sent off "the disappeared," as they were called, victims of state terrorism by the death squads of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina with such brutality from 1976-1983.

More than ten years later, this memorial service was our coming together for vanished lives, our neighborhood and community honoring of their memories in a ritual acceptance that they were certainly gone. One of my adopted brothers — Alvaro Colombo-Sierra — was listed among "the disappeared." The body of another brother — Alejandro Colombo-Sierra — had been found two years after he vanished, and we had been able to bury him. By my rough calculation, one out of every five of my friends had either been murdered or disappeared during Argentina's "dirty war" of state-sponsored terrorism. In this ceremony in part for Alvaro's memory, and for all the rest of the victims, my family and I hoped for rebirth and renewal, fashioned somehow from absence. We sought a sense of closure, and finally to pass through grief toward serenity.

Such serenity didn't last. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed that September 11 — like two black dying blooms against the Manhattan skyline — the sudden shock and grief I felt at the loss of so many thousands of lives by terrorism, and more, the siren-like wailing inside that continues screaming still for such an unsettling of our tranquility, the cross of peace burning again, I was thrown straight back into the years of rage I had suffered at the unresolved murders of my "disappeared" brothers in Argentina, then again at the terrible events of the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, in 1988, by a terrorist bomb, when students I knew and loved, two of them very closely — Christopher Jones and Nicole Boulanger, whose body was never found — went down in flames among the 35 victims on that plane from Syracuse University, where I was teaching. At the time, I was chosen as a designated memorialist for the university, and I've been writing memorials, despite my rage, for the dead from terrorism ever since.

After the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in the United States, once again, I found myself in benumbed, dumbstruck, grieving circles of families. I think everyone in this nation exchanged squeezes, hugs, hand-holding, tears among neighbors and co-workers, gestures meant to comfort each other in the face of the immense and incomprehensible question as to why, why, why.

We were once again afraid. How hard to conceive such a fall of so many lives, so many loved ones, could ever become a pretext for further existence, ever somehow be transformed by our human powers and prayers into an ultimate birth. All this combines now into the same pain. All now — as the death tolls rise daily in the Middle East, in the Far East, in Africa, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in all the new "anti-terrorist" wars — every death by terrorism anywhere becomes a part of the same agonizing spinning of a monstrous cycle of cruelty and violence that threatens to overwhelm the spiritual possibilities of humanity.

All peoples on earth have been challenged now — and I would hope also as newly conscious citizens of one world — somehow to earn the miracle of putting an end to terrorism. Still, so many of us look to tried and failed responses of the past, that the solution to crime is punishment, that the salve to righteous anger is revenge, that further violence of armed reprisals — cruise missiles, air strikes, soldiers, bombs, demolitions, secret assassination squads, all out war — is the only eye-for-an-eye response to terrorism which will ever work. So our society continues to seek answers in the new technologies of war and surveillance, to increasing empowerment of police and intelligence agencies and to ever more restrictive anti-conspiracy, press secrecy and illicit association laws, all of which carry further threats to our freedom. This is our response, the reaction to terrorism on all sides — war and revenge, righteous punishment, threats from world leaders, when, surely, what we should be tirelessly seeking is some fundamental change for the cause of peace.

Mankind has achieved many transformations of the soul throughout history. Our ancestors practiced ritual human sacrifice, incest was habitual, slavery almost everywhere. These barbaric acts are now universally condemned, not only the result of advances in economies and technology and of increasing political enlightenment among nations, no — it is because we have evolved in our humanity, made huge conceptual leaps in our consciousness as human beings and in the power of our spiritual condition.

Terrorism is a tactic of desperation directed against what is perceived to be an inflexible, powerful authority, without appeal to law or any existing social contract, in the perceived absence of any forum for expressing real grievances with a voice that will be heard. Terrorism is a form of violence of last resort, born of rage and frustration, arising from the conviction that there is no other choice. The current crime and punishment response to fight terrorism can only lead — as it almost always has in modern history — to a further spiraling of violence and more terror, which is precisely the reaction terrorists wish to achieve. As should be clear to anyone aware of rumblings in the streets throughout the Muslim world, or to anyone who has studied Bolshevik and Bakunin tactics at the turn of the 20th Century in Russia, or Fidelista actions in Cuba, or the upheaval and murder of the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s, or the bombings and surprise attacks that killed many hundreds of innocent civilians in the bloodshed of the founding of the state of Israel in the late 1940s — as anyone who studies the history of terrorism soon understands — terrorism can also grow into revolution, can become the violent founding of new nations.

The worn-out adage that civilized nations should not negotiate with terrorists is wrong. In the history of terrorist movements, short of revolution or civil war, negotiations have almost always been needed to mark their end. And it is generally the most powerful in these confrontations who must become more self-aware and finally yield and give to the most harmed, even if only symbolically, or in political repositioning toward dialogue and compromise. It is in the hands of the powerful to provide opportunities for change, not so much in punishment as with wise and cautious generosity. At the very least, the powerful must learn how to listen.

Could it be true, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, that by living inside human beings even God learns? This question is frightening, granting as it does so much power to the will of each man and woman, perhaps even the level of will it must have taken to steer a jetliner into a skyscraper and murder thousands of innocent people. But consider in the Judeo-Christian tradition how God may really have learned mercy from Abraham, patience and tolerance from the followers of Moses, forgiveness from the life, death and resurrection of Christ. So it must be also in those gentler passages of the Holy Koran which teach com-passion to enemies hand-in-hand with the rewards of devotion and peace — the cool green gardens of paradise with their flowing waters.

The Dalai Lama of Tibet awakens each morning with a prayer to rid himself of anger and resentment so he can be a more positive influence on the world. Arvil Looking Horse, 19th generation carrier of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe of the Lakota, a people once murdered and terrorized nearly out of existence, travels all over the globe to wherever there is a crisis. He has even performed pipe ceremonies in Iran and Iraq, praying for healing and peace in his ancient and holy language. What will it take for the enraged and aggrieved of all factions and faiths one day to pass this pipe, or to join together to break bread at the same tables?

Let us gather together dressed in white or bright colors — all peoples of the world — as emblem of our rebirth and renewal, as testimony of our hopes, in memory and honor of our dead and in the knowledge that we are providing their deaths a new and lasting meaning within the significant markers of civilization. Let us remind ourselves that death is a horizon, and a horizon is only a limit to what we can see. And so let everyone hear our singing: Let us learn to love ourselves second only to our gentleness. Let us share in the blessing of our gentleness. Let us vow never to stop fighting this prison of terrorism, never, until each woman and man is free, until every man and woman is in the custody of gentleness.