September 11, 2001

• Dealing with 9/11

• Understanding and loving the hand that strikes

[Note: This message was received on the evening of the tragic hijacking of four commercial airplanes and subsequent crashes into the World Trade Center Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a field in Pennsylvania.]

God speaks to each of you through the rubble, both physical and emotional. What happened today seems to be an isolated event, but it is the culmination of so much of what has preceded it. In the days, weeks, months and years that follow there will be a greater awareness of the cost of selfishness, greed, and anger in all of its manifestations.

You all want to help, each of you wants to make a difference. One of the most powerful forces available to you individually and collectively is the ability to promote compassion, understanding, patience, and a love of humanity that permits an open exchange of concerns and fears, as well as what gives great joy. There is no one who is really served by devoting effort to the placement of corporate blame. Some wish to place immediate blame on Arabs, Arab nations, Arab leaders. Others rush to blame the United States. There is indeed enough blame to go around involving everyone. Irrationality thrives through a lack of understanding, and it is the irrational that leads ultimately to extremism.

There is no society, no government that has a monopoly on being right, just as there is no individual who has a monopoly on wisdom. Achieving wisdom implies the necessity of inquiry. Being right is not a matter of insistence, but rather the exercise of inquiry. If you seek to be right, you must first ask questions. You must first learn the context out of which a sense of right and wrong may grow. Without context, being right or being wrong has little meaning. There will be much soul-searching to follow today and questions will be asked, but you will also hear many statements that assert rightness and wrongness with anything but a complete understanding of context.

Where is God in all of this? God is in your response, your response that invites, welcomes and promotes inquiry, inquiry that leads to mutual understanding. You are indeed all children, spiritual family members in the family of God. You all have brightness in you, that being your spiritual self. You also have, each of you, a negative side, wrongness that is not your spiritual side, but that is part of what distinguishes human from spiritual life. None of you are completely right just as none of you are completely wrong.

As you look back upon momentous historical events, you learn over time to uncover the roots out of which those events took place, and you begin to understand that all parties have a connection to each of those roots. Historians of the future will ultimately contribute to an understanding of what brought this massive destruction to your shores. It is for you to help foster an attitude of openness that must exist alongside what must seem like a prevailing negative approach of drawing borders, of drawing lines that separate. It is the separateness that must ultimately be abolished, but it is the separateness that will first be acknowledged. This phenomenon is no different in principle from events that take place between racial groups in your country. When there are clashes, the first response is to emphasize the differences, the separateness of the two sides. Such an acknowledgment only serves to perpetuate the difficulties that brought about the clash. It is in the understanding of the other point of view that one learns to break down those barriers that create the separation. And so it is with the events of this day. Perhaps they will contribute to bringing perspectives together for further understanding.

Yes, these activities, these events, the feelings that they arouse are painful, fostering anger as well as sympathy. Still, God’s presence is given voice through your attitudes and the attitudes that you encourage others to accept…positive attitudes. You are asked to love the hand that strikes. You are asked to understand the person who hates you. You are not asked to just let bygones be bygones. It is nothing so lightly presented as that. The understanding that you can encourage to take place is difficult, painful and will take much time, as you measure it, to be achieved. But it is the only means of resolving the tensions, the issues that brought the events to the present.

The tragedy of today is not merely the suffering that has been endured, but of equal importance it is the proliferation of attitudes that led to this event. And it is with the remolding of attitudes that each of you can be the most helpful. You are taught to love all human beings and you can acknowledge the importance of that, but you are being taken to the limits of that acknowledgment when you face the crisis that has been seen today.

You will hear many comments in the future stating what must be done. The majority of those remarks will be divisive. They will represent the separateness of which we speak, and many will hear those divisive remarks and say “yes, that’s correct.” There is nothing positive that can be drawn from that perspective. It is not a reflection of God. God’s presence is indeed constant, but it is you, all human beings, who transfer the presence into action.

Your prayers must be for your own collective strength and commitment to mutual understanding. Peace and dignity are the result of such understanding. This peace, this dignity does not require agreement, for you can still disagree with that which you understand, but that disagreement is no longer cloaked in hateful words or actions. When you disagree with someone and yet love them as human beings, you cannot inflict pain upon another. It is only when you disagree and have no understanding that such pain can be sent outward. Understanding is the key.

It is important especially in the near future that you promote an openness to understand—to understand another’s point of view, to seek to understand why individuals may feel such antagonism towards the institutions that were attacked. Your understanding will grow. You are not expected to defend those actions, but rather to gain an understanding of perspective, that’s all. The difficulty of that charge is enormous, for society tends to want to see things as black and white, bad and good, wrong and right. Being able to see the middle ground, the common ground, is the only way of achieving a greater level of peace and security.

For many in the United States, it was the end of a false sense of invincibility and absolute security. At this moment the United States as a people has entered upon the world stage. It is no longer “everyone else” and then the United States. It has become “We” with a capital W. Society will begin to increase its understanding of what it means to be members of the world community, and there is no place for psychological or ideological isolation. You are a part of a world community. You are a responsible component of that world community. You are equally vulnerable as the rest of the world is to the various philosophies of the world community, and therefore you must contribute to the sense of world community.

The future of peace is bright. Individually, nationally, you have been brought to an abyss and are horrified by what you see. Ultimately, this tragedy will lead to greater peace. It could have been yet more devastating. Your lives have been touched by today’s events, but it is our hope that they will be moved by these events, moved in directions that promote the positive, not creating a further abyss.

God’s design for humankind has not been derailed. It has been a difficult journey today, and there will be other difficult journeys in the voyage of humankind as it ultimately becomes reunited with the Godhead. But the direction of humans becoming more godly has not been halted, and although you reel from the shock of today’s events, you must be confident that God’s will shall be done, that God’s peace shall be attained. That goal will be reached through the efforts of human beings. Nothing can stop that goal. It will be obtained, the goal will be achieved, there will be a sense of peace, there will be a sense of shared responsibility worldwide. It will happen for that is the direction of God’s presence, that is what is positive. Take these tragic events and let them form a basis for your commitment to promoting all that is godly.

We are fully aware of the souls who have joined us at this time. They are in comfort. The transition was quick. But they also grieve, not for their loss, but for the loss experienced by those they love. It is our blessed duty to give them peace, to help them in their transition to a peaceful spiritual life, but it is also our desire to provide you with that great spiritual peace. God bestows that upon each of you and empowers you to disseminate that peace to all who are surrounding you.

You are blessed in God’s peace. Take it within you and be consumed by it. Rejoice!

Amen.