maintaining love in a war environmentby james redfield, author of "the celestine prophecy"
For spiritual people, one question seems to be most urgent: can we support a war in which our aim is to kill an enemy, especially if some innocent people are harmed in the process? Phrased another way: Are some wars worth fighting?
Such questions are at the heart of establishing a spiritual culture on this planet. If we believe that our destiny is to create a world where people express the higher attributes of democracy, religious tolerance, a more ongoing connection with the Divine source within us, and a more accurate vision of each of us finding a specific, spiritually-directed mission which manifests a world operating at a more enlightened level of inspiration and love, how do we reconcile war? Many religious leaders of the past recommended a totally pacifist attitude. "If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other also."
Yet some wars seem to be justified. Would any of us have called off World War II and allowed a collapse of democracy and the systematic genocide of some peoples? What about the intervention in Bosnia and the interruption of the atrocities there?
My personal attitude is this. At its current level of spiritual evolution, those still motivated by hatred and fear are threats not only to the status quo, but also to the world's continued evolution, and so they have to be stopped. Is part of the process coming to grips with our collective role in the cause of the conflict? Of course. The current outbreak of fundamentalism and religious hatred, although not true Islamic belief, is none-the-less the result of centuries of European imperialism, where some Western nations conquered undeveloped countries and made them protectorates, especially in Asia and the Middle East, leaving the native populations without national autonomy for many years.
Most of the offending countries that engaged in such imperialism have since apologized and most of the victimized countries have since gained autonomy. The rub has been Jerusalem, where both Arab and Jews lived. England, trying to get out of the region after World War II, with the help of the UN, divided the city into Palestinian and Jewish territories, creating Israel. Yet the Arabs immediately attacked Israel and attempted to destroy the new nation, prompting the Israelis to attack back and expand their territory to make it defendable. After that it has been tit-for-tat ever since, with the Palestinians still feeling dispossessed, but refusing to give up their threat to Israel.
Is peace possible here? Without doubt. But it will take both sides giving to the middle, and ending the bloodshed long enough to talk. Would this peace necessarily end terrorism? I don't think so, because the terrorist self-identity is self-perpetuating. Bin Laden, for example, has not even mentioned the Middle East until recently. His terrorism is aimed at destroying his vision of the corrupting influence of the West, in other words, our movies, our economy, our free expression - especially for women, and to overthrow what he considers to be the puppet Moslem governments that we support. He wants a distorted and strict fundamentalist Islamic world and the destruction of all other religious and social structures.
Would he suddenly listen to reason? I don't think this is likely either. Those of us who have worked with entrenched identities (control dramas) know that they don't respond to reason, or argument. They only respond when a catharsis of love and security within is discovered. Facilitating this occurrence of catharsis, however, is definitely possible, through intensive prayer, by enough people, directed toward the person in question.
Regardless of our feelings about the rightness of War, I believe our responsibility is to maintain Love, stay in a consciousness of Love, and to refuse to go into hate or calls for retribution. Yes, we have to save the world from terrorism. To delay is to run the risk that a terrorist in the future will have even more destructive weapons at his disposal. But all of our actions must come from Love, even the act of war, and we must never forget the power of prayer.
*** editorial comments on the above article
I think Redfield is not as clear as he might be, but does come down on the side of the necessity of this war. His statement is directed to pacifists as well as others and to me says that even the act of this necessary war has to be accompanied by love and prayer for our enemies.
So he advocates action in both the material sense of war (military, political, investigative, intelligence, financial, etc.) and in the spiritual sense of prayer and love. This is not pacifism. It's also not payback, retribution or closure. To my mind it is positive action on all fronts, all aspects of our being, body, mind and spirit, to try to prevent further terrorist attacks on America and other countries.
Non-violence requires an opponent with a conscience or responsive to outside opinion. The Nazis would have simply eliminated Gandhi or Martin Luther King and their followers with glee. They were so separated from any feelings of empathy or ethics that only force could affect them. World War II was necessary and many innocent people died, were tortured or went through hell in the process. But, when it was over, the Marshall Plan was a healing act of love toward our former enemies that brought them prosperity and democracy. This healing love should be sent to our enemies in Afghanistan as well, to allow this war to be clearly an act of ethical necessity rather than retribution. We need to know this ourselves, for our own ethical health, whether they get the message now or not. World support for the conflict depends on this.
The article was forwarded to me by a friend who, like many of us, is trying to clarify her feelings about this very complex ethical matter. No matter what people may say publicly, many shades of opinion on this exist so we can't accept received opinion without questioning it.Ted Knerr, 11/10/01
*** thich nhat hanh
FOR WARMTH
I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands,
to keep my loneliness warm
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me in anger.I wrote this poem during the vietnam war after I heard about the bombing of ben tre city. The city of 300,000 was destroyed because seven guerrillas shot several rounds of unsuccessful anti-aircraft gunfire and then left. My pain was profound.
In this moment, we invite our spiritual teachers, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and so many others, to be with us, to support us, so that we can hold in our arms the suffering of America as a nation, the suffering of humanity as a family, the suffering of the earth as a home for all of us. We need their energy so that we can become lucid and calm, so that we will know exactly what to do and what not to do, in order not to make the situation worse.
We know deep in our heart that responding to hatred and violence with hatred and violence, will only make hatred grow one thousand-fold. Only with compassion can we disintegrate hatred. This insight, this understanding should be with us in this very important moment. If we look and listen deeply we can see that when we pray for the victims, we must also pray for the attackers. They are also victims of confusion and violence. If as a nation, America wants to be safe and secure, it has to help other nations, other peoples, feel safe and secure.
I have the conviction that America possesses enough wisdom and courage to perform an act of forgiveness and compassion,1 and I know that such an act can bring great relief to America and to the world right away. I offer my heartfelt condolences, care and love for all who are suffering tremendously at this moment. I am aware that most of us have not been able to overcome the shock. Day and night I am deeply concerned with how to heal and transform this national and global tragedy. We know that there are those of us who are trying to help, to heal and to support. We are grateful to them. We know that there are many of us who are trying to see to it that violence will not happen again.
I and many others will fast from September 21st to the 30th in order to support all who have died and all who are suffering terribly in this moment and embrace them tenderly with compassion, understanding, and awareness. This is my prayer in action.thich nhat hanh
his address on the crisis at riverside church, nyc, 9/25/01
*** dear friends around the world, by the dalai lama
The events of this day cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them, and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and collective experience as we have created it - and we look earnestly for ways in which we might recreate ourselves anew as a human species, so that we will never treat each other this way again.
The hour has come for us to demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who We Really Are. There are two possible responses to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the second from fear. If we come from fear we may panic and do things - as individuals and as nations - that could only cause further damage. If we come from love we will find refuge and strength, even as we provide it to others.
This is the moment of your ministry. This is the time of teaching. What you teach at this time, through your every word and action right now, will remain as indelible lessons in the hearts and minds of those whose lives you touch, both now, and for years to come. We will set the course for tomorrow, today. At this hour. In this moment. Let us seek not to pinpoint blame, but to pinpoint cause. Unless we take this time to look at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of retribution from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and, likewise, seek retribution from them. To us the reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things.
The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, this and every moment. If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so, what then would be our response? Yet if we meet negativity with negativity, rage with rage, attack with attack, what then will be the outcome?
These are the questions that are placed before the human race today. They are questions that we have failed to answer for thousands of years. Failure to answer them now could eliminate the need to answer them at all. If we want the beauty of the world that we have co-created to be experienced by our children and our children's children, we will have to become spiritual activists right here, right now, and cause that to happen. We must choose to be at cause in the matter.
So, talk with God today. Ask God for help, for counsel and advice, for insight and for strength and for inner peace and for deep wisdom. Ask God on this day to show us how to show up in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change. And join all those people around the world who are praying right now, adding your Light to the Light that dispels all fear.
That is the challenge that is placed before every thinking person today. Today the human soul asks the question: What can I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world and to eliminate the anger and hatred-and the disparity that inevitably causes it - in that part of the world which I touch? Please seek to answer that question today, with all the magnificence that is You. What can you do TODAY ... this very moment? A central teaching in most spiritual traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for another.
Look to see, now, what it is you wish to experience - in your own life, and in the world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the source of that. If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause another to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another. Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love. -- My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
Dalai Lama*** compassion and revenge , by gary zukav
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are occasions of great significance. They are opportunities for you to feel inside, to find those parts of yourself that are in fear, and to make the decision to move forward in your life without fear. That is the challenge for each individual on this planet today. The pursuit of external power - the ability to manipulate and control - creates only violence and destruction. The painful events in New York and Washington are living examples of that reality. The causal chain that created this violence is one in which compassion and wisdom are absent.
Are wisdom and compassion present in you as you watch the television, and read the papers? It is important to realize that you do not know all that came to conclusion, or into karmic balance, as a result of these events. Because you are not able to know all that can be known about them, you are not in a position to judge them. When you are able to look at the events of the Earth School from this perspective, you will see clearly the central importance of the role that you play in it. That role is this: It is for you to decide what you will contribute to this world. Many will be asking your opinion of these events. Each question is an opportunity for you to contribute to the love that is in the world or to the fear that is in the world. This is the same opportunity that presents itself to you at each moment. If you hate those who hate, you become like them. You add to the violence and the destructive energy that now fills our world. As you make the decision to see with clarity and compassion, you will see that those who committed these acts of violence were in extreme pain themselves, and that they were fueled by the violent parts of ourselves - the parts that judge without mercy, strike in anger, and rejoice in the suffering of others. They were our proxy representatives. If you can look with compassion upon those who have suffered and those who have committed acts of cruelty alike, then you will see that all are suffering. The remedy for suffering is not to inflict more suffering. This is an opportunity for a massive expression of compassion. It is also an opportunity for a massive expression of revenge. Which world do you intend to live in -- a world of revenge or a world of compassion? Love, Gary* * * the deeper wound, by deepak chopra
As fate would have it, I was leaving New York on a jet flight that took off 45 minutes before the unthinkable happened. By the time we landed in Detroit, chaos had broken out. When I grasped the fact that American security had broken down so tragically, I couldn't respond at first. My wife and son were also in the air on separate flights, one to Los Angeles, one to San Diego. My body went absolutely rigid with fear. All I could think about was their safety, and it took several hours before I found out that their flights had been diverted and both were safe.
Strangely, when the good news came, my body still felt that it had been hit by a truck. Of its own accord it seemed to feel a far greater trauma that reached out to the thousands who would not survive and the tens of thousands who would survive only to live through months and years of hell. And I asked myself, Why didn't I feel this way last week? Why didn't my body go stiff during the bombing of Iraq or Bosnia? Around the world my horror and worry are experienced every day. Mothers weep over horrendous loss, civilians are bombed mercilessly, refugees are ripped from any sense of home or homeland. Why did I not feel their anguish enough to call a halt to it? As we hear the calls for tightened American security and a fierce military response to terrorism, it is obvious that none of us has any answers. However, we feel compelled to ask some questions.
Everything has a cause, so we have to ask, What was the root cause of this evil? We must find out not superficially but at the deepest level. There is no doubt that such evil is alive all around the world and is even celebrated. Does this evil grow from the suffering and anguish felt by people we don't know and therefore ignore? Have they lived in this condition for a long time? One assumes that whoever did this attack feels implacable hatred for America. Why were we selected to be the focus of suffering around the world?
All this hatred and anguish seems to have religion at its basis. Isn't something terribly wrong when jihads and wars develop in the name of God? Isn't God invoked with hatred in Ireland, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, and even among the intolerant sects of America? Can any military response make the slightest difference in the underlying cause? Is there not a deep wound at the heart of humanity? If there is a deep wound, doesn't it affect everyone? When generations of suffering respond with bombs, suicidal attacks, and biological warfare, who first developed these weapons? Who sells them? Who gave birth to the satanic technologies now being turned against us?
If all of us are wounded, will revenge work? Will punishment in any form toward anyone solve the wound or aggravate it? Will an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a limb for a limb, leave us all blind, toothless and crippled? Tribal warfare has been going on for two thousand years and has now been magnified globally. Can tribal warfare be brought to an end? Is patriotism and nationalism even relevant anymore, or is this another form of tribalism? What are you and I as persons going to do about what is happening? Can we afford to let the deeper wound fester any longer? Everyone is calling this an attack on America, but is it not a rift in our collective soul? Isn't this an attack on civilization from without that is also from within?
When we have secured our safety once more and cared for the wounded, after the period of shock and mourning is over, it will be time for soul searching. I only hope that these questions are confronted with the deepest spiritual intent. None of us will feel safe again behind the shield of military might and stockpiled arsenals. There can be no safety until the root cause is faced. In this moment of shock I don't think anyone of us has the answers. It is imperative that we pray and offer solace and help to each other. But if you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.love, deepak chopra
*** saint francis' prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.O divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.saint francis of assisi
francesco di pietro di bernardone (1181 - 1226)*** this IS a religious war
The Osama bin Ladens of the world - like the leaders of the Inquisition and others before them - demand that all embrace absolute faith. Individual faith and pluralism were the targets September 11, and it is only the beginning of the epic battle.
*** the rifle and the veil
restriction of afghan women is a terrorist act.
*** healing the pain
We, as are millions of people all over the world, have been in a state of shock, bewilderment and dismay, the depth of sadness, grief, and anger that anything this outrageous could ever happen. We, our nation, and the world are sharing a grief process that has such magnitude that it defies description.
Part of the grief process has to do with getting in touch with all of our feelings and to be able to share them with others. Anger is often a part of the grief process. We, as people who have worked in the death and dying and grief areas through Attitudinal Healing for over 25 years, feel that it is important to be aware of our anger and to share our feelings without attacking others with our anger. Grief is a process that for most of us takes time. It encompasses stages of denial, shock, anger, confusion, deep sadness, and more.
Sometimes some of us become attached to our anger and we want to retaliate immediately. We want to make other people hurt as we have been hurt. Perhaps the time during grief is not the time to make decisions for revenge and retaliation. Perhaps it is a time for a Spiritual Awakening where we call on a Loving God, a Higher Power, to help us find a creative solution to the injustice, anger and fear that many of us find ourselves in. It is not sign of weakness to be compassionate not only to the victims and their families of this calamity, but to all the people in the world who are suffering.
Is it not possible for us to have a gigantic heart full of compassion and love rather than a big stick that wants revenge? Is it possible that retaliation might not help the healing process of ourselves or the world, but might make it worse?
Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela did not bring hate, anger and retaliation for all the tragedy and deaths that had occurred to their people. Rather than concentrating on the problem, they concentrated on the solution by bringing the Power of God, a Higher Power, into the equation. They felt the power of Peace and Love and eventually Forgiveness to be fundamental to the healing process for all the pain and grief that had been endured.
We have one of the greatest of countries with more freedom than any country in the world. Yet we are not perfect, and perhaps part of the solution is to look at our nation's and our personal mistakes of the past, correct them, and forgive our past. Absolutely nothing justifies even the thought of the heinous crimes that have occurred. It is important for each of us to search and find the deeper root causes of these malicious manifestations of others hate and revenge. We must certainly track down these terrorists and stop them. While they must be brought to justice, will that end and solve the underlying problem? Hardly. Problems are not solved at the level of the problem. More violence does not solve violence. We must raise above the level of the problem to another level to find the solution. To find that solution we must go deeply inside and reach to the place where we connect with our Higher Power, by whatever name it is known to us. There and perhaps only there will we find our own connection to the problem as well as our connection to the solution.
Let's avoid the tendency to be myopic in our vision by failing to see possible larger pictures at hand. Events that change the course of our lives or the course of history are never simplistic. There are always multiple layers of lessons and learning and hopefully, transformation that emerge over time.
We each have the unique responsibility to honor all of our feelings, fears, anger, frustrations, and the like, so important to the healing process. Likewise, each of these areas are influenced by events at hand. We also have a spiritual responsibility to not let those emotions, our most powerful tool, be manipulated and used to foster agendas we do not endorse. It is imperative that while the current level of force, security, and lock down is vitally necessary, make no mistake that we are currently under complete government control, down to internet and phone communications. While this may well be necessary at this stage of the game for security reasons, it is imperative in a democracy that it also be time limited.
It is, hopefully, a time for prayers and asking for help to be a vehicle for bringing Light into a world that seems at the moment to be suffering from a darkness that we have never seen before. It is a time to ask for God's help to bring more love and compassion into the world through our own lives. It is a time to look at our own relationships and to heal those relationships, where we are still holding on to anger and rage. It is a time to be patient as we learn to find more creative and loving, rather than destructive, solutions to the difficult problems that we in the world face.
Let us join together and not get stuck in the anger and hate of who is the strongest. Let us instead get stuck in who is the most compassionate, the most caring, the most loving and the most peaceful. Let each of us take personal responsibility for exposing and healing our own thoughts, attitudes, and shadows. Let us join hands and step into the Light together, a transparent and, therefore, translucent reflection of each other. As each of us heals, the world heals with us.
gerald g. jampolsky, m.d., and diane v. cirincione, ph.d.
www.attitudinalhealing.org*** a world out of touch with itself
where the violence comes from
There is never any justification for acts of terror against innocent civilians - it is the quintessential act of dehumanization and not recognizing the sanctity of others, and a visible symbol of a world increasingly irrational and out of control.
It's understandable why many of us, after grieving and consoling the mourners, will feel anger - and while some demagogues in Congress have already sought to manipulate that feeling into a growing militarism (more spies, legalize assassinations of foreign leaders, increase the defense budget at the expense of domestic programs), the more "responsible" leaders are seeking to narrow America's response to targeted attacks on countries that allegedly harbor the terrorists.
But though the perpetrators deserve to be punished, in some ways this narrow focus allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it's too easy to simply talk of "deranged minds." We need to ask ourselves, "What is it in the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people?"
We in the spiritual world will see this as a growing global incapacity to recognize the spirit of God in each other-what we call the sanctity of each human being. But even if you reject religious language, you can see that the willingness of people to hurt each other to advance their own interests has become a global problem, and it's only the dramatic level of this particular attack which distinguishes it from the violence and insensitivity to each other that is part of our daily lives.
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us - that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger, and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives.
The same inability to feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes the minds of these terrorists. Raise children in circumstances where no one is there to take care of them, or where they must live by begging or selling their bodies in prostitution, put them in refugee camps and tell them that that they have "no right of return" to their homes, treat them as though they are less valuable and deserving of respect because they are part of some despised national or ethnic group, surround them with a media that extols the rich and makes everyone who is not economically successful and physically trim and conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about themselves, offer them jobs whose sole goal is to enrich the "bottom line" of someone else, and teach them that "looking out for number one" is the only thing anyone "really" cares about and that anyone who believes in love and social justice are merely naive idealists who are destined to always remain powerless, and you will produce a world-wide population of people feeling depressed, angry, unable to care about others, and in various ways dysfunctional.
Luckily most people don't act out in violent ways-they tend to act out more against themselves, drowning themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal despair. Others turn toward fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist extremism. Still others find themselves acting out against people that they love, acting angry or hurtful toward children or relationship partners. Most Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this "larger picture." It seems baffling to imagine that somehow we are part of a world system which is slowly destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly transferring the wealth of the world into our own pockets.
We don't feel personally responsible when an American corporation runs a sweat shop in the Philippines or crushes efforts of workers to organize in Singapore. We don't see ourselves implicated when the U.S. refuses to consider the plight of Palestinian refugees or uses the excuse of fighting drugs to support repression in Colombia or other parts of Central America. We don't even see the symbolism when terrorists attack America's military center and our trade center-we talk of them as buildings, though others see them as centers of the forces that are causing the world so much pain.
We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through" or "doing well" in our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this? Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that we have available to us-so why should others be angry at us, much less strike out against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable: the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of counter-terror will also be counter-productive. We should have learned from the current phase of the Israel-Palestinian struggle, responding to terror with more violence, rather than asking ourselves what we could do to change the conditions that generated it in the first place, will only ensure more violence against us in the future.
This is a world out of touch with itself, filled with people who have forgotten how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because we are so used to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do for us, how we can use them toward our own ends. The alternatives are stark: either start caring about the fate of everyone on this planet or be prepared for a slippery slope toward violence that will eventually dominate our daily lives.
We should pray for the victims and the families of those who have been hurt or murdered in these crazy acts. We should also pray that America does not return to "business as usual," but rather turns to a period of reflection, coming back into touch with our common humanity, asking ourselves how our institutions can best embody our highest values. We may need a global day of atonement and repentance dedicated to finding a way to turn the direction of our society at every level, a return to the notion that every human life is sacred, that "the bottom line" should be the creation of a world of love and caring, and that the best way to prevent these kinds of acts is not to turn ourselves into a police state, but turn ourselves into a society in which social justice, love, and compassion are so prevalent that violence becomes only a distant memory.rabbi vichael lerner, editor tikkun magazine, 9/12/01 © 2001 tikkun magazine.
* * *marianne williamson: interviewed by entertainment tonight on september 18, 2001
ET: When the country came together for a memorial service on Friday, and we prayed and lit candles and bowed our heads in collective silence, there seemed to shift in our consciousness, a shift in the mood of the country - was that an accident?MW: Of course it's not an accident; prayer is the conduit of miracles. We have a power in us, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, which is more powerful than the power of bullets. We're turning to God for help now - to the power of atonement, the power of forgiveness, the power of prayer, the power of meditation. We pray not only to heal from what's already happened, but also we're praying that we might become the people we need to be to live up to the challenge of what's happening now. Humanity needs a miracle.
Many of us fear that military action on the part of the United States might light a global powder keg. Millions of us are asking for God to intervene. We're humbled now; we know how much we need Him.
ET Churches, temples, and synagogues were filled with people this weekend. Why do you think people are turning to their faiths at this time?
MW: Often, we live under the delusion that with all the power of technology, the power of medicine, the power of science, the power of government, the power of our financial systems -- that we're safe and secure and protected. This week, we have been disabused of that notion; of course, we're disillusioned. But disillusionment is not all that bad, when you consider it means that you were laboring under illusions to begin with. Now we are reconsidering our notions of what "powerful" means. From a spiritual perspective, God is a power greater than any human power, even terrorism. His is a power that is in us but not of us. It is a power that can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and we desperately need Him now to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. That is why so many of us now are praying without ceasing.
It can be argued that some good things have come from this tragedy. Already we are a new nation. Already, we're a "we," when before we were merely a collection of "me"s. We have become a more deeply sober people. We're hugging our kids a little more tightly. We are counting our blessings for real this time. We're realizing we really do love this country and it's not unhip to say so now.
We're thinking about what this country has meant to our parents and our grandparents. We're thinking about what a gift this country has been to us, and we're realizing that we have every intention of passing that gift on to our children and their children. And we're also thinking about what America's relationship is to the rest of the world. This is a time for deep, national soul-searching. Why do so many people hate us? We're thinking about our fears, but hopefully we're thinking about them intelligently. We're allowing ourselves to ponder what will happen to our nation if we do this, and what will happen if we do that? The questions that confront us are so difficult, but we can handle this. I think we've matured as a generation . This is the defining moment of our lifetimes, but there is a deeper sobriety, a deeper maturity, a deeper humility and a devotion among us, and that cannot be a bad thing.
ET: Why is turning to our faith important at this time?
MW: We're turning to our faith because we realize how powerless we are. Prayer produces miracles. Government does not produce miracles, money does not produce miracles, technology does not produce miracles; God produces miracles.
When we realize how the powers of the world are sometimes not as powerful as we thought - that we cannot rely on certain things the way we previously had thought we could -- our first response, naturally, is fear; we feel unprotected. But then we ask, "Then where does strength lie? Where does power lie?" And that's when it dawns us that God is the power, and God is the glory. People in this country and around the world are grieving for those who died, and for their families, of course. We are asking God to bless them all at this terrible hour. And we are asking God not only to heal us from this catastrophe, but to sustain us through this period. We are asking Him to open up for us new, miraculous possibilities now. Miracles occur when we consider the possibility there might be another way. When we look at the options presented to us by traditional modes of thinking, it is reasonable to expect horrible days ahead. But many of us are asking God to bring forth new possibilities - now unthought of perhaps - and our faith is that He will do that.
Believing in a God of love, we pray for everyone. We pray for our leaders, of course. But we also pray for our enemies, as we have been told to do. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." We must cleave to the thought, we must maintain the conviction, that ultimately only love can triumph over hate. We need the love of God to touch the hearts of our enemies, and return them to their right minds. Ultimately, our only real protection lies in the eradication of hatred itself, and only God can eradicate hatred. So, we pray. We say, "God, we place this situation in your hands: provide us with wisdom, provide us with illumination. Bless us all."
When Moses and the Israelites stood before the Red Sea, they were certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they went forward, they would drown. If they turned back, they would either be killed or taken back into slavery by the Egyptian army. But the story of the Exodus, the story of Passover, is that God parted the Red Sea at that moment. In other words, God presented another option entirely. And God has not run out of miracles.
When we think of all our options now: military - which sounds so dangerous; doing nothing -- which also sounds so dangerous; we turn to God and we say, "Well, you come up with something." There is a line in Alcoholics Anonymous that says, "Every problem comes bearing its own solution." Perhaps the changes that have already occurred inside us because of this, will help us think deeper thoughts and come up with deeper answers. This war is more like a game of master chess than a game of pro football.
The ultimate answer is that we attend to more important things in life. On a program like "Entertainment Tonight," you certainly know what I mean. You have to report quite a bit about America's preoccupation with ultimately meaningless things. And this week, we realize that meaningless things are just that: they're meaningless, they are not ultimately important. This week, we're thinking about things that really matter. We're thinking about why American democracy matters. We're thinking about how we want to attend deeply to this nation's needs, in a way that many of us have to admit that we never did before. We're thinking about our relationships with other nations, something that most of us haven't spent time thinking about at all.ET: In other words, to quote you, we have been shocked out of a collective stupor.
MW: We had become a culture -- and most of us are well aware of this --that glorified the meaningless and the stupid. We romanced violence on television and movies. We were culturally very immature before this, and I hope we will never go back. It's time for us to grow up. A girlfriend of mine said the other day, "America now has lines on its face." We are not the young, brash, self-indulgent culture that we were before one week ago. But that is actually a good thing.
Now, the real wisdom within us, the real intelligence within us, our real care for the brothers and sisters who walk this planet with us, can come forward and express itself. We've always had that power within us. We just didn't lead with it, and now perhaps we will.
We need our love and wisdom to extend not only to people in this country, but to people all around the world -- people who have suffered as we do, who suffer as we do now in some cases, and who stand to suffer as we will if things go a certain way. All of us must think deeply about these things.
I read a quote the other day. I don't know who said it, but I remember that it was a famous person in history. They said, "War is far too serious a subject to be left in the hands of generals and presidents." This is a time for every American to think deeply about what we fear, what we hope for and most specifically, what we pray for.
ET: If the crisis passes, will we become complacent?
MW: I hope we will never become as shallow and as superficial a culture as we were before. We all pray fervently that this crisis passes, but let us not go back to the smallness of our former selves. This country needs us to be our better selves. I have heard on television over the last few days, a lot about how we need to go on now with our normal lives. But I hope that we don't. I hope we gather in circles with our friends and families, in our religious institutions and even in our own living rooms, to pray and meditate -- to pray without ceasing. I hope we sit with people we love and care about, and perhaps people we don't even know - knowing we are going through this together, realizing at last that we are a community after all. We need to share our wisdom and our hopes and fears. The only way we can be defeated by these events is if we fail to learn from them.
ET: How powerful is prayer?
MW: The power of prayer is infinite. There is nothing that God cannot do. There is no miracle that God cannot bring forth. But in order for our prayers to have the true power of God behind them, they cannot be prayers for ourselves alone. Some people are tempted to blame whole groups of people - even other Americans - for this tragedy. We must avoid that kind of thinking, because it is beneath us, and it blocks the miraculous impulse.
I think we should ask God to remove from us our own violent thoughts, our own judgments toward others. We should pray that we ourselves might become as peaceful as we would like the world to be. Divine love does not make us any less committed to eradicating the roots and power of terrorism, but it makes room for God's mystery. It makes Him first in command. It's counterintuitive, of course; I'm supposed to pray for those who have done these horrible things? But to pray for someone means to pray that they awaken to truth, remember. Isn't that, after all, ultimately what we want?
We ask God to take Bin Laden, and all terrorists, and remove the hatred from their hearts. We ask God to touch them. We ask God to reveal to them that we are not the people that they think we are. We ask God to reveal to the world who we truly are, as people. We ask God to forgive us for our own sins, and guide us in the directions He would have us walk -- as individuals, and as a nation. We ask God to bless the entire world. Remember, we are not the only ones who are scared right now. So we should ask God to bless every nation -- to take this entire planet and hold it tenderly in His hands.
We must ask God to fill us with His wisdom, and not our own. In Alcoholics Anonymous they say, "Your best thinking got you here." The way we were thinking before this happened, is not the thinking that will save us now. Einstein said, "We will not solve the problems of the world, from the level of thinking we were at when we created them". We must surrender completely and say, "Dear god, May I think as You would have me think, see as You would have me see, and do as You would have me do. Dear God, love and bless all humanity during this terrible hour."
ET: Where is God now?
MW: God is where He has always been: right inside each and every one of us. God did not do this; people did this. We all have free will. I do believe that His angels were working overtime that day and I think they are working overtime today. I think each and every person who was in those buildings or on those planes, is held in the hands of God right now. But the issue is not just what are we asking of God, but what is God asking of us? God is not our errand boy. He is asking each of us to step up to the plate now, in ways that we know deep in our hearts we should have been doing all along.
ET: One of your books is Healing The Soul of America. Marianne, how does America heal now?
MW: I think one of the ways that America can heal is by atoning for our own sins. Abraham Lincoln spoke of the need for national atonement. Sometimes we don't take as good a look as we might take at how we present ourselves to the rest of the world. We are a relatively small proportion of the world's population, and yet we consume a majority of its resources. We are perceived in many ways, and sometimes validly so, as arrogant and unjust. Often, when our politicians speak of "protecting our vital interests" around the world, they are primarily speaking of protecting our economic interests. Ultimately, our most "vital interest" is brotherhood and justice.
This is a very good time for fasting and prayer. This is not a time for hatred; it is a time for understanding. We must understand that only love can triumph over hatred. "Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord," means: God handles vengeance in His own way. You and I are supposed to clean up our own act. I think that's what God want us to do.
ET: What role does forgiveness have in all this?
MW: First of all, we ask God to forgive us for our own sins - individually and collectively. We ask God to forgive this nation for any mistakes that we have made -- I think that it would create a great field of energy around the planet, if the world saw us do that. And we must strive, in spite of our resistance, to forgive those who hate us, to resist hating those who hate us. Truly they know not what they do. We need to be praying for our enemies that they be returned to their right minds. Only love can do that...only God could do that.
ET: Rosie O'Donnell was talking on her show about being filled with rage against the terrorists when she turned to her six-year-old son who said, "Maybe they need more love."
MW: Children know what's true, don't they? Out of the mouths of babes, absolutely. When we think of terrorists, we should be surrounding them with God's love, that the evil in their hearts might be contained. That doesn't mean we don't try to find them and eradicate their networks of terror, by the way. Not at all. But our "ruling passions" will influence the outcome of our efforts. As Gandhi said, "The end is inherent in the means."
And certainly we must pray for our leaders at this time -- for all the leaders of the world, for all the people of the world. If we pray for everyone but our enemies, that will only serve to make them more powerful. What and who is prayed for, is brought back into God's divine order.
ET: You are part of an international prayer vigil. Tell us about the effort and what effect you think it will have on the country.
MW: The international prayer vigil is a way to harness spiritual power around the world. Every day, people from all over the world are coming together at the same time- noon on the East Coast, nine in the morning on our West Coast, five in the evening in London, etc. - for a minimum of ten minutes of sincere and silent prayer. Prayer detoxifies the consciousness of the human race. It casts out our fear. Prayer is an invisible power, but that does not make it less real. Prayer is very real. There is no more powerful action any of us can take than to participate in this prayer vigil, or some other. Nothing is more powerful at this time or at any time, than the power of prayer. Prayer and meditation, prayer and meditation - those are our greatest powers right now. Prayer is more powerful than any military technique, more powerful than any technology. And all of us have it within in our own hearts to say, "Dear God, please help us." Pray to God, as you understand God, and miracles will happen.
ET: I heard a woman ask, "With a crisis so big, isn't my little prayer insignificant?" What is the power in one person's prayer?
MW: Everybody's prayers matter. Nobody's prayer is any more or less important to God than anybody else's. We are dealing here in the realm of the great mystery. I can't answer the unanswerable; I'm just a human being like everyone else is. But I know that if we surrender something to God and ask that His will be done, then miracles happen. God answers every prayer; God hears every prayer. Let us have conviction now. Let us truly believe these things; let us stand our spiritual ground, and know that God is with us in our moment of despair. He is awake with us in the hour of our agony, asking only that we be awake to the agony of others, as well.
ET: What is your prayer?
MW:
Dear God, please enter here.
May love replace all fear.
May peace replace all violence.
May You replace all else --
Amenwww.marianne.com
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