Wayne
Manning On September 14, just three days
after the terrible acts of terrorism in New York, Washington DC, and
Pennsylvania, my main administrative task of the day was to write my usual
article for our November/December church newsletter.
My partner in ministry and in life, my wife Janet, and I had
already conducted several prayer services that week, and were wrestling
with how to engage those events on the coming Sunday. I remember thinking
how difficult it was to focus on Thanksgiving and Christmas, the things
one writes about in the last newsletter of the year. And then I thought maybe that’s
a good thing. We will celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas as we always
do, and we will do all the logistical things required by the holidays. We
will have mailings and e-mailings and announcements, and so on. Folks will
mark their calendars and make plans to attend the programs of their
choice. We will all do what we need to do as the holidays approach.
However, we must not let any of that get in the way of remembering what
happened that second week in September. We must not use our busyness as an
excuse to avoid dealing with the reality and enormity of these tragic
events. There is a new, enormous tear in the fabric of humanity and the
healing of it will be in the remembering, and the praying, and the
changing of human consciousness. The first two of these,
remembering and praying, are relatively easy for us. But how do we do the
third? How does human consciousness change? I’ve thought about that a
lot in the past weeks and I’ve drawn a few conclusions. The first and
most obvious one is that the only consciousness I have any real, direct
control over is my own. And to the extent those around me might use me for
a model, I might be an influence in their own effort to change. I have been looking at how I feel,
how I think, and how I speak about what has happened to us, and to our
world, and to all the people involved, victims and perpetrators alike. I
know that these three dynamics; feeling, thinking, and speaking, shape my
consciousness about whatever is before me. I support my government and my
president, and I pray for their courage, strength, and wisdom in the life
and death decisions they must make daily. I love America and I wear my
red, white, and blue with pride. But I have decided, for me, that I cannot
engage in the rhetoric that comes with war; the kind of languaging that
seems to be required in the waging of it. I am trying, as best I can, to
avoid demonizing the living, breathing people who comprise the terrorist
groups, the Taliban, even Osama bin Laden himself. I want to remember that
these are human beings, not much different from you and me, really, in our
humanity. They are as passionate as we, even though we are poles apart on
the enormous question of what constitutes human freedom. Do we stop
terrorism? Absolutely! One terrorist at a time if we have to. But how we
FEEL about it, and THINK about it, and SPEAK about it are crucial if human
consciousness across the planet is to change. Most of us, as individuals, are a
mix of intentions and motives and awarenesses. We can be heroes one day in
a certain aspect of our lives, and villains another day. What makes this
bearable is that we believe that human beings can change, that redemption
is possible, that the hero part of us can develop and grow, and the
villain part diminish. It takes only a small stretch of the imagination to
conceive of the whole human family, every living human being, as part of a
huge, macro-organism with a global consciousness comprised of the
individual awarenesses of us all. This “creature” too has moments of
heroism as well as villainy. It too is capable of redemption, of unfolding
into that glorious destiny pictured in our Christian, Jewish, and Islamic
traditions when God created us in the beginning in God’s very own image
and likeness. The value of this imagined “global creature” lies in its
power to show us that we are inextricably intertwined with every other
human being on the planet. We must learn to live as though we are part of
a larger organism if we are to survive and fulfill God’s intention for
creation. We each have our own individual
hope of salvation based on our own religious convictions. But our hope as
a species lies in holding that thought, that there is still that mote of
the image and likeness of God in every person, regardless of individual
current ideology or behavior. It is people of good will everywhere, in
every country and culture, who will, through their prayers and deeds,
through their feeling, thinking, and speaking, change human consciousness
to such a degree that the kind of mindset that leads to acts of terrorism
will be banished from the human psyche forever. That is our principal work in the days, weeks, months, years, and even lifetimes ahead. I encourage you, dear reader, to be willing to pray for such change, to truly let peace begin with you, deep within your own mind and heart. It is a huge task, but we are up to it. Thank God that this is so. In the mysterious way that grace works, our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations this year will contain a breadth and depth of spiritual meaning and oneness that will bless us beyond all expectation. Thank God that this is so, too.
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