Evening Sermon, September 13, 2001

Innumerable wars and conflicts later, the same thought, meditated upon, can help us find and keep our true center. Avoiding cold fear and heated rage allows us to find creative ways of reacting out of our true human center, creative ways of acting in love. It allows us to find ways to bring healing into damaged souls and bodies.

There is much that we can do to help. We can donate blood. We can contribute to the many funds and drives that are springing up. But we should not overlook the efficacy, the very real help we generate through our own prayers.

We find ourselves concerned for all the lives so suddenly lost. From this side, it looks as though those lives have simply been eradicated. It is easy to overlook the important, but more hidden aspect: that, contrary to appearances from this side of the threshold, human life does not end in death. Over and against the monumentally negative images we have seen, can be set another, more important and equally real image: As bodies fall to earth, grand and gentle Beings of Light receive and carry the further life of every one of those souls. They are presented to Christ. He gathers them up and takes them home.

No one’s real life has been lost. The kernel, the seed, the best of each of those individuals has been gathered up by the good beings in the universe. This best will be sown again, will grow and blossom and nourish.

We may be assured that those souls, perhaps bewildered at first, are now beginning to understand the real reasons why their lives on earth were harvested, how the event of their death fits into the pattern of their own past and present lives, how it fits into our lives, and how it will fit into the future life of the earth.

Their earthly lives were sacrificed, offered–by some unconsciously, by others, like the rescue workers, with more conscious intent. But their offering only moves toward meaninglessness if we refuse to accept the seed they are holding out to us: an awareness that human life is actually unceasing; that the grimness of death has another side-that it is a birth into another realm, a realm illuminated by Christ. They want us to realize that death serves the formation of new life, the sprouting of new trees from the fruit of the old.

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