Today marks 9/11: Hurt felt around the world with the events now etched in our minds. 

I wanted to take the opportunity to share this touching piece by someone I know personally, Reverend Noel.

9/11 Call

As I watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center implode their downward course to naught but rubble, as in Biblical times, was the similar fate of the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, I recognized that this was a defining moment for every human being on the planet, as follows:

In every one of us is the potential to become a Hitler or a Mother Teresa, and we each have now received a 911 call to make an ultimate decision: Which of these contrasting potentials do I cultivate and nurture?

The Old Testament (Deuteronomy, 30:19) makes clear the ultimate answer to this question:

“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life so that you and your children may live.”

I therefore now choose life as follows: 

  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, to be more than a further extension of humankind’s inhumanities to other human kindred.
  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, to be more than a reactionary impulse that creates me in the image of those whose forceful impulses I outwardly discredit.
  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, to be more than an instrument of the either/or retaliatory sociopolitical worldview that ongrowingly recycles mutual vengeance and re-vengeance.
  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, to be more than an agent of those whose purpose is to shape, direct, instruct or otherwise conform me to their own purposes.
  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, to be more than a mere defender of the things that I possess, of the thoughts that I profess, and of the feelings that I express.
  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, to be more than an expression of self-defeating teachings, preachments and ideologies, of outworn trends and fashions, of conventional wisdoms handed down, of yesterday’s reasons handed over, and of momentary meanings that last only for a season.
  • I am here to be a beneficial presence to all concerned, by being all of who and how I withinnermostly am when I no longer am being less than all of the more-than’s cited above.

~Rev. Noel McInnis~

Reverend Noel

Though I don’t always get what I’m looking for, I do always get what I’m looking from.

The ultimate alternative to this distinction is choiceless awareness.

Stay in the grace!
Noel

The Rev Noel Mcinnis serves as the Minister Emeritus at New Center for Spiritual Living in Lake Oswego, OR.
 
Serving as a minister for decades in the now Centers of Living (CSL), he recently had a blog published in the August newsletter of United CLS’s Retired Ministers Council.

 

 

Love all around, above, below, to the left and to the right, before you and behind you,
Georgena

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