Minutes of Meetings with God
and with Myself

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Extraordinary Consequences ...

The past few weeks have not been fun, filled as they were with the paradoxes of evil and good, of monstrosity and heroism. The horrors wrought by religious zealots have done more than snuff out lives, crumble concrete, shatter glass, distort metal, and splinter wood. The collapsing Towers of the World Trade Center landed in a pile with such a crash that individuals, communities, and nations still shudder from the impact. The shock, fear and revulsion produced by those criminal deeds have changed the people of the United States and the world, probably forever. Many people will never view the realities of each day or the potential for future in the same way. Life will lie under a pall for quite some time.

The huge loss of life and property in the September 11th attacks was overwhelming enough. As devastating was the unimaginable method of the attacks, using large commercial airplanes. All that damage was caused by people taking something mostly considered helpful, something considered basically good and trusted, something that is woven at some level into the every day fabric of our lives and turning it into a weapon of mass destruction. The scores of airplanes flying over our house will never just be airplanes again.

Lastly, it is clear that those who did those terrible deeds, used their religion as well as their picture of God and God's will to fuel their drive toward their appalling objectives. These people did with religion and with God, what they did with the airplanes. They took something mostly considered helpful, something considered basically good and trusted, something that is woven at some level into the every day fabric of our lives and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. Religion and God will never just be religion and God again, but for all the wrong reasons.

The past weeks have made it excruciatingly obvious that what we think and believe about God as well as how we live out our religion can have extraordinary consequences, not all of them for the good of the world and for humanity. What we do, what we fail to do, in the name of God and religion changes our lives and the lives of those around us for better or for worse.

Religion is about our deepest (conscious or unconscious) beliefs and ideas; it's about how convinced we are as to the way things really are both in this world and beyond this world. Religion is about what is most important to us; it is about our values and how we use our values to guide our lives.

A religious life is one in which we consciously sort out who and what is most important to us, then we dedicate ourselves to letting those most important people or things (this includes ideas, beliefs, goals, dreams, etc.) become the focus of our living. Believing in the existence of God or going to a church somewhere may have very little to do with being religious. Altogether too many of us in the U.S.A. believe in God and/or go to church, but neither really make much difference in the way we live our lives outside the walls of the church building.

The monstrosity and the heroism of September 11th changes everything. The fundamental question is whether the changes will be for the better or for the worse. This one day challenges everyone to consider what is really important in their lives and what it is that they want to do with the lives they have. This one day calls each of us to know what we believe about God, life, everything. This one day rubs our faces in the reality of the consequences of what we do or fail to do.

In particular, we who would be Christians need to rediscover the roots and the power of what we believe. Beginning with Jesus, himself, Christianity has faced the hard realities of the human condition. It has recognized our "lost-ness" in the sense of our wandering away from (our missing the targets of ) Truth, justice, peace, compassion, and Love … all that is God. And, from the beginning, the Gospel call has been to stop wandering and to turn in the direction of God. The Gospel is about change for the better, from the heart of each individual until the change transforms everything (social, political, economic and more) into the Kingdom of God.

Christianity was never intended to be a denial of death. The Cross will forever witness to the reality of death and to consequences of evil. Neither was Christianity ever intended to be an instrument of death (a reason or excuse for killing people). Jesus died for all, rather than kill anyone.

Beginning with the Resurrection, Christianity has been about facing death and evil; it has been about going beyond the stark reality of death and discover-ing new life. The empty tomb is not some exercise in fantasy or escapism; rather, it is a witness that evil and death cannot prevail. God's love always wins.

Across the expanse of millennia, from another time of terror and death when thousands were killed in the name of religion, the Apostle Paul says most powerfully:

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of dark-ness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. It is written: "I believed; there-fore I have spoken." With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak. (2 Cor 4:6-13)

Now is the time to believe, to speak, and to do so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in us.