Remembering 9/11 How to Build Peace: Inner and Outer

UnityAshSermon Archives

with Norma Nakai Burton M.Div.

When a nation or an individual is attacked, its understandable to feel  core level threatened and to attack in return.  Yet, it takes a great deal of spiritual inner work to search for and find adequate ways to both establish boundaries and protect one’s body and emotional well being, one’s family, one’s tribe, one’s nation and at the same time to seek for a greater harmony than we have yet known. 

This requires a deep excavation of our shadow, because there lays both our trauma wounds received and trauma we may have inflicted.  As individuals, as families, and as a nation we have a great deal of shadow work on our plates.  

If we are to bring into being a world in which “global terrorism” is no longer an everyday household fear, then nations, political units, leaders and rulers, religions and religious leaders must come together to lay aside their animosities and divisive self-interests. 

Misguided aspirations to power over others must give way to the gentler art of power with others. What can we — each of us individually — do? As hackneyed as it may sound, we can each commit to letting peace begin with us. 

Musicians : Jane Sterling and Richard Williams