Euphrates founder Janessa Gans Wilder was a panelist for an event on September 8th at the Navy Memorial in Washington, DC. Below are some of the thoughts she shared on the topic of a healing perspective we can bring to the ten-year mark of 9/11.
How can we, as spiritual thinkers, best approach the ten year anniversary of 9/11?
9/11 is a good chance to take stock of how the world has changed the past ten years—what have been the key challenges and what type of thinking underlies those challenges. Is it not fear, revenge, hatred, divisions, lack?
And what is the way forward? Albert Einstein once said that “problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.” So, we really need to be operating on a different, higher level of consciousness to truly address and solve these problems. All the major faiths provide us the roadmap—some form of the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Bible also tells us that “there is neither Jew nor Greek,” that we are all one, and that we should love our neighbors, as well as even our enemies!
What was your personal involvement in 9/11?
I was sitting in a military briefing at the United States Strategic Command south of Omaha, Nebraska. A military official came in and whispered in the briefer’s ear and he appeared visibly shaken. He announced that a plane had hit one of the twin towers and that we would have to adjourn the briefing and move in to another room. We crowded around television screens as we watched the second plane hit the tower. Moments later, we had to evacuate the base as President Bush was on his way there to the secure bunker.
What impact did that experience have on you initially?
Just as the announcement came, my colleague who worked in the counterterrorism office turned to a few of us and whispered, “It’s a terrorist attack. It’s Osama bin Laden.” I, on the other hand, was shocked and stunned; I had the distinct feeling that nothing was going to be the same again, including my own life. I had just undergone training at the agency looking at other intelligence failures—Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Shah in Iran. I thought, “how did we miss it again?” I immediately transferred from working on Africa to the Middle East. I spent two years in the Afghanistan office and then from 2003-2005, I served in Baghdad. My motivation was similar to other Americans—I wanted to understand why it happened and ensure that it never did again.
Over the past 10 years how has your thinking changed or evolved from that experience?
Exacting revenge for wrongs done is the “eye for an eye” mentality and is too old school! In the words of Gandhi, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” The only antidote to fear, hatred, malice, is love. It’s not about fighting fire with fire.
How can we prayerfully address the seemingly intractable cycles of fear or violence?
As we pray about them and root them out of our own thought and our own lives, we demonstrate that we have dominion over them—that there are more powerful forces. What is it that casts out fear? Love. Violence comes from the root word—violate. So, as we refuse to violate others in our thought and our own lives, we realize there’s a way to stop these cycles. Each person living this becomes a security zone, where hate, fear, and violence have no foothold. And he/she also becomes a light to others.
From your own experience, what root causes of 9/11 need to be addressed today?
Catching the drips from a leaky faucet does not fix the faucet. The root causes must be addressed—fear, ignorance, division, lack of security, fall of innocence, the “Other”, victimization, oppressors, terrorism, envy, hatred, revenge, humiliation, lack of opportunity, economic advancement.
What progress have we made since 9/11 in addressing these issues?
In many ways, we have made progress both at home and abroad. Visionaries all over the US and the Middle East are working on the basis of common ground and of addressing and rooting out these modes of thought in their own communities. Look at the Arab Spring, which showed us an entirely new face of the Arab world—one calling for human rights and democracy, rather than jihad, and one armed with facebook and twitter rather than guns and bombs. In other areas, such as the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. there seems to still be a great deal of fear.
What role can one individual’s prayer have in countering terrorism (at home and abroad)?
Terrorism’s primary weapon has to be fear because it lacks the real power to make change by other means. So when we pray to be delivered from fear, we are defeating terrorism.
“One with God is a majority.” There is infinitely more power in good than in evil. If nothing else, you can stop lending your voice and power to it. I stopped being overwhelmed by the death and destruction and turned my efforts to nation-building.
In other words, how do I know that my prayers are having an effect?
My experience by the Euphrates river in Iraq, I got rid of fear and the myopic focus that overwhelmed me in the face of evil. I chose to focus on the good and I immediately brought more of that into my experience. I think we can all do that. It’s not to sweep the bad under the rug. It’s to acknowledge it and deal with it, but not lending your emotional and thoughtful weight to it. It can never stand up to the power of good.
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