Today is the anniversary of 9/11, and while the country as a whole has moved on, the day is a sad reminder to all of us of the hateful acts which took place that day. It would be arrogant of me to think that I can say anything to make the pain go away. Losing people we love always hurts. But I’d like to tell you what I believe.
I believe that we exist to learn. We come here to experience and improve. The stories we pass on to explain our state of existence are consistent with that idea. In Christianity, for example, we learn of Adam and Eve, a story meant to try to explain our condition as humans. They had everything, but wanted more. So they got kicked out of Paradise. But that’s the simple version. Let’s dissect it a little.
Paradise is/was a place where everything we could ever want was made available to us. Without effort, our desires and wants were fulfilled. Being human, we wanted more. We wanted to believe that we could be God. We lost our gratitude for the things God provided to us, and so we had to learn. The only way to truly learn is to experience the results and consequences of our decisions. That’s what we do here. We make choices, we learn from them.
The goal is to tend towards reuniting with God. By that, I mean that we are supposed to achieve a condition in which we appreciate all that God has done and provides for us. Once we reach that state of existence, we fill our hearts with love and thankfulness and become worthy of Paradise again. There are good and bad things, people, experiences and circumstances but we are supposed to respond to all of them the same way – with love. When we get to that space where our responses are filled with love, we create a world in which the bad things go away forever and we live in love and happiness.
Some of us learn quickly, some of us require more time. Others never quite get it. This is why the concepts of Heaven and hell exist, to explain how we “earn” our eternal existence. This brings me to my point. As painful as it is to lose our loved ones, as much as it hurts to let them go, we can take comfort in the knowing that, at some point, we will each reach a condition in which we truly appreciate the Love God has for us. We become worthy of eternal existence in a state of perfect happiness. When we achieve that condition, we will either immediately reunite with our loved ones, or wait a bit for them to achieve that state. Either way, we all eventually get there.
September 11 showed us an ugliness that should not exist. But parts of our response showed us caring and love and a beautiful part of us many people forgot they even had. As difficult as it is, let’s remember the beauty that is inside us. Let’s think forward to the day when we achieve gratitude and Love and reunite with our loved ones. You may not believe in God, existence beyond the one you currently experience or any of the things I have written, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. Everything we have ever seen or experienced was created. Someday you will be with your loved ones who have left us and you will experience love, happiness and gratitude forever. Take comfort in that because it’s true. The victims of 9/11 as well as all of our loved ones who have passed from this form of existence to the next wait for us. Be happy now, and be happy then. That’s what was meant to be.