The Painful World

As I was preparing to write this week's ezine a bit earlier than usual, because of my travel plans, I listened to Ben Stein's opinion piece on the TV show, Sunday Morning. His conclusion, in the aftermath of this past week's shooting in Virginia, was that there is no place that is safe.

Wow, I thought, what a foreboding thought. Is there really nowhere that we can be safe any longer? This was a troubling thought at first. Living in Flat Rock NC, a small village quite similar in many ways to Blacksburg, VA, I've always thought I lived in a safe space, and then I remembered a comment from Albert Einstein.

Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile. He hypothesized that how you answer that question would determine your destiny.

I think friendly with safety and closely akin. So, I'd like to suggest that from a Life On Purpose Perspective, there is a place of ultimate safety and it's within ourselves. It's described in many different ways -- as the Christ Center, the soul, spirit, our connection with the Cosmic Consciousness, etc. I describe it also as 'clarity of purpose.' When we know our true, divinely inspired purpose, we have determined that, indeed, the universe is a friendly and safe place, because we know that we are surrounded by Universal Love.

Now, this isn't to downplay in any way what happened in Blacksburg, VA. It is to suggest that as we all process what happened, we do have a choice whether to approach it from a place of fear or from a place of Universal love.

During the same Sunday Morning program, they showed the memorial that had been spontaneously created on the campus as people left flowers and other mementos, including notes of forgiveness for the shooter. For me that was a sure sign that we are making progress in spiritual evolution. With forgiveness the healing process can begin. We need not forget what happened to forgive. We need not condone what happened to forgive. We need only forgive in our own way and time.