Years ago Connie worked with Maureen.  Sometimes we went to dinner with Bill and Maureen. Bill offered an interesting New Yorker’s opinion.  We even baby sat in a few emergencies. On the Meehan’s frig, hung Billy’s first grade school picture. On picture day Billy found his dad’s electric razor and trimmed off one eyebrow.  On September 11, 2001 Bill was well into his day as chief market analyst for Cantor Fitzgerald in the North World Trade Center tower.  By then Billy was a freshman at the University of Kentucky, his sister was a fifth grader in Connecticut.

“I have seen too much hate to want to hate. I see what it does to people, how it contorts their faces.  Hate is a burden.  I have decided to stick to love.” (Paraphrase of Doctor Martin Luther King)

Hate, rage, anger, revenge, payback are the first emotions that bubble up when evil strikes. Ironically, hate allows people to fly planes into buildings.  Hate pollutes the soul and poisons perceptions dehumanizing its’ victims. Those lingering in hate come to see other people not as fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters; but as objects to be hated.

In Ephesians 5:25 Paul cautions and commands Christians “so then, put away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”  When we linger in anger, bias, back-biting, contempt, caricature, prejudice, hostility, intolerance, untruth, malice, meanness, slander and hate; we make room for evil.

Today, pray the Lord’s Prayer with deeper reflection.  Linger over “deliver us from evil”.  Let us work to end evil on the highest moral plain of fairness, humanity, truth, goodness, civility and love.  May we not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Grace and Peace

Paul

Read a perspective from Billy Meehan five years after his dad’s death on September 11, 2001 http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/9/11/2006/id/11178