Peace Is Possible

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I turned on the television to check the weather. I had just woken up. On every station I saw smoke billowing up from the World Trade Center towers. I reached for the phone to call my mother but could not get through. So I sat and watched the horror unfold on my TV screen, like something out of a freakish nightmare.

A few days later, my brother invited me to a small peace vigil at a mosque on the northwest side of Chicago. Muslims were suffering a great deal of backlash after 9/11. There we were, standing outside the mosque, praying together. I whipped out my Bahai prayer book and was about to say a prayer for unity when the main speaker announced, “Here with us today we have Christians, Jews and Muslims.”

A Muslim woman standing next to me noticed the Bahai Greatest Name on my prayer book and called out, “She’s a Bahai! We have a Bahai here, too!” And so there we stood in unity, people from different major religions praying together.

I believe that peace is possible – between individuals as well as nations. Although the world seems like it’s falling apart around us, my faith tells me that this is just the beginning, that the human race is in its adolescence and coming of age. It is up to the individual to start striving for a better world today.

Now, ten years later, I am still mortified by what took place on September 11, 2001. Even today I can remember a newspaper photo of a little boy who was on one of the planes. He was returning from a class trip. I don’t think he expected to die a painful, fiery death. Who does?

The 9/11 tragedy made me want to work even harder in my life to spread peace. To remember to tell the people I love, how I much I care for them – and to show it. To reach out to my fellow man, and know – truly know – that we are all equal in the sight of God. Fear and hatred of other races, cultures and faiths spawns a darkness so deep that it makes a person capable of terrible things, even taking the life of an innocent child. Oh, that hate could be so blind!

I’ve had a very turbulent past and I have every reason to be angry at everything around me. Yet everyday I renew my own commitment to peace – in my angry moments, in my sad, self-centered moments, even in the moments when I want to be left alone. It’s keeping my mouth shut when I want to tell someone off. It’s reminding myself to be a better woman when someone insults or hurts me.

I am not saying that it’s easy; it’s a struggle for me everyday. It’s hard to find the light of God in everyone I meet, but when I see the violence on the news I realize once again that hate begets hate. I want to be the cause of love today. I believe that peace is possible.

Helena Marie Carnes-Jeffries has been writing for over twenty years. In 2003 she graduated from East-West University with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Communications. She took part in the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship at Louhelen Bahai School in 2006, and has had some of her work published in the Journal of Ordinary Thought and Area Chicago.