#89. Special Episode with John Dear: Dedicated to all whose lives were altered that day: Life and Death at Ground Zero, my personal experiences on 9/11 and the weeks following

0:00Welcome to the nonviolent Jesus podcast. I'm John, Father John Deere. And today I thought I'd offer a special episode of the podcast to mark the 25th anniversary of September 11th. By sharing some of my experiences as the local coordinator for the Red Cross of Chaplains. This is a project of BeatitudeCenter.org where you can find many other podcasts and regular Zoom programs on the nonviolence of Jesus practicing nonviolence and working for a more just more peaceful world. So let's begin with a little prayer. I invite everybody to take a deep breath wherever you are to relax, re-center yourself, and enter into the presence of the God of Peace who loves you infinitely and personally and

1:04everyone everywhere. And together let's welcome the risen nonviolent Jesus here with us and ask for whatever grace we need to follow the nonviolent Jesus more faithfully and to do God's will of peace. Beloved God of Peace, thank you for all the blessings of life, love, and peace that you give us. Be with us now as we reflect together on your life and call to follow the nonviolent Jesus and to work for a more nonviolent, more just world. Bless us, inspire us, heal us, disarm us, strengthen us, and send us out to do your will to do our part to help end war, poverty, racism, greed, injustice, fascism, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction that we might be your holy peacemakers and welcome your reign of universal love, nonviolence, and peace on earth in Jesus' name, Amen. So welcome friends, I'm recording this just before the 25th anniversary of the September

2:0811th attacks. It's September 2026 and I thought I might share some of my personal experience of those days and months. You can find some of these stories on my website, JohnDeer.org, but you can find a real full account of those days in my autobiography, a persistent piece where I'm taking much of these reflections. As I think back on that time, I always remember it was a Friday afternoon for me September 7th, that I was kind of an odd time, but a friend of mine, there was a small wedding in New Jersey and so I went to it and presided at it and came back that Friday afternoon for the first time ever, the train, you know, I was living in Manhattan on the Upper West Side in my Jesuit community and the trains, all the trains come through the World Trade Center and I stopped and got off and walked around the first floor, went to the Barnes and Noble,

3:10then they had a great pizza shop, I got some pizza, and I sat there looking at the first floor in the first World Trade Building and millions of people went by, it was like the whole world passing through there and I'd never seen such crowds. And then that weekend my parents came to visit, they were from New York but lived in DC and never came to visit and they announced a kind of elaborate three day plan which included lunch at the Russian T-Room, a visit to the Met Museum and a meal with my Jesuit community and mass including with Daniel Bergen, it was lovely and then my dad to mark the occasion, got reservations on the top of the World Trade Towers for that Tuesday morning at the massive restaurant, Windows on the World. But two days before my mother called me and said we thought you shouldn't have to make that long trip in the subway all the way down to Lower Manhattan.

4:15So we changed our hotel and we're going to have breakfast at the Park Lane Hotel instead overlooking Central Park and this was my parents and I said fine whatever you want didn't make no difference to me and so on Tuesday morning September 11th instead of being in Windows on the World I was in Central Park having breakfast with my parents. We heard the news as my father was checking out, we switched on the TV, saw the burning tower and my mother burst into tears sobbing, saying all those people are going to die. My parents immediately left and they were like the last car to go over the George Washington bridge before it was closed and all of Manhattan was shut down and the phone stopped working. I went back to my community, saw the second plane strike and the towers fall and immediately wanted to help. So I walked downtown, I headed south on Broadway.

5:15Now think about that, it's like 10.45 now, 11 o'clock that Tuesday morning. Once a people were walking from Lower Manhattan up north into the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and I was walking against the crowd and there's no phones, now the bridges are closed, the subways close, nobody knows what's going on and these military jets start swooping down over Central Park. So people were really scared thinking, oh, are we at war? They're going to be more bombing attacks on Manhattan. I certainly thought that. It was very eerie and serenal because there was this mass of cloud of black smoke which also was sort of white and sort of pinkish. If you live there you know what I'm talking about and it was like that for weeks and weeks. It was a beautiful blue sky.

6:15And I got all the way down, I was dressed in my clerics as a priest, I got down to 12th Street to St Vincent Hospital where my mother worked as a nurse in the 50s and there were a hundred doctors and nurses lining the street with stretchers and I asked if I could help and they said yes, by all means you're very welcome father and we stood there until six o'clock expecting you know the injured to come and there were no injured. And I could see in the distance the ruins of the world trade towers and at five o'clock I also saw the Liberty Building just fall straight down. It hadn't been struck, nothing did that and you know I've looked into that since then. The next day I went back, waited and offered to help but nothing happened and I heard on the news the mayor of New York announced if you lost someone in the towers go to the Armory on the lower east side on Thursday morning and register and you can sign up and

7:22I thought well I'll go there and offer to help. And the Armory is at Lexington and 25th, I guess that's East 25th Street and by 6 a.m. There were thousands and thousands of people lining Lexington Avenue. Now mind you everything is closed and again no phones and no subways and I just walked right past them all right through the front doors and was welcomed right in and found my way to the Red Cross office there where I met someone I'll never forget, Mindy Russell, this really charming Baptist minister from Sacramento and she proceeds to tell me that she's the uncalled coordinator for the month of September for the Red Cross Spiritual Care Program. That's what it's called. It's like pastoral care or the chaplains but if there's an emergency anywhere in the country like a plane crash or a fire or an earthquake she's to drop everything she's

8:27trained to do this and get on a plane and fly there immediately and set up the Red Cross response. And she was flown on a military plane that morning to New York City and she saw me and enlisted me immediately. She's awful of caffeine and adrenaline and she says okay, Father John, you go stand over there in that corner against the wall and after everyone has come through to fill out their paperwork we'll send them to you for spiritual counseling and I was suddenly kind of overwhelmed and a little scared because I saw the line of thousands of people and I said to her, but Mindy, what do I do? And she looked at me and said oh just listen and be compassionate and smiled and turned and walked away. That was a great moment for me because I thought like everybody I panic during those days

9:31and that was kind of my motto for the next three months as I worked with 550 chaplains ministering to 50,000 direct relatives. At the end of that day she came over to me with all the Red Cross officials and said we've been watching you all day. Would you be the coordinator at the Family Assistance Center for the chaplains and be their supervisor? I think I was the only priest and man Hatton who was free at that moment. I didn't ever perish. I just stepped down from my job as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I just finished writing a book and I was very free. So I said sure and that began a really intense journey for the next three months until Thanksgiving working. The center was almost 24, 7, 7 days a week and my job was everything you can imagine.

10:35The scheduling of chaplains managing the security of the chaplains and working with the police and all, I had to give an orientation to each chaplain, 550 of them and debrief each one of them at the end of their shift and I taught others to do the same and my motto was listen and be compassionate. You know we're spreading compassion here. And what was so interesting for me that I learned and so they taught me and then I taught other chaplains and we were off and running. But you couldn't, so there were different shifts, let's say an eight hour shift from nine to four if you were a chaplain you came in and we got you on the schedule. But you couldn't leave the building without attending a debriefing session with other chaplains and me or one of the other supervisors. And it was so interesting the whole point was self-care, right? You have to be compassionate to yourself if you really want to be compassionate to others

11:39and help them in this terrible time and everybody was under terrible stress. So we went around, you know, maybe I might have 15 chaplains sitting there after the four o'clock shift and say one story about what touched you, helped you, moved you or disturbed you from your experience today. And I heard hundreds if not thousands of stories about these, from these chaplains about what it was like for them. Then we went around the circle again, now think about this and you had to say one thing you were going to do for yourself that night and they everybody looked at me and they were like, what are you talking about? And this is self-care because this was so intense. I mean, there were crowds and media outside the building and you know, we were just dealing with people and totally distraught all day long. And people learned to say, I'm going to make myself a meal, I'm going to call my friend,

12:41I'm going to read my book, I'm going to watch my TV show, you know, whatever I want to take a walk along the Hudson, whatever to take care of themself a little bit. That proved to be very important and powerful during those days. The next day is Friday, September 14th. So they were going to open a massive building, which is like a conference hall. It was used for fashion shows, around 54th Street and the Hudson River. And that was going to open up as I recall Sunday. So because I suddenly had all full security clearance and all of lower Manhattan, I thought, well, I'm going to go down to Ground Zero and offer to help. And so I dressed up in my clerics and I think I walked most of the way and got there at 6 am and there was Ground Zero. And I walked right into it and the police welcomed me very glad to see me. There weren't any other priests around.

13:42It was nothing like what you saw in the newspapers or on TV. That's what my main memory. You just, you couldn't be captured. There were 16 acres of buildings totally destroyed. And because many other buildings were hit by the falling towers. Now the falling towers created what they called the pile, which was seven stories tall, totally on fire, burning, and some parts weren't burning. And rescue workers were climbing up and down. And I walked up to the pile. And then I'm standing there in my priest outfit with a yellow heart hat on. And all of a sudden a guy saw me, a fire rescue worker up there. He comes running down the pile, runs right up to me and says, in bursts into tears and says, Father, quick, give me your blessing. I'm digging for my best friend.

14:43So I put my hands on him and I set a blessing and a prayer. And I just said, please keep staying close to God and give yourself to God. And he said, thank you. And he turned and ran back up the pile. And it was like that for the rest of the day. As I talked with hundreds of rescue workers who were digging up their friends. And it was so horrible. And so overwhelming because I didn't have time to think about it or take it in. I didn't know this was going to happen. But all of them were desperate to talk for a minute. I remember one of them came down, came running down the pile, that aligned formed in front of me. And one guy came running down right up to him and he goes, Father, please teach me how to pray. We found the body of my best friend yesterday. I don't know what to do. So I took a deep breath. I mean, no one has ever asked me that, had ever asked me that before. Or has ever asked me that since.

15:44So for me, it was such a powerful thing to say there. I said, all you have to do is just become and remember that God loves you infinitely. So just turn to God and be with God and let him be right there with you and work through you and ask him to help you and guide you and do that today and every day for the rest of your life. And he looked up at me and he said, Oh, okay. And turned and ran off. And this just kept going on and on. And I remember, well, some stories, I won't tell you, they're too difficult. But I remember one worker was, you know, he was in total PTSD and he said to me, he's been waking up and screaming to the top of his lungs the last three nights because his task as a police officer was to collect the body parts and he came up to me and after

16:46saying all this, Father, what should I do? And it was just like that all day long. And that Sunday, I made my way to the Family Assistance Center, this massive building, which sticks out into the Hudson River, if you can imagine. And it was amazing how they set it all up. There were hundreds of booths with phones and computers and tables and folding chairs throughout the whole building, you know, maybe separated by just sheets hanging down if you can imagine that. So like, make shift cubicles and little offices. But one side of it had big offices for the Red Cross, the police, the mayor, the translators. I had an office, volunteer coordinators. And then there was another whole wing that was this state of the art restaurant, if you can imagine. Now, who's allowed in only a spouse, a parent, or a child of someone missing in the

17:49towers? And massive tons of mail and donations and gifts were being brought in, but you couldn't get in because of the security. And by part of my job was to manage which chaplains were allowed to stay and come in. And over the next three months as I did that, I, my myself, I know this because I was taking notes and journaling every night about these days. And then Columbia University called and only two weeks afterwards and said they'd started. And that was a big article about me in the New York Times. But they, so they called me and said, we are doing an oral history program. We want to come interview and it got me thinking about being very mindful of what I was doing and trying to keep track so I could talk about it later. So I, myself, counseled 1500 relatives. And I'll just tell you, these are some, from some of my, some of my notes. I remember Mary.

18:51She was a security guard employed on the 70th floor of the North Tower. She ran down the flight of stairs into the bottom, you know, out into the street just as the building collapsed. And all her coworkers died. And there she was standing absolutely shaking and sobbing. I remember Neil, who was a Catholic from Long Island. And he came in clutching a bag of hairs from the comb of his missing brother-in-law. And remember, one of the things we had to do was take DNA samples. Remember, because that was a whole other aspect of this. And that's what people were doing to describing their loved ones and besides giving all the information, it was a police report. So I was with Neil. And I took him to the booth and I sat down with him as he starts the process with one of the city officials filling out all the paperwork handing over the DNA evidence and so forth.

19:56And lo and behold, right then and there, the official says, oh, your brother-in-law's body has been found. It was one of the very few intact. And Neil burst into tears and asked me for prayer and I prayed with him and sat with him as he called his sister and the family and told them the news that the brother-in-law had been found. And so I gave him a blessing and sent him on his way. That happened over and over. That was the kind of a typical experience of all the chaplains. I remember the family of twelve who flew in from Europe in search of their missing son and they wanted me to bless them. So they joined hands and I did that. And then each one of them came over and hugged me and gave me a kiss. I remember them retired New Jersey couple searching for their son and they asked me to sit with them as their mouths were swabbed for DNA. I remember the young man who flew over by himself from Italy and he walked in by himself,

21:02barely speaking English, sobbing, saying he had come to look for his mother and that no one knew where she was and she had worked in the building. I remember the businessman who lost fifty colleagues. If you remember there were two or three floors at the top of each building which were owned by massive multinational corporations and all those people died. There were very few survivors and he was very distraught. I remember when I was at ground zero this truck pulled up and a dozen real short Mexican firefighters got out. They had just gotten off the plane as a gift of solidarity from Mexico. And we're now standing right next to the pile and they came up and said, Pajray, would you lead us in prayer? Do we join hands and I remember to prayer in my broken Spanish and they all burst into tears and then off they went one by one up the pile.

22:07I remember, I don't know if everybody remembers that the person registered as the first victim was father Michael Judge. I actually knew him a little bit. He was the Franciscan and lived on thirty-third street so he's the official fire chaplain for the city of New York. He ran the whole program and so he was friends with the president and the mayor and all and he was standing outside of the building. You can see it in the footage when he next to Giuliani when he was struck by falling debris and killed. So often I would be at the pile and a whole group of firefighters would come around me, speechless but just want to be with me. Sometimes as many as twenty. So I'm standing there and they come up to me with their heads down and they're looking at me and so I would start talking and I might say a prayer but wanting to break the ice I would say, hey did you all know father Michael Judge and they'd all smile and they'd

23:12all of them. This happened maybe ten times told the same story if you know this. He was notorious because you know if you had the annual dinner dance for your local fire station precinct with all the families he would come on that Saturday night and give the blessing. So he was known by name and at every fire station in the five burrows and he always said the same thing. All of you are little saints. You're all doing God's will. All your sins are forgiven and I bless you and he would bless them and they all cheered and smiled and I would go, wow what a thing of course I knew that he was called in and reported because priests were not supposed to do that. And Michael did it over and over again and given general absolution it's called. So they all tell the story and every group whenever I'd asked that they'd smile thinking of him and then burst into tears and start sobbing.

24:16And I would again say a prayer and they'd go forward. I'll just tell one or two other stories about this. I remember the head of the whole electric company for the state of New York. Now that's Con Edison you know here in California it's PG&E and the power is off and all of the lower Manhattan. There I am standing at the pile talking to crowds of rescue workers and here comes this business man in a yellow hard hat with 50 con ed officials all in hard hats and clipboards behind him and he's running toward me. He's running and calling out father, father, that's just a minute and our eyes meet and he starts sobbing, sobbing. Don't let them see me father but I'm here to dig up the wires and you know trying to get the power going but I lost my I can't handle it.

25:19I lost my brother and my brother in law and hundreds of associates. I don't know what to do but don't let them see me crying. Father what should I do? I said let's pray. We pray and I said God is with you. God loves you infinitely and give all your worries and concerns to God and just say you use me and guide me and help me through this day and every day from now on and I bless them. I said now you go and do what you have to do whatever you can to restore power and lower Manhattan and once again he jumped up and looked at me. I said oh right I can do that and he turned and walked away and started barking orders. That was very powerful for me. So many people saying please pray with me. This went on for weeks. I would like to tell a few more things. What most this is going to shift a little bit now. What most people don't know which is what we chaplains were dealing with was that almost

26:25two a person, the families, denied that their loved one was dead. Now by that I mean I heard this countless times oh Father John you don't know my husband. There's no way. He is digging himself out. He's going to show up any day now. You don't know my son. You don't know my father. And then we started comparing notes and all the chaplains were hearing that and this went on not just in September. We were hearing this in October. We were telling the mayor and the city this and they were always asking us for advice and things. And one day the mayor announced as well I'm just going to tell you what we did. They said we're going to try to invite whatever family members want to to come into ground zero. Now the thinking was this will help them deal with reality like going to the scene of the crime. But we're going to let the chaplains lead it and we're going to do it by boat.

27:27I was like what? So they got these ferry boats from the family assistance center in West 54th Street in Hudson. And they could take 75 family members with two chaplains. Imagine we load the boat and then we would say a prayer with them and then we'd ride down the Hudson River for only like 15 minutes and pull up right next to the pile, the ruins of the two towers. And the city now is covered with chain link fences and there would be thousands and thousands of flowers and photos and missing person cards and letters and thank yous to the rescue workers. The whole city was like that. The family's surrender was, the center was surrounded by these things and you would have seen pictures of them in the media because there wasn't much else to film. And we would pull up and there's the pile. You had to look straight up and you see all the smoke and we'd said a prayer and the family

28:29members were allowed to get off the boat, walk up to the fence and leave a flower or something and then get back on the boat and we'd say a prayer. Of course we would pull in and they'd all burst into tears and everybody's holding each other and we would walk the family members to the fence, bow our heads, have a moment of silence, all the rescue workers as far as you could see would see us and stop. I'm talking thousands and take off their hats for a moment of silence and then they would go back to work and we got back on the boat. This lasted just a week. It was too painful for everybody but I want to tell you one story and those of you who listened to the podcast will hopefully have already heard my friend talk about this. This has to do with my friend Colleen Kelly. Colleen's brother died in the World Trade Towers and I had done the baptism of Colleen's daughter along with some other friends at a big family event a couple years before and

29:35the brother would have been there and all. And so one day I'm on the ferry and there's Colleen's family. I know them, particularly her mother. We get down to ground zero. You know, it's another beautiful day and it's windy on the boat and everybody's crying and we're praying and now I'm sticking with Mrs. Kelly on the family and we go over and we leave flowers and we get back on the boat and Mrs. Kelly turned and said to me, the most important thing I heard in those terrible three months. I have no room for anger. Now if you recall by now we're bombing Afghanistan. This is early October and President George W. Bush is saying be angry and stop all this grief and stop all this compassion. Go shopping. He actually said that at the National Cathedral. Go shopping and get rid of this grief and everybody raised the flag and we need to be

30:39angry and people went for it and then we're rallying behind the troops. She says, I have no room for anger. This is at ground zero. We're back on the boat and she says to me, I'll never forget it. I have been thinking about the mothers of the hijackers and praying over them. What made their sons do this? What insanity drove them? What violence drove them to the suicidal violence? Imagine the suffering of the families and what they're going through before all this and now. Then she looked me in the eye and said, I only feel compassion for everyone there. So bombing Afghanistan will never bring my son back, Joan.

31:40It will only increase my grief. I thought she was one of the greatest saints I've ever known. How did she do that? She had been living a very faithful life. I've told her story to hundreds of thousands of people in the years since and I think she's a model for all of us to have compassion on everyone in every scenario. As you know and if you've read my books, what happened for me was my thinking was I'm teaching compassion to the other chaplains and trying to show it here to the neighbors, literally my neighbors who were grieving. But I wanted to show compassion and broad. I was taught love your neighbor and love your enemies. And so with my friends, I began coordinating the demonstrations in Times Square and Union Square against the impending bombing of Afghanistan and then the war in Afghanistan.

32:43And that was very powerful. We would stand out with thousands of people and people went crazy and were denouncing us. How could you be so unpatriotic and all? But for me, you know, the whole experience was standing at ground zero or just being in New York City in the peace vigil. For being with the family members, it was like either I was with, I was John at the foot of the cross comforting Mary over the death of Jesus on the cross like I felt that or being with Jesus as he approaches Jerusalem and breaks down Sabin saying, if only you had known the things that make for peace but at last it is hidden from your eyes and there will be not a stone left unturned. You know, he describes the destruction of Jerusalem because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.

33:45I think for the rest of my life with my friends, what was speaking out against the insanity of bombing Afghanistan and then two years later bombing Iraq as if what, that's going to bring back the loved ones or bring us revenge and we all know that those two countries had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks. They were all coordinated out of Saudi Arabia. And if you read Osama bin Blade and statements as I did during those days, you could say, well, why did they do that? Well, he says because of the U.S. occupation in Palestine and the sanctions on Iraq since the first Iraq war through the 1990s, which according to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the Vatican killed over half a million children under age five in Iraq, just the sanctions. And that's why I went to Iraq in 1999, invited all the Nobel Peace Prize winners to come

34:48with me. We were going to investigate what the UN said and we were the highest level delegation and sure enough, I met thousands of Iraqis who were subsequently killed, including the whole UN delegation. They were all killed later in 2003. Most of my hosts were killed. But we went to the hospitals on the doctors showed us, we have no medicines anymore because of the blockade. You cut off food and medicine to Iraq. It was so insane. And well, all of that's continued to today. 25 years later, we continued now to fund genocide in Palestine. We wage terrible war in Iraq, but also Afghanistan. And last year, bomb nine countries. As I record this, we're bombing Iran and continuing the funding of the war on Palestinians and Lebanon, but also other wars and violence and Syria and Congo. And South Sudan and so many other places.

35:51You know, we're just asking for it because war doesn't work. That's why Jesus said, you've heard an eye for an eye, but it didn't work. Gandhi said it just makes the whole world blind. But I say to you, offer no violent resistance to one who does evil. That's why my friend Archbishop Tutu, I never forgot. And that month of October, 2001, he said in one of his speeches, what would have happened if after September 11th, the United States, instead of all the money that went into one fighter bomber used on Afghanistan? If we had spent that money for the children of Afghanistan, with the same money for one fighter bomber, Tutu said you could have built 3,000 schools in Afghanistan, which would have won over not only the people of Afghanistan, but the whole Muslim world and the whole world. But instead, we went insane with violence.

36:56Why? To steal their oil, to build more weapons for the weapons, manufacturers who are growing rich off of these wars and just to show our imperial strength and so forth and so on. I could go on and on about that. And all of that is going to come back and haunt us and come back and land on us. Because as Jesus said, you reap what you sow. In those days, I remember I wrote an open letter to George W. Bush, maybe I'll end with this. It was kind of went viral on the internet. And this is kind of the way I feel today. I ask you to stop immediately the bombing of Afghanistan, to stop your preparation for all other wars, to cut the Pentagon's budget, to lift the sanctions on Iraq and US military

37:59aid to Israel, stop US support for the occupation of the Palestinians, lift the entire third world debt, dismantle every one of our nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, abandon the Star Wars Missile Shield program, join the World Court, obey international law and close all our own terrorist training camps, beginning with Fort Benning School of Americas. He had declared the war on terror, but war can't end terrorism because war is terrorism. And I kept writing, the only solution to these international crises is to overcome evil with goodness, not further evil. It means we need to win the world over with non-violent love. We need to change the direction of our country, feed every starving child and refugee in the planet, end poverty at home in abroad, stop all the injustices in military aid, create a new non-violent foreign policy that will serve humanity and support UN-based non-violent

38:59international peace-making teams. Violence is not only immoral and illegal, it's just downright impractical. Your global violence, George W. Bush and all the President's sins is doomed to fail and to lead to further suffering because it will only stir up further hostility against us. In the name of the God of Peace and Compassion, please reverse your destructive course and start us in a new direction toward a lasting peace with justice for all people on the planet. I want you to know that millions of us around the country will continue to oppose your policies and wars. I speak to tens of thousands of students and churchgoers each year and I find very little support for your war. We will continue to pray for peace, march for peace, demonstrate for peace, speak out for peace, work for peace, propose peace and resist your determined opposition to peace.

40:00You could save us all a lot of trouble and further loss of life around the world by taking high ground, adopting this vision of non-violence, exercising true moral leadership and leading us in a better direction toward a new world without war and the roots of war, starvation, poverty, oppression and justice. This is the only way to guarantee no more terrorist attacks and that way you will help us offer future generations a life of peace. Needless to say, I never heard from George W. Bush, but I did hear from Obama and later Joe Biden and Clinton. Because of the publicity around me working for both the families of the victims of 9-11 and the victims of our 9-11ish attacks on the people of Afghanistan, I was called in

41:01by the Jesuit provincial and he just yelled at me. What do you know about peace? Who do you think you are? And I was kicked out of New York a few months later. And so I moved to New Mexico, the poorest place in the country and took up the campaign of peace and here I am today. Well everybody, thank you so much for listening to my story and this episode of the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast. And I just encourage all of us to learn from 9-11 and to carry on the work of speaking out and resisting the insanity of war and injustice and following the nonviolent Jesus and doing what you can for a more peaceful nonviolent world. You can hear more podcasts and find other upcoming Zoom programs at beattitudescenter.org and sign up to receive our free blast with news about upcoming podcasts and zooms. Please tell your friends and coworkers about this podcast and I hope you all get my new

42:03book which has all my latest thoughts about all of this and what I continue to learn. Universal love, the practice of surrendering everything to the God of peace. If you're on the sub-stack you can look me up at Father John Deere. May the God of peace bless us all. May we all go forward as peacemakers and do what we can to welcome God's reign of peace. See you next time.