Missing In Action?

By Jim Kirwan
5-29-14

Life ~Existence

An excerpt from “World’s Most Powerful Speech”

Martin Sheen on ‘WE DAY’ in Vancouver 2010

9min 07sec VIDEO

“… The three most important needs of every human being on earth are not food clothing or shelter, as much as the need for freedom justice and healing.

It is the gross inequality of food clothing and shelter that divides us and the absolute necessity for freedom justice and healing that unites us. Clearly we need a far more realistic understanding of who we are and why we’re here, in order to have an honest relationship with each other…

…Whether we chose to acknowledge it or not we are all responsible for each other and the world: Which is exactly the way it is because consciously or unconsciously we have made it so. And while none of us made any of the rules that govern the universe: We do make all the rules that govern our own hearts.

And we are all beneficiaries of those many heroic strangers that have gone before us, over the centuries, who assure us that the world is still a wonderful and safe place despite our fears.

And we’re not asked to do great things: We’re asked to all things with great care!

Such an ideal is rare in a culture of so many compromised values and so much cynicism: A culture that all too often knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And yet there remains a very real and mysterious yearning deep within every human heart that compels us to reach outside ourselves and help others ­ for our own sake!

This yearning, this yearning is a true manifestation of our true selves. And it can lead to the very first small conscious acts of personal courage, which can bring rejection from the crowd and satisfaction from the heart. But this yearning can also be very costly as well. If it were not so, we’d be left to question its value.

And this above all: One heart, with courage, is a majority!

Over the entire history of the world, every ‘truth’ started as a blasphemy! And no one has ever made a contribution of any real worth without self-sacrifice, personal sufferings and sometimes even death.

The Irish tell a story of a man who came to the gates of Heaven and asked to be let in. Saint Peter said, "Of course, show us your scars.” The man said: “I have no scars.” Saint Peter says. “What a pity: Was there nothing worth fighting for?”

My fondest wish for every one of you young people gathered here today, is that you will find something in your life ‘worth fighting for’ because when you do ­ you will have discovered a way to unite the will of the spirit to the work of the flesh: And all of humanity will have discovered fire, for the second time!

It is my profound wish that the light from that fire will illuminate your path to that place where the heart is without fear: And the head is held high where the knowledge is free. Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls where words come out from the depths of truth and tireless striving stretching its arms toward perfection: Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sands of dead habit—where the mind is led forward by deed into the ever widening thought and action—into that heaven of Freedom!

Let us all awake.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzgVdX7FtS8

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net