Memorial Day observances held throughout the nation over the past weekend ranged from military services honoring our nation’s fallen veterans, for which the holiday originated, to more personal family gatherings and backyard picnics as high gas prices drastically reduced the number of travelers who would ordinarily take advantage of the first holiday of the warm Spring season following Easter.
With the steadily increasing violence and devastation of spring tornados, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc, the observance of Memorial Day is taking on new dimensions in an attempt to heal a broader range of hurting and grief and conquer an ever-widening circle of fear.
“The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction”, we read from the Baha’i pamphlet Beyond National Sovereignty, “and the strife that divideth and afflicteth the human race is daily increasing. The signs of convulsions and chaos (both natural and societal) can now be discerned, in as much as the prevailing order appeareth to be lamentably defective… The spread of terrorism redefines war, disrupting social stability. How does a nation strike back when the enemy is not another nation but a formless group that blends into the population?
Certainly not by attacking the nations within which such malignancies are festering–our own being among them.
America, on the other hand, is specifically singled out in the Baha’i sacred writings for this new era, for a critical role in the formation of this new world order. A unique role is totally inconceivable in previous religious dispensations due to the immaturity of mankind and the subsequent void of the scientific and technological development of today’s modern society. But principles alone will not independently resolve the world’s problems. A fundamental spiritual redirection is required. Not another religious redirection–God forbid–but a spiritual redirection for “Religion and Spirituality two different things,” stated one Native American in an interview from his reservation. “Religion is what you get when you’re scared to go to hell. Spirituality is what you get when you’ve been there!”
It’s been over 20 years since the Baha’i Universal House of Justice issued its Peace Statement to the Kings and rulers of the world declaring that “World Peace is not only possible, it’s inevitable! The statement further declared that these world leaders had, at that time, the option of how it would come about–whether through a consultative will or unimaginable horrors.”
Each Memorial Day we find ever-increasing numbers of religious theories, groups, and institutions that continue to divide society. Each Memorial Day also brings new records of mass destruction through social, natural, and military upheavals, each fueling the heat of its own purification process by which true spirituality inevitably comes–if by no other means.
