With the setting of the sum on March 20, the first day of spring, Baha’is around the world will gather to break the 19-day fast and celebrate the beginning of a new year (Naw-Ruz).
Locally the Roanoke Baha’i Community will gather for the joyous Feast of Baha’i (Splendor) the first of the 19-month Baha’i calendar year. The feast is traditionally followed by the Naw-Ruz celebration, one that the public can share. This festive occasion includes music, games, dancing and food from different international cuisines. All my not speak the same language but all clearly communicate through the universal language of love.
In man’s infancy, love of family, tribe or other community and fear of God (or Spirits) reigned supreme. As mankind matured, acquiring increased knowledge and material things that love shifted toward self-sufficiency, selfishness and greed. The more we acquire, the less we are willing to share and higher and more multiple the walls and fences of exclusion we build alienating us eventually even from family, close friends and loved ones.
I shall never forget listening to an interview with a famous conductor of a world-renowned symphony orchestra several years ago who, when asked what he considered the saddest word in the English language, answered without hesitate, “exclusion.” I thought the question odd enough and the answer even stranger from a man whose life and career had been in an exclusive musical profession. Such exclusion has continued to manifest it self throughout the maturation of mankind until it has become a primary source of division, competition and subsequent rivalry, none of which is conducive to happy and peaceful cohabitation.
Exclusion begets prejudice and vice versa. All the wars of human history have been and continue to be the result of some form of prejudice or exclusion that emanates from or fuels and intensifies love of wrong things as land, that belongs to no man or exclusively to any particular people; religious interpretation, the biggest divider of mankind along with society’s innumerable religious, political, social, academic, fraternal and other systems of hierarchy.
Mere knowledge of history’s fruitless wars and charted paths down dead-end streets is insufficient in itself. In the impending bloom of today’s modern warfare, comes the loud trumpet blat through the Baha’i Holy Writing:
“The Divine Springtime is come!… O friends! It behoveth you to refresh and revive your souls through the gracious favors that in this Divine, this soul-stirring Springtime, are being showered upon you. The Day Star of His great glory had shed its radiance upon you, and the clouds of His limitless grace have overshadowed you. How high the reward of him and that had not deprived himself of so great a bounty, nor failed to recognize the beauty of his Best Loved in this, His new attire.”
Investigate!
