We once again cross the precipice into another year that, as each new day, offers new hope, new opportunity, and new challenges. Many tend to look back over the previous year (or years) in an attempt to avoid similar mistakes, to memorialize certain special moments and/ or events and historically upon those among us, great and small, who failed to enter the New Year with us. Regardless, we must learn to live more for THIS DAY!
“Look to this day,” begins one of my many memorizations that I fail to draw adequately upon. “For every today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness; and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, I say, to this day!”
Increasingly challenging becomes the ability to keep one’s head and hopes high amid the perpetual magnification and glorification of bad and depressing news from personal family to world family scale. And Oh, the ever increasing numbers and depths of the back-to-back horror scenes and stories repeatedly shown on prime-time television and big movie screens promoted as “positively entertaining”– we keep marveling at how society is getting psychologically and spiritually sicker and sicker.
How can we on equal massive scale be reminded (through entertainment),“There are no great people in this world– only great challenges which ordinary people arise to meet.”
This same theory applies when referring to those with courage generally perceived as strong and fearless. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather varying degrees of temporary conquest over it. These extraordinary challenges often occur extemporaneously and the ordinary person or persons who happen to be closest at hand instinctively respond selflessly to the great challenge according to previously acquired attitudes and values.
In our prayers in common for peace throughout this special season, may we add those that will inspire us to become instruments of that peace as so eloquently and succinctly stated centuries ago by St. Francis of Assisi: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow Love (seeking no credit for nor benefit there from); Where there is injury, Pardon; where there is doubt, Faith; where there is despair, Hope; where there is darkness, Light; where there is sadness, Joy! Oh, Divine master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to Console, to be understood as to Understand; to be loved as to Love! For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is only in dying that we are born to Eternal Life!”
Therefore as we enter another New Year with current crisis applicable only to the exigencies of this day, we may do well to consider the wisdom of new messages from a new Messenger for a new maturity of mankind. Among them:
“It will not be possible in the future for men to amass great fortunes by the labors of others. The rich will willingly divide. They will come to this gradually, naturally, by their own volition! It will never be accomplished by (bitter rivalry), war and bloodshed.
True civilization will unfurl its banner in the mid-most heart of the world whenever a certain number of its distinguished and high-minded sovereigns–the shining exemplars of devotion and determination–shall, for the good and happiness of all mankind, arise, with firm resolve and clear vision, to establish the Cause of Universal Peace.” – Baha’i Scriptures (investigate!)
