A Remembrance Renewed

O Birthday of the Messenger! You are truth in the heart of life, restoring the surge of light to the deserts of consciences, among their barren grains of sand, far from the springs of generosity and love, of justice and equality.

Had the barrenness of consciences gone so far that it required the dye of purple to be delivered from the rigidity of death and the drought of rancor? O call of the blood — how wondrous its effect on the progress of men!

O Birthday of the Messenger, you are the trembling of lips that move in prayer to God Almighty, asking mercy for infant humanity, that it may be able to crawl along its long road.

And what is prayer but sincerity, selflessness, and self-denial — a response to the call of absolute good?

And what is prayer but a power beyond the reach of the senses, farther than the stretch of the visible, before which insight opens — fragrant with the perfume of heavenly inspiration — upon truth in the theaters of dreams and the unknown wilds of illusions?

O glorious remembrance — O return of the gleam of glory into the folds of souls, whisper of reverence to God upon the lips of the spirit in the hearing of conscience — we hoped, in your renewal, for a breath of goodness for our hearts, to dispel the gloom that has overtaken us. May the fingers of evil be palsied — they have played in every field, even the fields of religion and faith.

For behold, in our hearts there is a blazing anguish and a black, choking grief.

Was it necessary — for the film that had settled over hearts, fettering them and darkening them — that hearts should burn in their passion and their life before that thick membrane could be torn away?

Alas for the victims! Waves of zeal toyed with them, roaring without awareness, charging without wisdom... and the victims were gone — some to the darkness of the graves, and some to the darkness of helplessness and despair. And we said: fate has willed it. As we say in every predicament we fashion with our own hands and whose causes we contrive by our own heedlessness.

Mercy, then, for the victims, and patience for our hearts, and a little of Your light, O my Lord, to illumine our souls with wisdom, strength, and steadfastness — that we may take from the remembrance of the birth of Your great Prophet, each time it is renewed, an ember of the high ideals that dwell in faith in Your divinity: the sacred ideals of goodness that rise above hatreds and crown hearts with all-embracing love.

For faith has never joined with malice, nor selflessness with greed, nor continence with selfishness.

No messenger was ever sent but as a mercy from God and a guidance for men to the truth — to righteousness, cooperation, and beneficence, to those virtues which the pen of the word falls short of portraying, and which are too great for the bounds of definition and delimitation.

Shall we not, then, take a lesson from our victims! — and learn to float above rancors, and train ourselves in the art of swimming in the flood of life: the art of struggle and of contending with the sweeping current, of battling in the surge of crises and calamities, of prudence in uprooting the mines of hardship before setting out. All these are the ways of victory and of escaping drowning.

And perhaps in the shudder of our souls at the horror of the catastrophe there is an awakening to truths, and a revival of devotion to the worship of God alone — without idols and illusions, without exaggeration, playacting, and confusion, without exploitation and greed. Then a touch of His pure, immaculate radiance will brush our spirits, granting them awareness and wisdom, and enfolding them in security, love, and peace.