Inspired by Eid al-Adha

Feasts are but oases in the deserts of life, where souls take breath from the scorching heat of the days. Brief moments, measured against the length of the ages, and great ones, measured by the fragrance and the intimate whisperings they carry.

For in these joyous oases, fellow-feeling has an ample share of drinking from the abundant springs of hearts — that fellow-feeling which quenches the sharpness of hatreds, enjoins brotherhood and sincerity, and leads to the love that purifies souls.

And the feast we have just bidden farewell — the feast of sacrifice, charity, and brotherhood — has the greatest effect upon souls that are stirred by the fragrance of meanings and lit by the light of its radiant stars. In it lies the greatest symbol of humanity's sacrificed ones — those who denied themselves and were apostles of righteousness and goodness.

O sacrifices of truth, how sweet your fragrance! The brow of humanity has been crowned with the splendor of your spirits, and in the heights of immortality there glitter shooting stars from the devotion of your hearts, which gave themselves with the perfumes of the truth that never perishes.

Indeed, he who believed life to be mere matter has gone astray; in its essence there is a deep and total meaning, of which the feasts carry all that is high and sublime. And he who claimed that man is a body in which ambitions seethe and passions contend has been proven wrong; rather he has a spirit that rises and a mind that soars. He is forces that boil and roar upon the shores of the days. He is great when he believes in truth and keeps within its bounds; and how wretched he is when these forces rush headlong toward evil and sin.

We see this man provoked by meanings, driven by ideals into imitation, borrowing, and acquisition without end. And what we fear most is to see the ideals that ought to be followed, toward which the eyes of peoples are raised, concealing within them a deviation or a crookedness that individuals do not discern and communities do not sense. Graver still in consequence for people is that they should discern what is in one another's souls, and scatter ashes over the flicker of a fire blazing up from a revolt that devours and preys.

But why go far afield? Let us ask: do the sacrificed ones who have passed across the stage of existence find among us any who appreciate their merits — we who have let ourselves forget their example in the disinterested struggle for truth?

Do we not see the crowds raging for self-aggrandizement, scattered by hatreds, wandering in the paths of gain, sunk in the mires of greed? Do we not see people's ever fiercer rush toward the flame of self-interest, veiling themselves with every kind of device and excuse, and drawing curtains over a frightful voracity that sweeps away uprightness and justice, and carries off mercy and charity? Until we have lost trust in our dealings with one another, doubt and anxiety have spread through our souls, and our hearts have filled with rancor.

It behooves us, in the oases of the feasts, to free ourselves from these material bonds of ours, to stop our ears against the clamor of ambitions, and to devote our souls sincerely to God, that we may draw from the meanings of these feasts what will raise our standing in the battles of the self and win us victory in the fields of beauty and perfection.

And if, at these blessed reminders, we do not look back at what our hands have wrought and what our souls contain, and if we do not sound the depths of events with our minds, we shall never wake to our reality, nor shall we be able to distinguish between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness, in our qualities and our customs, in our masses and among our individuals, in our minds and in the depths of our spirits.

Let us think freely, and work sincerely, and breathe in, from the fragrance of the feast that has passed, what it scattered through the air of the perfumes of sublimity, so that the powers of man within us may be allowed to well up with goodness, and water the thirsting deserts that stretch along the shores of time.