One Common Faith | Page 5

impossible to exaggerate, for example, the transformative impact on global consciousness that has resulted from mass travel on an international scale. Greater still have been the consequences of the enormous migrations that the world has witnessed during the century and a half since the Báb declared His mission. Millions of refugees fleeing from persecution have swept like tidal waves back and forth across the European, African and Asiatic continents, particularly. Amid the suffering such turmoil has caused, one perceives the progressive integration of the world's races and cultures as the citizenry of a single global homeland. As a result, people of every background have been exposed to the cultures and norms of others about whom their forefathers knew little or nothing, exciting a search for meaning that cannot be evaded.
It is impossible to imagine how different the history of the past century and a half would have been had any of the leading arbiters of world affairs addressed by Bahá'u'lláh spared time for reflection on a conception of reality supported by the moral credentials of its Author, moral credentials of the kind they professed to hold in the highest regard. What is unmistakable to a Bahá'í is that, despite such failure, the transformations announced in Bahá'u'lláh's message are resistlessly accomplishing themselves. Through shared discoveries and shared travails, peoples of diverse cultures are brought face to face with the common humanity lying just beneath the surface of imagined differences of identity. Whether stubbornly opposed in some societies or welcomed elsewhere as a release from meaningless and suffocating limitations, the sense that the earth's inhabitants are indeed "the leaves of one tree"(4) is slowly becoming the standard by which humanity's collective efforts are now judged.
Loss of faith in the certainties of materialism and the progressive globalizing of human experience reinforce one another in the longing they inspire for understanding about the purpose of existence. Basic values are challenged; parochial attachments are surrendered; once unthinkable demands are accepted. It is this universal upheaval, Bahá'u'lláh explains, for which the scriptures of past religions employed the imagery of "the Day of Resurrection": "The shout hath been raised, and the people have come forth from their graves, and arising, are gazing around them."(5) Beneath all of the dislocation and suffering, the process is essentially a spiritual one: "The breeze of the All-Merciful hath wafted, and the souls have been quickened in the tombs of their bodies."(6)

"Throughout history, the primary agents of spiritual development have..."
Throughout history, the primary agents of spiritual development have been the great religions. For the majority of the earth's people, the scriptures of each of these systems of belief have served, in Bahá'u'lláh's words, as "the City of God",(7) a source of a knowledge that totally embraces consciousness, one so compelling as to endow the sincere with "a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, and a new mind".(8) A vast literature, to which all religious cultures have contributed, records the experience of transcendence reported by generations of seekers. Down the millennia, the lives of those who responded to intimations of the Divine have inspired breathtaking achievements in music, architecture, and the other arts, endlessly replicating the soul's experience for millions of their fellow believers. No other force in existence has been able to elicit from people comparable qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice and self-discipline. At the social level, the resulting moral principles have repeatedly translated themselves into universal codes of law, regulating and elevating human relationships. Viewed in perspective, the major religions emerge as the primary driving forces of the civilizing process. To argue otherwise is surely to ignore the evidence of history.
Why, then, does this immensely rich heritage not serve as the central stage for today's reawakening of spiritual quest? On the periphery, earnest attempts are being made to reformulate the teachings that gave rise to the respective faiths, in the hope of imbuing them with new appeal, but the greater part of the search for meaning is diffused, individualistic and incoherent in character. The scriptures have not changed; the moral principles they contain have lost none of their validity. No one who sincerely poses questions to Heaven, if he persists, will fail to detect an answering voice in the Psalms or in the Upanishads. Anyone with some intimation of the Reality that transcends this material one will be touched to the heart by the words in which Jesus or Buddha speaks so intimately of it. The Qur'án's apocalyptic visions continue to provide compelling assurance to its readers that the realization of justice is central to the Divine purpose. Nor, in their essential features, do the lives of heroes and saints seem any less meaningful than they did when those lives were lived centuries ago. For many religious people, therefore, the most painful aspect of the current crisis of civilization is