On the Baha'i Festival of the Covenant: The impulse towards unity

Last night Bonita and I went to our community's Day of the Covenant celebration. Our Spiritual Assembly members participated in the election of the Regional Baha'i Council. And then we all watched a DVD on the Hands of the Cause. How appropriate! How very wonderful! -gw

"Baha'i Festival of the Covenant," Uploaded on November 26, 2007 by Dr Phil on flickr
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

What does it mean to be a Baha'i? It's shared meanings, for one. -gw

To be a member of a religion is to share its meanings, its hierarchy of values and its ordering of realities. For Baha'is, the meaning that is imposed upon the world consists of a belief that, in the present state of the world, the only salvation for humanity is to move on to the next stage of its social development, the unity of humankind and the emergence of a single global order: ‘The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens’ (Baha'u'llah, 1983, p. 250). For this order to emerge, an individual's source of identity has to change from a solely national, racial, religious or ethnic one to a global one. Hence the strong impulse in the Baha'i community towards unity. A religion that claims to be trying to unite the world cannot be effective or credible if it is not itself united.

From "Marginality and apostasy in the Baha'i community" by Moojan Momen
Religion Volume 37, Issue 3, September 2007, Pages 187-209