This morning, a thousand delegates from some 150 countries to the International Baha’i Convention in Haifa, Israel, stood in silence as sirens sounded outside the Convention Centre to honour Holocaust Memorial Day. After this powerfully solemn and moving period, a delegate from Benin, who had been speaking when the sirens sounded, ended his contribution with a song that the Baha’is in his cluster had written as a way of teaching basic facts about the Faith.

In a moment the whole Convention was singing. Wonderful!

We’ve heard some wonderfully inspiring stories from Baha’i communities in Kiribati, Samoa, Senegal, India, UK, and many other countries. The stories are of learning, success, struggle. Almost 17,000 people becoming Baha’is in one year in India. Increasing declarations of faith from 2 or 3 per year to 20 during the Fast last in Senegal.

I had intended yesterday to provide this link to the Baha’i World News story with the names of the newly elected members of the Universal House of Justice, but my iPod battery ran out.

Right now I’m sitting outside instead of being in the session, trying to digest a good lunch and a fascinating conversation with a Baha’i who is both a cosmologist and a scholar of the Writings in Persian and Arabic. We talked in great depth (on his side at least) about some of what the Writings say about science and religion and the nature of revelation as a rational and non-arbitrary process. No time or capacity to write about this now, though.

Technorati Tags: Bahai, Baha’i, Holocaust, Israel, International Convention, science, religion