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The INVITATION ... an emperience in the Peace Dome |
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The Nobel Peace Prize Laureates you meet in The INVITATION One Sunday afternoon during the winter of 1949, a curious young black divinity student traveled to Philadelphia to hear a lecture about Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu religious leader in India who had been assassinated the year before. Gandhi led the longtime movement for India’s independence from Great Britian and he had done so by preaching a philosophy of nonviolent defiance which he called “satyagraha.” Gandhi believed that the power of love was greater than the power of hate, and that love could be used to changed people’s ideas and actions. The young divinity student was impressed by Gandhi’s concept. Six years it inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. to launch his nonviolent crusade against racial segregation in America, a crusade which eventually earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1964, at the age of 35, King became the youngest person to receive the peace prize. In four years, he -— like his spiritual mentor Gandhi — fell to an assassin’s bullet. |
Martin Luther King, Jr. This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man's scientific and technological progress. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers. ©1964 The Nobel Foundation, reprinted with permission |
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Ask how your school or organization can preform The Invitation. Email us at peace@som.org for details |
See the College of Metaphysics performance of
available on dvd |
