"We have stopped being a producer society," I said to Indira. "We've become an enslaver society. We have become importers. We steal from the poor nations of the world. We offer them our essentially worthless paper, and in return they give us their life by way of the products they produce for us, which we require for our living, but which we no longer care to produce for ourselves. Since I couldn't possibly give you an essentially stolen product as a gift, I found the range of selection rather narrowed."

      Against this background I presented my gift in the form of a postcard produced on homemade paper, inscribed by a local artist from North Carolina, signed by me with the simple inscription, "Have a happy forever Indira-day!"

      She looked at the present.

      "Isn't it your birthday today?" I asked.

      "Fred told you about that?" she said and began to smile. Then she looked at the card again. "That's the best that the mighty USA could produce," she said and began to laugh.

      "That's more deeply American than apple pie," I answered. "It represents America's brightest epoch, which was also the brightest epoch of peace right across the world in modern times. All the times before this epoch in which the postcard message is rooted, and the times after this epoch, were times of disaster for mankind. This epoch alone, which the message on the card relates to, was an epoch of peace. It was a profound epoch of peace, the greatest ever, which coincides with the spiritual pioneering work of a woman in New England by the name of Mary. Mary has put the Principle of Universal Love on the map with a power that no one has come even close to matching for 2000 years. She understood this principle to such an extend that a woman, who had been crippled with partial paralysis, had been healed in the space of a single moment by the power of that New England woman's profound outflow of love. It happened when her carriage crossed the crippled woman's path and the two women 'met' silently in that moment of her passing by."

      I told Indira the entire story, the one that Ross had discovered in his research among other similar stories. I also told her that this spiritual pioneer's profound universal love had put on the table a vastly higher image of humanity than the image that we commonly frame with the concepts of birth and death. I told Indira that my present to her is an "unbirthday" card. I told her that with each birthday that people celebrate around the world, they celebrate their mortality. "They celebrate their life as a timeframe stuck between two bookends, one is called birth and the other is called death. People count their years of life and then light candles according to all those years and stick them into a birthday cake. Once this is done the birthday person is summoned, who then ceremoniously blows all the candles out."

      I pointed out that this nagging sense of mortality, which people celebrate on their birthday, is literally stealing their life. "Shouldn't we rather celebrate the achievements of our life and with them our immortality as human beings? Our achievements come to light in our commitment to uplift the world in an enduring fashion. It is this profound sense of our enduring quality, the immortality of our humanity, which forms the substance that is symbolized by the Indira-day. This timeless substance unfolds every day of your life, Indira, and makes each day your forever day."

      "Do you want to scrap the birthday cake?" Indira said and smiled.

      "Of course not. Let's have the cake, but keep the candles lit and let each guest receive a burning candle to celebrate a life that is burning brightly, a life which has touched them all and keeps on doing that. The candle should keep burning until the cake is fully eaten and the truth is dawning brighter in consciousness that we are all one people and that civilization is a measure of our commitment to enrich one-another's life. Wouldn't that be more appropriate for a birthday ceremony? It would touch on the truth, and with it strengthen and widen the bond to one-another. But our small marriage concept doesn't allow that. It forces us to blow the candles out before we give the cake away. Of course the world's traditional wedding cake has no candles on it at all."

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche