Ring the Bells of Peace

I get emails from someone/something called EnlightenNext. I have to confess that I don't always bother opening them but tonight something told me to read the email and I'm glad I did. I've posted the song and the text of the email.

Salman Ahmad, guitarist and lead singer of the popular Pakistani rock band Junoon, is a musician on a mission to promote world peace and give a more progressive face to Islam. We first discovered his work when we saw his 2003 documentary film, The Rock Star and the Mullahs, in which he boldly squared off with fundamentalists in his native Pakistan who deemed his music haram, or forbidden, according to Islamic law. (You can read our article about him here and watch the talk he gave at one of our EnlightenNext centers here.) Now Ahmad has teamed up with Grammy Award–winning artist Melissa Etheridge to record a song for this holiday season titled “Ring the Bells,” which he describes as “a cry for peace and change in a world of war and chaos.” In collaboration with Deepak Chopra's Alliance for a New Humanity, Ahmad and Etheridge have dedicated this Sunday, December 21, as a day for people around the world to take a meditative moment to put the song's title into action.

Hope we can send good thoughts out to the Universe and ring our bells on Sunday at noon. Maybe some of you who are church goers can enlist your Congregations to participate as well.

Peace!