For many, the life transforming experience comes more quickly. In a magazine, Roger Rosenblatt tells this story: "I was being given a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum by its director, who had survived the bombing as a 13-year-old schoolboy. Translating for me was a woman in her mid-20s, who was born in Hiroshima, though long after August 6, 1945.

"As we walked along the exhibits, the museum director was talking about the effects of the bomb that August day: how his schoolroom had been flattened like a cardboard house, how he had trudged through streets in flames, over bodies, past children crying for their mothers. His narrative was intensified by the photograph of shadows on a bridge that remained after the people who made them had been obliterated. Suddenly the translation stopped- I looked from the director to my translator.

The young woman was weeping and gasping so frantically I thought she would faint. 'Oh,' she said as last, 'Oh, I'm so ashamed, referring to her loss of composure, but I never really knew about the war before this week. Of course I knew, but I did not know- The pain, the suffering. This is new to me.'

"Whenever I think of Hiroshima, I do not picture the bomb, but rather that young woman translator, trembling in tears, and I saw war for this first time in my life. The poet Shelley wrote, We must learn to imagine what we know. "

An Ancient Shinto prayer says: "I pray that the wind will soon puff away the clouds which hang like rocks on the mountaintops." Fifty years after the Atornic Bomb fell on Hiroshima, we have many reasons for saying that prayer. Our prayers go to the People of Bosnia and Croatia. We pray that somehow the bloodshed will end and they will move to Peace. We pray for all those who suffer violence and oppression throughout the world: in Africa, in Israel, in Russia, in Burma. And we pray for those who suffer violence here, in our land: for murdered children and their families. We pray for all who live in fear and mistrust William Faulkner spoke for us when he said in his Noble Prize address: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it, There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?"

Fifty years after the bomb, we sense in the words of Robert Jay Lifton, that "we are all survivors of Hiroshima." We are all Atomic Bomb Victims: our sense of life transformed by the Bomb. For centuries, humans have dreamed of immortality through monuments, or children, or poetry or music. With the existence of Atomic Bombs, when we symbolically dial the future, sometimes the answer comes back, "Sorry you have been cut off." There may be no future.

Some react by fleeing to dreams of a "rapture" in which the good people will be taken up to heaven. I prefer the motto of Christian Aid, "life before death. Millions have turned to ecology: the awareness of the fragileness of lift makes us appreciate the beauty of nature. In preserving forests or flowers, we are preserving something of ourselves. The planet is our larger self.

The evening of August 6th each year, a million people make a pilgrimage. A million paper lanterns are placed in streams around the world. The stated purpose is to pray for the souls of those who died on August 6th at Hiroshima, or on August 9th at Nagasaki. But for those of us who light the candies and place the lanterns on the water, the prayer is also for ourselves. Like those who survived the bombs, we pray to overcome the psychic numbing" that keeps us from life. We pray to acknowledge the survivor guilt" we feel, that we are alive while our friends and loved ones are dead.

The survivors rebuilt Hiroshima as a "City of Peace", with a "Peace Park" in the center. On the central monument which marks ground zero for the bomb, they wrote, "Rest In Peace. The mistake shall not be repeated." And the rusting atomic dome was left as a symbol, not to be forgotten.

Would the war have ended as quickly if the bomb had not been dropped? This debate will continue- But from the lessons of two bombs we know the risk of Atomic Warfare is a nightmare that can destroy earth and reduce us all to dust and shadows- All the science from Newton to Einstein flowed to produce August 6, 1945. We moved from Newtonian Certainty to "Chaos Theory" and knowledge of "M.A.D. - Mutually Assured Destruction."

We fear we, or our children, may be victims or survivors of some future Holocaust. With candies and paper cranes, we come to renew connection with the music of our hearts. What distant drummer do we hear? Do we hear the drums of hope or of some demonic dream that would lead us to destruction? Are our lives being frustrated by some ancient grief, some ancient unhealed wound?

Ancient unhealed wounds come back in Bosnia and Korea today. "And the sins of the parents are visited upon the children until the utmost generation." Ancient unhealed wounds fragment Christianity. We are isolated from Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Jew.

Recently, I read the report of an Interfaith service at Auschwitz, There were 30 Buddhist monks and nuns from Japan along with Christians and Jews. At the end of the service, one of the Japanese monks gave each of the people there ten beautifully folded origami paper "peace cranes-" Across the world the love of the survivors was reaching out.

The story of the service ended with these words, "The holiest place on earth is where ancient hatred becomes a present love. In every land and in every heart, may ancient hatred become present love.