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More on Community-Building

Posted by :James Howden On : September 14, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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(This piece is a sequel, not that anybody asked for one, to my September 4 musings about community. The above title should not be confused with moron community-building, which has more to do with what results when, smart though we be, we design our individual and collective lives without the time or the space for things that have sustained and enriched us since we lived in caves, igloos and mud huts. Breathe, brother. Breathe. Some of these simple things appear as suggestions below.)

After last week’s mutterings about air conditioners and the sharing of neighbourhoods with strangers, I promised to get positive. So what follows is a list of suggestions I’ve borrowed from a group called Imagine Ottawa, whose prescriptions target this particular city but are easily applicable to any collection of homes and businesses and play places. I’ve had their list on my bulletin board since Earth Day last April, and offer it in CAPITAL LETTERS. I’m not shouting at you; I’m just highlighting some fine ideas, and distinguishing them from my own rambling commentary, which follows in brackets. There are countless sources of sustainable-community thinking (like this one), but here’s an interesting start to thinking about how to make our neighbourhoods feel more like home:

TURN OFF YOUR TV. (Yup, first on the list. Interesting. We all know it’s a great time-sucker, and the idea is to create more time for all the other fine and interactive things that people do together. For all the hype, computers and other media that trumpet their interactivity are a pale substitute for good old-fashioned exchanges with people we know. Too many people are lonely and isolated, and most of our video/audio consumption these days is done by ourselves.  Reminds me of booze. I don’t do alcohol myself, but I’ve always thought that those who insist on never drinking alone are wise. Maybe we could start with the same rule: Don’t video solo.)

LEAVE YOUR HOUSE. (They can be fortresses of loneliness. And here’s a poet who knew: “Whoever you are: some evening take a step outside of your house which you know so well; enormous space is near…” That’s Rainer Maria Rilke. I use this slice of wisdom over and over.)

LOOK UP WHEN YOU’RE WALKING. (Much easier in the small town I grew up in, but it’s one of the mini-windmills I like to tilt at on city streets, too. People are surprised when I catch their eye and nod or pitch a hello, but they seem to like it. Anywhere, it’s good to acknowledge that other people exist. Smiles go miles. And so on.)

PLANT FLOWERS. GARDEN TOGETHER. (Community gardens are about the most radical, exciting urban development going. I want to be my neighbourhood’s Composter in Chief.)

SIT ON YOUR FRONT STEP. (Most of our houses are built backwards. Our front approaches are dominated by cars and garages. Our enjoy-the-outside zones tend to be out back, behind fences, where our neighbours get the message that they are excluded unless we make conscious efforts to invite them.)

TAKE CHILDREN TO THE PARK. PLAY TOGETHER. (It’s one of the perils of affluence: when everybody has everything – tools, sports equipment, entertainment units – nobody needs to share. One author termed it “the poverty of abundance”. I think sharing is a human need, a psychologically enriching thing. Ever noticed how many basketball hoops there are in private suburban driveways, and how seldom they are used? As great as basketball is, it’s more fun to play with others. Kids are more likely to play together when neighbours join together to make/improve/use a play zone in their court or park.)

USE YOUR LIBRARY. (Libraries are public monuments not only to learning but to a shared responsibility for education and the life of the mind. They are temples of equality and a hushed kind of social justice. And they make me crazy with literary lust.)

BUY FROM LOCAL MERCHANTS. (The car-magnet area super-mall is also a kind of temple. But it has more about it of profanity than sacredness, and the people there neither know nor care who you are. Sometimes older folks go there for walks in the winter. I call this making a communal silk purse out of a commercial sow’s ear.)

SUPPORT NEIGHBOURHOOD SCHOOLS. (In Ottawa, our cute little neighbourhood school, two blocks from our house, had been lost before we ever got to know and love it. So our Sam has been a primary school bus rider for three years. The good news? We’ve gotten to know the families who put their kids on the same bus. A bit of silver in that lining.)

FIX IT EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T BREAK IT. (Take that shopping cart back to the grocery store. Pick up a little litter.)

HAVE POTLUCK SUPPERS. ORGANIZE A STREET PARTY ON YOUR BLOCK. (Take a pizza – even better, a casserole – to the new neighbours on their moving day. My girl warmed me with a first-date home-made borscht soup when it was freezing outside. She warms our neighbours with muffins and peach crumble.)

ASK FOR HELP. OFFER YOUR SKILLS. (So often, we look to the Yellow Pages to find a skilled person who might live next door. My neighbour Kuljit put in our new windows. Bernie fixed my light. I did some nerdy editing for Andrea’s résumé and Duncan’s proposal.)

OPEN YOUR WINDOWSHADES. (Open everything.)

The worldwide Bahá’í community has been preaching planetary unity and the inevitability of global peace since the 19th century. The Bahá’ís have always been advocates of world vision, and a grounded, localized expression of that vision. Here in the first decade of a new millennium, I’m fascinated, as a participant/observer of this community’s work, that its core activities are rooted in neighbourhoods. Bring a little spirit. Learn together. Enrich the conversation where we live. Train and encourage the young to be superb neighbours AND world citizens. This is where we live.

An Eccentric Perfection

Posted by :James Howden On : August 2, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The Arabic term “Kamal” means something like perfection. Last night, I found myself among the endearingly odd and tiny Bahá’í community of – hmm, to tell the truth, I don’t even know where I was, though we had a gorgeous view of Baptiste Lake, wherever that is. We had joined them for their Feast of Kamal, a community gathering that combines prayer and study, community consultation and, in this case, gobs of ice cream and fresh fruit. There was sweetness on so many levels.

We four city-dwelling vacationers had wandered, not quite aimlessly, down country roads, through near-villages, past lovely lakes and the key turn. We were finally guided by cellphone along ever-smaller lanes to the Feast, whose size we nearly doubled, and were charmed by the beauty of the scene and the homey welcome of the host friends. Our program of writings, treating on the perfections of creation and the potential perfections in human beings, had been hand-printed and photocopied. No clergy, of course, in a Baha’i gathering, but I was touched, amused and impressed by the great care our hosts took in distributing the readings. We read aloud to the accompaniment of sunset sparkling on the lake, wind in the poplars, the occasional burst of laughter from the neighbouring patio or their kids squealing at the waterfront, and the tail-wagging, bumping visits of Max, the golden Lab next door.

It was too hot to be inside, and too beautiful to pay much heed to distraction. I’m sure we were something of a distraction to this elderly, close-knit band ourselves. But they never let us feel that way. Everyone was sweet to my seven-year-old Sam, the only person under 40 present. It was sweet to hear the words of Bahá’u’lláh in the sunlight and the wind. The raspberries and blueberries were bursting with sweetness. And the ice cream was, well, it was ice cream. Perfection, indeed, thanks to Slim and Mary Lou.

Partying with the Baha’is

Posted by :James Howden On : April 23, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The “Most Great Festival” of the world-wide community of members of the Bahá’í Faith is underway. It is called “Ridván”, an Arabic word meaning “paradise”, which is pronounced several different ways depending on one’s origins and one’s ability to get tongue and lips organized. (My Canadian mouth manages something like ‘Rez-VAWN’.) It’s a 12-day period that contains several major celebrations of the public declaration of the Faith’s founder, Bahá’u’lláh, in a Baghdad garden in 1863. His exile from Persia was just about to be extended farther to penal colonies of the Turkish Empire.

Here’s the thing that has always fascinated me about this whole celebration. Do you know how the Bahá’ís kick off their biggest annual wing-ding? They hold their local and national elections. Oh, there is feasting, song and dance and drama and generally boat-loads of roses and other beauties, but a sacred kind of voting is how it all begins. This might have been my first clue that the community was organized a little differently: they love their elections. No lie: I genuinely look forward to this process every year, because it is one that induces hope, requires prayer, deepens friendships and forms the basis of an entirely radical, completely new way of organizing human affairs. A Boston-area believer named Philippe Copeland writes about it very well here, if you’re interested. (He starts with the menu for his local gathering – mmm! – but then gets on to a good description of how one community does it, and the principles on which it’s based. Cool.)

In Ottawa, and around the world, they gathered to select the nine members of the Spiritual Assembly. There were no campaign slogans or placards, not even any nominations, for heaven’s sake. Just this, among many other calls to an electoral process that is oddly simple but incredibly profound: “Consider, without the least trace of passion and prejudice, and irrespective of any material consideration, the names of only those who can best combine the necessary qualities of unquestioned loyalty, of selfless devotion, of a well-trained mind, of recognized ability and mature experience.” So we did. And so it begins, and can you wonder why I love spring?

In the rose garden of changeless splendour – and in my home and adopted towns, and yours, too – a flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither…

The best of the season to you.

I’ll Miss You, KV. Hail and Farewell.

Posted by :James Howden On : April 14, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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My bride has been well-prepared. She woke me up Thursday with a sympathetic face.

“Sorry to say, but I think it’s a national day of mourning.”

“Oh, my. John Wooden?” I’d heard that my 96-year-old coaching hero, the great UCLA basketball guru, had been in hospital, but had left it reasonably well. She shook her head. So it must be, and was, another American icon, the shine from another facet of my mind. “Kurt Vonnegut, then?” She nodded.

[The New York Times obituary is a good one. You may also be interested in a piece I wrote on him just over a year ago. You’ll find it here.)

If I had a stronger journalistic streak in me, I’d have had this written long ago, though I did make a start in February of ’06. I hadn’t heard of the fall he’d had a few weeks ago and of his quick decline, but I’ve been waiting for this news for at least a decade. Finally. Vonnegut was 84. He’d been referring to himself as “an old fart with his Pall Malls” and hacking with every laugh for at least 20 years. He introduced his last novel, 1997’s Timequake, with a muttering prologue about being too old for this sort of thing:

“I had recently turned seventy-three. My mother made it to fifty-two, my father to seventy-two….Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was fifty-five. Enough! My architect father was sick and tired of architecture when he was fifty-five. Enough! American male novelists have done their best work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now. Have pity!”

He was tired. He was A Man Without a Country, his recent and now final non-fiction foray. He still supported social dissent, though he felt it did about as much good “as a banana cream pie”.

So how’s this for spooky? In his prologue to Timequake, Vonnegut writes of his recurrent fictional character, the utterly unknown but wildly prolific science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. (Is such productivity hopeful or insane? Determined or desperate?) Vonnegut confesses what everybody knew anyway: that Trout is his alter ego. Trout is central to the novel, and KV makes a cameo appearance himself. Timequake sees the death of Trout, just as he gives a lonely but finally hopeful description of “the special place of Earthlings in the cosmic scheme of things”. Vonnegut mentions in the prologue that Trout dies at 84, just as he did himself last Wednesday. Hi ho. And this, too: my son Will knows what Vonnegut has meant to me. He phoned me Thursday night to tell me that Kurt had died, but I already knew. I had gorged myself on obituaries, like too many dips into the chocolate box: they were sweet, and I felt a little queasy. Will also told me that he had borrowed Timequake from the library, for no particular reason that he knew. But he was dialled-in, I’ll say that for him. He finished it Wednesday night. And so it goes.

You couldn’t read a better obituary for Vonnegut than Timequake, though it is a fair bit longer even than this post. Perhaps it will make you want to read more. Slaughterhouse Five is his signature novel. 1969. Some say KV is best read young, but I’ve read it then and nearer to now, and I’ll read it again if I’m allowed to get old. It will last. My favourite might be Slapstick, in which a dishevelled but dignified old man runs for President of a post-apocalyptic America. His winning campaign slogan? LONELY NO MORE! He has invented a new method of giving Americans the sense of family and connectedness that they had long lost. Though civilization has been destroyed, they have something to live for, because the President has given them extended families to count on as they scrounge a living from the ruins of empire. A little gentleness, a little compassion, a little hope amid the decay of a dying century. That was the best of Vonnegut, over and over. And I laughed out loud a couple of times when I first read it.

But I don’t know where Kurt found the courage. (“Ah, Koort, it’s so hard,” he once quoted a German writer and friend, telling him what he already knew too well.) I don’t know, still, precisely why the tears come so fiercely when I randomly read lines this morning from Timequake, or when I dive into his essays and memoirs (Palm Sunday, say, or Fates Worse Than Death.) I think it’s the courage. Vonnegut tried to kill himself in the 80s. (“I wanted out of here!”) In the 90s, I saw him give a public lecture on literature, which at one point veered into a brief digression on smoking. “Why do people tell us that smoking will kill us? Don’t they see that this is exactly the point?” The audience, eager to laugh with the comic writer, the Shakespearean clown, the “moralist with a whoopy-cushion” — Jay McInerney, New York Times, the best review of KV I’ve read — roared with too-ready laughter. Then, eerily, instantly, suddenly self-consciously, they realized what he’d said and veered into a collective groan. Sometimes it worked the other way ‘round, too, but for me, well, maybe I’m too serious. Most often, what he said and wrote hit me as too painfully TRUE, or just too full of pain, to laugh with. He was the comic genius that made me cry, still and again.

Some commentators list Hocus Pocus as among his greatest, joining Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, or even his first, Player Piano. So I’m reading it again. I bought it in 1991 in a bus station or corner store. I was mid-divorce and devastated. Cover blurbs from the Houston Post (“hilarious”), the San Diego Tribune (“it’s a scream!”) and Playboy (“a king-sized relief valve of comedy”) prepared me not at all for what I found to be a grindingly sad bleat of human despair, all the more so for its bleak jokes and whistling-past-the-graveyard satire. Wow. What was the matter with me?

I’ve picked it up again, now that he’s gone. Fellow novelists Joseph Heller (Catch 22) and John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany is my favourite) have the front-cover blurbs, and they loved it. It doesn’t grab me yet, not in the way other Vonnegut can send me reeling with sorrow and wonder and gratitude. But it’s him, all right: characters without much depth whose comments and circumstances knock the wind out of me; quirky plots that seem to wander through banality to absurdity then suddenly coalesce in a storm of meaningful incident; a grim look at humans as a collective that is (occasionally) redeemed by the heartbreaking goodness of individuals, in spite of all. (Cruel and creepy things done “for love” made Vonnegut wary; he once – or twice – wrote that “what the world really needs is a little less love, and a lot more human decency”.)

Wedded as I am to a hopeful and consoling vision of the world, the one proclaimed and elaborated in the Bahá’í community, I wonder at his dignity and dogged belief. He saw the 20th century not as a transition and a birth pang, as I do, but as the death of civilization. He’d been right at the fiery centre of World War II, what he called “humanity’s second failed attempt to commit suicide”. He felt that the planet’s immune system was set to purge itself of our species, yet he kept on urging us to sanity and compassion, no matter what. No matter what. Such courage, such grace, even though he was convinced that the game is over. I’m humbled by his example. I hope to continue all the more to be moved by it.

I’ll finish Hocus Pocus before long. I predict that I will shake my head and mutter, “How did he do that?” Where did he find the guts to make art, and even a little merriness, out of the shrapnel of dismay? God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

And a NEW DAY to You, Too

Posted by :James Howden On : March 21, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The sun is beaming where I am, and the mercury will rise to stream-swelling temperatures tomorrow. It’s my favourite time of the year, and not only because there is the best of basketball, and days that seem brighter than they’ve ever been. It’s also a New Year in my world, and welcome to it.

The Bahá’í communities of everywhere celebrated Naw-Rúz (“New Day” in Farsí) last night with food and dance and song and holy words. “If we are not happy in this Day, for what time do we wait?” Today is a holy day on the calendar, hours of gratitude and festivity and renewed hope. (And, to be sure, of a certain kind of relief that the fasting period is over! I am, though, a big fan of the Fast.) Naw-Rúz is a Persian festival that has been celebrated for nearly 1400 years, one that is now shared by the Bahá’í Faith, youngest of the world’s religions. Bahá’ís haven’t had it easy in Iran, but last night in Ottawa Naw-Rúz was also a time of mutual respect and shared cultural richness among Muslims and Bahá’ís of Iranian extraction. So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth, said Bahá’u’lláh, and there was a fine little ray of it in Ottawa over dinner last night. (Wish I’d been there, but my Farsí is pretty limited.)

I’ll say it again: what a great time to be celebrating New Year’s! All that green, all that growing, all those immoderate northern symbols of rebirth and regeneration…

Happy Naw-Rúz!! May the spring be a season of joy for you. May your crocuses bloom.

ODY: Weeks 22-23. Stricken (Streakened?). Travellin

Posted by :James Howden On : March 7, 2007
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Category: On Second Thought

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Week 22 of Guitar for Dummy started off sweetly. Once upon a mall wander, when I should have been doing my consumptive business and getting the hell home, I hit the pseudo-intellectual indulgences store, where they sell cigarettes, chocolate bars, and more mags about more things than I could imagine. (Hold the cigs.)

Stores like this — does anyone call them “smoke shops” anymore? — with their racks upon racks of magazines always hypnotize me if I allow myself to walk in. Mercifully, I can usually pass by the sections for women, knitters, video game junkies and home repairmen. Normally, the music section is also beyond me, unless the cover features an artist I know. I’ve always loved music, but I felt outside it. Now, however, that I was a Certified Guitar Butcher, it seemed unjust that I had never bought a music mag, so it was a breakout day: would it be Guitar? Guitar One? Acoustic Guitar? Fingerstyle Guitar? Vintage Guitar? Guitar World? Old Fart Guitar Diletantte Galaxy? (I made up one of these.) I settled, for a reason I can’t remember, on Guitar Player magazine. 

It was a bit of a Looking Glass experience. It had English text, photos of (mainly) familiar things – faces, guitars, curvy women reminding me that I was an ol’ babe in BoyLand – and ubiquitous advertising, but it was a strange land where I could see and read and still not find much sense. (John Mayer (?) plays Regular Slinky and Power Slinky…okay, sure…Fasel infused classic wah cutting high gain distortion searing double-edge tone…I think that was a good thing, but it took me awhile to figure out where the verbs were…) It went on. I noticed spank-guitar shred lessons and alnico classica humbuckers. I certainly didn’t understand the local customs or dialect in this new world. (Toto, I don’t think we’re in Sports Illustrated anymore…)

I thought Guitar Player might teach me something, and that it might be good airport reading, because we were off on a family trip. We’d decided on Guadeloupe: it would be an immersion in French, and we knew two couples who had lived and worked there. Okay, and palm trees and sun. Just days ahead of our flight, I’d found that friends of these friends could lend me a guitar for the two weeks we’d be there. I stopped hunting for a titanium guitar case for baggage handlers to play catch with. Gordie would stay home and safe. 

4:30 am taxi, 6 am hop from Ottawa to Montreal, 9:30 Air Canada flight to Point à Pitre, during which we removed the many layers of clothing we’d needed for -25 degrees C. and got ready for the tropics. We arrived, met by other new friends. (So good to belong to the Bahá’í community, with friends and fellows everywhere we go.) Got settled in our gite, joined our new friends for an evening, returned weary and grateful for a clean bed at about 11 pm, and only then realized, with a foggy head but emotional air raid sirens, that my guitar connection hadn’t been at the meeting. ARGH!

I was up against it: The Streak was in jeopardy. The goal I’d set for myself had been 365 straight days at the altar of the guitar muse. The day before we left, I had played for the one hundred and fiftieth consecutive day, and looked forward to playing in the warmth of a Caribbean evening. But now it was late, in a guest house in rural Guadeloupe. (The nearest neighbours were cows and roosters.) I made a desperate stab-in-the-dark request. Good news: Yes, the proprietor said, my grandson has a guitar you could borrow! Profoundly helpless and regretful news: But he doesn’t live here. Maybe you could have it by tomorrow.

I was buried by it: The Streak was over! Hard to take, but there was no way around it. I had made a promise that in the end – well, in the middle, actually – I couldn’t keep. Shoulda brought my own guitar. Damn! Did we go to the wrong meeting, maybe? Where was Christine?… But there you go, and there I went. It was a lovely night for sleeping, and I was crispy with fatigue et un peu de chagrin. But it wasn’t the disappointment that kept waking me up – it was the damned roosters. 

Rose-Hélène was true to her word, and the grandson’s small guitar was in my hands for our first full day on the island. It took a long while to tune – at least I’d had the foresight to bring my electronic tuner, or I’d have been cooked trying to coax music out of that thing. After about six or seven minutes, it made some recognizable noises, though it had ridiculously high action, rather like the ol’ broken-necked Degas that I started with. It was a comfort to be back on the musical trail. I didn’t even try to go all heroic and somehow redeem the sins of the previous day. Jes’ played, and it felt good to not be too desperate or anal about the whole thing. Life goes on. The Streak was at One.

After two days with the baby guitar, I was back to full-size after finally meeting my connection. (Some people go to the Caribbean in search of illicit chemicals. I scored six strings.) It was a full-sized classical acoustic, dusty and out of tune but a good machine. There were little coloured circles all over the fretboard, but I didn’t really try to figure out the chord calculus. I just did my dusty old things in a bright new place: the windows of our gite were always open, so I tried to do my late-night strumming softly, thumbly. (I ended up not using a pick the whole time there.) After all, the other guests were, well, heck, some of ‘em were considerably older than ME, and dawn comes early in Gwada. (And according to several neurotic cocks, it comes over and over again, the all-night rooster version of the movie Groundhog Day…). So no psycho percussion, no windmills, no blues hollers or howls of frustration.

All was well, and then a few days later, it happened again! ANOTHER MISSED DAY. Was it the water? (Or the lack of it?) Was it bad sleeps, or hot days after Canadian ones? I’m not sure, but after a day as the loyal chauffeur and pack mule for the princess, and then some beach time and too much sun and a miserable drive home, I couldn’t friggin’ get around to the guitar because I had my head in a toilet for much of the evening. I finally was able to tumble into an exhausted sleep, and I didn’t even consider playing. Sigh. And so a new challenge came: would I still get that daily practice in without the absurd but effective spur of a long run of commitment?

My favourite practice of the trip happened a couple of days later. I sat on a rock, down near Atlantic’s edge in a town called Le Moule. For an inland lad like me, the swell and the roar of the waves is intoxicating, and I liked it well. The surf pounded relentlessly, and I sweated profusely. I turned my ballcap backwards to keep my neck from reddening and, but of course, to present the image of an arty young vagabond, sitting on a rock, discovering himself and chronicling his generation in song by the sea. (Too bad there were no other rampant sentimentalists there. If a narcissist plays by the ocean / Does anybody see?) So, yes, I was a bit self-conscious – still! – about playing “in public”, even though there was almost nobody around. Still, I had a blast: beautiful scene, beautiful sun, one idea in mind and time on my hands. It felt like a vacation. Sweet!

Our first week in Guadeloupe was a delight. (Except for that toilet episode.) I was quite proud of myself that the end of The Streak didn’t sabotage my commitment, or hasn’t seemed to. It was the only bit of dark cloud we had. So now the count stands, for those of you scoring at home, at 159 out of 161 days – not what I’d been planning, but a fair percentage. The Streak is now at 5. Whoop-de-do…

The Martin Quest

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Just before we left the country for a couple of weeks (though I wasn’t aware of it ’til last night), my favourite Martin gave a nice plug for this site on his much more visually dazzling one. Since Martin has given me dozens of hours of help getting this thing going, I must certainly return the favour. Marty subtitles his site “A Growing Repository of All That is Good”, and for my money, he’s actually being somewhat humble when he says that. It’s massive, and it’s very, very good.

He pours a sensational amount of time and intelligence and technical skill into his site. It’s full of news and visuals on his family, his posse and his faith community — Martin is one of the Dynamic Bahá’í Dudes of Ottawa — but also some very thoughtful information and lively discussions on the most important parts of our world conversation (so say I): spiritual enrichment, education for peace, the power of unity and the search for the ultimate set of speakers. There’s always something happening at The Quest.

Barnabus Quotidianus

Posted by :James Howden On : December 4, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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BQ is a web log that I recently stumbled upon. (It’s written by a guy older than me, which I find encouraging and consoling.) If your grasp of Latin is even shakier than mine, I’ll tell you that it means something like “The Daily Barney”.

But no, worry not, there is no annoying soundtrack and zero appearances by purple cartoon dinosaurs. Barney is a British writer who comments on community and spiritual development, primarily – all the places where social concern, citizenship, faith and activism converge – but he also writes appealingly on a wide range of personal stories and interests. He’s a good read. He manages a fairly difficult thing with ease and style: he can write about matters of religion, for example, with refreshing plainness, sense and even fun.

It’s a personal log, so it doesn’t carry any official stamp, but Mr. Leith is a prominent member of the Bahá’í community of the United Kingdom. So, there is a fair sense of how they approach issues from gender equality to religious discrimination, along with the Barnabus take on technology, media, writing, family and a long list of other interests. It’s a pleasant cyberspace stroll that you might enjoy, as I do.

Another Shot at Understanding: Learning About Islam

Posted by :James Howden On : August 6, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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One of the good Doctor’s opening salvos was this. Imagine if what others knew about Christianity began and ended with Hitler. He was nominally a Christian. His troops stormed into the Sudetenland with the words “God is with us” engraved on their belts…For this, Dr. Lawson argued, is precisely the skewed perspective of Islam that too many of us have swallowed with our supper-hour newscasts. Bombings = Islam. Islam = opposition to progress. Islam = two thirds of the Axis of Evil. (Oh, the curse of speechmaking!)

Lawson is a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, and our little family had run away on this weekend of thought and refreshment largely to hear him speak. He wanted us to think about revolution, one of the main casualties of which, no matter how praiseworthy are its aims and programs, is history. And among the histories we may think we know (but emphatically don’t) is that of Islam.

Dr. Lawson argues, for example, that “Europe was precisely defined  (geographically and otherwise) by its defensive and offensive resistance to Islam”. In large measure, this is why Europe was so dark in the Dark Ages, whereas northern Africa and western Asia shone with Muslim civilization. Islam predominated in Spain, for example, for 800 years, more than three times the duration of the United States of America. In addition to co-existing amicably with Jewish and Christian communities, Islamic cities like Cordoba (and, not incidentally, Baghdad) were centres of arts and architecture, medicine, science and commerce.

The European Renaissance can be traced to its eventual increased openness to the scholarly, artistic and other resources of the Islamic culture that surrounded it. Avicenna – the Latinized name of the Persian Ibn-Sina, a gifted astronomer, physician, poet, mathematician and philosopher – was an 11th-century Muslim that Lawson terms “one of the four or five greatest geniuses of world civilization”. We know Leonardo, but we are ignorant of those that preceded and made him possible.

Our tour guide of Islamic culture and contribution debunked the standard criticisms of Muslims: their treatment of women and of apostates, their so-called “conversion by the sword”, their relative cultural decline in recent centuries, the much-muttered but sorely misunderstood concept of jihád. Lawson also emphasized the deep-rooted garrison mentality of the European heritage, in which a more powerful and more advanced Islamic civilization was feared and demonized as the “barbarians at the gates”. Those bogeyman whispers can still be heard in our contemporary public discourse.

Lawson, while not himself a Muslim, argued passionately in defence of Islam. One of the silver linings of the West’s forced encounter with Islam is that understanding is slowly growing. Muslim and other educated voices are raising the image of the Faith of Muhammad around the world. Dr. Lawson pointed out a remarkable irony: members of the Bahá’í community, branded as heretics and victims of persecution in some Muslim countries, are called upon to understand and defend all that is noble and good in Islam.

There was much more, brilliant and fascinating. (And oddly reassuring. This stuff CAN be understood. Okay!) I’ll offer more snippets another day.

Youthful Reasons and Dreams

Posted by :James Howden On : April 2, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Otesha means “reason to dream” in Swahili. In button-down Ottawa and in hundreds of schools and community centres and parks across Canada, it has come to stand for how youth can grow hope and planetary stewardship right in their own bedrooms, backyards, school grounds or streets. Otesha means sustainability, usefulness, vision, good humour and a whole lot more, as my jam-packed living room found out last night.

The co-founder of Otesha, original “hopeful hooligan” Jessica Lax, is a 24-year-old crusader that my bride fell bike-over-compost in love with. You can find out what Otesha does and how it began – in the hearts of two Canadian kids who became brilliantly conscious of the oneness of humanity – by letting your mouse do the walking here.  Here’s what my family said in inviting friends and neighbours (and neighbours of friends) to listen to Jess’s story:

Otesha  is one of the coolest and most exciting things going on – by youth, for youth, and for a world of hopefulness and positive change….Jessica Lax, an Ottawa girl, found herself sitting under a tree in Kenya with Jocelyn Land-Murphy, another Canuck. Each was a university biology student, each was involved in the Canadian Field Studies in Africa program, and neither could see herself going back to Canada and resuming ‘life as usual’. They had been changed by their experience, and they wanted to BE THE CHANGE that they felt was required to make a healthy world. They loved the Swahili word ‘otesha’…and they gave it to the project that they dreamed up under that tree: ‘to enable and empower our generation to take action towards a sustainable future.’ Jess and Joss saw the global environmental crisis, the disparity between rich and poor societies, and the overconsumption – of energy, of goods, of everything – in their own communities back home. They formed Otesha as a way to help young people to be aware without despair, to see what was happening and not feel powerless about it. ‘We knew we wanted to present this message to schools across Canada,’ says Joss, ‘and we knew we didn’t want to drive more cars to do it!’ 

So they returned to Canada with transformed ideas about EVERYTHING – from diet to clothing, from education to entertainment – and a determination to act on what they had learned…

And as if that wasnt’ enough, Julie Séléger of the Ottawa Bahá’í community added to the mix! She danced her way through Europe with a youthful company called Diversity Dance Theatre, volunteers from around the world offering dramatic representations of social ills and clear-eyed looks at solutions to them. Julie has also volunteered as a neighbourhood school teacher in Haiti, part of a worldwide “youth can move the world” ethos spreading like wildfire in the Bahá’í community. Amazing stuff all ‘round, and about 30 teens and twenties filled our house with light as they talked about it all. Hopefulness came down like rain. It was sweet and good, sometimes sombre, frequently funny. What could be better?