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Baha’u’llah (the essence of all…)

I’ve been reading a short, incredibly dense series of statements by Baha’u’llah from “Words of Wisdom”. Each brief pronouncement names the “essence of understanding”, “the source of courage”, the “beginning of magnanimity”, “true remembrance”, and the like. It is five minutes of reading, and a lifetime of grasping. It concludes this way:

The essence of all that We have revealed for thee is Justice, is for man to free himself from idle fancy and imitation, discern with the eye of oneness His glorious handiwork, and look into all things with a searching eye.”

Baha’u’llah (1817-1892) was the Founder of the Baha’i Faith and the Author,

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Abdu’l-Baha (on peace, happiness & everything)

“The body of the human world is sick. Its remedy and healing will be the oneness of the kingdom of humanity. Its life is ‘The Most Great Peace.’ Its illumination and quickening is love. Its happiness is the attainment of spiritual perfections.”

‘Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921) was the son of Baha’u’llah, the source of the Baha’i system of knowledge and practice.

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Take the Red Pill! Rainn Wilson & The Matrix II

This is the second part of my recollection of actor Rainn Wilson’s talk at the recent Association for Baha’i Studies conference in Irvine, California. Part One is here.

Rainn Wilson related, with wonder and amusement, how excited many people became in  connecting the “man was embryonic in the world of the matrix” quote of ‘Abdu’l-Baha to the  mind-blowing Matrix trilogy. He said that there were groups of people who embrace “Matrixism” as religion, and regard ‘Abdu’l-Baha as its early prophetic voice, and as its link to the entire history of revealed religion. This was news to me, but I found them in a most curious and bemusing on-line presence. One of their four basic tenets is the use of hallucinogenics as a sacrament; another is “adherence to the principles of one or more of the world’s religions until such time as the One [Neo doesn’t count] returns”. This tiny group does elaborate a few more funky laws, my favourite of which is that “all forms of professional athletic competition have now been abrogated”. (The revenge of the picked-on against the surly jocks!) That’s funny stuff, I guess, unless it’s pathetic. However, it points out again, if we needed more evidence, how hungry human beings are for a sense of meaning in life.

Wilson showed another clip from Matrix the first. Neo faces off with the baddies who are trying to prevent him from penetrating and exposing the mass hallucination that intelligent machines have created. Their programming illusion is intended to convince the humans that life is as it always was – meanwhile, their actual bodies are imprisoned in pods and used as robot fuel. This is where many of the oh cool! effects of the movie are featured. Neo bends

“Bullets, be still and know that I am Neo!” Who hasn’t done this?

space and time. A hail of bullets slows at his silent command and clatters to the floor. He leans at impossible angles, and leaps with impossible speed. He artfully decomposes a bad dude by flying right into his holographic gut and exploding him from the inside. (Nice!) Neo has wondrous powers in the supercomputer-generated matrix because he understands that it is only a projection, an unreal construction. (Well, and because he is The Chosen One, which obviously helps.) By knowing the reality of life in that world, he becomes the master of it. 

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Albert Schweitzer (on human purpose)

“The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve…The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965) was a Christian theologian and medical missionary in Africa (in what is now known as Gabon). He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 because of the above, off-the-beaten-path but eminently Christian philosophy. This may the heart of all true and useful religion. Was he his “brother’s keeper”, a la Jesus Christ, practising the Buddha’s “right action”, and applying Baha’u’llah’s injunction to “carry forward an ever-advancing civilization”? He tried.

An Eccentric Perfection

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.

WritersFest III: Prisoner of Tehran

So many things to catch up on – it was a jam-packed weekend, but in my non-teaching period at the Home of the Rams I can get a little posting done. (It’s a supply teaching gig, so no marking, no prep! No steady income, either, mind you. Compensations.) Saturday began with an Earth Day festival of story, dance and other artful expressions of faith in human beings (a scarce but renewable resource) and reverence for the environment (ditto). Yes, and worm-powered composts, electric bikes, grassroots community-building and off-grid power. (All of which is green and great but, I admit, has nothing to do with prisoners or Tehran.) Then we roared off to further Ridván (“Paradise”) festivities, which did have to do with Bahá’u’lláh, the exiled Persian nobleman, also a Prisoner of Tehran. But that’s not the prisoner I mean, either.

From the mid-afternoon Ridván observance, I was off and running again to catch what remained of the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival and its second-to-last day. Especially, I wanted to hear more of the story of featured, first-time author Marina Nemat – yes, I AM getting to the point of this post! – who was jailed as a teenager in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Her crime, apparently, was to be a young woman with opinions; she spoke up to a high school teacher, asking that the class get back to what they were supposed to be learning and not the pseudo-religious political dogma that was being spouted. Not a prudent position to take in 1982 in the immediately post-revolution Iran! Her torture and imprisonment, her spookily brutal marriage to her jailer and her eventual escape from Iran have made for a tremendous story, one that she couldn’t tell for many long years as she rebuilt her life in Canada.

Marina Nemat is a very young-looking 42 now. Over the last several years, she found the courage (and perhaps the desperate need) to write her story. “I was a volcano,” she says simply. “I had to write this.”  And in facing the inevitable survivor’s guilt, as one who found a tangled path by which to walk away from Evin when others she knew did not, she eventually decided that making her story public was her raison d’être. “I realized that I was the perfect person to be a witness to what happened to my generation in Iran. I felt strongly that…this was why I had survived,” she told us. “I had to show that they had not forced me to change my mind.”

She speaks with great dignity and directness. At one point, she was asked from the audience whether she fears for relatives back home, or for her own life. There was no drama in her answer, but the simple bravery was breathtaking. There are perhaps “some second cousins” left in Iran, so she does not worry about anyone else in her homeland being made to suffer for her candour. And as for herself, she says, “I will never wear a bullet-proof vest or have a bodyguard. I was a captive to fear for too long, and I would rather live one day freely than 20 years with a bodyguard. That is not living.” We all love our writers at this Ottawa celebration of the power of the word, but after this remarkable window into a world of fearsome oppression, the applause went on and on. It was a day when the standing ovation was not a mere artistic convention, but a symbol of profound respect. The gratitude of strangers.

Partying with the Baha’is

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.

And We Mourn for the Americans…

“We are all Hokies today,” said one email to an American sports radio show today, as the chatter about bad calls and draft prospects was cut off at the knees by the word out of Blacksburg, Virginia. Yes, Virginia Tech’s athletic teams are the Hokies, but nobody’s thinking much about spring football or the basketball season just past. “There’s somethin’ ’bout Mondays always makes me blue,” Steve Earle was just singing out of my stereo. The grim curtain of violence has just fallen again in the United States. Somehow, thirty-three dead in Virginia hits harder than another Baghdad bombing statistic, but we’re all human. The hurting is everywhere, but it’s hitting the Americans especially hard today.

This particular bit of grimness is farther away for us in Canada, but only good luck and good policing prevented a similar death toll in our own college shooting last fall. (I wrote about Dawson College here. The feeling is the same today.) Education and gunshots make a horrifying juxtaposition. I grieve for those students hurt in body and soul. I try not to imagine the parents of VaTech students, waiting and wondering, and especially for those who don’t wonder anymore.

The words of Bahá’u’lláh, 19th-century Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, come to mind as we all ask, like sports-talk jock Jim Rome did today, “What the hell is going on?” Just before the dawn of the 20th century, with all its apocalyptic confusion, Bahá’u’lláh — a Persian nobleman tortured, jailed and exiled for teaching the oneness of humanity and the renewal of civilization — wrote this:

The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day….How long will humanity persist in its waywardness? How long will injustice continue? How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men? How long will discord agitate the face of society? The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective…”

We will know more, and it will likely make us sick. May it also make us work for the betterment of the world and the well-being of our communities.

And a NEW DAY to You, Too

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.

Even Stephen?

Had there been any doubt in my mind about the most important issues facing the world, it would have been dispelled yesterday morning by what I heard on CBC Radio. The Current is more than just a saucy, growling intro from The Voice, and before 9 am I had heard from two of the greatest voices of advocacy and awareness that Canada, that anyplace, has ever had: David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis. When these two get together, what do they talk about?

(Allow me to pause and hereby notify the Nobel people. For all his eloquent education and pleading and all that he has given to those suffering through the Great Pandemic in Africa, the former U.N. Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa has my nomination for the next Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Lewis should be the second Canadian¹ to join a club that includes Mandela, Teresa, King, Schweitzer and Matthai. The Peace Prize has been awarded since 1901, and will be until, well, until we have world peace, I suppose, but even then there will be milestones and heroes who bring ingenuity, progress and life to the world once war has been politically restrained or banished.)

These particular warriors of peace didn’t have long on the air, but as it so often is these days – and this is a good thing – climate change was the subject. David Suzuki, of course, was far ahead of the public curve on climate change, and has been a passionate defender of the environment for decades. His current campaign has him flying around the country (and, be assured, buying carbon offsets for all that plane travel) asking Canadians what they’d do if they were Prime Minister. Something I hadn’t known was that the first climate conference in 1988 – instigated by the Mulroney government and gathering scientists and leaders from around the world – was chaired by Stephen Lewis. This was several years before the famous Kyoto meeting and the Protocol that resulted from it, and Suzuki and Lewis were blunt and indignant: If we had done what we said we were going to do then, we wouldn’t be in the bloody mess we are today!

It was a superb (if too-brief) conversation with two mighty men, and a trip to The Current‘s website might allow you to play the interview. (It didn’t work for me.) One thing startled me, though: after all the wrenching speeches, tears (his and his audiences’), anguish and exhausting commitment he gave to the cause of African AIDS (and the resultant societal breakdown), I heard Lewis refer to climate change as the single biggest threat the world faces. (Especially to the already-ravaged African continent, not to mention all the low-lying islands and seashores that could be submerged by rising sea levels. Bangladesh.) Imagine the humility and detachment implicit in choosing this environmental threat over the ferocious pandemic he has been fighting from up-close, tongue and tooth and claw…

And there’s more: as big as these two issues are in their human toll – and you may be as worried about war, terrorism, bird flu, poverty, human rights, ethnic struggles – they are still symptoms of one fundamental problem facing the human race. It was elaborated in the 19th century by Bahá’u’lláh: “The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.” I’ve been thinking about this astounding statement for many years, and I am all the more convinced that this is the heart of the matter. The argument is simple but the implications are gigantic: DISUNITY is the underlying disease of humanity, and beneath all the greatest global problems lies our difficulty in recognizing the essential oneness of the human race.

It’s an awfully big idea to get my head around on a Tuesday afternoon, but I offer it for your consideration all the same.


¹ Buy yourself a milkshake if you knew that Lester B. Pearson, before he was our Prime Minister, won the Nobel for his peacemaking efforts in the Suez Crisis.