I think it useful to spend some time contextualizing what the history of the persecution of the Baha'is in Iran compares with in other circumstances and what the Baha'i response has been.
As onerous as the treatment of Baha'is has been in Iran it fails to rise to some of the worst atrocities human memory alas can take note of. From the ongoing genocidal events in the Congo and recently in Rwanda, to the well known Holocaust of Jews in Eastern Europe, to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during WWI, the devastation of the First Nations of the Americas - the mind wearies of such hugely sad events. These things transcend the outward treatment of the Baha'is in any circumstances. Thousand of Baha'is lost their lives in Persia in it's early decades of existence there but the situations were not systematic enough, pervasive or persistent enough to kill that many people and while some villages or towns had Baha'is driven out it did not rise to a whole region of what we might call, today, ethnic cleansing, as much as some may have hoped for it. This is not to say it wasn't tried. There are terrible tales of the suffering.
During the days of the Babi and Baha'is Faiths - which are inseparably linked - during such events our reactions were to send letters, walk into prisons, walk to firing squads, walk to whatever means of death was pushed on us. We counted only on God and the virtues that transcend time and place in the heart. We did not gather arms, we did not seek to shame leaders of government, or take sides in political squabbles seeking to advance the rightful treatment of Baha'is by siding with one side against another. Mind you we had opportunity to do so as well as the occasional overture from one side or another to seek to intercede on our behalf which would have resulted in a political agenda being advanced under the guise of helping our situation. We only sought fairness and peace and only in the earliest circumstances did we gather in self-defense. “You have demonstrated (it has been said to the Baha'is of Iran) in the example of your lives that the proper response to oppression is neither to succumb in resignation nor to take on the characteristics of the oppressor. The victim of oppression can transcend it through an inner strength that shields the soul from bitterness and hatred and which sustains consistent, principled action.”
An example of historical persecution in another case, it seems plain to me, outstrips what Baha'is in Iran have suffered after its earliest days, and still the Baha'is sought a standard of conduct to appear completely outside the machinations of political agendas. The events of the Soviet Union were far more heart straightening than things in Iran since the 19th century. The atheistic government systematically and viciously disrupted, deported Baha'is one family member from another or filled mass graves with our bodies on occasion.1, 2 The government was so implacable that standing up for the defense of the community from inside the system through perfectly legal means only earned more arrests and disappearances. They only stopped when they couldn't find any more Baha'is. Such was the case from the 1930s through the 1980s. But with the release of central control social and legal situations changed and Baha'is began to self-assemble into communities and begin to establish and enact the kinds of priorities the Baha'is have sought to do around the world. In some places the communities continue to flourish while in others reactionary governments comfortable with totalitarian control have reinstated some of the same rules on minority religions that existed previously for all - in fact the closer you get to Iran the more stringent the rules have been. But we can drink tea. Through all of this the Baha'is accepted the legal requirements forced on us - what was confiscated was given up, what was illegal to do we stopped doing, guarding only what was in our hearts and minds but acting with a rectitude of conduct that echo the accomplishments of the spiritual fortitude to seek independence in India or the nonviolent African-American Civil Rights movement but rising to a refinement unparalleled in eschewing partisanship and showing radiant acquiescence in the face of brutality. No government is our enemy, no religion, no people. "My object is none other than the betterment of the world and the tranquillity of its peoples. The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established. This unity can never be achieved so long as the counsels which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed are suffered to pass unheeded." Given the opportunity to petition for change or speak to issues of society for the benefit of all we do. The object has been to note virtue and self-effacement.
As time has gone on there has been a broadening of international standards of conduct as historically most countries have done things too unfair to their minorities. Indeed I doubt any country has a radiant history of how it has treated its minorities. In all the history I know of there are only a couple of examples of real success in how minorities were treated. The first - and unquestionably to me the best - was when the (probably) Zoroastrian Cyrus the Great of ancient Persia took the enslaved Jews and others and not only freed them from Babylon but mandated they return to their home lands and rebuild their temples. A command that succeeding Kings of Persia saw through.3 For more on Cyrus see ** Alas the Zoroastrians did not live up to that standard in succeeding centuries but this remarkable set of actions has been immortalized in historical and religious writings to shine down on us to this day. The other example is the Islamic "golden age" when leaders of thought and peoples of all kinds were able to gather and live and prosper under a Muslim based system of government and society unlike anything we see around the world today. During such times towering intellects, mystics, poets, traders, doctors, engineers and artists of many kinds were more often rewarded than perhaps anywhere in the world before or since. I do not know the full cultural circumstances of the time - what Muslim schools of jurisprudence, what policies of government and religion commonly espoused, what relationships across peoples and lands existed, I do not know what made those times so successful for minorities and the majority. But it is worthy of note and awareness and appreciation in the West as it should be to the East. However, past glory cannot be regained by seeking to hold up the visible triumphs of the past because they were fermented by living hearts presently engaged with the life we have at hand. It is the spirit of the age that matters. An outmoded idea will fail to inspire the vitality of life necessary to accomplish coherent change. Something has to wake us up.
But turning our attention to the modern age again I was saying that international standards of conduct have begun to be known and agreed to. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva conventions and Hague Courts come to mind. Alas that they came after a century of punishing death of far too many. And even before they were widely promulgated there were circumstances where Baha'is had to deal with other forms of legal marginalization. Two come to mind - one was out of Morocco and the other across central Africa. In Morocco in 1962 Baha'is were noted publicly and the familiar reactions took place to the point that a handful of Baha'is were jailed and eventually sentenced to death for their belief. But a new dynamic entered the stage. World opinion mattered. The King of Morocco traveled to speak to the UN and while in the States had opportunity to appear on US TV. At the same time early harbingers of these international legal standards started to use diplomatic channels and public opinion about such circumstances. Only when private contacts failed and the penalties chosen became clear did the Baha'is make the situation public. The outcry got the attention of the TV producers in the US and the King was taken to task for the treatment of the Baha'is live on the air. The Baha'is were initially found guilty of being members of an illegal religion but things changed and they were released. While the Baha'is there do not enjoy substantial freedom they are not the objects of anything more the polemics published in newspapers, so far, since then. The other example was in the mid 1970s when various Saharan governments leveraged their economic muscle by giving financial aid with conditions like making the Baha'i Faith illegal in their sub-Saharan neighbors with the outward cry of fears of secret agendas against the common good. The Baha'i response to such concerns of the governments was to patiently show our true purpose in society and to prove our faithfulness amidst much suspicion such that by the later 1980s we were successful in all cases at having these restrictions lifted and all of this without any public campaign though sometimes murderous death very painful to behold came upon us.
But now these laws and international standards are here and attempts of people of good will are promulgated through various agencies to try to live up to them. And, through well worn habits, Baha'is have ample evidence to make claims about our treatment. Not that it's been easy or always successful. In Egypt hadith-based standards of laws had not only made the religion illegal but required Baha'is to either convert or lie in order to receive payment for work or when seeking medical treatment when the government required identity cards that listed religion and forbade the Baha'i Faith from being listed or from having the box blank. This was eventually overturned through legal redress thanks to the stalwart Muslim lawyers who systematically came to the aid of the Baha'is. But things are not all good. The Arab Spring's arrival in Egypt has not seen the extension of this brief new standard. Indeed again newspapers cover political parties announcing polemics calling for our systematic disenfranchisement.
Walls could be filled with stories of the suffering of Baha'is and are. (page can be slow to load.... there is so much to load just in the last 30 odd years, and hasn't been updated since 2010.) Above I said that the persecution in the 19th century was not "systematic enough, pervasive or persistent enough". Experts and agencies raise the warning alarms of genocidal intentions because of the secret policies and outward policies. Experts and agencies raise the warning alarms of genocidal intentions in the government of Iran.(4, 5, 6, 7.) Indeed it is not through lack of trying that the Baha'is have not been done away with. The Baha'is in Iran are too numerous to be ignored. The balance seems to be in the wind. But even the self-confessed have sometimes sought to mend their ways. Still some do not credit we exist as a religion.(9, 10, 10)
It is with these examples I think it prudent to see what is going on in Iran, and what the Baha'i institutional and community response has been. Public awareness has been engaged and Iranians responding outside and inside of Iran has been heartwarming in their eagerness to be aware of and publicly decry the treatment we have been faced with. Moslem Iranians inside Iran helped us homeschool universities when we were kicked out of public ones. Moslem, Christian and Jewish academics, theologians and philosophers from around the world echoed again and again. People who from their religious heritages _they_ see as the very application of the ideals of their religion to this case. From Indian to Brazil leaders of thought have taken up the cause. Prison mates lauded their conduct and gained strength from Baha'is in prison. Moved by the reality of hearts Muslims and others used their creativity, steadfastness, and eagerness for the Baha'is to live without such persecution. Lawyer after lawyer after lawyer stood up for us when we could not stand up for ourselves. They did this out of their *own* sense of what was right. Though it does not immediately redress the suffering of the imprisoned and martyred at least joins our calls for peace and fairness in common cause. Even in facebook and it's progenitor on the web and cousin sites stand as unique efforts - more than a century of suffering has not seen such outcry about how we are treated as we have seen in the last few years.
Thank you.
To the people of Iran and all countries who have stood up in their private lives to defend and find common cause with the Baha'is, a special note and prayer for blessing upon you from our hearts. And to the lawyers who have tried to stand up for us our heartfelt care and prayers. Your efforts will be remembered for many years to come. They seem to harken back to a bygone age. God bless you. Failure is no limit to your tireless efforts. May your families one day come to know the virtue of your efforts if they lack any understanding of what you have stood out publicly to do.
And to the people of Iran in general. Know this. Despite circumstances as are too easy to delineate know clearly that we pray for your safety, your health, your honor and that peace rules the day and the drums of war silenced. Too high a price may come from such eventualities. If it be something human hands make happen please God it will be without any hint of agenda from the Baha'is. We seek to live in peace and justice whomever is given the authority of a nation. We care less which regime is in power than any regime that lives with Godly virtues all have been informed of through the religious gifts of the ages God has given every people.
=======
**
His Holiness Muhammad
and
Blessed King Cyrus
Showing posts with label Baha'i. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baha'i. Show all posts
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Some adjustments in my thinking following work in Wikipedia
I've been working for some time in Wikipedia on various articles both Baha'i related and not over the last several years. Over the last few years I've found a niche on a track where there had been fairly little work that I thought deserved a lot more attention. Many who've heard of the religion have known it to be the "the second-most geographically widespread religion after Christianity." Some would also be aware that the religion has been among the fastest growing in the world for some time. And while such statistical statements may feel weighty to some they are, after all, but just a few words trying signify a great deal more where lots of people in lots of ways have been engaged in spreading a religion for over some 160 years. So there is a lot more depth and breadth of substance behind the statistic that deserves to see the light of day.
This set the stage for me when I was wrestling with an element in an article on Religion in Australia. A couple editors were going back and forth on the size of the Sikh community in Australia. In January 2008 I stepped in alittle to smooth things and thought, here's all this back and forth over essentially a couple sentences - there's more material scattered in Wikipedia already about the Baha'i Faith in Australia that could be made into a more substantial article than this Sikh entry. So there it was - I slapped a few sections together from other places and did just a little research - Baha'i Faith in Australia. Of course as all things Wikipedia others got involved if they were interested but when the basic work was done I had this kind of cold sweat dripping down my back and a realization there were some 250 countries with waiting articles - and then there could be provinces and cities, and continent or language groupings.... I was sure the available documentation would be too thin to cover some places but surely I was looking at a fantastic volume of work to be done. If I managed to crank out an article a week it would still take me years plus updates as things would change on the scale of years (see for example Vietnam. I also quickly learned there was indeed more info available online than I had used in that first artlcle so I returned with lots of updates and revisions. After I got started on the project a number of other editors refined the articles from systematic weaknesses I had and I tried to learn to fix those things as I went along - many of them were more about style issues and referencing structures. There's also a whole world of interlinking one article to others - I had made a category to pull the articles together and others chimed in reconstructing them to make more sense and then February, in one of my relatively rare instances of anonymous editing, I thought to put back a mention to the new article back in the Religion in Australia article where the whole thing began. And the category settled down to Bahá'í Faith by country. The spread of articles also related to other work that had been done - the Bahá'í Faith by country article (as opposed to the category which was assembled by linking from each separate article.) Sometime I may go into greater depth on the development of those articles but the point that gave birth to this blog entry is to hihlight more about what came out of the experience of writing, to date, some fifty articles about the Baha'i Faith in various countries.
One thing I got out of it was a larger appreciation of the spread of the religion in Africa - how fast and surprising it was even to academics who saw it appear from nowhere and grow to substantial size in a few years. The prolonged effort of Enoch Olinga came up time and again, but also others. There were the special case of Kenya which really has a unique, so far, history. And there was a growing appreciation of the struggles of people to bring the religion to diverse places. Along in October last year my wife and I went on Pilgrimage and I had finished some 27 countries - seemed like an auspicious number. And I brought along a computer partly to help communications back home and a way to dump pictures (neither of which panned out too well) but I also was in a position where I could show other pilgrims what I and others had managed to put together about the history of the religion in their countries. Many shared they had little or no idea of the history in their country and expressed very sincere thanks for the work and studied the material while on pilgrimage. A few shared that they new significant parts but they were equally thankful and offered to ship me boxes of materials(!) So much work to do! A few chimed in that they might be interested in amending or adding articles of their own but the world is a busy place. But I was mostly gratified that I had contributed to the depth of the experience of other's pilgrimages by reminding them of the trail of effort that brought the religion to them through the waves of effort launched fifty or one hundred years ago from the Revelations of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and the succession of leadership in the Faith.
But there were other insights beginning to gleam out of the work. I was struck by the events following Abdu'l-Baha's release of the Tablets of the Divine Plan which specifies calls for people to go abroad to spread the religion. In short, though the Baha'i community was fairly small, perhaps in the few thousands, outside the middle east, the response seemed ... disproportionately small. Martha Root certainly took a huge jump kicked off by the tablets but beyond her.... there just wasn't that much. Australia was part of it but then along comes Shoghi Effendi and his plans and committees and there's a really very enormous push to systematically get people moving. It's truly a huge effort that takes off - especially in the face of some communities where the religion hadn't been really doing very much. Surely it can't be that Shoghi Effendi was somehow just more effective than Abdu'l-Baha?!
And slowly a widening insight to the pattern came into more of a focus. Look at the history of India, South Africa and Turkmenistan vs, let's say - Philippines, Kiribati, and Cameroon. There are other examples - it's not a pure west vs east thing or early vs late thing. I began to realize there had been a kind of short hand in my understanding of the kind of people Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi were and the work they undertook and I realized it was kind of wrong or lead to the wrong idea of things. Abdu'l-Baha is portrayed as a common man, comfortable with average people. His writing is very approachable and there's a strong sense of being at one with a wide variety of people. Shoghi Effendi is portrayed as a deeply educated cultured person with a tremendous grasp of language and taste. It would seem from things that the way a personality is should lead itself to the way things are for an organization. Look at the business culture of Apple vs Microsoft and the personalities of Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs. And there's another model of such influences to my thinking - look at physics; how it's deeply mathematical and abstract though the personalities of Einstein vs Dirac, for example, are so hugely different. So maybe there's a pattern. If a strong personality is the main influence in an organization then the organization picks up that personality. If there are diverse personalities involved then sometimes the organization subtracts out the differences and you are left with what it still in common - and believe me there's very little in common between Einstein and Dirac. But in the case of the Baha'i Faith you have this unexpected, to me at least, other pattern. Abdu'l-Baha is this man of the people, yet in his day the Baha'is sought strongly to appeal to social and intellectual leaders and tended to concentrate in enclaves. Shoghi Effendi is strongly academic but under his leadership the Baha'is in many places sought out the common man. The culture or personality isn't one of reflecting an opposite nor of a delayed expression of one personality moving out among the Baha'is. It's more like ... like how children grow up - that at one point in their life they are totally focused on putting things in their mouths and then they are all about asking "why" and then they bring you picture after picture after picture they draw or they become totally focused on a movie and watch it over and over and over but you also begin to see an integration of things underneath each wave of development. So what I'm saying is that the Baha'i Faith, as a community, has a developing culture and personality distinct from but also related to, it's leadership ... and it's evolving. We've had patterns of looking at "people of capacity" and "direct teaching" since I joined the religion and increasingly the waves are overlapping with currents going in different directions like in a developing ecological system.
I think we're on the verge of something.... on the outside we've had more attention to the religion in the last year than has ever been paid - even when the religion played a more direct party in history (see history of World War I especially in Palestine when war plans had to change) or was more successful in defending it's right to exist (see history with Morocco and Egypt when Baha'is were vindicated individually or collectively) when we were just a fraction of our present size and on the other hand this increasing complexity of capacity and it's expression inside the community.
This set the stage for me when I was wrestling with an element in an article on Religion in Australia. A couple editors were going back and forth on the size of the Sikh community in Australia. In January 2008 I stepped in alittle to smooth things and thought, here's all this back and forth over essentially a couple sentences - there's more material scattered in Wikipedia already about the Baha'i Faith in Australia that could be made into a more substantial article than this Sikh entry. So there it was - I slapped a few sections together from other places and did just a little research - Baha'i Faith in Australia. Of course as all things Wikipedia others got involved if they were interested but when the basic work was done I had this kind of cold sweat dripping down my back and a realization there were some 250 countries with waiting articles - and then there could be provinces and cities, and continent or language groupings.... I was sure the available documentation would be too thin to cover some places but surely I was looking at a fantastic volume of work to be done. If I managed to crank out an article a week it would still take me years plus updates as things would change on the scale of years (see for example Vietnam. I also quickly learned there was indeed more info available online than I had used in that first artlcle so I returned with lots of updates and revisions. After I got started on the project a number of other editors refined the articles from systematic weaknesses I had and I tried to learn to fix those things as I went along - many of them were more about style issues and referencing structures. There's also a whole world of interlinking one article to others - I had made a category to pull the articles together and others chimed in reconstructing them to make more sense and then February, in one of my relatively rare instances of anonymous editing, I thought to put back a mention to the new article back in the Religion in Australia article where the whole thing began. And the category settled down to Bahá'í Faith by country. The spread of articles also related to other work that had been done - the Bahá'í Faith by country article (as opposed to the category which was assembled by linking from each separate article.) Sometime I may go into greater depth on the development of those articles but the point that gave birth to this blog entry is to hihlight more about what came out of the experience of writing, to date, some fifty articles about the Baha'i Faith in various countries.
One thing I got out of it was a larger appreciation of the spread of the religion in Africa - how fast and surprising it was even to academics who saw it appear from nowhere and grow to substantial size in a few years. The prolonged effort of Enoch Olinga came up time and again, but also others. There were the special case of Kenya which really has a unique, so far, history. And there was a growing appreciation of the struggles of people to bring the religion to diverse places. Along in October last year my wife and I went on Pilgrimage and I had finished some 27 countries - seemed like an auspicious number. And I brought along a computer partly to help communications back home and a way to dump pictures (neither of which panned out too well) but I also was in a position where I could show other pilgrims what I and others had managed to put together about the history of the religion in their countries. Many shared they had little or no idea of the history in their country and expressed very sincere thanks for the work and studied the material while on pilgrimage. A few shared that they new significant parts but they were equally thankful and offered to ship me boxes of materials(!) So much work to do! A few chimed in that they might be interested in amending or adding articles of their own but the world is a busy place. But I was mostly gratified that I had contributed to the depth of the experience of other's pilgrimages by reminding them of the trail of effort that brought the religion to them through the waves of effort launched fifty or one hundred years ago from the Revelations of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and the succession of leadership in the Faith.
But there were other insights beginning to gleam out of the work. I was struck by the events following Abdu'l-Baha's release of the Tablets of the Divine Plan which specifies calls for people to go abroad to spread the religion. In short, though the Baha'i community was fairly small, perhaps in the few thousands, outside the middle east, the response seemed ... disproportionately small. Martha Root certainly took a huge jump kicked off by the tablets but beyond her.... there just wasn't that much. Australia was part of it but then along comes Shoghi Effendi and his plans and committees and there's a really very enormous push to systematically get people moving. It's truly a huge effort that takes off - especially in the face of some communities where the religion hadn't been really doing very much. Surely it can't be that Shoghi Effendi was somehow just more effective than Abdu'l-Baha?!
And slowly a widening insight to the pattern came into more of a focus. Look at the history of India, South Africa and Turkmenistan vs, let's say - Philippines, Kiribati, and Cameroon. There are other examples - it's not a pure west vs east thing or early vs late thing. I began to realize there had been a kind of short hand in my understanding of the kind of people Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi were and the work they undertook and I realized it was kind of wrong or lead to the wrong idea of things. Abdu'l-Baha is portrayed as a common man, comfortable with average people. His writing is very approachable and there's a strong sense of being at one with a wide variety of people. Shoghi Effendi is portrayed as a deeply educated cultured person with a tremendous grasp of language and taste. It would seem from things that the way a personality is should lead itself to the way things are for an organization. Look at the business culture of Apple vs Microsoft and the personalities of Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs. And there's another model of such influences to my thinking - look at physics; how it's deeply mathematical and abstract though the personalities of Einstein vs Dirac, for example, are so hugely different. So maybe there's a pattern. If a strong personality is the main influence in an organization then the organization picks up that personality. If there are diverse personalities involved then sometimes the organization subtracts out the differences and you are left with what it still in common - and believe me there's very little in common between Einstein and Dirac. But in the case of the Baha'i Faith you have this unexpected, to me at least, other pattern. Abdu'l-Baha is this man of the people, yet in his day the Baha'is sought strongly to appeal to social and intellectual leaders and tended to concentrate in enclaves. Shoghi Effendi is strongly academic but under his leadership the Baha'is in many places sought out the common man. The culture or personality isn't one of reflecting an opposite nor of a delayed expression of one personality moving out among the Baha'is. It's more like ... like how children grow up - that at one point in their life they are totally focused on putting things in their mouths and then they are all about asking "why" and then they bring you picture after picture after picture they draw or they become totally focused on a movie and watch it over and over and over but you also begin to see an integration of things underneath each wave of development. So what I'm saying is that the Baha'i Faith, as a community, has a developing culture and personality distinct from but also related to, it's leadership ... and it's evolving. We've had patterns of looking at "people of capacity" and "direct teaching" since I joined the religion and increasingly the waves are overlapping with currents going in different directions like in a developing ecological system.
I think we're on the verge of something.... on the outside we've had more attention to the religion in the last year than has ever been paid - even when the religion played a more direct party in history (see history of World War I especially in Palestine when war plans had to change) or was more successful in defending it's right to exist (see history with Morocco and Egypt when Baha'is were vindicated individually or collectively) when we were just a fraction of our present size and on the other hand this increasing complexity of capacity and it's expression inside the community.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Change
2007 brought plenty of changes but 2008 seems to be keeping pace. I've got a new job at the University of Chapel in the Library Unit and been on pilgrimage to some moving places like the Terraced Gardens on Mt. Carmel, Haifa Israel. International travel and committing time to communing with your Maker not like watching TV or running the same road trip day after day, unless you count hitting a deer which I also managed to do - albeit almost a miss. Just a graze....
My family is keeping healthy despite all the big changes that often bring illness from the stress.
Some thoughts on pilgrimage - it seems to me that in part pilgrimage is partly about having the time focus on the disciplines of a spiritual life. And if you are in a place in your life where not having a simple daily routine is ok and you can focus then all well and good. But if your life is more about malls and movies then you may find your thumbs twiddling in hallowed halls. Or if you come at pilgrimage intent on a heart felt question there can be a measure of judgement of the worthiness of the question and perhaps a window towards an answer, if over time. One of the first things I did was to simply say thanks - to recognize that because the Bab, Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha and the succeeding Heads of the religion and pioneers and "children of assurance" walked the planet, I was able to find and commit myself to something to move me beyond my comfort zone and find a home in the placeless. I find great value in meaning and actually doing something with my life beyond the limits and possibilities of simply my family have been really rewarding. There were a number of curious syzygys along the way - I happened to have the blessing of coming into the land of the Holy of Holies for several religions on the anniversary of accepting the Baha'i Faith 22 years ago. Curiously I also had a flight path that took me by Washington D.C., London, Paris, Rome, Athens - seemed almost like a trip through time except that on landing there were plenty of cell phones around. For some pilgrimage is a chance to grapple with the history that these people really lived - here are their clothes and writings, here are their pictures. However I'd read various histories a few times; enough to grasp something of the reality of events and people and places. But there is something else sitting on the floor where Baha'u'llah was in solitary confinement - and not for me so much about the privations, but of place to put my body, and attempt feeling respect, reverence, humility. To see pilgrims like myself across a moat across history from the same window he was eventually allowed to wave out from. There's a children's school out that window now. They play basketball in the empty moat. A hundred and sixty odd years ago it was a foul prison where some died. Now every two weeks there are cycles of pilgrims sitting in that room.
The youngest son of Baha'u'llah fell through a skylight in his youth in that prison. If you believe you are a son of God on Earth and can ask for anything, do you ask for being saved from this painful death? He asked to give up his life that the prison doors be opened and pilgrims be allowed in and God among us be allowed out.
My family is keeping healthy despite all the big changes that often bring illness from the stress.
Some thoughts on pilgrimage - it seems to me that in part pilgrimage is partly about having the time focus on the disciplines of a spiritual life. And if you are in a place in your life where not having a simple daily routine is ok and you can focus then all well and good. But if your life is more about malls and movies then you may find your thumbs twiddling in hallowed halls. Or if you come at pilgrimage intent on a heart felt question there can be a measure of judgement of the worthiness of the question and perhaps a window towards an answer, if over time. One of the first things I did was to simply say thanks - to recognize that because the Bab, Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha and the succeeding Heads of the religion and pioneers and "children of assurance" walked the planet, I was able to find and commit myself to something to move me beyond my comfort zone and find a home in the placeless. I find great value in meaning and actually doing something with my life beyond the limits and possibilities of simply my family have been really rewarding. There were a number of curious syzygys along the way - I happened to have the blessing of coming into the land of the Holy of Holies for several religions on the anniversary of accepting the Baha'i Faith 22 years ago. Curiously I also had a flight path that took me by Washington D.C., London, Paris, Rome, Athens - seemed almost like a trip through time except that on landing there were plenty of cell phones around. For some pilgrimage is a chance to grapple with the history that these people really lived - here are their clothes and writings, here are their pictures. However I'd read various histories a few times; enough to grasp something of the reality of events and people and places. But there is something else sitting on the floor where Baha'u'llah was in solitary confinement - and not for me so much about the privations, but of place to put my body, and attempt feeling respect, reverence, humility. To see pilgrims like myself across a moat across history from the same window he was eventually allowed to wave out from. There's a children's school out that window now. They play basketball in the empty moat. A hundred and sixty odd years ago it was a foul prison where some died. Now every two weeks there are cycles of pilgrims sitting in that room.
The youngest son of Baha'u'llah fell through a skylight in his youth in that prison. If you believe you are a son of God on Earth and can ask for anything, do you ask for being saved from this painful death? He asked to give up his life that the prison doors be opened and pilgrims be allowed in and God among us be allowed out.
It's a spot on the floor.
Millions of Baha'is have walked by it now. Some may be walking by it right now.
The manuscript with a father's prayer to God accepting this sacrifice is mostly empty. Only in tiny script squeezed at the bottom of the page does it say:
Lauded be Thy name, O Lord my God! Thou seest me in this day shut up in my prison, and fallen into the hands of Thine adversaries, and beholdest my son lying on the dust before Thy face. He is Thy servant, O my Lord, whom Thou hast caused to be related to Him Who is the Manifestation of Thyself and the Day-Spring of Thy Cause.
Lauded be Thy name, O Lord my God! Thou seest me in this day shut up in my prison, and fallen into the hands of Thine adversaries, and beholdest my son lying on the dust before Thy face. He is Thy servant, O my Lord, whom Thou hast caused to be related to Him Who is the Manifestation of Thyself and the Day-Spring of Thy Cause.
At his birth he was afflicted through his separation from Thee, according to what had been ordained for him through Thine irrevocable decree. And when he had quaffed the cup of reunion with Thee, he was cast into prison for having believed in Thee and in Thy signs. He continued to serve Thy Beauty until he entered into this Most Great Prison. Thereupon I offered him up, O my God, as a sacrifice in Thy path. Thou well knowest what they who love Thee have endured through this trial that hath caused the kindreds of the earth to wail, and beyond them the Concourse on high to lament.
I beseech Thee, O my Lord, by him and by his exile and his imprisonment, to send down upon such as loved him what will quiet their hearts and bless their works. Potent art Thou to do as Thou willest. No God is there but Thee, the Almighty, the Most Powerful.1
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