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.

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.

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.

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

She looks so mild and innocent in the picture with the big chain on her. Truth unseen is that she broke four smaller chains before we put her on that one and by the time we didn't use it any more she had worn it down so it would be easy to snap and often dragged away whatever the chain was anchored to.

I've lived with many dogs over the years - I think I've lived only 6 of my 44 years without a dog and often more than one and not a few cats. All were unique in their own ways of course. Spirit was unique in her boundless energy and yearning for freedom. She was almost never mean but she'd prefer to be on the other side of any fence or just beyond wherever a chain let her go - well sometimes a good deal farther than that but sometimes she'd step just that far and stop of her own accord. Her wanderlust got her pups, when she finally had them, in trouble. One tried to follow her and didn't make it back for a few weeks and was none too healthy then. We kept that dog too and he passed away earlier this year.

But Spirit's wanderlust was what brought her into our lives - she showed up on Sally's doorstep out of the blue one day 17 years ago. A little while later Sally gave her to me and when we married I brought her back.Certainly she lived a long life and saw more of the world than many dogs I'd suppose. Never came back hurt (well there was once from a skunk and once from a porcupine.) Never wanted to stay long. First alpha male dog of the neighborhood pack that wanted her in her first heat met the floor when he bothered her too much and left her alone for a year then. Second year he met the same fate but she became a bit more accommodating and seven pups took up much of her energy - but only for a short time. Then she was off again. Mind that she broke several chains and cable and hooks and locks and fences and doors. I'm sure she did thousands of dollars of damage over her years. As a pup right near the age of the first picture she also ate my glasses and driver license which she pulled from my wallet and then chewed up my wallet... all while I slept one day. And looked absolutely innocent afterwards. It just had sharp edges to work her teeth on is all. Well she didn't eat them - just left them in ribbons and bits.

Spirit also had a remarkable maternal instinct too though. She'd mind human children as well as her own (well, she'd tend to not let them wander off and once faced down a snake for our daughter.) And she was pretty patient of climbing babies and grasping hands though she'd also get up and move if need be. But while she'd do as her instinct demanded, as soon as there was a hole for doing something else, and a hole to go through, she'd be gone.

As she aged she did slow some and there were several times her health seemed to fail completely only to have her rebound partly from Sally's great tender care and find an opportunity, even in the last few months, where she had the gumption to get up and go, barely able to see where she was going.

And lately as almost all her mobility seemed to leave her she would seem to not comprehend that her body wasn't going where she intended - she'd lean off in a direction and her body would kind of stand there or swivel and collapse; poor body it had become. There were times I could just see it in her that she was leaning and was already in her mind 20 feet away when she'd feel she hadn't moved and would literally look around at her legs which hadn't moved.

Now her wandering quality is free of that failing body and any barrier of mankind.

Earth and Sky

Google Earth with Sky has grabbed a lot of attention, as anything Google Inc does. But I hope it helps the astronomy software field. It's got some competitors that do things alittle differently. It's really part of a spectrum of softwares for astronomy. The main free alternatives I use are Stellarium and Celestia. All three are free - there are other softwares that aren't free but since I work for a school system, free software is very welcome, and versions of each software run on various platforms, allowing for diversity of use.

Stellarium represents one end of that spectrum - it's more your classic planetarium software - you are on the Earth looking at the sky. You can anchor yourself to a particular place, though you can zoom out to look closely as if you were using a telescope. But there's no illusion that you are off the planet. You can add random meteors and twinkling in the stars, atmospheric effects. It's also got a feel for the way stars move across the sky - that things go around the poles. You can adjust things so they follow that pattern and change the day/time or the rate of time passing forward or backwards.

Google Earth with Sky is similar but it takes you somewhat off the planet. It has a few minor options as if you were on the planet but there's never a horizon. Being a bit more "out there" it has a better zooming view of things in the night sky - and it has a large database of pictures available. It goes deeper than Stellarium does by default.

Celestia is the other end of the spectrum - it's way out there. It's designed to actually leave the Earth and wander the stars or even among galaxies - it has a kind of warp speed function and a variety of navigation controls. It comes with a database of 35 MB or so but there's some 250GB of stuff over at Motherload of both real data and fictional data. There's a very big universe out there.




Astronomy and the natural world are commented on in the Bahá'í Writings - here's some snippets:

..whatever I behold I readily discover that it maketh Thee known unto me, and it remindeth me of Thy signs, and of Thy tokens, and of Thy testimonies. By Thy glory! Every time I lift up mine eyes unto Thy heaven, I call to mind Thy highness and Thy loftiness, and Thine incomparable glory and greatness; and every time I turn my gaze to Thine earth, I am made to recognize the evidences of Thy power and the tokens of Thy bounty. And when I behold the sea, I find that it speaketh to me of Thy majesty, and of the potency of Thy might, and of Thy sovereignty and Thy grandeur. And at whatever time I contemplate the mountains, I am led to discover the ensigns of Thy victory and the standards of Thine omnipotence.

Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator. Its manifestations are diversified by varying causes, and in this diversity there are signs for men of discernment. Nature is God’s Will and is its expression in and through the contingent world. It is a dispensation of Providence ordained by the Ordainer, the All-Wise. Were anyone to affirm that it is the Will of God as manifested in the world of being, no one should question this assertion.

So learning of the world of nature has much to teach us - and these astronomy softwares are a venue to learn about some of that world that might be a bit removed from the average person. It expands our minds of what is and what might be - how far and wide and high things are, and beautiful in ways no thing on the planet can be. It can wet the appetite for a more direct experience - laying out in the grass watching the night sky, or visiting area observatories where you can see for your self with your own eyes, or setting your camera to a long exposure time to capture the night sky in more detail then you would just by glancing up. The Pleiades are held up as a symbol of the unity we should strive for!



Expanding on this theme is the question of life in the universe beyond our planet. A subject that gets little or no comment in other Books of God has now been given some attention - perhaps there is something we need to be more aware of.... Not only does the Bahá'í faith accept that all the well known religions are inspired of one God and the aboriginal faith traditions are reflections of that same inspiration, but Bahá'í writings refer to Prophets "bearing a Message to God's creatures in each of the worlds whose number God, alone, in His all-encompassing knowledge, can reckon" which are "inhabited by beings capable of knowing God."(see "our planet" link for refs.) Some of us even have a Seti team for Seti@Home- Bahá'í Seti!

One of the qualities of nature and our perception of it is that our appreciate shows a limit of itself. Let me explain - Bahá'u'lláh says in the Valley of Unity: "In like manner, colors become visible in every object according to the nature of that object. For instance, in a yellow globe, the rays shine yellow; in a white the rays are white; and in a red, the red rays are manifest. Then these variations are from the object, not from the shining light." So things we see by reflection or emission show the part they share in common with light but of which they are not internally. Green leaves reflect green, yet are not of themselves green - they are, internally, red. Likewise things we see by their emission are sharing a part of themselves with us - but they remain behind, and some part not seen. Think of it like reading braille - we perceive the bumps of things, not the paper of which they are made - our senses are geared to read the bumps. Indeed in a curious way we also do not see the light itself - we see what the light is carrying and don't see what the light is itself. So light and all things are, like God, the manifest and hidden!

Feeling God in our lives....

I have wondered about a generalized perspective about one's life as a Bahá'í (or really any religion - this is about conversion experiences), even so that some become inactive, that people are wistful of their early days, somehow feeling closer to God then....

I have thought to examine The Seven Valleys (and where those valleys are referenced in Gems of Divine Mysteries) for descriptions of experiences or "active" connections with spiritual feelings from the next world or God....

Consider...

The Valley/City of Search

(Seven Valleys)
At every step, aid from the Invisible Realm will attend him and the heat of his search will grow.
(Gems of Divine Mysteries)
God may guide him in the paths of His favour and the ways of His mercy...He beholdeth the wonders of Divinity in the mysteries of creation and discovereth the paths of guidance and the ways of His Lord.

Those mysterious alignments - "there are no accidents", coincidences that seem too meaningful to be coincidences.

The Valley/City of Love...

(Seven Valleys)
until thou burn with the fire of love, thou shalt never commune with the Lover of Longing.
Be as naught, if thou wouldst kindle the fire of being and be fit for the pathway of love.
(Gems of Divine Mysteries)
He yieldeth up spirit, soul, and body in the path of his Lord, and yet he doeth so by the leave of his Beloved and not of his own whim and desire....consumed by the onslaught of separation in this world.... His eyes are ever expectant to witness the wonders of God’s mercy and eager to behold the splendours of His beauty.

Here there seems to be a paucity of experiences - at best delayed until later. If this is a stage where voyagers "get religion" then they also discover they don't "feel" God like they may reflect they did during their search even if they didn't really "get it" then. They struggle to be obedient and may in fact be, but feel the separation.

The Valley of Knowledge

(Seven Valleys)
His inner eyes will open and he will privily converse with his Beloved... and consorteth with the people of the immortal realm.
(Gems of Divine Mysteries skips)

Again some kind of active experience, but directly consciously, very real.

The Valley/City of Unity

(Seven Valleys)
seeth the brilliant rays of the divine sun shining from the dawning-point of Essence alike on all created things, and the lights of singleness reflected over all creation.... His shining becometh visible in every limb and member.
(Gems of Divine Mysteries)
beholdeth all things with an eye illumined by the effulgent lights which God Himself hath shed upon him.

And so on through the rest of the Valleys. Let's suppose that most of the people who look to change their religion get the Valley of Search, and a good number of them ( who can overcome reasons not to change) get to the Valley of Love and "get religion". They then can loose their "heat" as they obey without seeming aid which they now feel they have lost -those accidents we now feel more keenly from the past - they know God and His Faith but it's not as alive as it was when they were looking.... Not until they pass the Valley of Love do they again engage personal experience, but this time selflessly, a spiritual internal connection. But they do so selflessly only because of the love they have felt - the binding to God. And the experience gets even more powerful after that...

More on the Valley of Unity next time....Feeling

a dog, a life

Fifteen years ago a little wet mess of a dog entered the world while we lived in Chatham County, NC. One of a few to match his mother's eyes, he was her constant companion, and ours too when we wasn't lost wandering the neighborhood. Bapu we named him - affectionally after the friendly nickname of Mohandas Ghandi - I think it means "little father". We had hopes that Bapu, or "Bu" for short, would one day have a chance to pass on his blue eyes but that was not to be. He was a good dog - tender to the family, a good loud bark to strangers, and once in a blue moon defended the family from some of the gang dogs of the neighborhood - even broke a tooth once. Purple heart, so to speak.

This picture is near his peak physical form - he filled out quite impressively. I have lived with several dogs over the years but it was not until now in my adulthood that I was to see one pass on.

Having recently had Sally's father leave this life behind, Katarina is processing this business of dying - she had broke into a song-prayer recently saying "Grampa will die no more, no - he ain't going to die no more, No! He wont die no more!"... sounded like a good old spiritual. This time she started listing things that can die or not (window, mirror, car, hair can't die.) She was sad that Bu died.

Sally and I are sad too - Bapu was almost as old as our marriage. It's weird that Bapu's mother who has suffered more medical problems and dire prognosis should outlast him. And yet it also seems to fit - Spirit has something of an indomitable spirit to her - pretty much why we named her Spirit!

The spirit with which Bapu lived affected many lives - friends and family were accepted and marked with a good lick or three. Spare a moment and lick someone, or some other gesture of belonging, to some friend or family. It'll be Bu's last licks.

a resilient soul

Michael Jamir, who became a Bahá'í in March 1944, and this March turned 90, has left the cares of this world behind him and is free to lend his spirit to the advance of civilization.

In his life he directly brings together the countries and regions of Ukraine, the United States, some of the first Nations of America, Japan, the Caroline Islands, and then through his children to both Iran and the Marshal Islands so far. From Ukraine he comes by his parents. Michael was born, lived most of his life, and passed, in the United States. He served with some of the first Nations of America on inspiration from the example of a former House of Justice member and where he served at a time of growing emancipation and self-determination. Of Japan he entered as a medic and reunited the Baha'i world with Mr. Fujita. Pioneering to the Caroline Islands, and countless Assemblies and homefront pioneering posts in the Northeast, Midwest and South regions of the United States.

Please lend your thoughts and prayers to his family now briefly separated from him. First, his surviving wife Margaret, his companion for over 60 years. His son unfortunately passed before his father, but Vinson's family of Nura, their daughters Nasim Joy and Nahal Suzanne, and Michael's daughters Karla and Sally, with Karla's family with Paul, their children Jordan and Anna, and Sally with Steven and their child Katarina recently adopted from Michael's own parent's home country of Ukraine, are all dear to Michael and him to us.

Some of Michael's life story is published in "Why They became Baha'is: The First Generation Baha'is by 1963" starting on page 75. Michael's efforts are also mentioned in volume 11 of Baha'i World and the April 1947 issue of World Order.

Here's a picture of him.

The ClimateCrisis(.net)

I saw "An Inconvenient Truth" opening night in Durham NC - had to drive (with my pledged extra person) some 30 miles (plus the additional 30 miles I had to meet up with him). Not terribly efficient alas. It was almost sold out? Some 250 people? Bits of clapping and hissing....

It's an important movie, and a more important message.

For those that haven't followed global warming much it's a great summary with personal and group effort choices one can make with hints at some of the practical consequences without getting too scary. To get a taste of the movie go to their website (see http://www.climatecrisis.net )

For those that have followed global warming it covers some of the details in really good clarity while entirely sidestepping other things completely. This first thing I'ld add to any followup to "An Inconvenient Truth" - and that should be first (see http://climatecrisis.net ) - is the Nova/BBC-Horizons production of "Global Dimming"... See

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_prog_summary.shtml

Knock Knock