We enjoin upon them that are the emblems of His names and attributes to firmly adhere henceforth unto that which hath been set forth in this Most Great Revelation, not to allow themselves to become the cause of strife, and, until the end that knoweth no end, to keep their eyes directed towards the dayspring of these resplendent words which have been recorded in this Tablet. Strife leads to bloodshed and provokes commotion amongst people. Hearken ye unto the Voice of this Wronged One and deviate not therefrom.
O people of the earth! Living in seclusion or practising asceticism is not acceptable in the presence of God. It behoveth them that are endued with insight and understanding to observe that which will cause joy and radiance. Such practices as are sprung from the loins of idle fancy or are begotten of the womb of superstition ill beseem men of knowledge. In former times and more recently some people have been taking up their abodes in the caves of the mountains while others have repaired to graveyards at night. Say, give ear unto the counsels of this Wronged One. Abandon the things current amongst you and adopt that which the faithful Counsellor biddeth you. Deprive not yourselves of the bounties which have been created for your sake.Charity is pleasing and praiseworthy in the sight of God and is regarded as a prince among goodly deeds. Consider ye and call to mind that which the All-Merciful hath revealed in the Qur'án: 'They prefer them before themselves, though poverty be their own lot. And with such as are preserved from their own covetousness shall it be well.'* Viewed in this light, the blessed utterance above is, in truth, the day-star of utterances. Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself. Verily, such a man is reckoned, by virtue of the Will of God, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise, with the people of Baha who dwell in the Crimson Ark.
In all matters moderation is desirable. If a thing is carried to excess, it will prove a source of evil. Consider the civilization of the West, how it hath agitated and alarmed the peoples of the world. An infernal engine hath been devised, and hath proved so cruel a weapon of destruction that its like none hath ever witnessed or heard. The purging of such deeply-rooted and overwhelming corruptions cannot be effected unless the peoples of the world unite in pursuit of one common aim and embrace one universal faith. Incline your ears unto the Call of this Wronged One and adhere firmly to the Lesser Peace.
Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would prove lethal. Great God! We have observed an amazing thing. Lightning or a force similar to it is controlled by an operator and moveth at his command. Immeasurably exalted is the Lord of Power Who hath laid bare that which He purposed through the potency of His weighty and invincible command...
So, it would seem that over the past month I have managed to lock myself out of my own blog and then managed, in the process of getting back in, to completely gum up the works. So, assuming you can still read this, please bear with me until I can get things back up and running.
update: well, it seems I’m getting there. I have a new theme up, and things are looking more blog-y, thought I still seem to be missing the sidebar and all the the photos besides… I’ll keep working on it.
update: ok, things are looking pretty good. Photos are back, sidebar is almost there. There are still a few nips and tucks to be done, but I think we might be back in business. Thanks for your patience.
Right, so the Olympics have been over for days, but just a heads up that Nelson Évora, a triple jumper from Portugal, won gold. His coach Joao Ganco was the one that introduced Évora to the Baha’i Faith.
Here he is jumping at the world championships in Osaka last year. If anyone knows of video of his winning jump that may have slipped through the NBC net, do let us know.
This whole blogging-from-the-road thing is much rougher than I thought it would be. Especially for someone who gets car-sick just looking at the map, so blogging from the passenger seat is out of the question (that’s my mom doing some of the driving).
Anyway, after leaving Edmonton, we sped through Saskatoon and Winnipeg fairly quickly and did a marathon 26 hour drive from Winnipeg into Toronto where we spent a day documenting a community outreach project that’s being carried out almost entirely by youth aged 11-15.
The coordinators of the project are older, but the youth are the ones going out, talking to people, teaching the classes for kids, talking to people about the Baha’i Faith. It’s all pretty amazing.
After Toronto, we continued our eastward journey heading into Quebec for a Baha’i family camp. The focus of these camps is really about training and education, so they’re normally referred to as ’summer schools’ (or ‘winter schools’ depending on the season).
I was told that the topics they were studying here in Quebec are the same that are being studied at other camps that are going on all summer across the country. So if anyone out there was at the summer school in Silvan Lake, Alberta; or Shawnigan Lake, BC; or Winnipeg, Manitoba; you were probably studying the same thing that they were studying in Quebec. But you were probably doing it in english.
Sadly, despite 11 years of studying it in school, my french skills are rather meagre, so I can’t really tell you much more than that, but there was a lot of french study, a lot of french singing and a lot of french laugher.
We’re now in Halifax and, having gone almost as far East as we can, we’ll be turning around tomorrow and heading back to Montreal, where they’re doing more community outreach. I just hope someone there can help with translation…
I’m not doing a great job of keeping up, seeing as how I left Edmonton two days ago and am just getting around to posting about it now, but they did keep me pretty busy while I was there. Here’s a quick rundown of a typical day:
The community outreach team meets in the morning for prayers and reflection on the previous day’s activities. The size of the team varies in size from 20 to almost 40 from day to day, with some members there all day every day and others coming in on their days off or when they finished work in the afternoon. There are also participants that had come in from other cities just to assist with Edmonton’s community outreach, some staying for the full 9 days, others just for one or two. The team is conducting outreach in 4 different neighbourhoods, so after a group reflection, everyone splits up into their neighbourhood teams and continues to plan their activities and study materials that would assist them with their outreach (how to conduct effective classes for children for example, or ways to initiate conversations about religion in a society that would really rather talk about anything but.)
After a quick break for lunch, the separate neighbourhood teams head out to their respective communities where they break into pairs and set off into the neighbourhoods. Some pairs would visit parks or community centres, some pairs would visit with parents to further explain the classes for children and youth, some pairs would visit with people to do more detailed presentations about the Baha’i Faith, and some pairs would just go door to door in the community to tell people about the programs that the Baha’is were organizing in the community as well as just raise awareness about the Baha’i Faith.
<img src='http://www.bahaiblog.net/wp-content/images/20080813_1DM2_1790e.jpg' alt='children's class in Edmonton' align="left" hspace="10"/> Another quick break for dinner and then the teams in each neighbourhood prepare for their activities, which can include classes for children, classes for youth, study groups or devotional meetings. In all of the places that I’ve seen in the past few weeks, the children’s class has been the most popular. Usually held in a park somewhere in the neighbourhood, the classes are composed of children of families that the teams have met during the afternoon but often attract children who just happen to be in the park while the classes are going on as well. Sometimes the kids are the ones dragging their parents over to check out the class and sometimes it’s the parents that are dragging the kids, but either way the kids usually don’t want to leave at the end.
After the classes are over, all of the teams meet back at the community outreach HQ (in Edmonton it was the home of one of the Baha’is) to share experiences from the day, reflect on what they had learned and consult on how to use that learning to improve their outreach the next day. These projects usually continue for 9-14 days, 12 hours a day. It’s a very intense experience and, between the regular prayer and spirit of service, one that creates tight bonds among the participants.
While we’re on the topic of Rainn Wilson, everyone’s favorite crazy sea mammal has just launched Soul Pancake, a site for those who are “sick of spirituality having to be hippy-dippy, airy-fairy and uber-precious,” that seeks to “de-lamify talking about God & Religion.” And all that with a side of Pancakes? Rainn Wilson is a man after my own heart.
Rainn Wilson, big time actor, kidnapper and tv star was on NPR recently to plug his new movie and, while he was at it, took an oportunity to talk about growing up in a Baha’i family (at 28:06). Also, while I was off galavanting about the place, he did an interview with the Baha’i World News Service, so you might as well check that out while you’re at it.
Still here in Edmonton, still documenting community outreach. To get an idea of the kinds of activities that are coming out of these outreach projects, have a listen to this report from WMNF radio in Tampa, FL. (direct link to the mp3 here.)
I arrived in Edmonton yesterday and will be here through the weekend covering another community outreach project, but first I wanted to put up an update about the on-going persecution of the Baha’i community in Iran.
Back on May 14th, 6 Baha’i leaders were arrested in Tehran and taken to Evin prison where they have been held since then. From a BBC story on May 19:
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the arrests were a judicial matter and he did not give any further details.
The Bahai International Community says a senior member was arrested in March and six more last week; together they make up the entire leadership in Iran.
It says it has about 300,000 members in Iran, where the faith originated.
Relatives said the six senior members were taken to Evin Prison in Tehran on 14 May, after Intelligence Ministry officers raided their homes in the middle of the night.
On August first, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution <a href=?http://iran.bahai.us/2008/08/01/us-house-of-representatives-passes-resolution-condemning-the-persecution-of-baha’is-in-iran/">condemning the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran:
“This is government-sponsored persecution,” said Rep. Mark Kirk (IL-10), who introduced the resolution. “And we in the Congress should not be silent as Iran sets up the mechanism to ethnically cleanse its Baha’i minority, totaling over 250,000 human beings.”
“It sends a strong signal that Congress will continue to watch closely the treatment of the Baha’i people in Iran,” said Rep Howard L. Berman (CA-28), who is the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and co-sponsored the resolution.
And then on August third, a report in an Iranian newspaper claimed that the detained Baha’is had confessed to “setting up an illegal organisation with connections to a number of countries including Israel and they have received orders from them to undertake measures against the Islamic system.”
The international Baha’i community was quick to deny the report, saying:
“We deny in the strongest possible terms the suggestion that Baha’is in Iran have engaged in any subversive activity,” said Bani Dugal, principal representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations. “The Baha’i community is not involved in political affairs. Their only ‘crime’ is the practice of their religion.”
“The seriousness of the allegations makes us fear for the lives of these seven individuals,” she said.
She was responding to Iranian newspaper reports of statements by Hasan Haddad, deputy prosecutor general for security at the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran.
Numerous groups have spoken out against this latest wave of persecution against the Baha’is in Iran, including the Nobel Women’s Initiative, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry.
Left Ottawa, flew across the country, spent the weekend in Vancouver with a group doing community outreach in 9 different neighbourhoods across the city. It’s pretty much the same thing here as it was in Ottawa (though on a larger scale), classes for children, devotional meetings, and generally talking to people about religion, about spirituality and about the Baha’i Faith. Here people are prepping for a children’s class, making arrangements to go and pick up the kids in a neighbourhood called Skeena.
Again, the classes here are virtually identical to the classes in Ottawa (and, in fact, classes that are going on all around the world) consisting of prayers, songs, stories, crafts and games designed to foster virtues and unity in the community.
<img src='http://www.bahaiblog.net/wp-content/images/20080729_1DM2_9523.jpg' hspace="10" align="left" alt=Musical fireside in Ottawa' />I first heard about musical firesides when I was in Kuala Lumpur last year, and though I didn’t have a chance to go to one until I got to Ottawa, I had heard about them being used in India, the US, the UK, France and all across Canada. And I’m sure they’re being used in another dozen countries as well, but it’s just so hard to keep up these days.
Anyway, a ‘musical fireside’ is simply a presentation about the basics of the Baha’i Faith that incorporates video, photos, songs and prayers. It’s an opportunity for Baha’is to invite their friends and neighbours to find out what Baha’is actually believe. These days, religion having the reputation that it does, people are often hesitant to talk about spirituality and belief (whether it’s your own or someone else’s) even when others are genuinely interested in it. So this way, people can get together, eat some food, watch a presentation, sing some songs and have a discussion about religion and spirituality. The singing, as you can see, is key.
<img src='http://www.bahaiblog.net/wp-content/images/20080729_1DM2_9643.jpg' hspace="10" align="left" alt='discussing the Baha'i Fiath' />After the songs, more food and some discussion. Time to drink tea and ask questions and get to know your friends and neighbours. Because, after all, isn’t understanding a fairly key step on the way to unity?
I’ve been in Ottawa for a couple of days now hanging out with a group of about 20 Baha’is who are doing community outreach in a neighbourhood called Bayshore. They’ve been organizing devotional meetings, study groups and classes for children. Here a few of the participants take an opportunity to reflect on the people that they’d talked to that day as well as plan for the evening children’s class.
<img src='http://www.bahaiblog.net/wp-content/images/20080727_1DM2_9036edit.jpg' hspace="10" align="left" alt='children's class in the park' /> The children’s classes teach morals and virtues (like love, patience, honesty, unity and justice) using songs, stories, games and crafts. They’ve had 15-20 kids there the past couple of days, and while the kids laughed and played, the parents would come and chat with the organizers. Here michel goes through a book with a young boy. Because this is Ottawa, there is a real mix of english and french among both the organizers and the participants. This evening’s class was conducted in english and this young boy spoke only french, so Michel was taking a moment to translate this book for him.
At the devotional meetings, members of the community are invited to come together and say prayers and read holy writings from any of the world’s religions. This one was pretty chill, and after praying and meditating together, people hung out and had tea and chatted for a while. Nothing like praying together to build unity in a community, no matter what religious background we all come from.
Life never really works out the way that I plan (which is why I’ve largely given up on planning altogether). The last time I dropped a post on this blog, I was about to hit the road for what turned into an 14 month global tour of fun and adventure that included 18 countries, 78 separate flights, 79 different beds and approximately 125,000 photos. I know I had promised that I would blog as much as I could, but, sadly reality is rarely as easy I imagine and the prospect of getting a post up from Carracollo, Bolivia; Preah Vihear, Cambodia or Mulanje, Malawi was a little more than I could handle while trying to keep up with booking tickets, finding translators, trying to keep airport security goons from confiscating my cameras and securing a steady flow of delicious cups of tea (it’s all about the priorities).
But I do have some fun stories about a radio station in Soloy, Panama; a community bank run by pre-teens outside of Kathmandu, Nepal; youth building community gardens in Kiribati; and the village of Billimbing Besi in Sarawak where 90% of the residents are Baha’is. I’ll try to make real posts out of these and more, but in the mean time, after a couple of months of recuperating on my couch, I’m back on the road. This time I’m keeping the wanderings confined to my homeland of Canada, from Vancouver to Halifax and numerous ports in between. Given that I rarely do things in anything close to a logical manner, I’m starting in Ottawa. Which, I suppose is actually logical, given it’s the capital and all.
Schools must first train the children in the principles of religion, so that the Promise and the Threat recorded in the Books of God may prevent them from the things forbidden and adorn them with the mantle of the commandments; but this in such a measure that it may not injure the children by resulting in ignorant fanaticism and bigotry.We have formerly ordained that people should converse in two languages, yet efforts must be made to reduce them to one, likewise the scripts of the world, that men's lives may not be dissipated and wasted in learning divers languages. Thus the whole earth would come to be regarded as one city and one land.
O ye men of wisdom among nations! Shut your eyes to estrangement, then fix your gaze upon unity. Cleave tenaciously unto that which will lead to the well-being and tranquillity of all mankind. This span of earth is but one homeland and one habitation. It behoveth you to abandon vainglory which causeth alienation and to set your hearts on whatever will ensure harmony. In the estimation of the people of Baha man's glory lieth in his knowledge, his upright conduct, his praiseworthy character, his wisdom, and not in his nationality or rank. O people of the earth! Appreciate the value of this heavenly word. Indeed it may be likened unto a ship for the ocean of knowledge and a shining luminary for the realm of perception.Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, pp. 67-68
The light of men is Justice. Quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men. The ocean of divine wisdom surgeth within this exalted word, while the books of the world cannot contain its inner significance. Were mankind to be adorned with this raiment, they would behold the day-star of the utterance, 'On that day God will satisfy everyone out of His abundance,'[1] shining resplendent above the horizon of the world. Appreciate ye the value of this utterance; it is a noble fruit that the Tree of the Pen of Glory hath yielded. Happy is the man that giveth ear unto it and observeth its precepts. Verily I say, whatever is sent down from the heaven of the Will of God is the means for the establishment of order in the world and the instrument for promoting unity and fellowship among its peoples.[1 cf. Qur'án 4:129.]
Above all else, the greatest gift and the most wondrous blessing hath ever been and will continue to be Wisdom. It is man's unfailing Protector. It aideth him and strengtheneth him. Wisdom is God's Emissary and the Revealer of His Name the Omniscient. Through it the loftiness of man's station is made manifest and evident. It is all-knowing and the foremost Teacher in the school of existence. It is the Guide and is invested with high distinction. Thanks to its educating influence earthly beings have become imbued with a gem-like spirit which outshineth the heavens. In the city of justice it is the unrivalled Speaker Who, in the year nine, illumined the world with the joyful tidings of this Revelation. And it was this peerless Source of wisdom that at the beginning of the foundation of the world ascended the stair of inner meaning and when enthroned upon the pulpit of utterance, through the operation of the divine Will, proclaimed two words. The first heralded the promise of reward, while the second voiced the ominous warning of punishment. The promise gave rise to hope and the warning begat fear. Thus the basis of world order hath been firmly established upon these twin principles. Exalted is the Lord of Wisdom, the Possessor of Great Bounty.
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