Where’s the God?

Once upon a time—about sixteen years ago—I read with intense longing the accounts in The American Baha’i of the amazing numbers of Baha’is in India. I had little desire to visit Haifa but much to experience the swarm of believers I envisioned from these reports. So when I was short-term pioneering in southeast Asia I took my opportunity to fly to Delhi.

After my months of service, a sludge of fatigue filled my limbs, and gravity seemed to have a special affinity for me. I had learned a lot, given a lot. And what was the state of my own heart? I didn’t know anymore. I wrote in my journal that I felt like I needed to sit and sit and sit and do nothing for a long time. When the driver dropped me off inside the front gate of the Baha’i house of worship in New Delhi, I paused a moment to look for the first time at this long-imagined place. Then I began the walk with mindfulness and happy anticipation.

On that ordinary, non-holiday day, there weren’t very great numbers of people, but certainly a steady flow. I checked my shoes before the temple steps, with the men whose heads just stuck up above ground from the room of shelves and shoes below the promenade. These days I don’t even take a shower without shoes on, I have such problems with my feet, and couldn’t walk that short pilgrimage and scale all those steps even with my feet clad. But at the time, this small ritual delighted me. We didn’t do this at the temple in Wilmette. I wasn’t in Wilmette.

Barefoot, I walked the rest of my short pilgrimage and scaled all those steps. Then the strangeness began. The temple guides greeted me like something they had never experienced before—what a novelty, a freak of nature, a never-imagined creature: an individual Baha’i coming to pray and meditate. I was only slightly less rare to the longer-term staff, and they quickly targeted me as possible labor.

I turned down, though, the director’s invitation to scrub the temple floor in the early morning hours with the staff and guides—certainly worthy work—and reiterated my need for rest and contemplation. How is it, I wondered, that prayer and meditation receive so little recognition, here of all places?

Despite the distractions, I did pray and meditate, returning several days. I sat for long stretches listening to the steady passage of people through the temple. Women in brilliant saris with bangles on their ankles and wrists made a gentle music as they walked. The doors opened and closed episodically. Rustle, patter, jingle, whispers, silence. My prayers felt empty and meaningless.

I didn’t expect all or even most of the people visiting the house of worship to be Baha’is, but to be the only one, that was an impossibility in my American Baha’i–fed visions. I arranged my trip specifically to be present for a holy day celebration, and I was—me and the temple staff and guides. Granted, it was the midday commemoration of the martyrdom of the Bab, which fell that year on a weekday. Still.

I thought walking meditation might break the alienation spell that seemed to constrain my encounter with this place. So I walked around the back of the temple. From different angles, especially up close, it looked graceful, lonely, austere. But when I stepped out on one of the paths a guard urgently scurried after me and blew a whistle at me. Alienation successfully confirmed.

The temple director later explained that people had been picnicking and engaging in other unnamed inappropriate activities on the grounds so they had prohibited all freer motion. I sat with him in his underground office and studied his remaining white hair and the odd shape of his head. He worked me over diligently with greedy descriptions of the teaching opportunities in China and extracted a weak commitment from me to serve there next. My fluency in Indonesian didn’t matter or my familiarity with Indonesian culture. I could start over in China. China was the place to go. The opportunities must be seized! I asked my journal: Is the Baha’i Faith just, endless, never-ceasing activity?

I had come seeking to be one of many. I found myself a lonely anomaly. I adjusted my reality-sense and received the experience in a different way, as less of a pilgrimage and more of a truth-telling. I had loved the Indian space in my imagination, inhabited by so many Baha’is. But I didn’t want to feed on an illusion, and I let this one dissipate in the summer heat. I turned my attention instead to understanding what I could of the real state of affairs.

The temple had an air of busy, beautiful futility. All the guides were from other countries and didn’t speak the languages of the temple visitors. I learned from them that, although tens of thousands of Indians visited the Lotus Temple every week, no one could talk to them about the Faith. The overwhelming majority didn’t speak English and couldn’t read their native tongues. So, although some people could buy books in Hindi or other Indian languages and take them away, mostly even that avenue of communication was closed. They entered the Temple through the one door of nine that had been designated the entrance, looked around, wondered where the god was, and exited, awed and baffled, through the door which had been designated the exit.

Attending a gathering at the national center (about twelve people present, including guides from the house of worship) and a feast (about twelve people present, including guides from the house of worship) explained the lack of Indian Baha’is at the Temple. There were no more people at feast there than I would see at feast in Vermont, and the way of doing things was really no different either. The difference was that in Vermont almost all the people at feast actually live there permanently. At this feast most of the people were not from India but had come from other countries to serve temporarily at the house of worship. Supposedly, a great number of Indian Bahai’s lived out in the provinces. Maybe they did. Supposedly, attempts had been made to get them to come and serve at the house of worship but had not succeeded.

One need not suppose anything to see that the Baha’i house of worship in New Delhi was not built by or for a local worshipping community, nor even for a national or regional worshipping community. It wasn’t really built for worship at all—apart from the hoped-for future—but to get attention for the Faith. It was built to attract new Baha’is, to be a silent teacher. As such, it must be among the most resource-inefficient proselytizing efforts ever. When asked, the coordinator of the guides told me of a few stories of individual visitors becoming Baha’is; considering the millions who visit each year, this hardly seems a good take.

I felt uneasy driving away from the house of worship each day past the hundreds of shanties that were its nearest neighbors. People do not only need food, shelter and clothing, but I think building a trophy temple in a community where the Baha’is did not yet need such a large worship space was the wrong way to go. This strategy of preemptive capital investment has not been good for the development of the Faith. It has made the Faith top-heavy and concentrated its resources centrally, where they do little for the vitality of community life. I know—it’s just my opinion.

No doubt the temple has been very important to people. The servant who did the cooking and basic cleaning in the apartment where I stayed with the father of a friend wanted to go with me to the temple one day. She dressed up in her best sari, and we went. Some months later I received a request from my friend for another copy of the picture of Kamala at the temple; Kamala had shown it to another servant who had ripped it up in jealousy.

Indians will make their own meanings of the temple, as Indian culture has done with foreign input for centuries. Baha’is have made this particularly easy. The down side of using a ready-made, high-potency symbol such as the lotus in India without any process of new, specifically Baha’i meaning accruing to that symbol is that Indians need not know anything about the Baha’i Faith to see the temple as meaningful. Of course it’s meaningful. Of course they want to visit it. It’s a lotus! From one angle this is a boon; from another, the undoing of the whole endeavor.

As an example of how Indians are making cultural use of the Lotus Temple, I like particularly the news item I read, thanks to Baha’is Online, of a small-scale copy of the temple built as part of a pandal, a temporary structure constructed in tribute to Durga for the festival Durga Puja. One could hardly complain of this appropriation, since the temple is itself an appropriation. The replica sat atop the boxy structure, looking in the picture like a bright pink, many-pointed hat. And the inside of the pandal was done up right: no baffling void here, but the images, shaped from stainless steel, of many gods and goddesses.



(Note: The Information Center at the temple had not yet been constructed when I visited India.)

Unity—As We See It

On January 9, 1985, the Rev. Tom Hansen, a Unitarian Universalist minister—I do not use his real name—wrote to the spiritual assembly of the Bahá’ís of Wilmette, Illinois, to express his feelings of frustration and offense. First he had been invited to read at a World Religion Day service at the Bahá’í House of Worship. Later he was told that his reading selection was not acceptable and that, as he put it in his letter to the Assembly, he must read from “a world scripture such as the Holy Bible, or Koran, etc., or not at all.”

“How would you like,” he wrote, “to be asked to participate in a world religion day and then be told that the host required you to read what he defined to be your scriptures, rather than you being able to read from what you felt represented your holy writings?”

The letter is a page-and-a-half of single-spaced type. It is pointed, challenging, and painful.

I wonder if in clinging to decisions of Bahá’í leadership of decades ago you realize that you are denigrating other faiths in holding a world religious [sic] day and then not permitting your guest faiths to designate their readings to be what they call holy scriptures rather than going by your outmoded past? You are denying our beliefs, heritage, and scriptures, in saying, “We Bahá’ís have decided what is scriptural for you. We deny you the right, in our setting, to call scripture what you say is holy. You cannot read what is a true representation of your thinking in our world religious [sic] day. You are limited to what we Bahá’ís, or other authorities of the past century, call holy scripture. If you don’t agree that we are right about what is scriptural for you, and read from those books we limit you to, then you are excluded from our service.”

The letter passed from the Wilmette spiritual assembly to Bruce Whitmore at the Bahá’í House of Worship. Whitmore contacted Rev. Hansen by phone and sent a follow-up letter of apology with a copy of his own book on the building of the House of Worship as a gift. Whitmore wrote in his letter, “Although it may not be possible for us to change the directives which govern our devotional services, be assured that we will make certain that neither we nor Bahá’í communities planning programs at the House of Worship offend any other religious community, even inadvertently.”

Rev. Hansen read the book and delivered a sermon entitled “How the Bahá’ís Built their Temple.” Then he wrote back to Mr. Whitmore on February 7. He quoted ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Rúhíyyih Khánum from Mr. Whitmore’s book to “suggest that your whole movement reexamine their position about limiting the readings allowed in the main room of the temple.” He added his own emphasis to the quotes by underlining words and phrases such as unity, every, agreement, unfettered, all creeds, Unity of His Prophets, and Unity of Mankind. “Are you willing to hear from a Unitarian Universalist prophet,” he challenged, “or are we for some reason not included in that unity. And are we a part of the unity of mankind, or not?” He closed the letter with a minor factual correction to Mr. Whitmore’s book and thanks for Whitmore’s “big spirited attitude.”

I found this correspondence while doing research at the U.S. Bahá’í National archives in Wilmette. It originally interested me because it illustrates, I believe, the dissonance between the public image of the Bahá’í Faith and the more insular, restrictive, and conservative practice of the Faith. The former understandably led Rev. Hansen to believe that “in truth there is no faith in this community closer to yours than the Unitarian-Universalist religion” (first letter, to Assembly); the latter leads me to think that beneath the surface the two are more opposite than alike.

The dissonance I want to look at now, though, is that between the feeling of accepting all faiths that the doctrine of progressive revelation gives so many Bahá’ís and the meaning which that doctrine has when expressed or acted on in an interfaith context.

In his book Music, Devotions, and Mashriqu’l-Adhkár (1987), R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram documents the transformation in American Bahá’í consciousness of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár from a place for Bahá’ís to worship locally, as envisioned originally in the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, to its role as “silent teacher.” Armstrong-Ingram does not discuss the early American Bahá’ís’ understanding of progressive revelation and how it influenced that process. But I suspect it did, because the House of Worship has come to be understood primarily as a physical and public means of relating to non-Bahá’ís religiously—naively so, I would say.
In the last chapter of his book, Armstrong-Ingram quotes Hatcher and Martin:

At the present time, the houses of worship are not principally used for Bahá’í community services. Rather, they are opened as places where individuals of all religious backgrounds (or those professing no particular faith) meet in the worship of the one God. Services are nondenominational and consist of readings and prayers from the scriptures of the world’s faiths, with no sermons or other attempts to cast these teachings in a mold of a specifically Bahá’í interpretation.

This passage deserves its own essay to unpack its multi-dimensional naiveté and self-deception; I quote it here simply as an example of the disappearance of the doctrinal assumptions underlying devotional practices at the House of Worship behind a claim of non-denominationality.

Progressive revelation is not just a belief in the shared divine origin of the world’s religions, which is the aspect of the teaching that is built into the temple. The general scheme of architecture that all Bahá’í houses of worship share—nine doors and nine sides—symbolizes unity. And the Wilmette House of Worship, in particular, sports the symbols of other major world religions cast into its decorative concrete exterior. The doctrine also includes the conception that God communicates episodically with humanity through perfect teachers. Their revelations have become the scriptures which are now the only accepted readings in the auditoriums of Bahá’í houses of worship. There is nothing neutral or nondenominational about this point of view; it is particularly Bahá’í, though some other faiths have related doctrines. How could Rev. Hansen and his rejected twentieth-century Unitarian writings fit into this scheme? As part of the human corruption and decline of the revelation of Christ and its disintegration into schism?

So we find Mr. Whitmore caught between the directives for worship in the auditorium, which have their roots in this specifically Bahá’í concept of progressive revelation, and the desire to experience fellowship and unity with people of other faiths. How, I wonder, did he think they would avoid offending “any other religious community, even inadvertently”? By not holding interfaith services in the Auditorium? By not inviting Unitarians? Making the rules clear up front might have helped. But the offense seems almost bound to have been repeated in some form, so long as the building continued to be seen by Bahá’ís as a place for all to worship—on Bahá’í terms.

I imagine the Bahá’ís involved were startled by Rev. Hansen’s response. But the invitation they had issued was not really one to come together as equals and peers—it couldn’t be, because the rules governing the use of the auditorium had, and still have, a specific bias. It was an invitation to participate in a Bahá’í conception of the oneness of religion. The Bahá’ís involved stumbled into this awkward situation because they believed they were doing one thing when in fact they were doing another. Progressive revelation is not a bright, universally obvious umbrella under which all religions can happily gather; it is a doctrine of one particular religion. Bahá’ís need to recognize its limitations as a basis for interfaith relationships.

Seven years ago I moved away from the vicinity of the House of Worship, so I can’t speak for any recent developments, except to praise the presence of Van Gilmer as music director. I do know, though, that there has been a long history of frustration and dissatisfaction with devotional activity at the House of Worship. I think that both Bahá’ís and people of other faiths will find more pleasure in worship there when the understanding of the place reverts to that originally intended by Bahá’u’lláh—a place for Bahá’ís to worship, though one with open doors.

Also, judging at least from Armstrong-Ingram’s book, a fresh engagement with Bahá’u’lláh’s and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s writings on the subject might yield a devotional practice more various and engaging than the one which has dominated the House of Worship’s history.

It would also be more distinctively Bahá’í than the historical one. I think that would be a good thing.