Let the Renaissance Begin

He is, and should for all time be regarded, first and foremost, as the Center and Pivot of Bahá'u'lláh's peerless and all-enfolding Covenant, His most exalted handiwork, the stainless Mirror of His light, the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, the unerring Interpreter of His Word, the embodiment of every Bahá'í ideal, the incarnation of every Bahá'í virtue . . . Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p. 134.

This photograph of Abdu’l-Baha’s hand, from the book Written in Light, edited by R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram, was taken before Abdu’l-Baha started allowing himself to be freely documented with cameras.

In 1903, Helen Coles was so insistent that she be allowed to take his picture that at last Abdu’l-Baha relented and said that she could photograph his hand. She did, and the picture was eagerly viewed by a select few of the believers when she returned home. It was termed “the hand that holds the world.” --Written in Light, p. 4.

I still keep a picture of Abdu’l-Baha by my bedside. My reluctance to recycle it or pass it on is part superstition, part loyal affection. I’m not sure he was a great thinker, but I am sure he was a great person, and I still like having him around.

In a discussion-group exchange on sexuality and the Baha’i Faith which has been preserved at Baha’i Library Online, Baha’i scholar R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram said many interesting and insightful things, as he had a habit of doing; I highly recommend the full read (link). Midway through the document he says, “I have copies of hundreds of pages of wonderful pilgrim notes that would be problematic to publish.” He continues,

Abdu'l- Baha was a very physical person and interacted very physically with those around him. He touched, patted, held, stroked hands, arms and shoulders of both men and women while talking with them. He put his arm around people. He stroked their hair. He had a great sense of humor and indulged in horse play when in groups of men, slapping faces and bopping people with his umbrella. (He was also known for his extensive repertoire of dirty jokes in Turkish.)

Judging from the sample summary Jackson gives, those problematic pages would be wonderful to publish. He goes on,

The response of many American women to him was also very physical, indeed could be profoundly sexual. At that time in the US, the epitome of male sexual attraction was a mature, bearded man. There were a large number of sects started in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s by imposing, bearded men who gathered a disproportionately female following. In almost every one, these women were sexually exploited. One of the remarkable things about Abdu'l-Bahá is that there is not the faintest trace of a shred of a hint that he ever took advantage of the way women responded to him. And there certainly would have been no objection on the part of many if he had tried. One of the beliefs of the American Bahá'í community at that time was that there was to be a third Manifestation for this dispensation born in America and there was quite an eagerness to be the mother. . . . Abdu'l-Bahá both accepted the intensity of people's feelings for him and attempted to direct that intensity into suitable channels. Indeed, he even accepted the propriety of intense love relationships between men and women within the faith as long as that love did not lead to illicit sexual activity. (This is documented in both pilgrim notes and tablets. Some of the individuals involved in these couples were married to other people at the time.)

Oh, that sexy Abdu’l-Baha and those horny American women. I sympathize with the women; I might well have had a yen for him myself.

I wish Jackson had lived to write a biography of Abdu’l-Baha and a book on sexuality and the Faith and a whole bunch of other books. He didn’t, damn him. But what he left behind, bless him, is suggestive. The paragraph I have quoted above ends with this observation,

Now, it hardly needs to be said that anything that even comes close to sex is a frontline freakout issue. But, how can we possibly understand Abdu'l-Bahá's relationship with the community, or indeed the issues involved in current interpersonal relations, without looking at such evidence?

I’ve always felt, in a rather vague, unarticulated, possibly indefensible way, that the full benefit of Abdu’l-Baha was not accruing to the community of Baha’is. There was a Baha’i children’s song I knew: “I am a Baha’i, I am a Baha’i, Abdu’l-Baha’s my example.” Every time I sang the song with kids I thought, “In what way do we take Abdu’l-Baha as our example? In what way do we hope these kids will take him as their example?” I’m sure many Baha’is can answer those questions in very personal ways. I’d love to hear those answers. To me, at that time, the words of the song suggested that stories about him ought to have a much greater place in our community life than I experienced. They could be keys to interpreting Baha’ullah’s own writings. They could influence administrative decisions. They could trigger a renaissance of dirty jokes on Mt. Carmel.

I know those stories can’t have the standing of authoritative writings, but surely Abdu’l-Baha’s example was in his living as well as his words. Though he’s not around any more, the stories about him are. That is what we have to tell us what kind of figure he cut in the world. Where is the line between what they can be and what they can’t or shouldn’t be? If I was still a Baha’i, I think I would give more attention to those stories and the possibilities on the right side of the line.

Regardless, the stories about him are enjoyable, and that seems reason enough to grant them generous space.

At the second Baha’i World Congress, in 1992, an elderly American woman who had met Abdu’l-Baha as a child told the story of her encounter. I wrote it up as a short story a couple of years later, fictionalizing a little to put flesh on its bones. Probably a sin in the book of some. Oh well. I rooted the story out of an old file-folder recently and deleted enough extraneous words to make the prose minimally presentable. I still wince a bit when I read it, but here it is. I remembered the story well enough to write it down, but not the name of the teller. Can you tell me whose story this is? I’d love to know.


A Visitor

Elizabeth sat on the stairs in the entry hall picking dirt from under her fingernails. She was grumpy and bored. She kicked the bottom step with her heels and listened to the grandfather clock mark the passage of time. She watched a small spider making its web between the rungs of the railing then mashed it between her fingers and wiped it on her pants.

“Come here and change into a nice dress,” Mrs. Campbell called from upstairs. “A visitor is coming today.”

“I don't want to,” Elizabeth replied, too quietly to be heard on the second floor. Adults were not to be trusted; they didn’t like naughty children. Only Mama and Papa could be trusted.

Suddenly the room felt different, bright. Elizabeth smiled and giggled to herself as if she were being lightly tickled. Through the window she could still see the cloudy dark sky and the drizzle that had thwarted her morning plans for playing in the garden. But inside the house, at least in that room, it was sunny and warm. “Maybe I will change my clothes,” she thought.

Bouncing up the stairs she called, “Mrs. Campbell, I want to wear my very best dress! And I need a pencil and a piece of paper please.”

Mrs. Campbell was waiting with the dress in hand, so glad to get the girl into something presentable that she made no demands as to washing before dressing. Elizabeth took the pencil and paper and scribbled purposefully until the marks seemed complete. Then she descended the stairs to wait.

Almost immediately a knock came at the door. The sunshine is here, she thought. She opened the door and greeted a short elderly man in a long white robe. If she hadn’t been so immediately held by his eyes Elizabeth would have thought he looked quite silly walking around in a nightgown. Age had bleached his full beard and the curly wisps of hair that poked out from under his turban.

Elizabeth handed him the piece of paper covered in scribbles. “This is a prayer for you,” she said.

“Thank you,” he replied as he bent forward to receive the gift.

Just then Papa rushed in from the back of the house to greet the guest himself. Elizabeth felt robbed.

Papa walked him through the living room to the sun porch where Mama lay sleeping, sick with tuberculosis. Elizabeth was not allowed in the room, but she peeked through the tall French doors and watched. The visitor stood by the side of the bed and looked at Mama’s face a long time. He put his left hand firmly on her left hand. Then with his right he touched her forehead. Elizabeth imagined the warmth of his hands. She wished that she herself was ill.

Very slowly he removed his hand from Mama’s face. He stood perfectly still. He closed his eyes and seemed to be saying something, although no sound came from his lips. The room had been stuffy and awful since Mama took ill; it now felt fresh. Elizabeth, who could hardly sit still five minutes was startled when the visitor lifted his face. He looked at Papa and smiled. “She will be fine,” he said.

Papa seemed confused and surprised. The visitor indicated with a nod of his head that he would like to sit in the living room, and Papa graciously led him there, calling to Mrs. Campbell to prepare some tea. As the two men passed Elizabeth standing at the door, the visitor smiled at her, and she knew she was invited too.

The visitor surveyed the room, its fine furnishings, the paintings on the walls, the glass and porcelain vases. “You have a beautiful house, Mr. James,” he said. “I hope someday it is a beautiful home.”

Papa straitened his vest and cleared his throat nervously. Just then Mrs. Campbell entered with the tea tray. She served the two men and turned to leave. The visitor stopped her with a touch on her arm and silently indicated Elizabeth sitting slumped in a chair across the room. She was not usually in the room when Mr. James received guests, and she certainly never took tea with them. But the visitor insisted in his silent way. So Mrs. Campbell took another cup and saucer from the cupboard and poured Miss. Elizabeth some tea.

Elizabeth sat up straight in her chair and received the cup. She tried to sip like an adult. Papa and the visitor began talking in earnest. She didn’t follow their conversation of words. She was wrapped in her own conversation with the visitor. At least they seemed be speaking, she and the man with the white beard, in smiles and glances. “This is a man who likes naughty children,” she thought. Certainly he had come to see her just as much as he had come to see Papa.

The men’s conversation continued for perhaps an hour, but not more. Then Papa walked the visitor to the door. The white-haired man smiled at Elizabeth, and then he was gone.

She sat on the steps for a while remembering the morning. Maybe there were three adults who could be trusted.

The Mind of the Big Lesson-Plan Maker

Warning: Heavy Irony Ahead

The God of progressive revelation is shockingly inept. He sends Jesus, His messenger and a perfect mirror of His divinity, with instructions exactly appropriate for the needs of humanity at that time and for the next seven or so centuries but neglects to emphasize the importance of getting the message written down. Instead, the guy wanders around the countryside healing people, speaking in riddles, and selecting a fickle, slow-brained, and foolish band of disciples to found his church. Or maybe he didn’t. We don’t really know because, damn it, he apparently only wrote in the sand.

So—if the Baha’i corrections to the Christian story are, in fact, correct—when the Gospel started to be recorded some decades later, everything was already all wrong: Jesus was God, the bread and wine were not just symbols, and Christ’s physical body had risen from the dead. One can almost hear God exclaiming “Jee-zus!” in exasperation as He bangs His glorious brow on the walls of heaven. But, c’mon, He has only Himself to blame. Jesus was, after all, a perfect reflection.

And, really, what could be expected from a God who, the last time around, thought that stoning for any little offense was just what humanity needed and that genocide in the service of land grabbing was progress? Or was all that nasty stuff just human distortion of divine intentions? We, the intractable students, could always be to blame.

But I beg you, oh believers in progressive revelation, don’t edit out as mere corruption of the truth that story of Noah, passed out drunk and naked, so incongruous with his status as unblemished mirror of the Celestial Beauty. God himself has good reason to drown his despair with earthly spirits, so why not one appointed to carry out his plan—so simple, neat, and reasonable, yet ineffectual in a world that will have nothing of tidiness and rationality?

The foundational mistake must have been making the creature in the image of the Creator. We humans do have a way of making things up, telling stories, and creating new stuff. Perhaps Noah had a vision of 2008 in which the failed, corrupted, and lifeless revelation of Jesus, fueled by pesky human ingenuity, would keep sprouting new forms (not all nice) and popping up everywhere like an invasive species, while a small band of intrepid Baha’is, holding their heads high, would chant

The old religions are passé,
Baha’i alone is for today!

as they hold aloft the Kitab-i-Aqdas and march into the bright new tomorrow.

We are in that future now. Entry by troops is happening, but those crazy Africans and South Americans have got it all wrong. They are supposed to be joining Ruhi study groups en masse, not opening a new Pentecostal center every week in Rio and Nairobi.

All this despite the infinite wisdom of the five-, three-, and one-year plans. God should have known, must have known, that even this latest and greatest, hot-off-the-assembly-line dispensation, with its anti-schism super-plus covenant, was doomed to failure when that Shoghi couldn’t even follow simple instructions and write a freakin’ will. The new infallibility protocol is buggy, big-time. Vet your code, man!—I mean, God.

Enough irony, Ms. Leaf. Say what you mean.

Okay. I don’t like the Baha’i doctrine of progressive revelation any more.

It was the hook that first snagged me for the Faith. But its tidy narrative has little to do with actual religious history. I've been harsh with my ironic take, to make a point, yet I've hardly touched what could be said. And the God implied by that trim tale is to me unbearable. If God has been rolling out revelations like new versions of Windows Operating System for soul and society—well—I think I’ll take the gas pipe, thank you. Ditto if we’ve been failing a very good K-12 curriculum.

Maybe some eloquent Baha’is with good depth perception will define a new way of speaking of progressive revelation that is worthy. Maybe they already have and I just haven’t read any of it. I believe if you’re going to reject something you should reckon with the best of what it can be, not just the worst of what it is. So bring it on.

But I don’t like the view of revelation as communiqué from God, message transmission with varying degrees of noise on the line. I don’t like the neat divide between human and divine implied. And I don’t like being cast in the great tale as corruptor, not creator. The House likes to say that Baha’i institutions will succeed where others have failed because they are ordained by Baha’u’llah, manifestation of God. From God: success, triumph, glory! Made by humans: nice try, doomed to fail.

Scripture is more like a slug to the gut and a whisper in the ear than a set of age-appropriate instructions. And we made it. We have been discovering holiness and creating God for a long, long time. In the last few thousand years we’ve made records of our joy and folly to pass on. Baha’i rhetoric claims the relatively simple provenance of Baha’u’llah’s writings as a great advantage—the message got through this time. And atheist or otherwise debunking rhetoric often cites the humanness of Baha’i or other scriptures to knock them down. Both groups assume the same idea of revelation, only one thinks it is obviously happening and the other thinks it obviously isn’t.

I think scripture, and more broadly religion, is collaboration, human expressions inspired by divine presence. With a lot of foolishness—and worse—mixed in. Scriptures are not trap doors leading away from our own responsibility—God said it, I believe it, that settles it. No, they are testimony; they are invitation.

I know that my view doesn’t sit prettily with Baha’i beliefs about Baha’u’llah and his compositions. Nor with those of Biblical literalists. Nor those of most Muslims concerning the Qur’an. But even if God does send messages through Messengers, then what? The problems of interpretation and response remain. And they depend on whom you believe God is.

I believe that God is not a distant schoolmaster.

God is a small child whose excitement at your return home shows in the rapid action of her knees as her figure bobs up and down. She toddles forward a few slow steps, pauses to set down her toy guitar, then runs as best she can, all enthusiasm. How will you receive her? What great play do you make for her delight?

Positive? Negative?

My college Baha’i club was something of a haven for certain members of the local Baha’i community. One woman had memorized a prayer which she said at every opportunity. It was something like, “O, God, make me so meek and such a nothing that no difficulty perturbs me in the slightest . . .” You know, that sort of thing, though of course in much more elaborate language. The line that got me bad every time was about quelling every rebellious passion. I would sit there in the silence of my rebellious passion and think, “I can’t help it, I hate this prayer.”

From a different person I might have felt it differently. But the combination of those words with that personality, everything so neatly ordered and just so and tied up with perfect reasonableness, rationality and good cheer . . .What was it we used to say in sixth grade? Gag me with a spoon. Life is not neat, or reasonable, nor, if you’re paying attention, does it give cause for never-ending good cheer. And a prayer like that should be handled with care, if at all, as it is the kind of thing that helps keep people (women especially) in very bad places when feelings of rebellion and repulsion and the assertion of self should propel them out. I wondered why I never saw this prayer in print, and it gave me unholy pleasure not much later to discover that it was inauthentic, or at least not authenticated for Abdu’l-Baha or Baha’u’llah.

Now I find that another oft-referenced passage that I have always disliked, for much the same reason, is apparently unauthenticated as well: “Look always at the good and not at the bad. If a man has ten good qualities and one bad one, we must look at the ten and forget the one. And if a man has ten bad qualities and one good one, we must look at the one and forget the ten.” According to the handy-dandy search tool at TrueSeeker, this appears in Baha’u’llah and the New Era, in the section titled “The Sin-Covering Eye” (p. 82–83). We are told that “Abdu’l-Baha tells us,” but not when and under what conditions Abdu’l-Baha tells us.

A longer text (BC#36) containing this passage can be found at Baha’i Library. That version comes from the personal papers of one Dwight Barstow. If anyone can trace it to any other source, I would love to know. The title given for this longer version is “The Commands of our Blessed Master, Abdu’l-Baha as revealed in tablets and instructions for the beloved in America,” which suggests it is a kind of summary or paraphrased compilation. Not only the title but the text indicates that the writer was not Abdu’l-Baha but an individual Baha’i, as it contains the phrases “our Master has said,” “the Master also said that,” and “our blessed Master said.” My guess is that these are notes of a talk by Abdu’l-Baha, possibly the same talk of which a different version appears in The Promulgation of Universal Peace (pp. 452–453). It was given on December 2, 1912, in New York, and ends, “Be illumined, be spiritual, be divine, be glorious, be quickened of God, be a Baha’i.” I am sure you know the one.

The two texts cover much the same territory and have stylistic similarities, though I greatly prefer the “Consider all men as your equals” of the latter to the “Know that we are less than anyone else” of the former. Each contains passages that are in some sense about seeing only good in others. Both have weak provenance. In any case, my business is not to define the real principle of the Faith by weeding out inauthentic passages and looking at what remains in the context of reason, experience, and the whole body of Baha’i writings. I am interested in examining what is widely believed by Baha’is partly because of these passages. And although these texts don’t, when scrutinized, look very authoritative, the likelihood is that Abdu'l-Baha did say things of this sort. We have similar passages, solidly authentic (I think, but I do start to wonder about everything), such as in Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha (p. 169), “One must see in every human being only that which is worthy of praise,” and a bit down the page, “Thus it is incumbent upon us when we direct our gaze toward other people, to see where they excel, not where they fail.”

It is a principle often signified by the succinct phrase “the sin-covering eye.” At first I thought this phrase must have some prominent place in primary writings, judging from how often I saw it deployed. But p. 169 of Selections is the only place I’ve located where Abdu’l-Baha uses it, and that in the strange context of his story (not found in the Gospels) about Jesus extolling the whiteness of a dead dog’s teeth while others exclaimed how disgusting was its rotting carcass. The term occurs twice in Shoghi Effendi’s searchable writings, once in God Passes By (pp. 164–165), in reference to Baha’u’llah’s response to his brother’s covenant-breaking activity, and once in Directives From the Guardian (pp. 140–142), where he distinguishes between what should be the response of individuals to the failings of others and an Assembly’s appropriate response.

In Baha’i discourse, “the sin-covering eye” is a whole complex of beliefs about what can and can’t or should and shouldn’t be thought, said, or done; about the of nature persons, organizations, and communities; about negative and positive, bad and good, in what sense they coexist and how we should respond to them. It ranges from sophisticated to simple, from individuals to everything. I can’t possibly take on the whole array in one essay so I won’t. Ironically, speaking openly of negatives, faults, or problems is one bad thing for which devotees of the sin-covering eye will often suspend their principle of seeing only the good. The one definitely addressable negative is the addressing of negatives. This knocks my funny bone.

Some years ago a friend of mine took to describing Larry, my husband, whom she had met only a few times, as very honest. This is what Larry was to her, honest. “He’s really honest. I think he’s very honest.” She was, I think, fulfilling her idea of her Baha’i duty to identify good qualities in this particular other and hold them up. And while I think it is essentially true that Larry is honest, it is not, as the phrase goes, who he is. And so long as she holds onto that as who-he-is, she will know nothing of the real wilderness that is his particular person.

Ignoring the bad and focusing on the good, if taken up simplistically, thus mutilates people in one’s imagination. Persons become collections of qualities that are distinct, separable, and evaluable as good or bad. Whatever is deemed to be bad is ignored, and whatever is deemed to be good is taken as the whole. I don’t doubt that there is something sick in us that wants to fondle what we take as other people’s faults, missteps and wrongdoings, or even to become obsessed with trying to correct them, rather than attending to the order of our own homes. But people are not collections of good and bad qualities; who we are is not divisible, and what is awry in us affects all of who we are in complex ways. If in other human beings you reject and ignore what you deem to be faults, you don’t get something wonderful to affirm, you get a dissected carcass of personhood in your imagination. And you may get a significant danger in your life.

If Baha’i children are raised to see only the positive in others and to perceive faults only in themselves, how then are they, on coming of age, to be equipped to investigate the character of another and to choose someone to spend their life with? It’s like being expected to do calculus when you’ve been banned from doing arithmetic. Inability to see the negative sets people up for victimhood. What’s to stop a Baha’i child from getting in the car of a stranger who offers them a ride? The person is being friendly, right? Why look at negatives? How will her good Baha’i parents protect her from abusers who would gain their own trust through good qualities—favors, kindness, openness? And if a young woman is taught to see only the uprightness, good service, and generosity of the young men she looks upon with interest, what are the chances that she will be skilled in perceiving how one who returns her interest uses these to mask his duplicity, ambition, self-righteousness, and violence?

Selectively seeing the faults of others is like saying, “You suck and I don’t.” But selectively not seeing the faults of others is like saying, “Please use me.” Hands go up, objections are made: The Baha’i Faith does not condone abuse. It is for justice and for the punishment of abuse. People should not allow themselves to be abused.

Yes, but how? There seems to me an assumption in this line of thinking that you can get rid of something and keep it at the same time—ditch your cake and eat it too. An assumption that you can not see the faults in others, yet be able to do just that when it really matters. But abuse is complex; recognizing it is far from automatic. And it isn’t separable from lesser sins like manipulation and lying. Where is the line between what can be perceived and discussed, and what shouldn’t? And if the sin-covering eye is not meant to overlook real wrongs, if ignoring the “bad qualities” only means not freaking out when your spouse doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste, then what are we talking about, anyway? Are breaches of etiquette sins?

Shoghi Effendi wrote,

There is a tendency to mix up the functions of the Administration and try to apply it in individual relationships, which is abortive . . . But individuals towards each other are governed by love, unity, forgiveness and a sin-covering eye. Once the friends grasp this they will get along much better . . . (Directives from the Guardian, pp. 41–42)

But LSAs, NSAs, and the Universal House of Justice cannot handle everybody’s problems, difficulties, and faults. There are too few of them and too many of us; there always will be. And besides, how are assembly members to be skilled in doing this if before they’re on the assembly they’re not allowed to think, converse, and make decisions about the bad stuff? Everybody has need of perceiving more than just the nicenesses in others in making decisions as parents, citizens, supervisors, landlords, tenants, patients, teachers, just about every role a person can occupy. Hell, merely in opening the front door to a stranger who has knocked, one needs to be alert to more than the pretty whiteness of his teeth.

The idea that all critical thought about actual people can be left to assemblies is frankly dumb. And writing an over-long essay to point this out seems dumb too. Like, duh. Yet I’ve seen the trouble these ideas can make. And I think every religious community should look honestly at the ways its culture, ideals, scripture, and ways of functioning can enable abuse.

But I’m not saying it’s OK to talk however, whenever, whatever. I don’t believe that. Talking needlessly about what’s wrong with other people is probably one of the more recurrent sins of my life. I can remember being in middle school and talking with a friend during a sleepover about everyone we knew, picking them apart for pleasure. When we’d done with one we’d think of another. I think the game was driven more by me than by her. I remember saying, “Who next? What about so-and-so?” and having simultaneously a hovering awareness, slightly outside the moment, that something was not right in me. I think after that I never engaged again in this practice overtly as a form of entertainment. I’m still figuring out, though, the more subtle and not-so-subtle ways I err in my thought and speech about others.

But I thank Baha’u’llah, Jesus, the boogie man, maybe even the tooth fairy—certainly my own desire to be a whole healthy person in good relationships—that I never really succeeded in implementing this “Baha’i ideal” of the sin-covering eye, that never sees the “faults” of others. Life is just way too hard, way too dangerous for that.

Minus the Facial Hair

It's winter in Vermont.

It's what you call beautiful.



Out every window . . .



bathroom,



kitchen,



living room,



and from the driveway.

On cold insomniac nights the wind rushes through the clear cut across our road to howl in the trees on our hillside, while I shuffle about the 55 degree house unable to build a fire (we heat with wood), unwilling to wake Larry. Every time I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror I think that I, in my new wool hat, remind myself of someone. Suddenly, after a few nights of wondering, I know who it is, and pulling out my Basic Baha’i Dictionary I find the image.

Yes . . . in that new hat, Ms. Leaf bears a suspicious resemblance to Baha'i calligrapher Mishkin-Qalam.


At least, it seemed that way at 3:00 am.


(A real post is coming soon, probably.)

(I think I can. I think I can.)

Hey, It’s Masá’il!

My favorite month in the Baha’i calendar! I think the month named “Questions” should be a nineteen-day extravaganza of inquiry. If Questions is an attribute or name of God, then it seems improper for Baha’is to keep their questions tucked away. What would happen if during this month all Baha’is looked inside, into the shadowy corners of their minds and hearts, and coaxed out all unspoken questions . . .?

Why haven’t more of the Bab’s writings been translated? How do we know when the Universal House of Justice is legislating, and has it ever legislated on anything? Why isn’t Khadíjih Bagum one of the Letters of the Living? How much is the salary of the Secretary of the U.S. NSA? Do sexually active gay Baha’is have their administrative rights removed more often than violent abusers? Do violent abusers ever have their administrative rights removed? Are the violations against Iranian Baha’is by the Iranian government the only government abuses of human rights that Baha’is are allowed to speak out about and organize to stop?

Does a paper on which the text of the long healing prayer is printed have magical healing powers, as suggested in the prayer? Does my membership in the Baha’i community hinder or help my spiritual growth? My intellectual growth? Is teaching the Faith proselytizing by a different name? Why are there so few excellent books in the secondary literature of the Faith? Has pre-publication review been in the best interest of the Faith’s development? How can cannabis damage the soul? How can Baha’is resolve feelings of guilt for past actions? If Baha’i houses of worship are supposed to be places we go to hear the word of God recited, why aren’t acoustics the top priority in design instead of appearance? Shouldn’t the Temple of Light be the temple of sound and spoken word?

Diverse, perplexing, and unanswered questions: Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Question: How can “questions” be an attribute of God? God is glory. God is beauty. God is light. God is mercy. God is perfection. God is might. God is knowledge. God is power. God is “questions”? How? I don’t know . . . but I like it. Perhaps “questions” as a divine attribute is a way of naming the divine relationship to our free will, God’s wondering what we will choose, the self-chosen not-knowing of the All Knowing.

When I think about questions as something holy in us, an attribute of God that we are to reflect, I think of curiosity, of openness, of knowing that one doesn’t know. Questions imply a relationship between the asker and the truth, between the questioner and the world. By questioning, the intellect approaches the divine with its own proper need, the need to know, to understand. Is there a God? How do I know? What good is God anyway? The questions of the mind blend with the questions of the heart. And when we bring our questions to each other, something happens. Both by our questions and by our responses to the questions of others we reveal ourselves. Questions can be creative. Questions create community.

Independent investigation of truth is proclaimed as a primary principal of the Baha’i Faith. I wonder, though, is there even such a thing as independent investigation of truth? Can we seek truth without being in conversation? Can we come to the truth without each other? And what if we do? So I’ve come to the truth, all by my lonesome. Great. The truth is, we are not independent. We are always interdependent. And our search for truth is in community, a community of shared language, of shared history, story, and culture, or, at the very least, shared humanity. Nor can the divinity of questions be realized if we are in isolation from each other. The questions need the community and the community needs the questions.

But questions are nothing much if they do not lead to any exploration of possible answers. Or if the answers are predetermined. And if the answers are not predetermined, then they will not be the same for everyone in the community. Do people slip from active participation in Baha’i community, are they marginalized or kicked out, not merely because of this or that hot-button issue—although that is certainly there—but because of a collective and institutional discomfort with questions, their contagiousness, and the diversity and change which an open-ended creative relationship to the truth must yield?

Not only do we reveal ourselves in our responses to our own and other people’s questions, but we also reveal our theology and our relationship to the divine. If a religious community does not allow questions, real questions, open questions, challenging questions, and if it doesn’t want the people who question, who manifest this divine attribute, then I wonder what kind of God that community serves. Aren’t questions an expression of our desire for the unknown? The paradox at the heart of Baha’i faith—that we are created to “know” and “worship” (short obligatory prayer) what “minds cannot grasp . . . nor hearts contain” (Arabic Hidden Words)—is a paradox which, if lived, must yield questions and more questions.

Can the Baha’i Faith be a community that lives its questions? Or is it bound to be a community of quick answers? Are the principles of the Faith ready answers to our troubles, or arrows pointing in the directions where productive questions lie? The unity of humanity: What is unity? Why are we divided? Who is my neighbor? Do I feel heard? Do I listen to others? Is unity necessarily good? How does God want us to live our unity?

Questions lead to other questions. How is it that neither unity nor oneness is among the divine attributes on the calendrical list? How can our Baha’i community collectively manifest those that are, such as mercy, light, honor, dominion, and might? How will we know that the power we manifest is a proper reflection of divine power?

One way is to question the community's exercise of power. Looking at this list of attributes, “questions” seems to me the safeguard of all. A community must question itself as it attempts to reflect the divine in its collective life.

In the Kitab-i-Aqdas (p. 64), Baha’u’llah says:

In the Bayán it had been forbidden you to ask Us questions. The Lord hath now relieved you of this prohibition, that ye may be free to ask what you need to ask, but not such idle questions as those on which the men of former times were wont to dwell. Fear God, and be ye of the righteous! Ask ye that which shall be of profit to you in the Cause of God and His dominion, for the portals of His tender compassion have been opened before all who dwell in heaven and on earth.

This admonition can easily be used to maintain the status quo. If there are questions which the fear of God should keep us from asking—a proposition I’m not ready to affirm—they will likely be suspiciously close to the questions that most need to be asked. The questions “which shall be of profit to you in the Cause of God” may therefore look to some like a threat to the Cause of God. Who will decide which questions can be asked? Faith is a risky affair. If Baha’is err in the direction of checking questions to protect the Cause of God, they may protect themselves from their heart’s desire.

I think allowing questions is closely akin to allowing God, and that is our job, to allow God, to allow the mystery of our own hearts, the uncertainty of our lives, the fragility of our hope. I think it’s possible to live in holiness without answers, but I don’t think it’s possible to live in holiness without questions.

What do you think?

Wait a Momen: Part 2 with Preface

(Part 1 here.)

Preface. Oh, poopy—I’m all out of sync with the goings-on in Baha’i cyberspace. While I procrastinated on posting Part 2 of “Wait a Momen,” word of Moojan Momen’s latest article in the academic journal Religion, “Marginality and Apostasy in the Baha’i Community,” hit the Internet and has created quite a stir in some corners, with good reason. You can read the abstract here. He focuses on twelve individuals whom he names as “apostates,” which in his definition are people who have left the Baha’i Faith and dedicated themselves to attacking it. I’ve read the whole article. The only person his argument might fit is Wahid Azal, who has accepted the accusation with pride. His remarks can be read in the comments here. Here are links to some other responses, mostly by persons named or referenced in the article:

Alison Marshall
Karen Bacquet
Umm Yasmin
Steve Marshall
Brendan Cook


Momen’s article is a strange tangle of accurate perceptions, assertions with scant or absent evidence, factual errors, exaggerations, omissions, and underneath all an annoyance that anyone is publicly criticizing the Faith and being heard.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program:

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When it comes to traditions of worship, I’m a bit of a slut. I love the silent receptivity of ascetic contemplation. I love the joyful noise and agonized cries of the Black sacred music tradition. I am so smitten by Abraham Heschel’s writing on the meaning of the Jewish sabbath that I have considered observing it myself. And after a few months of reading Anna Dirks’s essays on Islam at her blog, Annalog, I long to hear the muezzin call, to perform wud’u, and to prostrate myself five times a day in prayer. The passive/active dichotomy Moojan Momen uses with its bad/good implication doesn’t seem to me a very useful way to look at religious practice.

Momen draws his model of passivity from the worship and ritual of an imagined, generalized Christianity, but I’d like to take him to the real Episcopal church I attend when I’m up to it, where, in the course of an average Sunday morning service, those gathered sing, stand, kneel, eat, drink, read scripture singly and collectively, greet each other with “The Peace of the Lord,” and listen to a sermon which may be given by a member of the clergy or of the laity, or even by a group of youth with mics, drums and electric guitars. That one kid looks so sweet when he sits with his family in the pews, but he can wail somethin’ good when he goes down on his knees singing, heavy-metal style, “Confess your siiiiiiiiins!” The congregation goes wild.

And we do too many other things to mention. Just recently I watched the children carry to the altar groceries brought by congregants as donations to the local food pantry. Giving to others is giving to God. A one-year-old toddled up with a large box of Life cereal. Depending on the day he came, Moojan Momen might have his feet washed by a member of the congregation and wash the feet of another. On the first Sunday of the month he could receive the hands and prayers of members who have joined together under the rather hokey name “the healing team” and who pray with individuals for their specific needs during communion. I try to go on the first Sunday of the month.

One of these days I will ask that the whole congregation lay hands on me and pray for my healing. It is lovely when it happens, usually when someone is going to have an operation. She sits in a chair and all gather close around her. Those closest place their hands on her head, shoulders, legs, arms, and everyone else places their hands on those in front of them so that we chain together. Then we pray, the priest aloud, the rest in silence. All healers in the name of Christ. I would be happy—and I do not mean this sarcastically—to have Moojan Momen there on the day I receive this gift. Lay and ordained, visitor and member, we all give. And we all receive.

What rubs my heart like 60 grit sandpaper is the way Moojan Momen maligns receiving. He reads it as passive, as the negative opposite of active. In this view, receiving is lazy, it is not doing for yourself. “Each Bahá’í must be his or her own priest.” What a lonely vision. But receiving is not the negative, passive opposite of being active; it is the fulfillment of giving. And is it easy? For me, learning to receive has been both hard—a letting go of pride—and healing. What can you give if you do not receive? A religious community which defines itself as purely active, each member doing for herself in contrast to the supposedly passive receivers of other faiths, will be a collection of exhausted people doing a lot and giving little.

Yes, during the Sunday morning service we “receive” the sacraments. But, Mr. Momen, the sacraments are gifts of God. You do not need to believe in them to find sympathy with this phrase—“gifts of God.” In the post-communion prayer we give thanks for these gifts and, addressing eternal God, say “send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.” In other words, to do the work God has given us to do, to love as we have been loved. “Let us bless the Lord,” the deacon says. “Thanks be to God,” the people answer.

Baha’i writings are, in the context of Baha’i faith, gifts of God. Those who meditate on them privately or attend Feast, devotional gatherings, or services in Baha’i houses of worship receive them afresh as they are read, and then, like Christians, go out into the world to love and serve the Lord—as they feel inspired to by the receipt of those gifts.

Or do they? Oh yes, the House of Justice says, some Baha’is have been doing it wonderfully, but not enough Baha’is, not everyone, and, dear me, not in the efficient, systematic, and membership-expanding way the House wants. Speaking of the changes Shoghi Effendi made, Momen says, “the charisma of Bahá’u’lláh and Abdu’l-Bahá needed to be routinized—to be institutionalized.” With the House now dictating what few activities local communities must focus on, how exactly Baha’is should study Baha’i writings, and what can and can’t be discussed during consultation at National Convention and in delegates’ reports to their communities, it seems more likely that the charisma of Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha will be banished or simply lost in the commotion than that an egalitarian grass-roots renaissance will sweep the Baha’i world.

The authority and command of the Universal House of Justice peers around every idea and clause of Momen’s prose, lending it a self-conscious awkwardness. These, I think, are the words of a man trying hard not to think his own thoughts. He must conclude that “[t]he direction towards which the Universal House of Justice is pointing the Baha’is is clearly the next logical step in the development of the Baha’i community”: his faith depends on it.

The most remarkable sentences in his essay come near the end. They leave me feeling sad for the Faith, for Baha’is, and for Moojan Momen.

Indeed it may appear strange to some to say that this change of culture is a change that seeks to create communities where individual Bahá'ís are initiating activities and decisions are made at a “grass-roots” level, and at the same time to say that this change is a process that is being initiated by the Universal House of Justice and is thus being directed from the top. However, one has to consider the question: how else would such a change of culture occur in a community that is used to receiving its directions from the top and is prevented, by the concept of the Covenant, from launching a grass-roots rebellion in order to achieve such a change?

Odd, isn’t it, under these conditions, to trace passivity in the Baha’i Faith to other religious communities?

Everyone knows the Faith is supposed to be expanding rapidly. Everyone knows it isn’t. Momen and the House say that it’s because, among other things, Baha’is have been passivated by the religions around them. But I say that blaming other religious groups is just a trick, a trick that exploits our too-common willingness to see the ways of others as inferior without seeking any substantive understanding of them. It sounds quite harsh to name it, but the word for this is prejudice. Prejudice is used by the House and extended by Momen, perhaps unwittingly, as a distraction so that Baha’is will not protest against the real blaming implicit in this discourse: rank and file Baha’is have failed.

I’m not going to replace this fallacious blame with any other; there are other souls in cyberspace who can do that much better than I can. Besides, I’d like to see the whole idea of entry by troops tossed in the dustbin with a hearty laugh. What a liberation that would be. Baha’is and Baha’i institutions need a better purpose than membership-expansion. The real desire of Baha’is to help the world has been too long co-opted by that fantasy. And if Baha’i communities receive, give, and thrive, growth will likely happen anyway.

After years of listening to consultation at Feast in Chicago, which consisted largely of a succession of people saying “I suggest we do this,” “We need to do more of that,” “We’ve got to do much more of this,” “I suggest the Assembly should do that,” “The friends need to,” “The friends must,” I finally stood up one feast and said, “I don’t think we need to do more. I think we need to do less.” I got serious eyes from Assembly members but continued, “We need to do less and show up for each other more.”

Until very recently I had not seen The American Baha’i in five years. Looking through the October 16 edition, which a friend passed on to me, I was at first confused by certain uses of the term “resources” and then aghast. For example: “new resources were identified and Assemblies were informed of trained resources in each of their communities.” We the people are not resources to be trained and exploited, located and utilized. We are gifts of God. If we slacken our will a bit, our drive to achieve—and I am thinking now not just of Baha’is, because we are, after all, in a world-wide pickle together—and turn our attention more to receiving each other, I think we will find ourselves already, to our surprise, where we want to be. And from that place we can give real service to the world.

And we’ll do the hokey pokey and we’ll turn ourselves around, ’cause that’s what it’s all about. Clap clap!

Wait a Momen: Part 1

A change is happening in the Baha’i world. Moojan Momen says it’s a necessary, right, and good change of culture. Or, rather, he says the Universal House of Justice says it’s a change of culture, and Moojan Momen confirms this is so. He says a bunch of other stuff too; you can read Momen’s essay “A Change of Culture” here. But what has me up off my couch of heedlessness to call across the Atlantic, “Momen, honey, please think again,” is this:

Clearly, the Universal House of Justice considers that the Bahá’í community is still tainted by certain characteristics that it considers should not be part of the Bahá’í Faith and that it is these characteristics that are holding back the progress of the Faith. These are, broadly speaking, characteristics which exist in current religious communities and which Bahá’ís have brought with them into the Bahá’í community.

These unwanted traits include the passivity implied by the words “member of a congregation.” Members of a congregation play a receptive role—receiving sermons, sacraments and advice from the priest. They are told what their scriptures mean and how to apply that to their lives. In some congregations, it is even considered to be within the priest’s powers to hear confessions and pardon sins. Bahá’ís can no longer, in the new culture, play such a passive role. They must actively participate in their communities, study and interpret their scriptures for themselves, and work out their own salvation. Each Bahá’í must be his or her own priest.

How’s that for a quick smackdown of the Christian laity? In his elaboration of the opinions of the Universal House of Justice, Momen is talking about Christianity for sure, though he doesn’t say it. Sermons, sacraments, priests, confessions—other communities use some of these terms but no other community uses all of them. And he uses no terms and describes no practices that are specific to Islam or Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism. It’s the infectious Christian passivity that has gotten into the Baha’i community and must be gotten out.

Is there passivity in Christendom, an over-reliance on clergy? Sometimes, yes. But comparing worst Christian practice to Baha’i ideals is not exactly fair; nor is speaking in such breezy generalities about something so diverse as Christianity. Even if Momen’s words are not read as Christian-specific, I object to them no less. Is this how Baha’i individuals and institutions should relate to other faiths—using them as a crutch to prop up the stumbling greatness of the Baha’i Faith?

Baha’is and Baha’i institutions should think critically about how other religious communities function and learn from them, but these generalities don’t qualify. Momen makes his case for the passivity of Christians from worship and ritual, with a little kick to pastoral care on the side. He makes no attempt to understand those practices or to discern their relationship to the functioning of Christian communities and the action of Christians in the world, which would be more relevant points of comparison, since the subject of his essay is not Baha’i worship but the responsibility of individuals in the operation of community. Momen does not seem to be interested in understanding his religious neighbors. He knows they are passive. But, as a scholar of religion, he ought to know better.

The Baha’i metaphor of levels of education, overused to describe the relationship of religions to each other, misleads many minds, perhaps Moojan Momen’s. The Faith is not graduate school to the kindergarten of Judaism and Hinduism, the middle school of Christianity and Buddhism, the high school of Islam. The Faith is more like a stereotype rebellious teen amidst the village elders who have done it all and have a lot of good stories to tell. The Faith has lots of good ideas and a lot of opportunity, but it is also too convinced it has the answers and is going to do things differently. Learn from the worst, the bad, and the not very good of other communities and avoid those mistakes if you can. But also look for the best and be challenged by it.

What I really want to know is exactly what activity in this new Baha’i culture is not already performed by Christian laity all over the place? Does Momen think that only Christian clergy run children’s classes? That Christians never pray together unless they have a priest or a pastor there to lead them? That Christians don’t read, discuss, write about, or meditate on scripture unless someone with a white collar tells them what to think or how to read it? Has he not noticed the abundance of non-ordained Christian theologians, public intellectuals, artists, and writers, not to mention pig-headed crazies? Or that the laity play a large role in church governance in many Christian denominations? Goodness me, has he not noticed the political influence of the Christian right in the U.S. lately? That wasn’t achieved with a limp laity. No, for good and for ill, lay Christians are plenty active.

And what of Baha’is? Momen says, “It is no longer sufficient in the new culture for Baha’is to fit in their Baha’i activities into odd nooks and crannies of their lives.” I guess “Baha’i activities” refers to children’s classes, study circles, devotional gatherings—you know, the core activities—and does not refer to fulfilling the commandments of Bahá’u’lláh to earn a living through the exercise of a skill or trade that is of service to humanity, to raise children and care for elderly parents, to tend to the needs of the body, to pray and meditate alone in the privacy of your home, to be a good friend—you know, all the things around which Baha’is have been fitting in their “Baha’i activities.” This point of view wants the Faith to become more of people’s lives, but is in fact urging people to see it as less of their lives. Attending a cluster meeting is a Baha’i activity, making love with your spouse is not; filling in the blanks in Ruhi Book 2 is a Baha’i activity, managing your finances is not; voting at unit convention is a Baha’i activity, tending a vegetable garden is not. There is something anti-human in this point of view, and Baha’is would do well to resist it. To paraphrase a well-known sage, the Faith was made for humanity, not humanity for the Faith.

But what have actual, living, breathing Baha’is been doing? Have they just been a bunch of couch-of-heedlessness potatoes? Well, here’s a little sample: One of my best friends barely escaped three years ago with her life from an abusive marriage, which in three months had escalated from aggressive nose pinching to attempted strangulation. She has been healing, regaining her strength, learning a new job, supporting other women. The house of another friend burnt down last year. She escaped with her husband, her pocketbook, and their cat, but nothing else. Incidentally, she has also lived with chronic illness for 30 years and raised seven children, fielding much other trouble and tragedy with wisdom and wit. Another friend works to pay for her children’s college education, after having raised them pretty much alone. She’s also exploring a quiet romance with a longtime friend who has suffered from severe mental illness since being severely sexually abused in early adulthood. Needless to say, he hasn’t been the same since, and being intimate with him is complicated, though, she reports, well worth it.

I have a Baha’i friend who, after years of being abused by her husband, separated from him a year ago when she realized he was sexually abusing their son. She is caring for her son on her own, with a greatly reduced income and inadequate support from family and her local spiritual assembly. Two friends have been coming to terms as adults with attention-deficit disorder and learning disabilities. Another friend had to fly to Germany a few years ago to locate her son, who had disappeared after being pulled from military service in Iraq because of psychological breakdown. She has since helped him find his way again.

If this sounds like I know a remarkably afflicted bunch of Baha’is, I would say . . . I think not. This is life. Major difficulties are common, not rare. Baha’i community is healthiest when supporting people in their lives and least healthy when whipping up a more cult-like absorption in community activities and plans of expansion. If Baha’i administration treats Baha’is as if their lives are obstacles to the progress of the Faith, then it risks irrelevance to those lives. People will walk away—and they have been, at a good clip.