REFLECTIONS ON A CULTURE of LEARNING AND OF GROWTH

RonPrice

REFLECTIONS ON A CULTURE
OF LEARNING AND OF GROWTH
Community and Individual
Paradigm Shifts
A Context and a Personal Text

DEDICATION

This essay is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the forty-fifth anniversary in April 2008 of its first election in April 1963. This essay is also written in commemoration of the memory of my maternal grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield, whose epic autobiography was an example of the culture of learning with which he was imbued all his life.

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It is my hope that what readers find here in this essay, originally written for the Online Journal of Baha’i Studies will serve as a useful extension of their reflections and understandings regarding the culture of learning and of growth and the paradigmatic shift the Baha’i community is currently going through and has been going through since the mid-1990s, in relation to both learning and growth. If this article or essay functions in only a small way to assist in bringing about a paradigm shift in the lives of some of my fellow believers across the globe, a paradigm shift without which any shift in Baha'i community life will have little meaning to them, this essay will have achieved one of its central purposes. I have found, in writing down my thoughts on this subject, that I have experienced an auspicious beginning to my own reflections on the new paradigm, the new culture of learning and of growth in the life of the Baha’i community that has emerged in the last decade.

Paradigm shifts do not take place easily because they involve a change in basic assumptions within the current and dominant theory of operations and activities in whatever field in which they occur. My hope is that this piece of writing may play one of the thousands of incremental or microcosmic, sensible or insensible parts in a process which is now in its second decade. As Moojan Momen noted in a critical essay which has been instrumental in creating the ongoing dialogue about this new culture of learning, “the tide is turning” to an appreciation of the significance of this new paradigm after some initial and not always moderate criticisms of its context and content.

More than a decade-long process(1996-2008) of capacity building, of a culture of learning and of growth in the size of the community, as well as an accompanying paradigm shift in Bahá’í community life, is flowing into the waters of Baha’i community life with a sometimes strange, often new, sense of life, of systematic learning and teaching, of the extension of individual teaching endeavours, “irrespective of circumstance,” to a wider circle of people.

There are many aspects of what is involved in our understanding and experience of this culture of learning and of growth and this essay makes a reflexive, a critical and hopefully a useful exploration of some of these aspects. Hopefully, too, members of the Baha’i community and interested observers will be assisted, in the process, in clarifying their own understandings, their misconceptions and confusions, if they have any. There were certainly an inadequacy of Baha’i perspective and inappropriate attitudes, at least from my point of view, which developed regarding several fundamental issues involved in this new culture of learning. I do not see this essay as correcting these attitudes or even enlarging these perspectives but, rather and simply, contributing to an inevitable and necessary ongoing dialogue on many and any of the questions regarding this process. Such is my lofty aim here in this mediation and meditation on several themes. I do not break any new ground but, rather, just look over a patch in an intellectual garden which has been laid in the last few years. I try to profit from the work of other gardeners and I aim, too, for lucidity and beauty of expression in a process which has been made easier to indulge in over recent years due to technology and affluence.

An understanding of the nature and meaning of the great turning point we are passing through at this climacteric of history as well as an appreciation of the implications of what has occurred since the coming of the Báb and Baha’u’llah, what is occurring in our lifetimes and what will occur in these early decades of this new millennium, as the House of Justice pointed out, will help us to meet the challenges ahead. There are many sources in Bahá’í history and the Baha’i writings to help us to obtain a more adequate understanding of the significance of Baha’u’llah’s Revelation in relation to this turning point and to help us understand how His Revelation relates to this new culture of learning and of growth in the life of the community. Hopefully, these sources will help us find a context for the discussion of several relevant fundamental questions which have arisen in this decade-long exercise. We need to be on our guard that in making merely superficial adjustments in the context of the glitter and tinsel of our affluent society these will themselves fulfil the tasks at hand. Far otherwise. I trust this lengthy essay will not be in any way intimidating and will not be lacking in a good deal of common sense as I explore the nature of the process in which the Baha’i community is currently involved. The desirability of pursuing this process is taken for granted, although I am sure that for many this exercise in analysis is not needed nor wanted nor seen as even remotely necessary. In the end, I write this for myself to help relieve some of the complexity and burden, to clarify and enlarge some of my own thinking and to enjoy the act of discovery as I make room for new and fresh ideas which I hope come along as I write.

We must turn again and again to fundamentals, at least I feel I should as I discuss this new development in the religion I been associated with for over half a century for, in some ways, this paradigm shift is not some revolutionary new wave of thinking that has suddenly sprung up ex nihilo. A detailed and exact knowledge of all the terms and language involved in this new paradigm and of the many and varied applications of this culture of learning and of growth and of the diverse conditions prevailing around the world, while valuable in itself, is not and cannot be regarded as the sort of knowledge, learning and understanding that is primarily meant by this new paradigm. This detailed knowledge and this new language is explored elsewhere in many an essay, discussion paper, document, letter and internet post and is certainly not at the core of this literary analysis, this essay.

To expand on an example which Moojan Momen raises in his useful article about the same topic I am writing about here and to provide some of the context in which I want to discuss this subject, I would like to comment on the change in culture that the Guardian initiated in the 1920s and 1930s. This change did not spring up ex nihilo within the Guardian’s action-oriented exegesis any more than other significant and paradigmatic shifts in the life of the Baha’i community have sprung up ex nihilo, out of nothing. Like most change in science and the arts, change occurs by what you might call a happy accumulation; an original approach is not invalidated just modified or given a particular emphasis.

The work of the Guardian from 1921 to 1936 provides for us an irresistible comparison and contrast in concept and method with the changes in our time. I find this comparison with the work of Shoghi Effendi, the paradigm shift he developed in those entre deux guerres years, irresistible because retrospection offers dimensions of understanding which sharpen our perception of the current cultural shift in the life of the Baha’i community.

Shoghi Effendi did much more than explain the texts; he directed and guided the community through a crucible of transformation that forged the Baha’i community. I don’t want to go into the details of this forging process. Glenford Mitchell did a fine job, one of the best from my perspective, of delineating the objectives and purposes of this forging process some thirty-five years ago and I leave it to readers to enjoy the pleasures of engaging in his well-written article in World Order magazine. This forging process of Shoghi Effendi had been preceded before he assumed the reins of office in 1921.

The Guardian, that offspring of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s interpretive mind and co-sharer in the genius of divine interpretation, assumed his position as the legitimate successor of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, as Mitchell points out, which was difficult for people to estimate, to understand, to appreciate. An evaluation and understanding of the grandeur of the Guardian’s work or position is difficult, as the British historian Macauley once wrote in another context, because there was no standard by which the Baha’is could measure his position.” The Guardian’s role and station was from a Bahá’í perspective, unique in history.

The preliminary steps, the precursors, of the Administrative system which Shoghi Effendi gave his paramount attention to building, to permanently and systematically establishing in those entre deux guerres years, had already been taken by ‘Abdu’l-Baha and even by Baha’u’llah in the years preceding His ascension. I will not outline these steps here for Shoghi Effendi has done this for us comprehensively in his extensive delineation of the first stirrings of the Baha’i Administrative Order. In short, the cultural shift, the paradigm shift, that Shoghi Effendi was so instrumental in developing involved what Horace Holley called an evolution from “a small local group to a national unit of a world society.”

The American Bahá’í community consisted of an informal network of groups, “small pockets of ingrown and amorphous communities” in 1921 and by 1936 it had developed into “a vastly enlarged and well-organized religion with a national consciousness” and was able to initiate an international teaching campaign. It is this development, this organizational evolution, this alteration in the consciousness and direction of the Baha’i community that is involved in what Momen calls “a change in the Baha’i culture” and which he draws on to compare the present change in culture in the life of the Baha’i community in the last two decades. The change in culture initiated by Shoghi Effendi was, indeed, a gradual one characterized by phases and transitions, one might even say, a multi-paradigmatic shift.

Reading the work of Bramson-Lerche on this subject is instructive, but I will not comment on her analysis here. Suffice it to say, the context for the change in culture that Momen refers to in the 1920s and 1930s and that she utilizes for her helpful comparison to the change in culture the Baha’i community is currently undergoing, is heuristic and rich in its potential to cast light on our current culture change. The paradigmatic shift that the Baha’i community is now engaged in, like the one referred to between WWI and WW2, needs to be seen in context . For this most recent shift, like the former, did not spring up ex nihilo.

The Baha’i paradigm has always been fundamentally right from a Baha’i perspective. For the Baha’i this is not a subjective statement but one of fact. The Baha’i paradigm, the Baha’i worldview, the Baha’i model, the Baha’i archetypal pattern or exemplar is not, at its heart, an organization, an ideology, a cosmology, nor a framework for action among other possible definitions and applications of the term paradigm. It is, as Douglas Martin pointed out in the conclusion to a talk he gave in April 1992:

“a universal reality operating within every soul and between all souls. It is readily accessible to independent investigation and discovery. It is the axis of the oneness of the world of humanity. It is reality and ultimately it will engage the minds and spirits of all people because it is the nature of reality to do so.”

However elusive, subtle and visionary Martin’s words here, they are also provocative, enticing and stimulating to the imagination. For the Bahá’í this Cause is the paradigm of paradigms; but from time to time this paradigm needs a refinement, an extension, a variation, an adjustment, a series of fundamental transition phases, what some might call simply a shift. I would like to suggest that whatever shift, whatever culture of learning and of growth the Baha’i community is going through, whatever phases and stages that have characterized it and will characterize it in the years ahead, they are each and all part and parcel of the three distinct but interrelated processes set in motion by “the triple impulse generated through the revelation of the Tablet of Carmel by Bahá’u’lláh, the Will and Testament and the Tablets of the Divine Plan bequeathed by the Centre of His Covenant.” It is to a brief discussion of this triple impulse, the context for this new culture, the context for what is referred to as this new paradigm, that I now turn.

The construction work at the Baha’i World Centre is and was an historic thrust in the context of that first impulse. The vast, prolonged and costly building enterprize, fulfilling the glorious vision on the efflorescence of God’s holy mountain, is exerting, has exerted and will exert “a profound influence” on the worldwide Baha’i community. A series of developments at the World Centre: the completion of the Seat of the Universal House of Justice in 1984, the announcement in 1987 of the Arc Project which by 1988 had resulted in “the emergence of a new paradigm of opportunity” and which by 1989 had resulted in “heightened expectations” were all an expression in the world of concrete, marble and architectural reality of that first impulse generated well over a century ago just before the passing of Baha’u’llah in His Tablet of Carmel.

This change of culture, this historic paradigm shift, is also intimately connected to the second and third impulses specified above. The second impulse and this paradigmatic shift, I would argue, is part of “the striking impact” of the Holy Year and the publication during that same period of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Charter of Baha’u’llah’s World Order and a Book of phenomenal importance, a Book which opened “wider the door of a vast process of individual and community development.” That Holy Year 1992/3 witnessed “an auspicious juncture in the history of His Cause,” the commemoration of the centenary of the Ascension of its divine Author and a celebration of the centenary of the inauguration of His Covenant.

The erection of the buildings at the World Administrative Centre of the Faith “within the precincts and under the shadow if its World Spiritual Centre” is part of a process that has been underway since 1951. The construction of the eighteen monumental Terraces are manifest expressions, it should be emphasized, of the emergence from obscurity of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, an emergence which, like entry by troops, is also a process not an event. This emergence from obscurity associated with, and a result in part of, the developments at the Baha’i World Centre resulted, in part at least, in the increasing emphasis, especially as that “propitious Year” with its “vista of new horizons” concluded, in the process of entry by troops which the House of Justice pointed out Baha’i communities could “prepare for and help to bring about.” This emphasis on the process of entry by troops was foreshadowed in the Ridván Message of 1990 when the House pointed out that “almost one million souls entered the Cause” from 1988 to 1990.

Entry by troops was also not a new phrase or a new concept which suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was also, as I say, a process, a process which the Guardian had referred to as far back as 25 June 1953, four decades before the beginning of the recent song and dance about the process in the 1990s. When the term began to be used extensively in the 1990s many Bahá’ís, thinking it a new concept and thinking it meant masses of new believers entering the Cause, felt pangs of disappointment when the familiar one or two, or a few or none at all were to be seen on the enrolment lists each month. Eventually they came to accept what Peter Khan had emphasized as early as 1996 that the key word in the expression “the process of entry by troops” was "process.” Indeed, one could argue that the process of entry by troops has been part of the Babi-Baha’i experience since the 1840s, if not in Islam itself 1300 years before.

The third impulse, set in motion by the Tablets of the Divine Plan unveiled in 1919 and first formulated in a specific teaching Plan, that Seven Year Plan of 1937 to 1944, is at the basis of the recent emphasis on this process of entry by troops. For such a process to be successful now and in the years and decades ahead, a new culture of learning, a paradigmatic shift, is and will be required on a number of fronts. This was true in the 1950s when the Guardian first used the term in one of his letters and it has been true wherever and whenever large numbers of people entered the Cause or are part of the plans for their entry.

Large numbers have not characterized growth patterns in the West since at least the 1980s and in the places where I have lived since the early 1970s. In the USA numbers have been in decline since the late 1970s and the number of LSAs have actually dropped in Africa, Asia, South America. During the years thusfar of this paradigmatic shift, the Baha’i community in the West and much of the East is not being faced with the many problems that come from significantly increased enrolments. Accelerated and sustained growth has yet to be realized in most places including most A clusters.

The new culture of learning and the training institutes with their increased and more regular socializing, with their emphasis on memorizing, on accompanying serve activities, on learning methods that compliment individual learning and that are especially useful for new Bahá’ís has not, as yet, been productive of any significant rise in enrolments.

The renewed emphasis on the process of entry by troops and the concomitant and associated “united clarity of vision for the expansion of the Cause and all its agencies,” was, as I say, part and parcel of this recent paradigmatic shift. It was ushered in by “the developments in the remarkably dynamic period” of the Six Year Plan of 1986 to 1992 and “the accumulated potential for further progress” which was considered “incalculable at the time;” as well as the view that “some mysterious rampant force” was resulting in a quality of change in the world which the House of Justice referred to as characterized by suddenness or “precipitateness.” The rigorous effects of this rampant force were like a “a quickening wind” which was “ventilating the modes of thought of us all” and “renewing, clarifying and amplifying our perspectives.” It is against this background, this socio-historical context, that this new culture of learning found its original articulation in the mid-to-late 1990s.

This ventilation, this quickening, it seems to me in retrospect, resulted among other things in: (a) the new focus of the Four Year Plan of 1996 to 2000, “a turning point of epochal magnitude,” and (b) a series of documents that tried to summarize “the experience of the Baha’i world in advancing the process of entry by troops. These documents, in addition to many letters beginning with a series of three letters in January 2001: “to the Conference of the Continental Board of Counsellors,” “to the Conference marking the inauguration of the International Teaching Centre Building” and “to the Baha’is of the World,” laid out in some detail the nature and meaning of this culture of learning, this culture of growth and this paradigm shift.

These letters and these documents noted that, among other things: the scheme could not be applied in every situation; we stood too close to comprehend the magnitude of what was so amazingly being accomplished; a coherence of understanding, a change of time, a new state of mind and immensely promising prospects were developing within the divinely driven enterprize we were occupied with; an unprecedented project, a fundamental change of consciousness was taking place; and that the future had never looked so bright.”

By 2005, nearly a decade after its inception, this new paradigm, this culture of growth and learning: (i) had “crystallized into a framework for action,” (ii) resulted in the friends engaging in “progressively more complex and demanding acts of service,” (iii) saw “a steady increase in the exercise of individual initiative,” (iv) was characterized by the believers “entering into closer association with people of many walks of life,” (v) was marked by “a graceful integration of the arts into diverse activities,” (vi) issued in “a rigorous process of learning that was “the hallmark of this phase of the development of the community,” (vii) possessed a flexibility that “discouraged the tendency to confuse focus with uniformity or exclusivity” and (viii) saw this new process as the outcome of yet another stage in “the silent growth of that orderly world polity whose fabric” the Baha’is themselves were weaving.

At Ridván 2006 the House cautioned the Baha’is not to be “misled by the painful slowness characterizing the unfoldment of the civilization” they were laboriously establishing. This cautionary note has been voiced on many occasions over the years by each of the Central Figures and Their legitimate successors. When “hoped-for results did not readily materialize” and “a measure of discouragement set in” it became necessary for believers to become aware that their “high expectations of the early years were.....quite unrealistic.” This problem of high expectations, of the flush of enthusiasm, of the lack of moderation is and has been “in no small measure responsible for the failure of the hopes” many so fondly cherish within the context of this new paradigm as well as the entire Baha’i paradigm right back to the days of the Báb. Like the task of the Báb Himself, as Shoghi Effendi pointed out, the task faced by this new paradigm is impossible to achieve—in the short term. But in the long term, as the Baha’is have been told time and time again since the earliest days in the history of their Faith, the ascendancy of this process among the many processes in which the Cause is engaged, however severe their disapppointments, is inevitable; however severe some crisis may be which threatens the unfoldment of the Cause making that unfoldment slow, painfully slow and which blasts the hopes of some program, triumphs unsurpassed in splendour are in store, down time’s long and stony path.

I have lived with the presence of the terms entry by troops and mass conversion as well as the notion of increased receptivity now for over half a century. Entry by troops has been occurring in one way or another, as I suggested above, since the 1840s and, I would argue, so too has been the increased receptivity we keep hearing, but about which we seem to have little understanding. Our understanding of the implications of this deceptively easy phrase which falls from our lips, of its long term role and of its fundamental importance to our community life in the last century and a half and in the decades to come--is crucial.

It is not my purpose here to dwell on the nuances of meaning of this term, nor do I intend to outline the places where it has occurred and the variations as to its application and realization but, like so many things in the Cause, we all stand in need in this important epoch of transition of the “new and wonderful configurations” of knowledge and understanding, “the dazzling rays of this strange and heavenly power,” to embellish our minds with fresh insights derived from wisdom and the power of thought as applied to this important phrase: increased receptivity.

Douglas Martin, the former director general of the Baha’i World Centre Office of Public Information said in April 1992 that the Baha’i community had “not been able to escape a certain connotation of exclusivity.” Such a connotation, he went on to say, had inevitably arisen from the efforts of the Baha’i community in the teaching field and the Baha’i community’s preoccupation with conversion and membership as well as the inevitable intrusion of an “us and them” mentality. The culture of learning, the paradigm shift, that the Baha’i community has been engaged in since the mid-1990s, and which had been initially intimated by Martin, among other intimations in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I have referred to above, involves a heroic effort to shed a number of previous and now quite inappropriate views in the Baha’i community. This shedding of old, now archaic views, it seems to me, is all part of this paradigm shift.

Martin referred to “parochial” views, views clearly outmoded, counter-productive and militating against realistic and accurate images of the Cause in the public mind which public information programs had to reconfigure, so to speak. Such programs in recent decades tended to focus the public message, the image and the ethos of the Baha’i Faith, in religious terms and tended to preoccupy the Baha’is with conversion in one way or another. Just as the Guardian had summoned the Baha’is in the years between WW1 and WW2 to reject a view of the Cause as a movement, a fellowship and, even, as a religion in the familiar sense, so too are the Baha’is now summoned to see the Faith they belong to in quite different terms than was the case in the first three decades after the election of the House of Justice in 1963, in the first six decades of the first implementation of the teaching Plans since 1937 and virtually in the entire lives of most of the Baha’is now in its international community.

Viewed in some ways this new, global and embryonic civilization, this culture of learning and growth which has been part of the Baha’i community since its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century, is and has been slow in developing. Viewed from different perspectives, though, its growth and development has been “momentous” with prospects which are “dazzling.” This has been the case all of my Baha’i life wherever I have lived. At Ridván 2007 the House urged the Baha’i community “to open up avenues to guide souls to the Ocean of His Revelation” and such an urging, such a tone and style of writing, has been the case in many, if not most, of their statements over these past five decades since the “unique victory that the Cause won in 1963” when the fully legitimate institutionalization of that charismatic Force, what some sociologists call a routinization of charisma, a charisma of office as opposed to a prophetic charisma was completed.

The Universal House of Justice expressed the view that the consultations which take place in the periodic cluster meetings, meetings instituted at the very start of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006) and which are part of this new culture of growth and learning, should discuss the concepts of the culture of learning, of change and the paradigm shift in Baha’i community life. These discussions should generate a “unity of thought about the growth of the Faith.......maintain a high level of enthusiasm and.....create a spirit of service and fellowship among those present.” “Such discussions,” they went on to say, “should not become bogged down by undue concern for procedural issues, but should focus on what can be achieved and on the joy of witnessing the fruits of hard work and diligent effort.

This tendency to get bogged down in casuistry, in definitions and meanings of terms, is an oft’-experienced problem both within and without the Baha’i community, both within academic circles and in a host of other interest groups. I do not want to contribute to this endless discussion of terminological distinctions, this disease of words, this illness that strikes at the heart of many a consultation on a myriad of issues, but it is a problem that must be faced even if it is difficult to deal with and solve. We need to be on our guard to protect ourselves from the insidious affects of this casuistry on the consultative process and on our very understanding of quite fundamental issues of the Cause. We need to be on our guard, too, less the new emphasis on the institute process results in a limiting of other Baha’i activities and programs like: interfaith dialogue, deepenings, scholarship, firesides and many individual initiatives.

It is natural that any given educational program, involving whatever resources and whatever format and wherever located, will not appeal to everyone and that some Baha’is will not wish to participate. The House of Justice has recognized this reality of individual styles of learning preferences and advised that the believers not make their own evaluation and understanding of the new programs and emphases “a cause for disunity. “Participation”, they go on to say in this context, “is not a requirement for every Baha’i, who, in the final analysis” chooses “the manner in which he or she will serve the Faith. What is essential is that the institute process be supported even by those who do not wish to take part in it. What is essential, they continued, is that whatever the personal efforts of individuals to teach and in whatever ways they involve themselves in core and other activities that these individuals possess a sense of mission, a sense of enthusiasm and the wisdom to know what to say and when to say it.

Decisions must be made according to individual “circumstances and possibilities” and “the nature of the populations” with whom the Baha’is interact. And again, the House emphasizes that it is desirable that activities which “give expression to a diversity of talents become harmonized into one forward movement, and the stagnation caused by endless debate over personal preferences about approach” be avoided. In this regard the House emphasized that it was “most noteworthy....that the spirit of initiative by believers” had come to extend over a very wide range of endeavours....

Peter Khan, in a talk he gave in Toronto in August 2006, commented off the cuff that “if you don’t want to participate in the core activities, it’s okay; you’re not being disobedient to the Cause. If your orientation is that you want to do proclamation or write poetry and that’s all you want to do, God bless you......What Baha’is have to do is overcome the zealotry of people who are really enthused about this new direction and to re-channel the penchant of such people to pressure others. It is not the intention of this new paradigm, this new institute process to divide the community into those who have done the Ruhi program and those who have not, to develop a hierarchy, an elite; it is not the intention that the Ruhi activities become a substitute for Baha’i community life or, indeed, provide a ladder to climb and thus attain some formal or informal form of leadership.

The structure of LSAs, Groups and localities, committees, councils, feasts, holy days, inter alia remains in place and is still at the heart of the Baha’i community. This paradigm shift is intended to enrich the overall expression and diversity of Baha’i community life not replace what has been at the centre of community life for decades. The guiding philosophy of this new paradigm has sometimes been expressed as an integration of service activities with focused study of the Baha’i writings around a central core. “This sytem allows for the almost infinite development by various user communities of branching sub-sets that serve particular needs.”

I have seen many a deepening program since my first association with the Cause in the 1950s and I have drawn on just about everyone I’ve seen in the last several decades. The Ruhi program is only one of many that I am confident will evolve in the decades head. Right now it is the main program out in the community. But, more importantly in some ways, it is the enthusiasm, effectiveness and devotion with which the teaching work is carried out not so much the method.

The process of spiritual development is “essentially a solitary pursuit....it is a process of refining one’s character, of cultivating the practice of prayer, meditation and regular reading of the sacred Texts. These are, by their very nature, solitary exercises.” This is not to say, of course, that these activities can not be done in groups. The process of learning is also and inevitably an individual exercise. If the Ruhi program promotes one way of reading Scripture, a way that focuses on a plain, outward and acontextualized understanding of a quotation, a quotation without any historical or other context, this does not need to be seen as an undermining of other approaches to interpretation, approaches which promote a multiplicity of methods.

This new culture of learning is already beginning to result in a “growing confidence and commitment of the believers which has been reflected “in the thrust of individual initiatives,” a thrust which is gathering momentum. There is, as I indicated above, a much richer expression of the diverse talents of the friends an expression which is beginning to appear in the Baha’i World—a richness that bodes well for the future progress of the Cause.

If the expression of the diverse talents of individuals and if the number or believers completing the Ruhi books has increased, but this has not led to increased enrolments; if the mobilizing of Baha’is to do anything often attracts non-Baha’is thus making what some might call “the non-specific aspects of the study circles that are working;” if some Bahá’ís do not want to take part in these programs; if some of the believers see this new paradigm as some uniform system imposed coercively from the top-down on each and every believer for each and every seeker no matter what their background; if some believers see non-participation as a form of Covenant Breaking; if an apparent lack of success of this new program is placed at the door of “it has not been implemented properly—these are just some of the problems of such a work in progress that the community must deal with. The institute work “has significantly reinforced the long-term process by which a universal system of Baha’i education will take shape,” but for many believers the process at the local level thusfar has been very small and inconspicuous. The trials encountered seem to be, as they have been for over a century, necessary and inevitable ones “that refine endeavour and purify motivation so as to render those who would take part worthy of so great a trust.”

Beyond and beneath all this, of course, is the necessity for each believer to become a more effective teacher. As the International Teaching Centre pointed out, if we are not meeting people to teach, all of the plans, campaigns and reflection meetings aimed at finding ways to share the Divine Message with the waiting masses are to no avail. To put this another way, “no amount of organization can solve inner problems or produce or prevent victory or failure at a crucial moment.” As Shoghi Effendi wrote during the height of WW2: “Ultimately all the battle of life is within the individual.”

If this new culture of change with its concomitant emphasis on entry by troops was all about numbers, then Douglas Martin would never have said that the “maturation of the U.S. Baha’i community since the 1960s has been breathtaking;” nor would Peter Khan express his concern that, when he hears people talk about entry by troops, he “internally cringes.” The Plans, Dr. Khan went on to say, are about “advancing the process of entry by troops.” It is simply unrealistic in many places to expect a large increase in numbers or even a small increase in the short term. The key word is “process” not “troops” and not “entry.”

I would add that this new paradigm of the last decade or so is not about membership, not about us and them, not about enrolments, conversion and a range of other words and terms that have preoccupied the Baha’i community, that have focused its energies and its goals, on numbers---a critical but necessary focus and preoccupation of recent decades. Martin went on to say that the Bahá’í community must now make a heroic effort to shed” this baggage of the past. If tests and difficulties beset the Baha’i community in these early stages of implementation of this paradigm then “such tests are the surest evidences of that process of maturation.” Such tests are the inevitable precursors to a broadening and a widening of the very processes in which this community is engaged.

The image of the Cause can be said to have gone through three—and perhaps four—major transformations in the last 100 years. With the triumphant completion of the Ten Year Crusade and the successful establishment of the Universal House of Justice, the image of the Cause again went through a major shift in focus. The Baha’i community had become established through the entire planet in the Ten Year Crusade. My Baha’i life was just beginning in those years. The new stage opening before the Baha’is now requires a fundamental rethinking of the presentation of Baha’u’llah’s teachings, a simple but radical shift. It does a disservice to the mission of Bahá’u’lláh, to the World Order which He has come to establish, to focus the public message in religious categories. This talk by Douglas Martin was, for me, a heuristic and stimulating contribution to the up-and-coming discussion, one of the earliest intimations of the new direction that the Baha’i community was about to take in the next decades.

An ongoing problem that is always present, it seems to me and as the House pointed out, is “the task of refining the criteria needed for valid assessments” of what the community is actually achieving. This, they go on to say, “is proving to be an ongoing challenge to institutions....Rigid criteria are obviously counterproductive, but a well-defined scheme to carry out evaluation is essential. This scheme is still a work in progress as it may be for some time and as this whole paradigmatic shift in emphasis is a work in progress, as they say somewhat colloquially these days.

As we work through this major shift, this new paradigm, it is important that we keep before us, as I indicated above, a number of fundamentals. The Guardian put some of these fundamentals in context right at the start of his ministry in 1924 in an ‘oft quoted passage:

"Not by the force of numbers, not by the mere exposition of a set of new and noble principles, not by an organised campaign of teaching -- no matter how worldwide and elaborate in its character -- not even by the staunchness of our faith nor the exaltation of our enthusiasm, can we ultimately hope to vindicate in the eyes of a critical and sceptical age the supreme claim of the Abha Revelation. One thing and only one thing will unfailingly and alone secure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause, namely, the extent to which our own inner life and private character mirror forth in their manifold aspects the splendour of those eternal principles proclaimed by Baha'u'llah."

This new culture of learning “implies that Baha’is must not only learn from their Scriptures and from the collective wisdom of the group....in the study circles, but they must also learn from their own experiences.” More recently, Momen says he sees “the community as an aid to the individual’s personal mystical progress.” This, of course, is hardly new, although Jack MacLean in his interesting critique of some of Momen’s ideas emphasizes that the basic thrust of Momen’s comments “is to make a major shift from the individual to the community.”

About twelve months, perhaps even less, before completing the last of His books, Memorials of the Faithful, ‘Abdu’l-Baha began His Tablets of the Divine Plan, the foundation statement for all the future teaching Plans and the framework of action within which the Baha’i community could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His Memorials of the Faithful among His many other writings. Like The Will and Testament, though, it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book and, indeed, the vast corpus of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s writings. Perhaps that time is insensibly arriving now that we are in the earliest stages of community building with clusters and core activities, with study circles and devotional meetings, with children’s and junior youth classes and deepenings, with external affairs and a range of other departments and agencies of this efflorescing Cause. Perhaps it is time to really begin to get a handle on His teachings and those of His Father and to make our own personal deepening in the writings a primary, if not the primary, focus of our lives.

With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages, with a concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, using a style of biography that has continued from classical times into the twentieth century, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives us biography in miniature. Memorials of the Faithful has a certain bias toward the person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation of individual lives with facts teased, coloured and given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain fashion. ‘Abdu’l-Baha has made for the Baha’i community a very useful omelette in this His last book first published in Haifa in 1927.

So much of my life as a Baha’i has been a life-in-community. It seemed to me only appropriate that I would give a few words on the subject to the brilliant tactician 'Abdu'l-Baha who survived one of the most difficult communities and advised us on how to live in difficult communities in our time. As our own communities have been, are and will be challenges for us to live in, this analysis of some of 'Abdu'l-Baha's final words before He passed away less than six years later will be timely, but can not be dealt with in this essay in sufficient detail to sufficiently explore the implications of this book which often gets lost in the avalanche of resources that have become available in the Baha’i community in the last three decades. Suffice it to say: the 77 individuals in this collection give us every conceivable human type—the sort of diversity which is our life in Baha’i communities and which will be even more so in the years to come.

It should be obvious to readers by now that a strong thread of my theme in this paper is an emphasize on continuities from the past; that this new paradigm, this new shift, has not been created ex nihilo, nor does it imply in the least that we disregard the century and a half of divine guidance which preceded these latest in the long series of fate-laden days. Individual creativeness, collective creativeness, the acquisition of consultation skills, an emphasis on a culture of learning and of growth do not delimit in the least an emphasis on the individual struggle with what you might call the existential realities of life. These realities Shoghi Effendi, with his very practical and down-to-earth exegesis, pointed the believers time and again toward a “persistent and strenuous warfare” which they all must wage against their “instincts and natural inclinations” and a heroic self-sacrifice in subordinating their “own likings to the imperative needs of the Cause of God.”

Shoghi Effendi did not waste words on sheer argument, on hairsplittings and disputes, on what is often called casuistry, on idle and endless discussions of the superfluous, but emphasized, rather, the writing and discussion of high thoughts which are “the dynamic power in the arteries of life...the very soul of the world.” He knew only too well that the inner struggle we all face is the ultimate battle in life and is not a popular sport to engage in at the best of times. It often requires “the discipline of waging a mental jihad,” writes Jack MacLean, a jihad against illusions that imbed themselves inside the souls of men and often take possession of their very lives, what Baha’u’llah calls idle fancies and vain imaginings.

In the middle of the then Seven Year Plan from 1979 to 1986, the signs of the crystallization of a public image of the Cause, uninformed but friendly, were becoming evident and the emergence of the Cause from obscurity was becoming more apparent. The “early signs of a crystallization of a public image,” in those 1980s were subjected to this fundamental, this paradigmatic, shift just at the time when the Baha’i Faith was emerging from an obscurity in which it had been enshrouded for a century and a half.

Indeed I would argue that, if I could come back in one hundred years, say in 2108, and examine the quarter-century, the years 1983-2008, it would be plainly apparent that the first global public image of the Cause was given its initial crystallization in this twenty-five year period, a period which also saw “the very beginning of the process of community building,” a series of remarkable and dazzling achievements, the awesome tapestry of beauty spreading over the mountainside of God’s Holy Mountain and a stage in an immense historical and institutional process that entered a critical phase in its efforts to canalize the forces of a new civilization.

In 1983, the governing body at the apex of the Administrative Order of this Faith, the Universal House of Justice, occupied its permanent seat in an imposing marble building faced with 57 Corinthian columns at the top of an arc-shaped path. The final two buildings, built on either side of the Seat of the House of Justice, were completed in 2000: the Centre for the Study of the Texts and the International Teaching Centre Building. I could expatiate on the many other sources of this early crystallization of a public image in addition to this complex of buildings and gardens on Mt. Carmel. For example, the two new houses of worship, one in Apia in Western Samoa and the other in New Delhi in India, completed in 1984 and 1986 respectively, as well as the vast increase in literature that became available to seekers and to the many interest groups which increasingly dotted the landscape of society helped establish this public image and helped the Bahá’í community at the same time in the creation of a collective identity.

One central part of this image, this identity, largely below the surface of popular culture where most people spend the vast majority of their time and where public images are born and die, is the extensive literary productions and publications that have emanated from the Baha’i World Centre. As well as the several important messages, letters and books that have been produced by this institutional trustee of Baha’u’llah’s global undertaking at the apex of the Baha’i Administrative Order: The Promise of World Peace(1985); Baha’u’llah(1992); The Prosperity of Mankind(1995); Century of Light(2001); Letter to the World’s Religious Leaders(2002); One Common Faith(2005), a multitude of statements were published as a result of the work of the Baha’i International Community which focus “on the promotion of a universal standard for human rights, the advancement of women, and the promotion of just and equitable means of global prosperity.” This latter category, largely subliminal even amongst most of the Baha’is, but a crucial aspect of the Baha’i public image, an image confined to a coterie, was accompanied by other manifestations of a public image which I won’t dwell on here, for that is not the purpose of this paper. The burgeoning quantity of literature that has become available in this quarter-century, 1983-2008, has been paradoxically and ironically a contributing factor to both a deepening and clarity of understanding and an obscurity and complexity that has made the discussion of made issues fraught with difficulty.

In many basic ways the institute process, the study circles, the Ruhi materials are, each and all, ways and means for all of us to work together in these earliest phases of community building, to learn together and grow spiritually and numerically. This new culture of learning and growth, this new paradigm of action is more than deepening although, like some of the deepening activities that all Bahá’ís are familiar with, it is a decentralized system of locally based group learning.

At Ridván in 1967, after I had been associated with Baha’i activities for more than a dozen years, the House defined deepening as an expression of our individual and group efforts “to obtain a more adequate understanding of the significance of Baha’u’llah’s stupendous Revelation” and “a clearer apprehension of the purpose of God for man.” But our Baha’i community life is challenged, is summoned to what you might call a specific application of this deepening process; indeed, we can now be said to be at the very beginning of the process of community building itself. The House of Justice reminded us and made clear that the institute process is not a series of deepening classes. It is rather part of a very wide framework for this community building process.

On 9 October 2005 Farzam Arbab defined a training institute as: “an agency for the development of human resources dedicated to the advancement of the process of entry by troops. It is not my purpose here to discuss the nature and purpose of the institute process, the study circles with the Ruhi materials as their core curriculum, the clusters, the devotional meetings, the children’s classes and junior youth activities. These topics are in need of no more details nor discussion. There are several major sources of explanatory frameworks, of talks by significant Bahá’ís as well as comments by a multitude of Bahá’ís on the internet at many a site, of booklets of materials, of resources prepared by innumerable NSA’s, by clusters and by regional communities/councils, among other institutional bodies. These sources, taken as a whole, leave no doubt that this institute process is not a spasmodic, uncoordinated process characterized by a series of exertions that lack clarity and single-mindedness. They provide a context for lucidity and precision on a complex and profound process. The extent to which each of us grasps this complex process clearly at any one moment and the extent to which many minds which are not easily satisfied understand this deceptively simple, but in some ways quite profound, process is quite another question.

Our task, my task and yours in 2009, 2010, 2011 and in the years following to, say, the end of the first century of this Formative Age is to ask ourselves what we can do to hasten the attainment of the goals of the current plan and, in the process, inscribe our mark on this brief span of time so charged as it is with potentialities and hope. The catalogue of terms, processes, issues, problems, tasks and goals we are faced with possesses a vastness that I can only hint at here. Many, if not most, of these tasks and goals existed long before this new paradigm of opportunity arose and they will be on my spiritual and community plate until I and most readers here depart from this mortal coil.

Dr. Arbab emphasized the importance of “each individual taking charge of his or her own learning....What is at stake is the level of consciousness achieved, the will created, the desire aroused and the degree to which what is learned is internalized and translated into action.” Dr. Arbab said much more in his papers, papers I read as far back as 2004 when he came to Australia and I will add just two of the many sentences that especially impressed me in that excellent series of talks. Firstly: “the overall process is enormously complex and simplistic ways of approaching it can be counterproductive.” And secondly: “Capability empowers a person to think and act in a well-defined sphere of activity and according to a well-defined purpose.” Perseverance is often difficult; rising above one’s limitations is easier said than done and, since so much of what we are engaged in are processes, the work, the task, the passion of our lives, is and will be forever incomplete, only partially satiated.

Each of us must apply our energies and whatever reflections and actions we bring to the process and processes at the local and cluster level, in the main. As each of us does this these processes will also take place at the national level in countries all around the world with continual guidance from the Baha’i World Centre to assist us in our understanding and in our implementation of them in our individual and community lives.

Here in the local community I live in, for example, there are four adult Bahá’ís with an average age of seventy. Until we began devotional meetings, one of the three core activities in this new paradigm, an initiative of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006) that will continue for some time to come, all the Baha'i teaching initiatives in our locality over the previous dozen years in which there had been resident Baha'is had not involved advertised public meetings of any kind. In the decades before 2003 when we began devotional meetings, Baha'is had travelled to this locality in various seed-planting exercises, sometimes called travel teaching; quotations and phone numbers had been regularly placed in the major newspaper throughout the 1990s and prayers had been said by the nearby Baha'i community for the progress of the Cause which had been the town for its extension goal.

Baha'u'llah's writings have always forbidden an aggressive proselytism through which many religious messages have been widely promulgated in society. Inviting people to meetings in public places and in private homes, forming relationships with local people in a wide variety of ways one of which is now called Home Visits, joining local interest groups and what might be called a very mild form of proselytism if one wanted to be critical: all this is and has been part of a general policy of establishing small groups at the local level throughout the Baha’i world.

The experience of the Baha'i community over many decades in Australia and, indeed, in most western countries where this new Faith has grown, has shown that in most places few people ever come to advertised Baha’i public meetings of any kind, especially since, say, the 1950s and 1960s and the arrival of TV, among other socio-historical and technological shifts in the last half century. And so our Baha'i Group approached its task with expectations which were not imbued with unrealistic goals thinking we would achieve, if we just tried hard enough, some kind of 'entry-by-troops,' an oft-misunderstood process at the best of times, especially in the first decade of its extensive use, the years 1991-2001. There are rare exceptions, of course, but the patterns of action/activity and response to Baha'i initiatives in many areas of the teaching process are as predictable as the sun getting up in the morning and setting at night. One could say this is simply realism, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a meagre response or any one of a number of phrases to capture the experience most Bahá’í communities have had in the West in the last four decades.

In our local community, then, we saw these devotional meetings as opportunities to advertise the Cause, to give it a greater public face in the northern half of Tasmania and, indeed, throughout the state. Our energy was directed toward what we felt was a realistic goal. The Faith had been in the north of Tasmania for over half a century--and in Tasmania for 80 years--when we started planning our devotional meetings more than five years ago in February 2003. But the public visibility of the Cause in many of the small towns of northern Tasmania was nil or approached nil. Our intention was to raise the profile, so to speak. And this we did.

Devotional meetings have now taken place once a month for a full five years. Advertising includes: (a) ads in the print and electronic media--on four radio stations, two TV stations and in two newspapers; (b) 35 posters/month and a total now of over 2100 in the 40 shops in town in which we put posters; (c) 100 fliers/month giving a total now of 6000; and (d) two special Tasmanian internet sites among many non-Tasmanian sites. The total cost of all of the above is: $20.00/month.($10 for a rented country Women’s Association room; $8.00 for one of the newspaper ads and $2.00 for the paper, ancillary materials, petrol, oil, water and wear and tear on clothes, vehicles and our psyches, inter alia)

It is this advertising that lets people in our Baha’i locality of 7000, and the wider Tasmanian community of about 400 thousand, know that Baha'is dot the Tasmanian landscape. Advertising in the 8 different mediums/media and 13 different individual outlets , through the repeated exposure every month, through systematic and regular information bites, has created a definite public profile for this Baha'i Group and, more generally, for the Baha'i Faith. This profile is of a friendly but largely undefined group, a group with multi-focused worthy causes, internationalist, tolerant, but only understood superficially not in any depth. Our devotional meetings accomplish many things in the long road out of obscurity and the exercise should not be underestimated.

We have been asked to take part in this core activity and we have done so to the best of our ability--well, one can always do better, I suppose, at least theoretically. Our aim is not to build a large concentration of adherents nor even to concentrate on numbers, membership and conversion in any sense. Our entire thrust is to: (a) plant seeds and let people know that the Baha'i Faith exists in this region; (b) provide the opportunity for the population to find out about this new Faith through as many channels as possible: by phone, on the internet, by meetings in public and private, by the powerful medium of advertising in a variety of forms/channels and through the relationships each of us have with others.

The population of our locality is, as I say, about 7000 and there is an average attendance of 3 Baha'is per meeting. Five people have come from other interest groups. Each of these five people came once and we never saw them again. In the 64 meetings thusfar this is an average of one person, once per annum in attendance. But, as I say, we are not measuring our success by the attendance; that was not our aim; our goal was not to get as many people into a room as we could. Our aim was to inform the wider community in Tasmania of our existence and the existence of the Baha'i Faith. The Tasmanian community very soon will have a beautiful public Baha'i edifice in Hobart open to the public. Our aim was to get as much pre-opening/post-opening public and private exposure to this new Faith as was possible given the nature of our activity. As ‘Abdu’l-Baha once said in answering a reported who asked a question about the number of Bahá’ís: one gem is worth fields of grains of sand.

My wife cooks a cake for each meeting. I welcome everyone in the style and spirit of Maratha Root who is reported to have given a talk with nobody present at all; we have readings, a discussion and then a social part. For most of the meetings in the last several years, my wife and I are the only ones present. In putting up 30 to 40 posters every month we get to talk to many people and one becomes a familiar part of the social landscape. Our Home Visits would be more accurately described as Shop Visits in the act of putting up posters, although we also have nine Home Visits per month.

I will not expand on the other aspects of our local community’s work drawing on the common vocabulary associated with this new paradigm; namely, clusters, institute courses, children’s classes, junior youth initiatives, study circles and tutors among other terms. The many types of teaching resources, methods, styles of learning, attitudes, habits and qualities needed to carry out various acts of service I will not dwell on here. In our town we have decided that much of the paradigm is not appropriate for us to engage in. As the House of Justice pointed out in its Ridván message of 2007, teaching must take place according to one’s own and one’s group’s “circumstances and possibilities.....and the nature of the populations with whom” that group interacts. We have no children in our community; all of our own children have fled the nest, so to speak, and none of the four of us felt inclined to offer classes, in any of the current forms Baha’is draw on, to local children and adolescents. We were not inclined, either, to initiate the kind of direct teaching that has recently been part of the National Teaching Program in Canada and reported on recently in Baha’i Canada.

Individual efforts to teach the Faith have, without question, been on the rise in this decade-long paradigmatic shift. My own writing, my poetry and prose, I saw as far back as the 1980s as part of a vast drama, part of my role in lending my share of assistance to the operation of forces involved in this vast process which, as Shoghi Effendi pointed out in his concluding words to The Promised Day Is Come is leading “humanity out of the valley of misery and shame to the loftiest summits of power and glory.” My writing in 1984 was initially inspired by my grandfather’s autobiography, a copy of which I received that year from a cousin in Canada. My reading of this lengthy work synchronized with the initial developments in this public image which I have referred to above. I was also inspired by the construction projects on Mt. Carmel as well as in Apia in the western Pacific and in New Delhi in India where new Baha’i temples were completed in 1984 and 1986, respectively.

I had no idea twenty-four years ago that the first literary successes I had then and which continued by insensible and sensible degrees would develop into an epic literary work containing: a five volume journal, a body of 6500 prose-poems; a collection of 5000 letters, emails and posts on the internet; a second collection of over 300 notebooks; a body of over 500 published and unpublished essays; a dozen unsuccessful attempts at a novel and; finally, a five-volume narrative of 2600 pages--a total oeuvre that seems appropriate to refer to as an epic.

Perhaps the fact that I had been living through epochs which were “the most turbulent in the history of the human race,” in the darkest hours before the dawn, in what the House in October 1967 called “the dark heart of this age of transition,” provided the key stimulus to this literary output. Certainly a culture of learning is reflected in a culture of writing, at least for some. This writing was a process, too, that did not spring-up ex nihilo. By 1984 writing had been an important part of my life as a student, a teacher, a lecturer and in my association with the Bahá’í Faith for some thirty years. Trying to engage people from many walks of life by means of the written word and share the Cause with seekers among my contemporaries became much more successful as the Arc-Project approached its completion and the new culture of learning advanced year by year.

I was increasingly able to integrate my writing art into diverse activities mainly on the internet. Internet writing became, for me, a form of action which mobilized my energies, strengthened my appreciation of the need for a systematic approach on the world wide web, requiring as it did making adjustments to my ongoing literary activity while maintaining continuity. This activity is and was based on a realistic assessment of possibilities and resources and has resulted in literally thousands of people hearing of the Cause for the first time, developing their knowledge of it and entering into a useful dialogue with many in relation to their specific interests. As in daily life, of course, so in cyberspace, one does not win all exchanges. Not everyone responds with enthusiasm. One has to deal with a new set of problems in some ways not unlike those in face-to-face interaction.

I have lived through a series of some remarkable periods in the growth of the Baha’i community. When my mother became a Baha’i in Ontario in 1953 and I was nine years old, ninety per cent of the Bahá’ís on the planet lived in Iran and now in these early years of the evening of my life at the age of