Mentoring

Mentoring Faith


By John Taylor; 29 July, 2004



Aw, isn't that sweet. The kids just went off to Bible school and on the
way out Silvie recited the memorization assignment that they had given
her yesterday. In an act of bravado she handed the hard copy to me on
the way out the door. Now she has to remember it. It says,


"But his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law he meditates
day and night." (Psalm 1:2)


That Psalm pretty much foreshadows the Aqdas, doesn't it?, with its
re-visioning of law as a choice wine that you break out day and night
when you recite the Word. Unsealed is a licit love affair with your
Creator. Which brings me to a magazine article in my favorite science
magazine that has haunted me since the moment I came across it in our
local library,


Constance Adams, "It Doesn't Take a Rocket Scientist," Popular Science,
February 2004, p. 69


This analysis of the problem with NASA and its suggestions for reform
was published just before G.W. Bush's announcement of the mission to
Mars. Every once in a while I take the magazine out of the library again
and re-read the article. What it says applies to more than space
exploration, important as it is. A race to space is the most likely
candidate for a constructive alternative to war because it redirects
national pride to open up new abilities and resources for all. That is
all very well and good but Adams' criticism of the American Space Agency
seems also says a great deal about how to overcome the obstacles we face
in teaching the Baha'i Faith.

An architect, Constance Adams came to NASA as an outsider to design
TransHab, an inflatable living module for both the space station and
long term interplanetary flights. She used her architect's skills to
mediate several teams of specialists and engineers. She attributes the
success of her re-design of the older, inadequate "crew support
quadrant" to the way each of several disparate teams of experts learned
through consultation to internalize the guiding principles of the
others. In doing this she also discussed the overall problems of the
agency with workers at several levels. This article is the result of
applying her methods to the entire agency. Popular Science headlines it
on the cover: "Attention NASA. You're Broken. How to Get With the
Mission."

Adams began her job with an investigation of what she calls
"institutional memory." NASA did not have one. "The standard response
when I requested data on old projects was a quizzical stare." The only
way that she could find out the dimensions of the original living area
in space, Skylab, was to get a tape measure and go herself into the old
trainer on display in a space museum and measure the thing herself. This
problem of forgetting the past, starting each project from scratch
without benefiting from previous experience is what she calls the
"knowledge capture" problem. On a personal level, this is what taking
oneself into account does for believers, it prevents us from forgetting
what we have learned on a day to day, week to week level. Anyway, she
continues,


"The only American men and women who have ever successfully designed and
flown a spacecraft are retired or retiring; many others are no longer
with us. Without a conscious program of mentoring within the
organization, this knowledge is only intermittently and imperfectly
transmitted to new generations of engineers and scientists. The result
is that young engineers constantly redesign programs without being aware
that previous designs for the same item already exist." (70)


Not having an institutional memory creates new problems and levels of
risk with every step they take. They suffer from a "creeping lack of
real expertise;" the bureaucracy stagnates and supports its own culture
rather than "real intellectual capital." Underlying the knowledge
capture problem looms a worse problem, what she calls the "vision
capture" problem. This is an "institutionalized inability to capture
vision" epitomized in the many attempts to plan a replacement for the
shuttle, whose ten year planned lifespan is long over. Good plans are
constantly reworked, then "radically rescoped to meet immediate
political goals within soaring budgetary shortfalls." (72)

Behind the vision problem is what she calls the "great projects
problem." This is the desperate need not so much for vision as a
consistent vision. NASA had that for a decade. They lived through one
great adventure, the journey to the moon. A clear goal was experienced
together with the whole planet. Without the world on board it sank back
into one hellish, false half-life after the next. Its repeated
self-abortions came of so few Americans seeing their own place in the
stars; whereas war, the profits are clear, that inspires. When a soldier
enters the military everything is clearly laid out and the results of
cooperating with its organization are immediately rewarded. In the space
program that mass organization is missing; only a tiny number of
astronauts get systematically trained.

In the glory days all in NASA focused on the narrow goal of walking on
the moon. Since then, as the investigators of the Columbia crash
concluded, the basis of its failure to go beyond the shuttle represents
a "failure of national leadership." Typically Western and democratic,
Americans now are in imminent danger of being overtaken by the East,
China and Japan, who have the strange ability to look beyond a four year
project lifespan. Needless to say, the surges, cuts and stops in funding
would never have happened if every American once in their lifetime
visited the space centers -- or even had a trip into orbit to visit a
space hotel. In that case each and all would have a personal stake in
the stars and NASA's support would not be so half-hearted and
intermittent.

That consistency is what pilgrimage seems designed to give the Baha'is.
This form of obligatory tourism takes us, if we were born into the
Faith, to the very heart of our childhood ideals. The institution of
pilgrimage spreads the consistent spiritual vision to wherever the faith
abides. The direct, personal visits to the Holy Places, as well as the
contacts with the central Administration in Haifa gives an information
exchange that goes in both directions. The leaders of the Faith use the
flow of visitors to take the pulse of the planet, and the planet learns
from them. Of course, we also gain a consistent vision in more mundane
ways. Especially through prayer and fasting, which invokes the
confirmations of Holy Spirit and shows us where we are headed between
now and eternity.

As for institutional memory, though, that is still a problem. When we
talk about teaching the Faith we are utterly clueless, you get the same
thing that Constance Adams encountered when she came to NASA and asked
about what they knew of the lessons of the past: just quizzical stares.
Yesterday I was reading some science fiction and of all things stumbled
upon this bit of wisdom from Kabir, a 16th Century Sufi poet. He wrote,


"If you have not lived through something, it is not true."


It has been so long since we lived through a successful teaching
campaign that we really do not believe. It is impossible really to
believe that teaching the Faith is possible, however much we may want it
to be so. If we are ever to succeed in systematic teaching campaigns, we
will have to follow what Constance Adams suggests for NASA, set up a
mentoring system. That way the lessons learned by successful teachers of
the Faith will no longer be lost. What Adams found in NASA, massive
waste of effort, was also what the Guardian found when he took on
leadership of the Faith. That at least according to what I heard in an
old recording of a pilgrim who met the Guardian many times. This
pilgrim's recollection of what Shoghi Effendi said is startlingly close
to the prescription for NASA. The Guardian told him, shocking as it may
seem, that all the efforts of Martha Root and the other brilliant early
teachers of the Faith were almost completely lost and wasted. Seeing
this wastage was why the Guardian placed such heavy emphasis from then
on upon raising up the institutions of the Faith. Once erected these
institutions could consolidate the gains of successful teachers.

In spite of this, the Master taught that it was not the framework that
makes an institution effective. Not the structure or design counts but
the virtue of the souls running it.


"It is unquestionable that the object in establishing parliaments is to
bring about justice and righteousness, but everything hinges on the
efforts of the elected representatives. If their intention is sincere,
desirable results and unforeseen improvements will be forthcoming; if
not, it is certain that the whole thing will be meaningless, the country
will come to a standstill and public affairs will continuously
deteriorate. I see a thousand builders unequal to one subverter; what
then of the one builder who is followed by a thousand subverters?" (SDC,
23)


To me the important question is: how do we learn to teach from those
with direct, albeit not recent experience? How do you do it right? And
when you know, how do you convey that knowledge to the body of the
believers? One idea I am contemplating is interviewing older, successful
teachers of the Faith on videotape and then making a "how to teach"
documentary. Even so, this would fall far short of mentoring, a
systematic program of apprenticeships in teaching. One hopes that the
Ruhi institutes will teach that.



John Taylor
helpmatejet@yahoo.com
 
Blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
 
Badi Web Site: TBA