By John Taylor; 2006 May 02
Today is the twelfth and last day of this Ridvan festival. Our community will be viewing the new pilgrimage DVD. The meeting will take place at our home tonight.
The second prayer in Baha'u'llah's Prayers and Meditations talks about a special heaven, garden or paradise known as Ridvan.
"Suffer me not, O my Lord, to be deprived of the knowledge of Thee in Thy days, and divest me not of the robe of Thy guidance. Give me to drink of the river that is life indeed, whose waters have streamed forth from the Paradise (Ridvan) in which the throne of Thy Name, the All-Merciful, was established, that mine eyes may be opened, and my face be illumined, and my heart be assured, and my soul be enlightened, and my steps be made firm." (Prayers and Meditations, 4)
A prayer for the knowledge and guidance of God. It pictures knowledge, as frequently in scripture, as drinking water. The water from in this case is from the river of life flowing out of a paradise or garden, just as the teachings of Baha'u'llah originated from Ridvan, the island near Baghdad where the "Name of God was established." On the twelfth day He left for Constantinople, a notorious center of corruption. Thus the birth of the pure revelation for this age began with a trip into the viper's den. Just how corrupt this place was, I had not realized. In researching corruption, my interest of late, I performed a search of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the first article that turned up on its hit list was the following historical information about that notorious Turkish court in the centuries leading up to Baha'u'llah's visit there.
"In consequence, corruption and nepotism took hold at all levels of administration. In addition, with the challenge of the notables gone, the devsirme class itself broke into countless factions and parties, each working for its own advantage by supporting the candidacy of a particular imperial prince and forming close alliances with corresponding palace factions led by the mothers, sisters, and wives of each prince. After Suleyman, therefore, accession and appointments to positions came less as the result of ability than as a consequence of the political maneuverings of the devsirme-harem political parties. Those in power found it more convenient to control the princes by keeping them uneducated and inexperienced, and the old tradition by which young princes were educated in the field was replaced by a system in which all the princes were isolated in the private apartments of the harem and limited to such education as its permanent inhabitants could provide. In consequence, few of the sultans after Suleyman had the ability to exercise real power, even when circumstances might have given them the opportunity. But the lack of ability did not affect the sultans' desire for power; lacking the means developed by their predecessors to achieve this end, they developed new ones... No matter who controlled the apparatus of government during this time, however, the results were the same -- a growing paralysis of administration throughout the empire, increasing anarchy and misrule, and the fracture of society into discrete and increasingly hostile communities." ("Ottoman Empire." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopedia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD 26 Apr. 2006)
Ridvan, then, is about taking the Message with undaunted courage to the most corrupt places, concentrating only on serving God, as did the Master on that stressful journey; ever praying "...that mine eyes may be opened, and my face be illumined, and my heart be assured, and my soul be enlightened, and my steps be made firm." My life of late connects with the mission of Ridvan, at some deep level. Call it the Ridvan spirit. Like Christmas, it is in the air and floats us higher.
On Saturday night Marie sang with the Voices of Unity at Hamilton's celebration of the Voices of Unity. Since they were not up for this trip, having already traveled enough that day, I stayed home with the children reading aloud the last pages of "Airborn," Kenneth Oppel's youth novel about a cabin boy on an airship. Surprisingly, six-year-old Tomaso also listened to much of the story as Silvie and I alternated reading the text aloud, until he finally dropped off to sleep just after nine in the evening. Silvie was caught up in the story and when it was bedtime she insisted on reading the last chapter herself.
My father, as is his wont, left an article on the kitchen table for me to read after we stopped reading. It reported on a Japanese study that found sore ill effects from prolonged video game sessions the development of children's brains. It seems that this activity is too narrow to stimulate more than a small segment of the brain. Reading aloud by contrast, the article pointed out, stimulates a much wider spectrum of grey cells. Reading is better than video games for the development of young brains (under age 25), in spite of its being seemingly sedate and boring in comparison. This made me feel better for spending the holy day evening reading a novel.
If this study is confirmed I do not imagine there will be any future interactive "Ridvan Challenge" video games made up for all the family to play. Perhaps presentations will be designed intended to encourage reading passages aloud from Holy Writ.
I have long been uncomfortable with how Baha'i meetings end up always in the same format. A sociologist traveling the world attending Baha'i meetings from the rain forest to the Himalaya Mountains might come away with this definition of what Baha'is do: they sit around in a circle successively reading aloud from books. True, the Ruhi institute system is designed to change that, to make reciting from memory into a more frequent alternative. It could be that someday studies will find that reciting from memory has an even greater benefit than reading aloud from books, I do not know. Spiritually, I have no doubt that this is true. Reciting the Holy Word in my experience synchronizes and connects me with the Great Genius of the Age in ways beyond mind and word.
But when I read of such findings about young brains I hope that investigations will look into whether reading aloud benefits adults as well. We do know already that two out of three people over the age of eighty are afflicted with either dementia or full fledged Alzheimer's. We know that a variety of mental exercises can stave off the onset of such brain degeneration. If so as members of the "sitting around in circles reading aloud from books" religion, we can expect to benefit from our full brain workout reading aloud together, if not now later, in our dotage.
Given all that, this may argue for smaller meetings where each person has more of a chance to read. In a large group proportionately fewer attendees have the opportunity to read aloud for themselves; this may account in part for the greater warmth and love in small communities like our Haldimand group, as opposed to the relative coldness and distance in large cities, at least the ones that I have resided in. This is why I think that we should make an effort to get around the barriers standing in the way of giving everyone present a chance to read the holy text aloud for themselves.
The Ruhi institutes introduce many innovative alternatives and original approaches to the Word. We could try these out in regular meetings. One way might be to project the text of prayers and readings onto a screen with an overhead projector and have everybody read it aloud together, all at the same time. That way we could have as large a meeting as we wish and still have everybody benefit equally, if not more, from reading the Word aloud.
Historically, Baha'i communities have shied away from this practice due to a rather silly misunderstanding of Baha'i law -- congregational prayer is forbidden, ergo we cannot pray aloud together because in Christianity this is termed "congregational prayer." Even songs that can be construed as prayers we avoid, or mouth the words with great trepidation. I recall attending one meeting in Guelph where the musician assured the audience that it was alright for everybody to sing along with this prayer. He even had a member of the House of Justice there, and he nodded his assent that it was okay. Still, there were not many singing with him, and those who did sounded shaky and doubtful.
No, no, no. What is actually forbidden is the Muslim practice of saying obligatory prayers aloud together at the Friday meeting, a meeting which is also compulsory. There is nothing against doing what Christians do, saying a prayer aloud, all together, as long as the practice does not become a ritual. Meanwhile, sitting around in a circle reading aloud from books is starting to look, to a sociologist's eye, pretty close to a ritual in itself. But once you have gone through all the explanation as to what Baha'u'llah's definition of congregational prayer was and consulted chapter and verse in the Aqdas to confirm that this is the case, most Baha'is in community life still fall back to the old way of everybody reading separately, "just to be on the safe side." After all, that is what congregational prayer meant for us before we were Baha'is so we should avoid anything that may hint of that. Meanwhile our brain cells are turning to mush for disuse; do not even bother to mention that we believe in the harmony of science and religion, and that we may benefit more both physically and spiritually. That will not wash.
At the heart of this is a need for a more precise sociological definition what a Baha'i is. Right now it is "someone who sits in a circle and reads aloud, one after the other. A better, more incisive definition (outside of the definitions available in the Writings, of course) is "someone who puts the Word before all other words." This broader definition allows for a broader variety of approaches to the text. Any way of placing Holy Writ higher and closer to heart and mind, is fair game. Even if it does not involve sitting around in a circle and having one person read aloud from a book while everybody else sits in silence listening.
There are many alternative possibilities. The simplest would be to project the word on a screen or wall and watch the written words as we listen. Or why not have everybody read, sing, chant the Text aloud together? Why not project the words in several languages at once, including the original Persian and Arabic, so that we will get even more benefit from contact with the Word? Why not try out Gregorian chants, or displays of the text put into new formats, fonts and calligraphy? Or with artistic backgrounds, or acrostics, anything to get a new insight, a new path into the Ridvan of the knowledge of God.
Recall what Ruhiyyih Khanum, the pre-eminent Baha'i in the world at the time, once said in her plain spoken way that our meetings, Feasts in particular, are boring. The greatest challenge facing scholars of the Faith today, she said, is how to liven them up. That is what students of the Faith should put forward at the ABS, new ways to coordinate and present the text, to expand the sociological definition of the Faith. All we need do, to get into the spirit of Ridvan, is to explore ways to put the words of the greatest Mind first in our meetings and in our lives.
May all of us leave the Garden of Ridvan this year in the new clothing of unity, that arising from the principle of the Oneness of God, as the Word Itself suggests we do,
"...how numerous are those peoples of divers beliefs, of conflicting creeds, and opposing temperaments, who, through the reviving fragrance of the Divine springtime, breathing from the Ridvan of God, have been arrayed with the new robe of divine Unity, and have drunk from the cup of His singleness!" (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Iqan, 112)
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John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
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