Prayer Sharing; Report on the Inter-Cluster Meeting, "The First Movement of the Plan"
By
As mentioned last time, Saturday's meeting was for clusters with fewer than one hundred believers, ones like our Ontario Cluster Number 4, which includes our Haldimand LSA, Brantford LSA, Brant County group, Paris LSA, and Norwich County LSA, as well as the largest native reserve in Canada, the media-darling Oshweeken Six Nations, which is right next another rez, that of the Mississauga First Nation. The other three clusters were all much further away, north of
Being such a small meeting in a small town, we had the unique bounty of personally meeting both our Auxiliary Board members, Maem Smith (propagation) and Shakar Arjomand (Protection), as well as Peter Smith of the Ontario Baha'i Counsel who so ably chaired last spring's inter-LSA meeting -- in my report of that meeting I was erroneously calling him "Tod Smith," as a reader pointed out to me later. I am plagued by ideas, as readers of this know, and I shared my quest for an illustrator for a non-fiction comic book about the Faith or perhaps for the Ruhi Program that I would like to write with Maem Smith. She knew of at least one Canadian Baha'i illustrator.
I had the chance to express to the Protection ABM my concerns about the progress of the Faith here, the need for Persian pioneers. I see that as our only realistic hope of reversing the accelerating decline in numbers that we are in here in Haldimand. We have dropped by half over the past two years and if it continues we may lose an incorporated LSA. It burdens my heart that a big city like
Our morning break-off session was led by Shakar Arjomand and included the notorious eccentric Bruce Beach (known to readers of the Toronto Star for covering his property with buried buses in preparation for a nuclear crisis about to hit -- when it is Dr. Strangelove time that is what we will all need for our survival right away, a one way ticket to a seat on a buried bus. I know I will. Absurd crises breed absurd solutions.); he had a large, bushy grey beard and at his feet was a golden Labrador retriever pup, a Seeing Eye dog in training. He carried a badge reading: "Ask to Pet." I had met Bruce before at an ABS break-off seminar about the International Language that included just myself and him. As an Esperantist I was surprised to learn that his International Language Institute does not seem to have a specific language in mind. That does not seem to have stopped him from talking to the Chinese government about an international language. He said at the Saturday Cluster meeting:
"The UHJ had asked me not to mention the Baha'i Faith when talking with the Chinese government and only later did I realize their wisdom. The Chinese officials kept asking me if my International Language Institute had anything to do with religion and I told them no. They knew I was a Baha'i though because in all their chattering away in Chinese I kept hearing the word "Baha'i" being repeated over and over."
So if there is a crisis and the lights go out all over the world, we will have a place on a buried bus, seeing eye dogs to guide us to the bathroom and we will be acutely aware of the need for a language to converse with other bus-dwellers. And here I had been feeling strange for suggesting an illustrated Ruhi book to the Auxiliary Board Member.
Since my joking about a speaker at a conference last spring stirred up so much controversy afterwards, allow me to put in a disclaimer here. I do not mean to mock Mr. Beech. This Faith is universal and includes all manner of diversity, including diversity of thought and opinion. I think Bruce Beach rightly complains of intolerance and conventionality from his fellow believers. I have seen it, and it is worse outside of his earshot. The word for it is backbiting. Pray God that the above attempt at humor is not that. We should all make an effort to be every bit as open and welcoming to diverse opinions and viewpoints as we are to diverse races, cultures and languages.
Anyway... we went over the first two paragraphs of the UHJ's 27 December letter to the Counsellors, which Shakar said _is_ the current five year plan (the plan I saw at a publisher's website on the Net must have been a hallucination; it made we wish I had actually read it). In proper Ruhi style we deconstructed the material, each throwing in our own two cents worth, especially on this sentence:
"The elements required for a concerted effort to infuse the diverse regions of the world with the spirit of Baha'u'llah's Revelation have crystallized into a framework for action that now needs only to be exploited."
What is the framework? Answers came from all directions: the clusters, the three core activities, children's classes, devotionals, the Ruhi study institutes. Shakar said that the three have actually become four, since the House has tacked on junior youth programs too. I guess it is like a three plus one bedroom house. Then there are the counsels, the Ruhi activities, which have been tacked onto the Ruhi deepenings as sort of semi-independent projects.
That deserves a paragraph of explanation. It seems that you do not necessarily have to be doing Book One in order to do the Book One activity. In fact our Cluster Coordinator is asking us to do the activity on our own and report back the number of times we did it, for statistical purposes. What? What is the Book One activity? I have gone through that book several times with several tutors but I had to be told what it is. The activity is sitting down with with another believer to say a prayer and then do the Ruhi Thing, you know, Construction, Deconstruction and Synthesis -- rather like Platonic (not Socratic or Hegelian) dialectic. You go over the prayer with a fine toothed comb, sentence by sentence, word by word, sharing personal insights and experience with one another, one on one, as they are reflected in and from the holy Text. The step to synthesis would be the follow up, leading to more activities, this time with non-Baha'is. This last part is what strikes terror into the heart of shy, introverted writers like myself.
In the afternoon session we had a chance to try this dialectal immaterialism, or whatever you want to call it, out on one another. I was paired with Phyllis from Somewhere Up North. I must say that for me this was the most productive part of the day. Now I can say that I have done it and it does not seem as foreign and difficult as it had. We were given about five prayers to choose from. We were to pick one, decide which of us would be the "animator" and which the animated, or whatever the word is. You know, the quick and the dead. I am not very good at explaining, let me just scan in the material and you can read it for yourself.
WORKSHOP: STUDYING A PRAYER Multi-cluster Conference.
Group yourselves in pairs, with someone you do not know too well. Each of you choose one of the five prayers below to study together Determine which of you will facilitate the study of the prayer. When carrying out this exercise:
-Read the selected prayer on your own for a couple of minutes, make notes, highlight words
-Together, examine difficult words and difficult concepts, sentence by sentence
Consult about the implications and applications of the prayer in your lives, sentence by sentence. Discuss what stands out in the prayer and why, sentence by sentence. Once one group member has facilitated the study of one prayer the other member then facilitates the study of another prayer.
Like many other groups, we did what my kids always do, we picked out the two shortest prayers. The prayer I "facilitated" (when I do it a better word would be "pontificated" or "bombasted.") with Phyllis was a prayer of the Bab. As readers of the essays over the past year of this Badi' mailing list know, the Bab inspires me to endless orgies of analysis. His words are packed with meaning. It was hopelessly dumb of us lazy fellows to pick out a short prayer of His, for the stream of His Writing may seem narrow but it always amounts to a very deep wade inot profound depths of meaning. Here is the prayer.
"PRAISED and glorified art Thou, O God! Grant that the day of attaining Thy holy presence may be fast approaching. Cheer our hearts through the potency of Thy love and good-pleasure and bestow upon us steadfastness that we may willingly submit to Thy Will and Thy Decree. Verily Thy knowledge embraceth all the things Thou hast created or wilt create and Thy celestial might transcendeth whatsoever Thou hast called or wilt call into being. There is none to be worshipped but Thee, there is none to be desired except Thee, there is none to be adored besides Thee and there is naught to be loved save Thy good-pleasure." (The Bab, Selections, 214)
Phyllis had her favorite part but I only remember my favorite part. Isn't it always the way? My favorite was the apparent definition of the word "steadfast." To be steadfast, He implies, is to submit to the Will of God. Islam. Peace, acceptance of God. It takes detachment to do that, for His will varies from ours as often as not. For example, if I had been detached from personality, I would have resisted mentioning Bruce Beach in this report and would not have slid down that old slippery slope towards a hundred years of hellfire. I was not being steadfast. Of course, I did not mention any of that to Phyllis.
Time is running out on this little conference report. The keynote speakers offered several helpful hints towards implementing this framework for action. One suggested incorporating it into our daily self-assessment, you know, taking into account our own actions before God. "Think of how you are progressing in the prayer sharing with other souls at that time." Excellent idea. Lately I have been doing so much exercise that I procrastinate and my taking into account usually comes about just before sleep. Usually I end up dropping off to sleep when it has barely begun. Maybe a better time would be in the morning. Still, having done the prayer sharing once with Phyllis I may have something to think about and assess in my future daily assessments.
Peter Smith reported that in the last plan the Counsel was guided to concentrate on the most advanced clusters. Now in this plan the emphasis is on all, even us, the "Dispersal Clusters" who I am sure qualify as the weakies. It is possible, we are assured, to get the ball rolling everywhere. The UHJ says it in paragraph two of the Letter:
"Indeed, so consistent has been the experience with intensive programmes of growth, implemented on the basis of this understanding in divers clusters, that no cause for equivocation remains. The way forward is clear, and at Ridvan 2006 we will call upon the believers to steel their resolve and to proceed with the full force of their energies on the course that has been so decidedly set."
No comments:
Post a Comment