Ridvan Deviance Challenge
By
This year the Universal House of Justice has seen fit to make the 2007 Ridvan Message available to the entire Baha'i community at the beginning of the Greatest Festival rather than waiting for it to filter down from the National Conventions. As for its contents, continuing their tendency of the past couple of years, the Ridvan Message no longer makes any attempt to serve as an annual report. There is no detailed retrospective or even much of a summary of the accomplishments of the Baha'i world over the past year. The magnifying glass is still squarely on the advance of the institute and cluster process, which, the House asserts, is bringing results wherever regions apply it in a "coherent" manner. In its conclusion the message punches down to the chief thing that we all need to be thinking about which is not surprisingly teaching:
"With so firm a foundation in place, the foremost thought in the mind of each and every believer should be teaching."
They end the message with these inspiring, not to say daunting, words:
"We look with expectant eyes to the day when teaching is the dominating passion in the life of every believer and when the unity of the community is so strong as to enable this state of enkindlement to express itself in unremitting action in the field of service. This, then, is our ardent hope for you and the object of our most fervent prayers at the Sacred Threshold."
Before this they do give a nod to the deteriorating condition of the world, though as always with our response to it squarely in mind.
"... What all must acknowledge, irrespective of circumstance, are both the crying need of a humanity that, bereft of spiritual sustenance, is sinking deeper into despair and the urgency of the responsibility to teach with which we each have been entrusted as members of the community of the Greatest Name."
Teaching the Baha'i Faith on the personal level calls into motion all the skills which I, as a shy, isolated writer, tend to be worst at. Then I married a spouse who is even more shy than I am. This cross I must bear. I did have a friend who was attracted to the Faith and almost declared a few weeks ago, but then his on-again off-again girlfriend came back and that was the end for now. Teaching the faith simply does not happen if you do not continually make new friends, and that is harder for some of us than others.
Much of our teaching as a family should be through our children's contacts, but one of our children is painfully shy and refuses to open her mouth before friend and stranger alike, and the other now that the warm weather has set in just disappears with the little neighborhood urchins and only returns when it is too dark to see. I do not discourage this, since these days the electronic media are so attractive that a concerned parent is only too happy to see the nippers spending time outdoors. In fact, today is the first day of "screen-free" week at our children's school. Both kids came home on Friday with a brochure entitled: "Take the Pause to Play Family Challenge."
This little handout we Baha'is, as well as activists outside the Faith, would do well to emulate. Instead of browbeating, patronizing or affronting families with their lazy, sedentary couch-potato lives, this "Pause to Play" just throws down a non-confrontational challenge. They must endure one week without screens, "For one week in April we challenge you and your family to turn off your TV, video games and computers."
On the front cover of the brochure is a frame of a television screen where the young ones are encouraged to draw in the physical activities they do this week instead of sucking on the glass teat. On the second page is a chart to put a check into for each day detailing whether they were 100 percent screen free, or spent 1 hour or less using screens, or one hour or more, as well as the number of minutes they were active. They make an exception for homework done on the computer. Now that his initial enthusiasm for music is flagging, Thomas tried to wiggle the piano into the challenge, since it undeniably has a little LCD screen. We had to be very firm that piano practice counts as a homework exception too.
These goals do not seem all that hard, especially for our kids, who already have no broadcast television or video games, and are limited to an hour or less on the computer and Internet. Not only that, they have to earn this time by doing their piano practice first, and reading a certain amount aloud to myself or Marie. Unless and until that is done, no computer or movies. That was the only way, I found, not to have reading and music squeezed out of the day entirely.
As for myself, I try to limit my screen time as much as I can, though since I got high speed Internet a few weeks ago, this has become much harder. How people find time to squeeze in television as well and still have a life, I do not understand.
Now that, for health reasons, I spend several hours in physical activity each day, my reading time, the heart of everything for a writer, has been severely curtailed. I read before bed, but often I am too tired from all that activity and just drop right off without cracking a book. I try to make up for the lack of intellectual stimulation by listening to spoken books as I exercise, but the choice of material is unfortunately narrow. I look forward to the time when my computer's robotic reading voice is improved and sounds less metallic, more natural. Then I will be able to listen to things like the Baha'i writings (I know, there are Baha'i spoken books, but they are not read by professional actors as are mass market audio books).
Not reading so much, I find it hard to keep up my writing output to the furious pace I kept only a few months ago. But the feeling of health makes up for my inadequacy as a writer. Physically, I feel like I am walking on air, but professionally, I feel like I am standing at the bottom of
On some days I get too busy to exercise, especially when we drive into town. When I miss activity for as little as one day, though, my body tells me loud and clear now. It talks to me. I seem to hear it say, "I have rights too. Why did you not use me today? What am I, putty?" Yeah, I get sarcasm from it. Before it went over my head, but now I have ears that can hear. At first I laughed at this seemingly ridiculous thought that a mere body can have human rights, but I am coming around.
On the other hand, the Muse has rights too. What I really need is a "writer's challenge brochure" in which to check the things I need to do to be healthy and creative, and teach the Cause, all at the same time.
Another time sink threatening my reading of books is the huge and ever mounting pile of surplus newspapers and magazines left over from my father's many subscriptions. He now has a veteran's pension as well as his senior's pensions, and spends all his disposable income, it seems, on science magazines, all of which are passed on to me after he has read them. I have an awful time keeping up: the information explosion is a daily, palpable reality.
One thing I came across last night in my overdose of science magazines seems relevant to the planned teaching effort combined with personal initiatives that the House (following Abdu'l-Baha) is encouraging us to do. It is from a review of a book by a medical journalist, Atul Gawande, called Better. This collects together all the good things that the cream of the medical profession are accomplishing, everything from miraculous battlefield surgery to the designers of hand washing campaigns at home. These chosen few innovators, whom Gawande calls "positive deviants," all seem to follow to a tee the practices that the Baha'i life teaches, especially our daily taking of the self into account,
"The elements of their success, he tells us, boil down to key personal strengths, diligence, moral integrity, willingness to acknowledge failure, and ingenuity in seeking solutions. This includes carefully tracking the details of their own performance, since only by measuring outcomes can they later analyze which approaches work and which do not." (Tony Dajer, "Reviews," Discover, May, 2007, p. 68)
This is why I look forward to the day when we can plug all our daily data flow into a single source, and have it visually go over everything that we have done in the past day, week, month, and so forth, as we take ourselves into account. Imagine how much more effective we would be as Baha'is and as "positive deviant" world citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment