Tending the
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When the Master was cut off from the world during the Great War, He made the following reminiscence about his daily routine in Akka before He assumed leadership of the Baha'i Faith,
"'During the days of the Blessed Perfection,' he continued, `when I got up in the morning, the first thing I did was to inquire about the health of the believers, one by one; and then I called on those who were sick to see how they were. If their indisposition was slight, I cared for them myself; otherwise I sent for the doctor. Then, this duty performed, I went to the school and examined the pupils. To those who were doing well I gave money or gifts; others I encouraged to push forward; Thus all the students who were graduated from that school received much praise, and were given scholarships in Damascus and Constantinople.'" (Star of the West, Vol. 13, p. 171)
So, before He was given the job of what we would call an executive or CEO, as well as writer, speaker and spiritual leader, the Master's main concerns on a daily level, by this account, were what are for Baha'is the two most important, high-status professions, the physician and the teacher. Not that He usurped their jobs, as He makes clear. Rather He did what we all can do, He asked how people were feeling and offered praise and encouragement, not to mention financial aid, to pupils, students and scholars. But I find what He said next to this diarist particularly mind-blowing:
"In every undertaking, constant vigilance and attention are necessary, for, no matter how perfect an organization, if negligence creeps in, it will little by little lose its efficiency. If a piece of farm land is left to take care of itself or if the supervision of the farmer is slackened, the farm will be either abandoned or it will turn into a thorny patch." (Ibid., p. 171-172)
We see here brought in as an analogy the third of the big three Baha'i professions, the farmer. Everything depends upon agriculture. And of course the world of today sees in
So what the Master seems to imply here is that we should not sit back and let doctors and teachers do their work in a vacuum. Their callings are too important to delegate completely. The human mind and body are gardens that need our constant attention or everything will deteriorate. True, the gardens of mind and body do need the services of an expert from time to time. For example, on the Mount Carmel grounds a landscape architect or chief gardener may come by periodically to attend to higher-level problems, but the burden of weeding and daily upkeep are entirely up to laborers. In affairs of mind and body, amateurs and non-experts must do most of the supervision.
This is a good way to introduce the questions that have been running through my mind lately. What do we, as Baha'is, need to pay attention to? What field are we cultivating? I do not think I am going out on a limb when I say that this should be teaching the Faith; for example, in a recent message the House suggests that we make it the "dominating passion of our lives." We also need to pay attention to the progress and virtues of our fellow believers, with a mind to the upkeep of the talent pool in the Administrative Order. In another communication the House said,
"...it is a bounden duty that confers a high privilege upon every Baha'i to select, as a responsible citizen of the new world being brought into existence, the composition of the institutions having authority over the functioning of the Baha'i community. In this regard, indifference and neglect on the part of any believer are alien to the spirit of the Cause. The friends must strive ceaselessly to avoid being contaminated with these destructive attitudes, which have inflicted such damage on the integrity and authority of the institutions of a declining world order." (Letter,
The "destructive attitudes" that threaten to contaminate us are pretty clear, it seems to me. Like every vice, it starts off as a virtue. A healthy skepticism of government is a good thing, indeed necessary for a democracy, or what the Ancient Greeks called a polity. A gardener who does not care to remove weeds, or who cannot tell the difference between a plant and a weed, will hardly have a beautiful garden. A polity depends upon an educated, concerned citizenry who do not take everything government says on face value.
However, when skepticism grows out of control, it becomes a worse weed than the weeds it is designed to extirpate; it becomes cynicism, an excuse to bellyache about how corrupt government is while sitting back and doing nothing to change it. As Dr. Chomsky so often points out, political neglect masquerading as cynicism plays into the hands of super-rich plutocrats who usurp popular government to their own class-conscious ends. Chomsky decries a populace that complacently denigrates government, the only institution designed to respond directly to their will; certainly nobody, not even their employees, can influence the quasi-fascist machineries of large corporations, the bodies that set the agenda behind the scenes as government weakens. And, never forget, the gift of corporate non-polities to the world is the Pandora's Box of global warming.
This brings me to an interesting teaching experience in the early 1930's that I read about on the on-line Baha'i Academics Library yesterday. A Baha'i teacher recalls how on board a ship she ran across a woman contaminated by spiritualism, or some other piece of mental garbage pretending to religious belief. As Baha'u'llah says, "They see the sun with their own eyes, and yet question that brilliant Orb as to the proof of its light." (Iqan, 208) Her reply to this non-seeker's critique of Baha'i ideals was the only one possible, to talk about the purpose of religion. Spouting quasi-religious opinions is not the same thing as addressing the need that religion is designed to fill. Never confuse your politics with your religion! She did this by citing what was evidently a well-known Tablet of Abdu'l-Baha at the time, the "Tablet of East and West,"
"`Abdu'l-Baha describes the purpose of religion in the Tablet of East and West; `The cornerstone of the religion of God is the acquisition of divine perfections and the sharing in his manifold bestowals. The essential purpose of faith and belief is to ennoble the inner being of man with the outpourings of grace from on high...'" ("Outposts of A World Religion, by a Baha'i Traveler; Journeys Taken In 1933-1934-1935," by Loulie Mathews)
I looked frantically for this "Tablet of East and West," but evidently we do not have it today; certainly we do not know it as such. Was she thinking of the Tablets of Baha'u'llah to the kings and leaders of East and West? The closest thing I could find is this, a very recent re-translation distributed by the House of Justice:
"For the head cornerstone of the religion of God consisteth in refining the characters, reforming the manners, and improving the attributes of men. The purpose is that beings that are veiled may see, and that dark and defective realities may become illumined." (Unnamed Tablet cited in "Universal House of Justice, 2001 Apr 18, Clarification of Various Issues Raised by Provisional Translations," p. 2)
In any case, this describes just what the garden is that we are to tend; we should not be concerned with opinions, outward policies or temporal decisions when teaching, we should rather aim at the "characters," "manners" and "attributes" of those around us. Believers are not teaching by merely sharing opinions. That may be interesting but it has nothing to do with teaching the Cause. It reminds me of the way my seven-year-old son Tomaso collects trading cards with his little friends.
Like just about every boy his age, Tommy has a large collection of Yugi-oh and Pokeman cards. Of late he has branched out to hockey cards. He trades hockey cards not because he knows or cares about hockey in the slightest but solely because his friends are interested in it and enjoy learning about the best players through cards. So Tomaso unselfconsciously plays along. Being Canadians, they all have some kind of tie to the sport; even if they do not play it themselves, someone they know does. But for Thomas the hockey positions, "goalie" and "forward," are purely writing on his hockey cards. He arranges each team on the floor in his own order, according to how he imagines hockey players stand. This frustrates his grandfather no end. Grandpa, having experience with real hockey games, insists that the goalie stand in front of the goal, that the forward stand forward, and so forth. Tomaso sees no need for such restrictions weighing down his whims.
This, it seems to me, is what religious opinions, divorced from character, manners and virtue, turn into, a mere game, a tangent. Belief and convictions, no matter how fervently held, have nothing to do with the purpose and reality of religion. They are what hockey trading cards are to the sport of hockey.
So the first step to teaching must be to forget specific points of doctrine and become concerned with people, with their character, manners and virtue. They are God's garden, after all. To teach is to check up on them every chance we get, like a worker tending a garden, like the Master did every morning. We start with tending the garden of our own body and mind and then turn outwards.
Our Haldimand Baha'i community is very fortunate to have Ron, a believer who is exemplary in this respect. I have gotten used to saying to every local I meet, "I am a Baha'i. You probably know
Observing Ron's methods with awed respect, I have learned that knowledge of people is like any form of knowledge, it follows the rule of Jesus: "Those who have get more, and those without lose what little they have." Ron is concerned with people and avid to learn everything about them, and knowing one person leads to more people. Especially in a small town like this, everybody is related to everybody else, and everybody has a story that you can tag them to. Myself, I congratulate myself for remembering Richard's first name, everything else is a blur; details flow out of my brain like water off a duck's back. I can tell you what Maurice Merleau-Ponty thought about phenomenology but I have no inkling of what is in the heads of people I have met in the flesh.
Which is why I am such an unsuccessful teacher of the Faith.
I have been reading about the lives of Martha Root and other great teachers of the faith and I find that they were all far closer to Ron than a theoretical blatherer like myself. Take Martha Root, and how she taught the Faith to the Queen of Rumania. She arrives in town, whips off a note along with a copy of "Baha'u'llah and the New Era," and two days later she gets an audience and learns that Her Royal Highness was up all night reading it from cover to cover. I do not know if we have a copy of Martha's original note to the Queen, but judging by what is known of her methodology I would guess that it probably said something like, "I was just with so and so, who sends you greetings in the enclosed letter of introduction; so and so also had this to say about so and so, which may be of interest, since you know so and so. And so on and so and so." I do not know, that is how extroverts sound to me, these endless, annoying and forgettable names like a mountain torrent. I just do not get it. They might as well be talking Chinese, but I observe the results, and bow in reverence.
Not that I am putting myself down. That would be an offense to human dignity. I was talking last week to somebody in as high a position in the Administration as I have ever met, and when I mentioned that I am a blogger he said, "Oh, that is what the House is calling the Baha'is to do now." That was news to me. I felt like the believer who moves to a new town and finds he is being called a pioneer. And sure enough yesterday the news came through the pipes that a "Baha'i Internet Agency" has been formed with the object of encouraging more blogging in the Baha'i community. Here is their lovely website:
It has good instructions on how to start a blog, and even includes a PowerPoint presentation given at a recent conference explaining what a blog is. I was shocked and dismayed to find that the presenter had mis-attributed to Baha'u'llah the Guardian's famous 1930's quote predicting what we now call the Internet. There are other slips there too, but all was forgiven when I noticed a Badi' Blog essay included in a list of examples of Baha'i blogs.
I guess our theme for today is that even though we do not all succeed at teaching as much as we would like, or serve the Faith in the way we think we should, we can all tend the garden to some extent, no matter what our circumstances. If we do that single-mindedly, we are promised success. The Master said that it would only take a year to illuminate
"Therefore, you must forsake all thoughts, be united, set aside all intentions and hold only to one intention. This is the summons to the
We can all do our part. Everyone can give to the Fund, and can always pray for those souls who are up to their elbows in earth, planting and weeding the divine Garden, be it teaching or administrative service. It is a matter of "ask and ye shall receive." Let this be our prayer for the full-time servants of the Administrative order:
"Who is there that hath cried after Thee, and whose prayer hath remained unanswered? Where is he to be found who hath reached forth towards Thee, and whom Thou hast failed to approach? Who is he that can claim to have fixed his gaze upon Thee, and toward whom the eye of Thy loving-kindness hath not been directed? I bear witness that Thou hadst turned toward Thy servants ere they had turned toward Thee, and hadst remembered them ere they had remembered Thee." (Prayers and Meditation, 254)
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