Decredentialization

Decredentializing the Cause of God; A Digression on the ABS and Curtis Kelsey

By John Taylor; 2007 July 07

 

Here is an interesting way to teach the victims of that bane of my life, the J-W cult, from the biography of my hero of late, Curtis Kelsey,

“One afternoon two Jehovah's Witnesses called on Curtis.
He greeted them warmly and invited them inside, making them feel at ease. After praising them for their courage in breaking away from orthodoxy and expressing admiration for their devotion to their Faith, the two men relaxed. Then Curtis listened to what they had to say, much of it being read from the Bible they were holding. About ten minutes elapsed when Curtis said gently, 'Do you recall what is stated in the Book of Daniel? "Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.'"
'Where is that?' said one of the men, handing his Bible to Curtis. Curtis turned several pages and said, 'Here ... in Daniel ... twelfth chapter, ninth verse.'
After reading the passage, one of them said, 'What is the significance of this?'
'To me,' Curtis responded, 'that passage means that the Bible, the Gospel is sealed until the time of the end, and even Jesus Christ didn't know when the time of the end would take place. Only the Father knew.'
The two men looked at Curtis strangely, wondering what he was trying to tell them. 'This may seem harsh,' Curtis said, 'but as a good Christian you shouldn't be using the Bible to teach your Faith. It is sealed until the time of the end.'
Then Curtis proceeded to tell them the story of Baha'u'llah, that it was He who came 'in the Glory of the Father' to unseal the Words in the Bible; and that Baha'u'llah was living during the time the first Jehovah's Witnesses were expecting the Return of Christ. In a gentle and patient manner Curtis had turned the teachers into enthralled students.” (He Loved and Served, The Story of Curtis Kelsey, by Nathan Rutstein, George Ronald, Oxford, pp. 158-159)

I have also learned a lot from Curtis Kelsey's recorded talk, “The Story of Abdu’l-Baha,” which is on the Baha'i A/V Web Site. I have listened to it over again several times, each time with increasing profit. Here is the voice of someone who met, worked with and listened to the Master. One thing he said strikes me now, a pilgrim's note of the Guardian, who said something to the effect that you cannot take the mystery out of the Cause of God. If you do that, you take God out. The tendency of Americans (and by that I presume he means those involved in administering the Cause, since he called America the "cradle of the Administrative Order") is to want to Americanize the Baha'i Faith by wanting to remove all Its mystery. Do that and you kill the Cause, all that remains is a dead thing unworthy of the name "Faith."

Since the time of the Guardian I think we have caught an even worse disease, or perhaps the same one in more advanced stages. Credentialism has gripped us; we want to academicize the Baha'i Faith. Those who enter the higher levels of the administration are if anything overqualified. They tend to have spent too much time in the same institutions of higher learning that trained the present non-religious leaders of Americanization. I mean the very qualified people who brought us the Guantanamo Bay detention camp scam, among others. I am not saying that there is borderline criminality here as among their classmates, just a tendency to remove the mystery, to use the Administration in ways it is not meant for. What the great essayist said centuries ago is just as true today.

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly." (Michel de Montaigne)

The problem is witch's brew of fanaticism and opinion-worship that breeds the contagion of the cult. This is the very definition of a cult: any group that has narrowed its sources of information to the point that its goals reflect one set of values over the spectrum of alternatives, over the recognition that there is more than meets the eye. In other words, no mystery, no humility. A cult neither knows nor cares about what is going on outside. Today's educational system has become cultish to the extreme. If you think academe is not a cult, why do you never see discussion in the media or in the thousands of fora that are held every year of anything to do with world government, or a world language? Why so little concern about unification, even as the climate draws its noose to literally choke us all?

 I have been going over dozens of papers published over the past few decades in the ABS's "Journal of Baha'i Studies" and in almost every case there is nothing of discernible value in there. You can see that the author has been trained to write narrowly, for a tiny audience of specialists. That, and the Writings, is all they know. Most papers reflect the cultishness of their teachers; they aim at nothing beyond ironing out the Baha'i Faith's mystery. They translate the simple, clear, eloquent language of the Writings into the jargon of their field, and give birth to a stillborn mind child.

 Yet Baha'u'llah's main teaching is "unity in diversity." A Baha'i writer needs to aim at a varied audience, to take as source a varied data stream, if only to follow this divine dictum of unity in diversity. The ABS is out of touch with this, which is why the successful Ruhi program seemed to come so far out of left field. In the late 1980's I wrote the ABS, begging them to cooperate more, to coordinate their specialized research skills to go after what works in teaching the Faith, and take everything from there. The response was verbally polite but left it dead in the water. Even now, I cannot understand why they do not barge down the doors of the Ruhi Institute in Columbia and insist on helping to improve, or at least proofread, this program.

 Okay, I see the negative feedback from my readers coming in already, so I will try to make this criticism as constructive as I can.

 First of all, we can work to remove credentialism -- not by criticizing administrators, that would be a grave spiritual error that more than anything would kill the mystery. I mean something as simple as keeping the qualifications suggested by the Guardian in mind when we think about whom to vote for, not necessarily the number of degrees behind the person's name. If you doubt that it is possible to have a "well trained mind" without graduating grade school, just listen to that recording of Curtis Kelsey's talk. It is one of the most brilliant Baha'i talks that I have ever heard. You may say, Kelsey cheated in effect by being taught directly by the Master. Not very many of the people on your local voting list have that distinction.

 But if you think that, you are wrong.

 The Master has been an even more effective teacher since He left His physical body. And recall how Kelsey learned his lessons, by sitting in on lectures by the Master in Persian and Arabic, languages he knew nothing of. Recall how in the middle the Master stopped and told Kelsey in English that it does not matter that you do not grasp the outer meaning, you are getting the inner meaning, which is not dependent upon words. Believe it. And believe that many outside the recognized channels of Academe there exist individuals and groups that are getting it, as far as successful deepening and teaching are concerned. At least, that is what the House think has happened with a certain group in Columbia. And, aside from divine infallibility, they are at the Cause's data central, the best position to judge what is working around the world and what is not. Why are the ABS not right down there with them, asking them to explain why this works, in what ways it differs from pyramid schemes, talking to and working with them?

 Taken all in all, I think that a faithful Baha'i whose training comes from the spirit, rather than from a credential factory, should have the same cachet with her fellow believers that a PhD has with the powers that be who pick who gets to walk in the halls of power outside the faith. That is the only way we will ever address another criticism of an "Americanized" Baha'i Faith that comes straight from Haifa itself, that the administration is failing to involve the whole community:

 "Although Spiritual Assemblies are good at specifying goals, they have not yet mastered the art of making use of the talents of individuals and rousing the mass of the friends to action in fulfillment of such goals. Removing this deficiency would be a mark of the maturation of these institutions. May your Assembly lead the way." (Letters of The Universal House of Justice, 1994 May 19, response to US NSA, Paragraph 47)

 Anyway, that was a digression. Here is another. One thing I noticed listening to Curtis Kelsey's voice in this recording was that his pronunciation sounded oddly like a couple of aunts I had, Aunt Marguerite and Aunt Amy. It took me a while to place what it was. Like them, he was slurring the middle of his words. "Valiu'llah Khan" becomes Valcon, etc. Both of these aunts of mine died from strokes, and Kelsey was taken, probably not long after this talk, by some other cardiovascular malady. It makes you think about that tablet (in the selection we featured from "He Loved and Served") where the Master wrote to his agent in Akka, asking him to go out of his way to accommodate Kelsey's protein-rich American diet. As the Master told Kelsey, "Now I am bringing My kindness, later on (Kelsey later understood this to mean the Guardian's ministry) I will bring My discipline." Certainly choice of diet is a discipline that Americans are at last beginning to realize is crucial for saving the planet, not to mention our own cardio-vascular health. This too the Master predicted that in the future everybody would become a veggie.

 Another thing the Master told Kelsey was that every dispensation starts with a new Adam, a new creation from scratch. That was what I sat down to write about this morning. But now I find that I have used up all my time. Shucks. Maybe next time.