Birth II

The Birth of Sacrifice (Birth of the Bab, part II)

By John Taylor; 2007 October 16, 01 Ilm, 164 BE

As my regular readers know, I have my doubts about sports. They were confirmed this morning by an amusing and disturbing entry to George Monbiot's blog, called "Playing in the Rough." (monbiot.com, posted October 16, 2007). Before he retired from golf a few years ago, my father was a fanatical player. I played the devil's advocate with him, jokingly downplaying the benefits of what I refused to call a sport. Monbiot describes the atmosphere of a country club very aptly when he calls those idyllic park like surroundings "teletubbyland." And whether you call it a game or a sport, the health benefits of the activity are undeniable. My father at 87 is healthier physically than many men just entering middle age. Nonetheless, it does not take long for Monbiot to uncover the environmental drawbacks of the golf courses springing up in every poor, undeveloped part of the world.

"One study suggests that an 18-hole course requires, on average, 22 tonnes of chemical treatments (mostly pesticides) every year: seven times the rate per hectare for industrial farming. Another shows higher rates of some cancers, such as non-Hodgkins lymphoma (which has been associated with certain pesticides), among golf course superintendents. Courses consume staggering amounts of water. Many of them are built on diverse and important habitats, such as rainforests or wetlands. In some countries people have been violently evicted to make way for them." (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/16/playing-in-the-rough/)

Another recent article in Macleans Magazine strikes closer to home for me. Steve Maich's October 22, 2007 article, "The concussion time bomb; New research suggests head injuries can trigger a descent into dementia, madness and maybe even murder," describes the ill effects of bops on the head in sports. It describes how former wrestler Bret Hart became an activist on behalf of professional wrestlers after the dire harm of his own concussions became evident. A concussion remains a difficult injury to assess and detect, even with all the recent advances in neurology and brain monitoring technology. It pretty much takes an autopsy, usually prompted by a former athlete's going insane, committing suicide while taking several other innocent souls to join the choir celestial along with him, to prove that the extensive brain damage characteristic of concussion actually existed in the first place. The article does not mention soccer, but the practice of "heading" by soccer players is now known to have similar ill effects on the brains of players of the world's most popular sport.

Why does all this strike home to me? Because I am convinced that my migraine disability was exacerbated, if not caused, by several concussions I suffered when I was a teenager and dedicated Judoka. I particularly remember one Judo match in Rochester, New York, against a large opponent, or more to the point, I do not remember it. I only recall bowing, connecting with him, and then finding myself in the change room dressing into my street clothes, on the way to the hospital.

I must have been about fifteen years old then, and a few years later I did something really insane, I became a Baha'i. I found that most Baha'is do not have a strong interest in sports, which suited me just fine. When I read about what happens to professional athletes after concussions, I am glad I quit Judo so young. I wish I had taken up table tennis right after quitting Judo, though, because in the past few years I have found how much I need the physical activity and competition that a sport offers. But body and soul depend upon it. As far as I can see, there are no harmful effects from ping pong, as there are from golf, judo or boxing. Only one possible drawback springs to mind. In China, where table tennis is king, this sport seems to take advantage of the fact that people there prefer to amuse themselves indoors. This tendency means that industry there pollutes the air with impunity. The people do not spend time outdoors and do not miss a clean atmosphere, which only makes things worse. For me as an individual, though, this is an advantage, since if I try something outside, like jogging or bicycling, a bad smog day will sicken me for days afterwards. For now, ping pong is my only choice.

The question in my mind is, why is it so hard to do anything on principle? If we know something is wrong, why not just stop it? There is no lack of alternative games, sports and activities to turn to if a present sport proves to do more harm than good. Even if there were not, we could easily invent any number of new sports that would avoid known harm and at the same time put to use new, and even useful, skills.

It is not that quitting an established but harmful practice has never been done. The British Empire did it when they abolished slavery, an institution that was extremely profitable to its elites. But was that the first and only time the human race stopped something on principle?

We know as a scientifically proven fact that violent sports harm their participants physically, and social scientists suspect that watching violent sports harms spectators mentally, spiritually and politically (by glorifying conflict over cooperation, not to mention exposing them to manipulative advertising), and, as Monbiot points out, even that most non-violent sport imaginable, golf, poisons the environment and abuses the rights of people living and working on golf courses and the land surrounding them.

So why not just stop it? Why not just move on?

I suspect that we do not want to give up profitable but harmful sports for the same reason that we do not want to give up one jot or tittle of present benefit in order to stave off the future benefit of not having to undergo climate change. Monbiot hit the nail on the head at the end of his book "Heat" when he pointed out that this climate crisis differs from other crises and protest movements in the past in one respect: the enemy is us. The only ones the people can pick placards and protest against are the people themselves. We know that we all have to make adjustments to our lifestyle in order to accommodate principle and the environment; we just do not want to give anything up in order to do it. It seems like too much effort. So we continue blithely on, business as usual, handcarts plummeting to hell.

This is the age of responsibility, and responsibility demands sacrifice.

I think that the underlying reason we are so unwilling to change or sacrifice, even when we know we must do it for our own survival, is hidden in the Holy Day we are about to celebrate, my favorite among all Baha'i holidays, the Birth of the Bab. The birth of the Bab is all about one thing, the birth of sacrifice. That was what His life was all about. The Bab wrote of his early years,

"And when I attained full maturity Thou didst cause Me to bear allegiance unto Thine inaccessible Remembrance, and enabled Me to advance towards the designated station, where Thou didst educate Me through the subtle operations of Thy handiwork and didst nurture Me in that land with Thy most gracious gifts." (Selections, 174)

He is speaking of His surroundings, the city of Shiraz, the sacred House of the Bab. One day, when the dark clouds of evil and superstition have dispersed, every male Baha'i will be required once in a lifetime to go there and visit that house, that house where the "subtle operations" of God's "handiwork" nurtured the Bab and prepared Him to make the ultimate sacrifice. "Greater love hath not a man than this, that he give his life for his friends."

And let there be no mistake, it is men who are mostly obsessed with sports now, men who drive a few elite athletes to sacrifice the very goal of sports, physical well being, for their obsessive pleasure. Somehow that rather barren, desert-like land, the province of Fars, sunk down now into a world center for fundamentalist fanatics, gave birth to a sacrificial spirit that took the Bab to the high station of sacrifice.

That is why, I think, Baha'u'llah decreed that pilgrimage to this place is obligatory for male Baha'is, and not for females. Girls and women are usually more perceptive of spiritual, invisible matters, and the pilgrimage is not obligatory for them. Men have spatial-oriented brains, "show me" minds that lock onto motion and physical presence. Men must go and see this House, go there and feel it, hear it, touch it, before we will ever understand in our bones what sacrifice is, and what the Bab was about in His sacrifice.

By all human standards, the life of the Bab which began on this holy day was a sad life. It was tragic, and all the more so since, being Whom He was, he must have seen what would happen from His very first day on earth. The poignancy of His story will inspire a thousand Sophocles and Shakespeares to portray it and bring it home. The more you feel the love of the Bab, the sadder the events of His life become in eye and heart. I can hardly bear to think of the disasters and violence that His person and His Revelation initiated. The revolution, the torture, the massacres, the state and religion sponsored terrorism, the lies and suppression, the violent death of all His friends and most of His believers, the relentless rejection of a whole nation, people, clergy and government combined.

What sports contest, what last minute victory by an underdog team can ever compare with the drama of this story? The Bab's early marriage and the tragic stillbirth of their only child, His dramatic declaration to eighteen disciples in His own rooms -- for the first time in religious history the Letters of the Living had to find Him, not be picked out and taught by Him -- then His forced exile and eventual martyrdom in Tabriz. Nor did the story stop with His physical martyrdom. The Mullahs decreed that His remains be cast out of the city walls as a meal for the dogs, but dedicated followers secretly stole it away, hid them and eventually smuggled them to the Holy Land. Abdu'l-Baha, was assigned by His Father the task of building a suitable resting place for the Bab. Under great danger and difficulty, He eventually succeeded in erecting a sturdy building, the inner part of the present Shrine of the Bab.

"Every stone of that building, every stone of the road leading to it," He, many a time was heard to remark, "I have with infinite tears and at tremendous cost, raised and placed in position." (Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p. 275)

In a 1909 tablet Abdu'l-Baha triumphantly announced,

"The most joyful tidings is this ... that the holy, the luminous body of the Bab ... after having for sixty years been transferred from place to place, by reason of the ascendancy of the enemy, and from fear of the malevolent, and having known neither rest nor tranquillity has, through the mercy of the Abha Beauty, been ceremoniously deposited, on the day of Naw-Ruz, within the sacred casket, in the exalted Shrine on Mt. Carmel... By a strange coincidence, on that same day of Naw-Ruz, a cablegram was received from Chicago, announcing that the believers in each of the American centers had elected a delegate and sent to that city ... and definitely decided on the site and construction of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkar." (quoted in, Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, 276)

Though I have mentioned that pilgrimage to the House of the Bab in Shiraz is obligatory to men, it is significant perhaps to note that while the Master spent His efforts on the Shrine in Palestine, it was the women of the holy household, especially Munirih Khanum and Bahiyyih Khanum, who expended the lion's share of time and effort seeing to it that the House in Shiraz was suitably preserved and decorated for visitation by pilgrims. And it was here that the bile of the fanatic directed its full fury. On August 20, 1955, the Guardian sadly described the latest assault on this precious structure.

"In Shiraz, in the province of Fars, the cradle of the Faith, the House of the Bab, ordained by Baha'u'llah in His Most Holy Book as the foremost place of pilgrimage in the land of His birth, was twice desecrated, its walls severely damaged, its windows broken and its furniture partly destroyed and carried away. The neighboring house of the Bab's maternal uncle was razed to the ground." (Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, 135)

Nor, as we all know, was that the end of it. I will not describe the details of the eventual complete destruction of the structure known in our scripture simply as "the House." That would sadden us, and the birth of the Bab is not a sad occasion, it is happy.

It is happy because knowing of His suffering and the inexplicable hatred directed against Him and anything associated with Him permits us to understand that our happiness is not in superficial victory, it lies in sacrifice. Superficial victory, like that of the Iranian persecutors, is as ephemeral as last year's title race. Life itself only comes about through sacrifice, and sacrifice of the spirit has endless results that never will be seen by physical eyes, but never are forgotten by those in touch with soul.