p39 Synchronizing Spirit

Mashriq Making

By John Taylor; 2008 March 02, 01 Ala, 164 BE

Consider, if you will, the following interview with John Grayzel in World Order Magazine. Here he mentions the fact that much of what we are learning about world-based solutions is routinely wasted due to lack of planning and organization on an international level. Here is what he says,

"What I bring from my past professional background is an awareness of the enormous amount of knowledge that has been generated by people who are solving problems around the world. But frequently the knowledge is not captured. Rather tragically it is lost, and learning is repeated over and over again.

"Individuals have solved almost all types of world problems many times over. It is the world that has not solved its problems, due, I would say, to a lack of unity. The solving has been done one by one by individuals, and the actions have not coalesced into something unified.

"It is like a flower that sprouts, blooms, and dies but does not produce seeds for the next generation. Similarly, the academic world is filled with immense amounts of information and repositories of knowledge that are never translated into action. There is a real shortage of bridges between knowledge and the real world.

"I hope that in its second phase of existence the Baha'i Chair can serve as a venue where individuals will begin to share and work together on crafting common understandings and common approaches to solving some of the major problems that face humanity." (John A. Grayzel, re Maryland Baha'i Chair, World Order. 2006, Vol. 38, No.1, p. 19)

I checked out the website of the Maryland Baha'i Chair, but found little to indicate that this second phase has got going yet. In any case, the waste of learning is what troubles me. I think we are being overwhelmed with solutions as well as problems because it was all prophesied of old; the time of the end was predicted to be a flood. A flood is too much water. Water is a good thing, necessary for life, but too much overwhelms our ability to deal with it. We need institutional change to be able to channel the massive influx and turn it to good ends. Until we create new bodies, the institutions we have will wander around like monsters, doing more harm than good.

This brings me to Mary Shelley.

Mary Shelley is now regarded as the author of the first work of science fiction; her Frankenstein is also studied as a major example of early feminist fiction. A couple of months ago I wrote the following fragment about her creation.

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The Corporation as Frankenstein Monster

I caught a snippet from a CBC Radio interview the other day with a literature professor who was saying that when Mary Shelley wrote her novel "Frankenstein," they immediately compared her monster constructed from dead body parts and vivified by lightning, to the just-invented limited share corporation. Like the monster, a corporation is a non-human entity endowed with all the abilities, interests, rights and privileges of a human being. Like the monster, a corporation does not die, nor does it have a history, parents, a childhood or ancestors. It just is. Like the God of Moses, it defines itself by saying "I am what I am." Little wonder that Frankenstein's monster still evokes horror.

Actually, now that I think of it, the Frankenstein monster was more human than a corporation. At least it has feelings; it is tormented by what it is. It deeply regrets the fact that its "father" is so horrified at what he did that he withdrew and became, in effect, an absentee father. The monster wanders the earth in anguish. At one point it creates a bride for itself, but then it thinks, "What happens if we have children and start breeding?" This thought horrifies it. Mary Shelley has the monster chop up its bride before she can be brought to life.

Modern corporations have no such compunctions. They breed like rabbits. And their spawn is just as immortal and untouchable as the non-human creatures from which they came. The film "The Corporation" gives an example of a company that broke just about every moral and legal rule in the book, yet the American government still drew back from disbanding it. It was decided that to kill one corporate Frankenstein, no matter how evil, would have set a bad precedent for ideological reasons. A government that stands for unfettered capitalism would not dare hold corporations accountable for their actions in the same way that a human being is. It can and does execute humans who murder other human beings, but these ideologues dare not dip their hands in the virtual blood of an artificial entity.

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That was as far as I could take this chain of thought at the time, but now I think I can relate corporate Frankensteins to what Christians call the "body of the Church," to what a Baha'i might call the "body of the Mashriq." I am thinking of the following statement of the Master:

"Temples are symbols of the reality and divinity of God -- the collective center of mankind. Consider how within a temple every race and people is seen and represented -- all in the presence of the Lord, covenanting together in a covenant of love and fellowship, all offering the same melody, prayer and supplication to God. Therefore, it is evident that the church is a collective center for mankind. For this reason there have been churches and temples in all the divine religions; but the real Collective Centers are the Manifestations of God, of Whom the church or temple is a symbol and expression. That is to say, the Manifestation of God is the real divine temple and Collective Center of which the outer church is but a symbol." (Promulgation, 163)

The word "Mashriq" means east, as in the place where the sun rises. So the Master says that our prayers and ability to unify has always dawned from the Manifestations, as symbolized in houses of worship, be they mosque, church, synagogue, Mashriq, or whatever. Just as institutions like hospitals arose from early Christianity, many other service institutes will grow out of the Mashriqs. An old folk’s home has already been built as an auxiliary to the Wilmette Mashriq.

Maybe one day we will refer to the Baha'i Faith as the Mashriq, in the same way that Christians use "the church" as a synonym for institutional structure of their Faith. One of Baha'u'llah's longest and most difficult tablets is the Suriy-i-Haykal, the Surih of the Temple. It includes at the end a recapitulation of the Proclamation to the Kings (most of the originals have been lost or destroyed, and we would not know what was in them were it not for the Haykal); and as if its name -- a pun in many languages for body and temple -- were not symbol enough, Baha'u'llah had the Haykal tablet written in the form of a pentacle, the symbol of man, specifically The Man, the holy Manifestation of God.

What does all this have to do with Frankenstein and corporations? Here is my line of reasoning. Mary Shelley was married to Percy Shelley, the author of "The Necessity of Atheism," which got the young poet booted out of Oxford University. She too was a "free thinker" who believed in free love, rather than marriage. Her nightmare vision of Frankenstein was born out of this "modern" way of thinking. Her soul perceived a world coming where men, using science, learned to take over the reproductive functions of women. This appropriation immediately was understood to be a metaphor for the corporation because these institutions too are born artificially, born from the heads of men rather than the natural wombs of women.

The service institutions born out of the Mashriq may one day make the corporation a more natural being, give it a mother, as it were, instead of a father only. Institutions, following the Baha'i principle that even religion is an appliance, a tool for good to be cast off and disbanded as soon as it ceases to benefit or becomes an end in itself, will change their DNA. No longer will they be immortal gods, concerned only for their own limited, temporary interests. There will be a world corporate constitution, just as there will be a worker's bill of rights. God only, as symbolized by the Mashriq, the church, or whatever, will be an end in Himself, all else will serve, all else, save His children, will be cast on the fire when they cease to serve God and mankind. And the heart of it all is the Mashriq, because it is like a clock that sets and synchronizes our spiritual reflexes.

"Thou hast asked about places of worship and the underlying reason therefor. The wisdom in raising up such buildings is that at a given hour, the people should know it is time to meet, and all should gather together, and, harmoniously attuned one to another, engage in prayer; with the result that out of this coming together, unity and affection shall grow and flourish in the human heart." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 94-95)

Truly, if we are to avoid a flood of superficial knowledge, we need to study more profoundly, deepen deeper, and then apply it in living, loving institutes.

That is why the Mashriq unifies study of the Word with dawn prayers in an atmosphere of silence and reverence, for as the saying goes, still waters run deep. Only this can stop the flood of outer solutions that are found and forgotten, and build knowledge that is married to service. The Mashriq channels knowledge into institutionalized, lasting bodies of change.

In her memoir, the daughter of Howard Colby Ives tells this anecdote about why we need to study fervently, with all our might,

"Which brings to mind the story told me of a newly declared believer, radiant and eager to serve. He wrote Abdu'l-Baha asking what he should do. Abdu'l-Baha told him to study the Teachings. Eighteen years later the man wrote again to the Master saying that for several hours each day for the eighteen years he had studied the Teachings and what should he do now? Promptly Abdu'l-Baha wrote and told him to go and study the Teachings. This was an East Indian Baha'i where, now, the Faith is truly roaring." Muriel Ives Barrow Newhall, Mother's Stories, Self-Published, Shawnigan Lake, BC, 1998 <http://bahai-library.com/index.php5?file=ives_mothers_stories_abdulbaha.html>

It is no coincidence that India is now the largest Baha'i community in the world, that the regional counsels were born there, and that the most beautiful Mashriq of all, the Lotus Temple, was built there, and it now receives more visitors than the Taj Mahal. Let us then turn all our efforts to the Chile Mashriq, the last of the Continental Mashriqs; when that is done, then we can start building Mashriqs on more local levels, so that one day we will all walk to our local Mashriq to coordinate our prayers and readings in the morning with one another, no matter who we are or where we may live.