Bahá’í News/Issue 523/Text
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| No. 523 | BAHA’I YEAR 131 | October, 1974 |
Improvements made at House of Worship, page 4
The Hands of the Cause in St. Louis, page 9
The Flowering of the Planet, by Guy Murchie, page 13
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page five
page nine
page twenty
| CONTENTS |
Around the World |
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Kenya: Nairobi conference starts Five Year Plan | 1 |
Italy: Annual summer school held at resort | 1 |
Latin America: Hand of the Cause encourages teaching | 2 |
Switzerland: Swiss summer school holds twelfth session | 4 |
United States: House of Worship chairs reupholstered | 4 |
Ecuador: Auxiliary Board trains assistants | 5 |
Thailand: Prime Minister lauds mission of Faith | 6 |
Togo: Wedding of pioneers draws wide publicity | 8 |
Spain: Information on Faith aired over television | 8 |
The Hands of the Cause at St. Louis | 9 |
The Flowering of the Planet, by Guy Murchie | 13 |
A Glimpse of the World Center, by Gregory Dahl | 20 |
| COVER PHOTO |
Five Auxiliary Board assistants were appointed in Ecuador. They are, from left to right: Luis Navas, Julian Menéndez, Patricia Garcés, Patricia Muñoz, and Hermiñio España. They are shown during a public meeting in Otavalo’s central square on the last day of the orientation.
| PHOTO AND DRAWING CREDITS |
Front Cover and Pages 1-8: Bahá’í News; Page 9: Paul Slaughter; Page 10: The American Bahá’í; Page 11: Paul Slaughter; Page 12: Mark Tanny; Pages 13, 14, 17, 18: The Bettmann Archive; Page 20: Israel Government Tourist Office.
| POSTAL INFORMATION |
Bahá’í News is published for circulation among Bahá’ís only by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, as a news organ reporting current activities of the Bahá’í world community.
Material must be received by the fifteenth of the month preceding date of issue. Address: Bahá’í News Editorial Office, 112 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091, U.S.A.
Change of address should be reported directly to Membership and Records, National Bahá’í Center. 112 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois. U.S.A. 60091.
Copyright © 1974, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
Around the World[edit]
Kenya:
Nairobi Conference Starts Five Year Plan[edit]
An active teaching program in Kenya, marking the launching of the Five Year Plan, is underway. A national conference in Nairobi, in May, blessed with the presence of the Hand of the Cause Raḥmatu’lláh Muhájir, gave more than 80 Bahá’ís from all parts of Kenya an opportunity to become familiar with the goals of the Five Year Plan and for each to choose his or her particular area of service. News of the goals given to other countries and of successful teaching efforts around the planet, as well as some insight into the responsibilities for Kenya’s particular goals, was given by Dr. Muhájir.
Prayer, education, the family, the role of women and children, and the administrative order, were all subjects considered by the gathering. Classes on strengthening the Local Spiritual Assemblies were held. Dr. Muhájir stressed the significance of the construction in Haifa of the building that will house The Universal House of Justice and urged the friends to extend their service to meet the needs of this critical time.
United Nations World Environment Day also attracted full support from the Bahá’ís of Kenya, who sent more than 1,000 invitations to attend a public observance in the Kenya Polytechnic building. Posters, and radio announcements in both Swahili and English on the Voice of Kenya, helped to publicize the meeting. A United Nations official and a member of the local Bahá’í community participated in the meeting, which attracted a large audience.
Italy:
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Hundreds Attend Summer School
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Annual Summer School Held at Resort[edit]
The 1974 Italian Summer School was held at a seaside resort on the Adriatic coast, September 13-22. More than 300 Bahá’ís from 10 countries attended.
National Spiritual Assembly members for Kenya are shown (above) following their election at Riḍván. They are, from left to right, back row: M. Sohaili, Christopher Musambai, Frank Mukoyani, Laban Wekesa (Chairman), and Bonaventure Wafula (Secretary). Seated, from left to right, Justus Wekesa (Treasurer), James Kingoina, John Asalache (Vice-Chairman), and Frederick M. Wahome. The Convention and a teaching conference were held at Kisumu.
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The summer program was organized into seminars devoted to such themes as parent-child relationships, and obedience and liberty. A coordinator was assigned to lead each seminar and to encourage the friends participating to consult on their subject exhaustively and apply the Bahá’í writings to their discussions.
A project of the Italian Youth Committee during the session was to recruit a team of traveling teachers to visit an area of the country still not opened to the Bahá’í Faith. The team was ready to leave at the close of the summer school.
Latin America:
Hand of the Cause Encourages Teaching[edit]
Reports of increased teaching activity and well-attended deepening classes have flowed into the Bahá’í News editorial office following the extensive travels of the Hand of the Cause Abu’l-Qásim Faizí in South and Central America. At a teaching conference in Lima, Peru, in July, he encouraged Bahá’ís from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile to plan immediately their participation in Five Year Plan activities, to involve their youth as much as possible in the teaching and deepening programs, and to retain the Bahá’í perspective “despite the pressures from the outside world.”
“We must all know that the aim of whatever we do is the unity of mankind, the central pivot of the religion of Bahá’u’lláh,” Mr. Faizí said. “It is toward that point of unity that we are all marching,” he added. Mr. Faizí recalled that the beloved Master gave us the Tablets of the Divine Plan during the First World War, “lest our energies be dispersed in many different directions,” and went on to explain that The Universal House of Justice expects us to focus our energies on winning the goals of the Five Year Plan as the greatest possible help to humanity at this time. He stressed that youth have the time, energy, and desire to do something valuable with their lives, and encouraged everyone at the conference to be steadfast and faithful in Bahá’u’lláh’s Cause.
1.
Bahá’ís from Central and South America enjoyed the presence of the Hand of the Cause A. Q. Faizí at summer schools and deepening sessions. 1. This picture was taken in Lima, where Mr. Faizí’s visit was followed by the offer of nine youth to pioneer. 2. Here the youth are shown in front of the Ḥaẓíratu’l-Quds in Lima during a Pioneer Institute, with Auxiliary Board members Mercedes Sanchez (far left, front row) and Fernando Schiantarelli (far right, second row), and members of the National Teaching Committee. 3. Mr. Faizí met with Counsellors Mas‘úd Khamsí (far right) and Raúl Pavón (wearing dark glasses) and Auxiliary Board members from Ecuador and Peru, in the Lima Bahá’í Center. 4. Mr. Faizí, with Counsellor Pavón, visited with friends from Ecuador. 5. Mr. Faizí with Counsellor Leonora Armstrong (center) and three Auxiliary Board members (left to right) Jairo Bruni Cerqueira, Touba Maani, and Edmund Miessler.
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Before the conference was adjourned one of the Indian friends offered a farewell song, a typical Peruvian melody, on the “quena,” a type of flute; a Bahá’í from Ecuador said a prayer in Quechua; and all present joined in singing the Greatest Name.
The Bahá’ís gathered in Lima also commemorated the anniversary of the Martyrdom of the Báb, which fell during the conference period.
In San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, Mr. Faizí met with Bahá’ís of Central America at a conference sponsored by the Continental Board of Counsellors. More than 200 attended, from Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Beginning immediately after the Feast of Words, the conference provided an opportunity for the Continental Counsellors to meet with Auxiliary Board members, and for members of National Spiritual Assemblies to consult on common goals; it also included workshops on proclamation, mass media, and the education of children.
During June, Mr. Faizí brought joy and inspiration to communities throughout Brazil. He was often accompanied in his travels by Counsellor Leonora Armstrong and Auxiliary Board member Rolf von Czekus. Mr. Faizí’s busy schedule included: Recife, Bahia, Salvador, and Lauro de Freitas (where 200 friends turned out for an evening meeting), Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte (scene of crowded meetings for five days), and Sao Paulo (where a 10-day study course averaged an attendance of 40-60 in the afternoons and 60-80 in the evenings, with as many as 150 on the weekend).
Topics for his deepening classes included “Education of Bahá’í Children,” “Education for Teaching the Faith,” “Love and Marriage,” and consideration of The Hidden Words as a repository of commandments for individual growth and perfection and of spiritual and administrative principles.
Cautioning the youth about the influence of the world today, Mr. Faizí used the analogy of trying to reach a drowning man. “You can reach down with one hand and pull him up, but if you give him two hands, he will pull you in. Be careful of your companions and beware of their influence.”
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Switzerland:
Swiss summer school holds twelfth session[edit]
In a chestnut forest above Lake Maggiore in the Ticino district of southern Switzerland, Bahá’ís from nearly twenty nations gathered during nine days in August for study and fellowship. Sponsored by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Switzerland, the twelfth Swiss Summer School fulfilled three objectives: to promote international friendship; to deepen the knowledge of the student Bahá’ís; and to spread the Teachings in the region between Lake Maggiore and Lake Como, a Five Year Plan goal for Italy and Switzerland.
A week before the school opened near Arcegno village, groups of multilingual youth from France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland traveled to the towns of Lugano, Bellinzona, and Locarno to give the Message to scores of citizens. From the first day of school all of the students, aged six to sixty-plus, were aware that the classroom instruction was to be linked with the vital teaching work. The theme of the school was stated by the Hand of the Cause Adelbert Mühlschlegel: “It is a law in the Bahá’í Faith to give the Word of God to other men just as we have been given it.”
During the school session nearly two hundred Bahá’ís and guests participated and exchanged ideas in classroom, seminar and round-table discussions, and they supported the public meetings at Locarno. Quick to recognize the news value of the Bahá’í School, Radio Bern and Swiss television conducted live coverage and interviews on several occasions.
Among the teachers at the school were Auxiliary Board member Anna Grossman of Germany, and Nicholas Janus, American pioneer to Belgium. Mrs. Grossman spoke on The Advent of Divine Justice, and Professor Janus attempted to outline the system of universal education brought by the Manifestation of God.
Dr. Mühlschlegel addressed the friends on the second day of the school. He said the path to self-realization is love, worship, and service to God. “We pay homage to God through illuminated actions, which effectively teach our fellow men,” he said.
Dr. and Mrs. Mühlschlegel worked as a team at the school, as did other Bahá’í couples. Ursula Mühlschlegel spoke about the role of every Bahá’í in the local and international spheres, in the Five Year Plan.
Another class of special interest to the friends was the six-hour course on Islám given by Dr. Massoud Berdjis of Germany. In this course, he presented information on the Prophet’s life, the Qur’án, and the development of the Islámic faith and civilization. Italy sent two teachers, Agnese Boerio of Turin, and Hassein Avaregan of Rome. Mrs. Boerio spoke on God’s Covenant with man and of man’s responsibilities to God in this day, while Professor Avaregan dealt with 19th-century prophecies and the universal signs of the Manifestation.
Two Swiss pioneers to Zaire, Africa, Otto Jung and J. P. Laperches, contributed impressions of their five years in the field with their families.
United States:
House of Worship chairs reupholstered[edit]
A crew of artisans from Gulfport, Mississippi, has been busy reupholstering and refinishing some 1,200 chairs in the auditorium of the House of Worship for more than three months.
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India: Delegation calls on Indian President
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Fred Baker and his wife Lola, owners of Baker Interior Decorating Service of Gulfport, read about the proposed repair work in the November 1973 issue of The American Bahá’í. Mr. Baker has been a furniture builder for 40 years; his wife is an interior decorator.
When their offer of assistance was accepted by the National Spiritual Assembly, the Bakers brought their staff and equipment from Gulfport and set up shop in the basement of the House of
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Worship shortly after the St. Louis Conference.
The chairs are removed from the auditorium in sections of 100 to 130, and taken to the basement work area. First, the old upholstery is stripped from the frame, and the old finish removed. The necessary repairs are made and the chairs refinished with lacquer.
The chairs, Mrs. Baker said, are soundly constructed of maple and are still better than any that can be bought today at reasonable prices. They are being reupholstered in antique taupe velvet. More than 1,300 yards are required to do the job, now scheduled to be completed in mid-December.
Working with the Bakers are their daughter, Amelia; James Davis, an employee who was not a Bahá’í when he arrived in Wilmette, but who declared after less than a week at the House of Worship; and Robert Stoakley of Batavia, Illinois, who introduced the Bakers to the Bahá’í Faith 15 years ago when he was an employee of their firm in Mississippi. Volunteers from the Wilmette area have provided assistance as well.
The Bakers have also redecorated rooms and furniture at the Ḥaẓíratu’l-Quds, and at the Bahá’í property at 121 Linden Avenue. Some of this furniture, which was quite worn, belonged to the Hands of the Cause Amelia Collins and Horace Holley.
Ecuador:
Auxiliary Board trains assistants in Ecuador[edit]
An orientation institute for five newly appointed assistants to Auxiliary Board members was held October 5-12 in Otavalo, Ecuador.
The assistants are appointed at the discretion of the Continental Counsellors in zones where it is felt they are needed. In its letter of 7 October 1973 providing for the appointment of assistants, The Universal House of Justice said their aims should be to “activate and encourage Local Spiritual Assemblies,
Mr. Baker at the House of Worship in Wilmette.
The relatively small upholstery and refinishing shop in the House of Worship foundation area is equipped to handle all phases of the repair process. In the foreground: Robert Stoakley; in back, left to right: Mr. Baker, Amelia Baker, James Davis, Mrs. Baker.
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Continental Counsellor Raúl Pavón congratulates Hermiñio España on his selection as an assistant to the Auxiliary Board.
to call the attention of Local Spiritual Assembly members to the importance of holding regular meetings, to encourage local communities to meet for the Nineteen Day Feasts and Holy Days, to help deepen their fellow believers’ understanding of the Teachings, and generally to assist the Auxiliary Board members in the discharge of their duties.” The assistants are appointed for a limited period—one or two years—with the possibility of reappointment.
The new assistants to the Auxiliary Board attended classes in the mornings and afternoons, were assigned to study volumes of Bahá’í writings independently, cooperated in developing materials for proclamation, and participated in a mass teaching exercise in Otavalo’s central square.
A morning class on the Covenant was taught by Auxiliary Board member Patricia Conger, who explored its importance in a week-long series of lectures and extended discussions. A second Auxiliary Board member conducted an afternoon workshop on creating useful and effective visual aids for teaching. Their use in teaching the Faith in Ecuador has grown at the urging of the Counsellors and has produced significant results.
A two-day class on the development of the institution of the Continental Board of Counsellors was part of the curriculum, as was a complimentary course on the work of the Counsellors and the mission of their Auxiliary Board and its newly-appointed assistants. The former was taught by Charles Hornby, a member of the National Assembly, the latter by his wife, Helen.
Every afternoon the group met with National Assembly member Ralph Dexter to discuss the functions and obligations of Local Spiritual Assemblies.
There was time every day after lunch for recreation and sports, and each evening was devoted to fellowship and informal talks with Counsellor Raúl Pavón. During the week, the assistants recorded a program on the Nineteen-Day Feast for radio broadcast, and at the public proclamation on the last day, the visual aids developed in the afternoon workshops were tested. A good crowd appeared for the event.
Auxiliary Board assistants have been assigned for the coastal and highland areas of the country. The assistants for the coastal areas are: Hermiñio España and Julian Menéndez for the province of Esmeraldas, and Patricia Garcés for the province of Guayas. The assistants for the highland areas are: Patricia Muñoz for the province of Pichincha, and Luis Navas for the province of Azuay.
Thailand:
Prime Minister lauds mission of Faith[edit]
The World Religion Day celebration in Bangkok, Thailand, on January 20,
Five Auxiliary Board assistants were appointed in Ecuador. They are, from left to right: Luis Navas, Julian Menéndez, Patricia Garcés, Patricia Muñoz, and Hermiñio España. They are shown during a public meeting in Otavalo’s central square on the last day of the orientation.
Auxiliary Board members and their new assistants pose with Bahá’ís attending the orientation institute in Otavalo, Ecuador.
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1974, was attended by scholars, students, businessmen, government officials, and representatives from many religions.
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England: Bahá’ís active at medieval fair
Bahá’ís from Norwich, Ipswich, Woodbridge, Peterborough, Canterbury, Hammersmith, and Henley took part in the Medieval Barsham Faire, held August 24-26, at Waveney, England. More than 2,000 pamphlets were distributed during the fair and good publicity appeared in the East Anglian daily paper. Bahá’í musicians took part, some of whom are shown in the above photograph. It is estimated that 25,000 persons attended the fair. |
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Sri Lanka: National Spiritual Assembly of Sri Lanka
Extensive publicity in two of the local newspapers of Sri Lanka preceded the 1974 National Convention, which was attended by Counsellor Salisa Kermani and Gloria Faizí. Elected to the National Spiritual Assembly were, left to right, standing: M. L. C. Chandrasekera, Vice-Chairman; N. Subramaniam, Assistant Treasurer; R. D. David; K. C. Suwarneraj, Treasurer; and K. G. Chandradasa. From left to right, seated: V. Chitravelu, Secretary; K. Sivappirakasam; B. A. Cadir; and C. P. M. Anwer Cadir, Chairman. |
The ceremony was officially inaugurated by Deputy Prime Minister Sukich Nimmahaeminda, who read a letter of greeting from the Prime Minister, Sanya Dharmasakti.
A talk on the Bahá’í Faith was given by the Vice-Chairman of the Spiritual Assembly of Bangkok, Sathien Chaiyasaena. The Bahá’í community sponsored the World Religion Day event.
The proceedings were filmed for local television and broadcast during late evening news programs.
In his message, the Prime Minister assured the gathering of his presence “in spirit,” stressing the importance of a meeting of different religions on a common platform. He praised the Bahá’í community for its initiative in organizing the observance.
“I have known the Bahá’í religion,” he said. “The Bahá’ís intend to bring about unity of different religions, races, and nations. It is a noble thought, but a difficult one.”
Mr. Dharmasakti went on to say:
“At present we are living in an age of chronic crisis. It is not merely a moral breakdown in personal relationships; country after country exhibits confusion over its national goals, while at the international level, the attempt to create a peaceful world society is constantly frustrated.”
The Prime Minister suggested that the solution to current problems could be achieved through harmonious growth and parallel development of science and religion in society.
“From this evolutionary thinking we may presume that, sooner or later, we may learn to regard this earth as a beautiful garden, where each individual, like a flower, has different charm, a peculiar beauty, its own delicious perfume and beautiful color.
“If you meet those of different races and colors, you should not be haughty and withdraw yourself into your shell of conventionality, but rather be glad and show them loving kindness, since this is what Lord Buddha teaches us,” he said. “Think of them as different colored roses growing in the beautiful garden of humanity, and rejoice to be among them.”
He concluded by again praising the Bahá’í community for its “untiring efforts in creating better understanding among the existing religions in Thailand.”
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Colombia: Goals of Plan considered
Counsellor Donald R. Witzel and Auxiliary Board member Cecilia Iguarán participated in a regional conference at Riohacha, La Guajira, Colombia, July 20-21, held to consider Five Year Plan goals. Friends attending the conference are shown gathered at a small monument, which is the foundation stone in front of the National Bahá’í Institute. Similar conferences were held during July in Venezuela, Curacao, and Colombia. |
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Germany: Conference considers expansion
Mass teaching, aimed at establishing a Local Spiritual Assembly in Traunreut, was one of the activities stemming from a deepening and teaching conference in Grossbergham, Germany, in June. The week-long conference was attended by the Hand of the Cause Adelbert Mühlschlegel, Counsellor Erik Blumenthal, and Auxiliary Board members Anna Grossmann, Ursula Mühlschlegel and D. Katzenstein, as well as Bahá’ís from all parts of Germany. Some of the friends who gathered to consider goals of the Five Year Plan for Germany are shown in the above photograph. |
Togo:
The wedding of two newly-arrived pioneers, Charles Lerche and Kathy Hampton, attracted widespread attention in Lome, Togo, when it occurred during the International Teaching and Deepening Conference sponsored in July by the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Lome. Counsellor Zekrollah Kazemi and Auxiliary Board members Thelma Khelghati and Bahman Sadezzadeh participated in the conference.
Centered around the theme of “Building Bahá’í Community Life,” the program included lectures, workshops, discussion groups, and question and answer periods, permitting maximum possible participation by the Bahá’ís attending.
More than 300 persons came for the public meeting held on the concluding evening of the conference, although less than 200 were expected. Throughout the weekend, twenty-two persons accepted the Faith, and teaching teams visited other parts of Togo following the conference.
Spain:
Information on Faith aired over television[edit]
The first mention of the Bahá’í Faith on Spanish television was made during a special July broadcast about different religious communities active in Spain. The Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly was interviewed, a portion of a Nineteen-Day Feast was shown, and two Bahá’ís quoted a passage from the Writings. One of the Five Year Plan goals given to Spain by The Universal House of Justice was accomplished by this telecast.
Another milestone has been reached in Spain with the successful holding of a three-day children’s institute, sponsored by the National Child Education Committee, September 5-8, with 25 children from all parts of the country attending.
The Hands of the Cause at St. Louis[edit]
On Sunday afternoon, the closing day of the St. Louis Conference, Kiel Auditorium was brimful—not with the usual sports or rock-and-roll fans, but with soldiers in the Army of God, facing six standard bearers of Bahá’u’lláh’s Cause. The Hands of the Cause from the birthplace of the Bahá’í Faith, from the Holy Land and World Center of the Cause, from the continent in the heart of the Pacific, and from the land of the spiritual descendants of the Dawn-Breakers, each in his own words called the friends to deepen in the central truths of our Faith and to perform those deeds which will lead to the victories promised by the Master in the Tablets of the Divine Plan, and by the Guardian in his messages to the American community. Amatu’l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum did not speak at this session with the Hands of the Cause, although her presence blessed the gathering, and the love evinced by the members of this great Institution for one another increased the ardor of the listening soldiers to accomplish their assigned duties. What follows is a brief account of each talk.
The Hand of the Cause Abu’l-Qásim Faizí
“This morning I had the greatest joy of my life, to go and see some underground activities of this conference. More than 1,000 children ... are gathered in the rooms of the hotel where most of you live. They are being trained, educated, and kept under the safe custody of volunteer teachers. This shows that the American Bahá’í community is alive, is thriving....
“ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says the greatest form of worship is to educate children. Please, 10,000 people are here and I hope there are 50,000 children in their houses. Educate them, and after ten years you will have a great regiment of teachers, soldiers of Bahá’u’lláh, ready to sacrifice all and everything on the path of this universal Faith.
“The beloved Guardian has encouraged young people to study the history of the first century of every religion. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to know something about the early religions of God, particularly about the first century of their growth, and also about the 100 years that have passed since the Declaration of Bahá’u’lláh. If you study properly, and consider the events which took place in the first century of the Christian era, you will be full of hope, aspiration, and certitude for what will surely happen in the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. In the first century of Christ, only eleven apostles dispersed throughout the world. It is written in the history of those days that one of them reached Rome. When he came to the capital of the Roman Empire, he was astounded and felt absolutely hopeless. He saw the gladiators with all their armaments walking in the streets of Rome. He found merchandise coming from all parts of the Roman empire to this great capital... He said to himself, ‘I am only a Jew who is a subject of the Roman Empire. I am absolutely illiterate. I have no armaments upon me. I am clad in a white cloak and I am here. How can I ever change the ways of these people? How can I ever turn the attention of these people to the kingdom of God? They are immersed in their follies, in their low standards of life, in their despicable habits. Their greatest joy is to see slaves thrown into the mouths of ferocious animals, and they are so excited by seeing such
“The beloved of all hearts, Shoghi Effendi, ... said many times that all the Bahá’í conferences must reflect the spirit of the Conference of Badasht, which was held in the presence of the Blessed Beauty, Bahá’u’lláh.”
things that they start to sing and dance. How can I even get these people to say two sentences of the Lord’s prayer?’
“In his dismay and disappointment, he started to return whence he came. It is said that on his way home he heard a voice. ‘Quo vadis? Where are you going? Return to your post, which is Rome. Stay there, and you, singlehanded, unknown and illiterate, will vanquish the whole of the Roman Empire.’ Dear friends! We are standing at that very same spot where the apostle stood. We are facing a decaying civilization. We are seeing with our own eyes their fallacies, the lowering of their standards and the way in which every day these are diminished in their greatness, importance, and influence throughout the world. Perhaps because of the power which they had in their hands some of us will become disappointed and forget the commandment of our beloved Guardian, who asked, by the pure blood of the martyrs, that we stand firm at our posts, wherever we might be, and promised that ours would be the greatest victory that history would ever record.
“I would like to avail myself of this great opportunity ... to address myself to the Bahá’ís of America and tell them, ‘I wish you all success. I congratulate every one of you, every family who is responsible for sending these beautiful pioneers throughout the world.’ I have seen them in Europe, in South America, Central America, and everywhere. Hand in hand with the Persian pioneers, they are conquering the whole world. They are bringing masses of people under the canopy of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. They are resuscitating the whole planet and changing the standards of life for the people who are immersed in their material pleasures.
“The greatest philosophers the world has known were living at the time of Christ, yet none recognized Him. The mystery is this, that none of these philosophers ever accepted His Faith, but a handful of unknown, illiterate people accepted Him and because of their sacrifice, this Faith spread all over the world. This also is happening today. Illiterate, unknown people praise the beauty of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh and proclaim clearly that this is the only factor that will make the whole of humanity come together. This is what we desire, the unity of all mankind.
“Where is that one Christian disciple now? He is utterly buried in the earth somewhere. But what happened? The whole of the Roman Empire collapsed, brought down by its own excesses.
“Today is the day in which we can establish the foundation of the Kingdom of God on earth. Bahá’u’lláh says that one moment of this Day is equivalent to 100 years in the future. What we can do in one minute today we will not be able in the future to do within one hundred years. One drop of service today will be accepted by Bahá’u’lláh as one ocean, one particle of dust given in the Path of Bahá’u’lláh, will be seen by Him as mountains given to His Faith.
“Please, dear friends, while we are here together, a great love, a great force is generated showing the unity of the whole of the Bahá’í world. We must take this great spirit of the conference wherever we go. We will not sit silent far from the fields of service. If we cannot go directly to the fields of service to teach, let us have a spiritual affiliation with those who are there. Let us sacrifice whatever we have for those people who are serving the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh.”
The Hand of the Cause Collis Featherstone
“Each and every one of us in this room has one thing in common. We all gave recognition to Him Who is the Day Spring of God’s Revelation and the Fountain of His Laws. As a result of this, we have all obligated ourselves to a Covenant ... We have accepted the Faith. Bahá’u’lláh tells us clearly that ‘the first and foremost duty prescribed unto men, next to the recognition of Him Who is the Eternal Truth, is the duty of steadfastness in His Cause.’ How can we attain this? Only through knowledge of God, and recognition of ‘He doeth whatsoever He willeth.’
“This means that every one of us must study the Cause of God. In the course of my travels, I have sometimes been very surprised to find that many believers only have one prayer book, and no other books at all. Furthermore, I have been very surprised that even those who are deepened teachers may just have one or two books of the Cause.
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Friends, if we look in the front of the prayer book and read again the passage that begins, ‘Whoso reciteth, in the privacy of his chamber, the verses revealed by God,’ it makes us realize the necessity of knowing the Revelation of God for ourselves... To maintain this steadfastness we are called upon to acquire the knowledge of God and recognition of the Covenant of God.
“When I was in Haifa with my wife in October 1953, we had just returned from the New Delhi Conference. The Guardian was very interested to hear of the events of that conference. He asked, ‘Now, what is the result of the conference?’ Being present at St. Louis, at one of the greatest assemblages of Bahá’ís in history, could only prompt one to repeat the Guardian’s question, ‘Now, what is the result of the conference?’
“What is going to be your contribution?”, Mr. Featherstone asked. “What are to be your actions? ... Will you leave this conference and in three weeks time have gotten back in the old routine? Today is the day of sacrifice. The world is in need. And the Bahá’ís no longer have time to sit in a circle and look at themselves. There is a world outside crying for this Cause of God! I can only hope and pray that you will respond with every effort, and in your local communities make offers of service, make contributions to your National Spiritual Assembly, that its lifeblood may flow. I have rejoiced to see the achievements already made by your National Spiritual Assembly in bringing out materials to suit the needs and the calls of The Universal House of Justice.”
In closing, Mr. Featherstone said: “Love. This is the essence that makes a Bahá’í community alive. Where there is love, there is unity. Where there is unity, there are plans, there are actions, there is life, there is the true spirit of the Cause. May all of you diffuse such love that the love of Bahá’u’lláh may cause your areas, wherever you come from, to be infused with a new light. Bahá’u’lláh calls us to teach according to our capacity, and which of us knows his own capacity?”
The Hand of the Cause Dhikru’lláh Khádem
“This conference, the largest one in the history of the Faith, invites us to remember that most historic Conference of Badasht. The beloved of all hearts, Shoghi Effendi, wished us to follow that example; he said many times that all the Bahá’í conferences must reflect the spirit of the Conference of Badasht, which was held in the presence of the Blessed Beauty, Bahá’u’lláh.
“Friends. There were 81 at that Conference in the cradle of the Faith who came with their lives in their hands to offer to their Beloved. And now we have over ten thousand from all races and nationalities gathered under this roof. Many of them are the descendants of the Dawn-Breakers.” (Here he was interrupted by a wave of applause). “Descendants of the Dawn-Breakers; this title was given to you, the American believers, by the beloved Shoghi Effendi!”
“Detachment, love, and enthusiasm,” qualities of the early Dawn-Breakers, were listed by Mr. Khádem as the qualities that will help to win the goals of the Five Year Plan. Speaking of the participants in the Conference at Badasht, he said: “When the friends dispersed from that Conference, they had on their lips the praise and song that Ṭáhirih composed. After 21 days in those gardens, they went to the arena of sacrifice. All of them dispersed, in order to change the whole world; and they did.”
“The time is short for us,” Mr. Khádem said. “I think the prayer chanted to open this session, the beautiful prayer of the beloved Shoghi Effendi which has not yet been translated for the West, is a precious contribution to this conference. I wish the beloved Guardian, to whom we are indebted for all the victories, were with us at this conference to say those beautiful words which he often said—‘Look, behold! Behold the bounties of Bahá’u’lláh!’ ”
After recounting the events in the Síyáh-Chál in which Bahá’u’lláh heard exalted words assuring Him “We shall render Thee victorious,” Mr. Khádem urged the friends to render their thanks to Bahá’u’lláh for all the victories of the Faith, including the conference which they were attending. He recalled that Shoghi Effendi had sent him to the United States with this promise, “I will send you to the West to behold the light and glory, the mysteries of the Faith.”
“He made it possible for me to be here today in this conference. Last night I noticed many old believers present, and now I have the bounty to be in
“The beloved Guardian encouraged young people to study the history of the first century of every religion.... If you study properly, and consider the events which took place in the first century of the Christian era, you will be full of hope, aspiration, and certitude....”
your presence, to be in the presence of my beloved Hands of the Cause of God, the standard bearers; the Counsellors; the Auxiliary Board members; and the generals of the Army, the members of the National Spiritual Assembly; and the beloved friends in this conference.
“Friends, ... the beloved Shoghi Effendi many times raised his right hand and said emphatically: ‘I am waiting to hear with my own ears.’ He is waiting for our response to the call which the supreme body of the Faith, The Universal House of Justice, has given. I think the moment that we do something, he hears. Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, all of them hear. There is no need to raise our voices. They all are with us, they speak to us, and we have their guidance.”
The Hand of the Cause John Robarts
“The one thing that has been a common factor in each of the Plans has been that we begin to work, really work, in the final year or two years. Up until that time we know about it, we think about it, we do something about it, and our beloved National Spiritual Assembly encourages all the teachers to go out and work and teach. But somehow it is not until about the last two years of the Plan that suddenly we have frantic prayer campaigns and teaching campaigns and people flying all over the continent, in fact all over the world, until finally on the last day of the Plan it is completed.”
Mr. Robarts recalled how at the end of the Five Year Plan for Canada, in 1953, thirty Local Spiritual Assemblies were established in the country. To ensure that this task be carried out and that every possible Assembly be elected, “two very devoted Bahá’ís packed their bags and were ready to fly away from their homes at the last minute.” One of them was called upon to move to another community at the last minute so that an Assembly could be elected. “Our Plan was completed,” said Mr. Robarts, “but at the very last hour.”
“In these Plans,” he said, “we notice that there are always some people who are very anxious to serve but somehow they just cannot bring themselves around to teaching the Faith. They are devoted, they want to serve, but they don’t bring anybody in and they have an awful feeling when the Plan is completed that they really haven’t carried their own weight.”
He said we must begin to develop good habits of teaching and participation in Bahá’í life. He told the story of a gifted but unsuccessful insurance salesman in Canada whose bad habits so crippled his approach to work that even with a good personality and unusual talents he was not able to succeed. It was only when increasing failure forced him to adopt a rigorous, disciplined approach to his business life, with new habits replacing the old, that success came.
Mr. Robarts urged Bahá’ís to set goals for themselves in this Plan and that they make sustained efforts to accomplish their personal goals. He suggested that daily prayer, deepening in the Writings, and the memorization of as much of the Writings as possible were some of the keys to becoming successful Bahá’ís. Other requirements he mentioned were active participation in the life of the community, regular attendance at Feast and Local Spiritual Assembly meetings, and systematic support of the Fund. To the list he added this final admonishment: “We must love all people. That sometimes requires quite a habit. We have to work at that!”
The Bahá’ís are greatly blessed to receive the guidance they do from The Universal House of Justice, he said. “We had a letter from The Universal House of Justice just two weeks ago in which it said that the entire Bahá’í world seems to have arisen as one man to embrace the Five Year Plan, and we have the highest hopes for victories and developments during its course.”
He concluded his presentation by reading this passage from the Five Year Plan message of The Universal House of Justice to the Bahá’ís of the world: “As the old order gives way to the new, the changes which must take place in human affairs are such as to stagger the imagination. This is the opportunity for the hosts of the Lord. Undismayed and undeterred by the wreckage of ‘long-cherished ideals and time-honored institutions’, now being ‘swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines’, the world community of Bahá’ís must surge forward eagerly, and with ever-increasing energy, to build those new, God-given institutions from which will be diffused the light of the holy principles and teachings sent down by God in this day for the salvation of all mankind.”
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An artist’s reconstruction of agricultural work in a prehistoric village.
The Flowering of the Planet[edit]
If you look around you in the world, at the countryside, the cities, and the highways, you may get the impression that things are going along as usual, that nothing is happening today very different from what happened in times past, although of course most educated people have been taught that mankind changes and evolves slowly from century to century, from age to age. But the world isn’t what it seems and I would like to speak of something drastic that is happening here on Earth right now that never happened before and may never happen again. One could call it the flowering of the planet, although “germination” may be a better word than “flowering” because it is more fundamental and perhaps easier to believe since the coming blossoms of Earth have not yet convincingly revealed themselves to many of us. All viable worlds must eventually germinate and flower, moreover, and, to future historians, it could well be that this twentieth century will become known as the century of the Flowering of Earth.
I am referring to this century, and this period in history, because Bahá’u’lláh said in His clear voice that this is the day when all the atoms of the earth will attest to its greatness and that this is the day for which mankind has so long and so patiently been waiting. Prophets of old must have had some age in mind when they spoke, as recorded in the Bible, of “the latter days” and “the time of the end.” So why shouldn’t we believe Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet of today, when He tells us they meant now, our very own time? I know there are many people in the world not convinced of this, and some are still awaiting “the second coming” which, they suppose, may yet be centuries if not millenia away. And they haven’t noticed anything special happening in these so-called “troublous times” that seem to be just a continuation of the troublous times of all ages.
But I have some facts I would like to present to you on the subject. My scientific studies and the thirteen years I
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On August 25, 1830, the locomotive, Tom Thumb, raced a horse between Relay and Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has since used locomotive power instead of horse-drawn cars.
have just spent in writing a book about life on this planet may have given me awareness of a few things some of you may have missed. Specifically, I would like to tell you about fifteen evidences of the germination of Earth, which Bahá’u’lláh must have intuitively known would lead to her future flowering. All of them, as you will see, are unique historical events.
1. The first of my fifteen evidences of the germination of Earth is the explosion of man’s population in the twentieth century. To put it in perspective, visualize the human species a million years ago as composed of something like 100,000 inquisitive furry creatures living in the most fertile parts of Africa, Asia, and perhaps Europe. There was land enough for the average family to occupy an expanse as big as Long Island all by itself. But naturally most of them gravitated into the valleys favored with the best water and game, leaving other regions almost empty. They did not live in villages though (for villages had not been invented) but rather roamed about in small groups hunting meat and gathering vegetables to feed themselves.
After another 990,000 years, which would bring us to 8000 B.C., this species, with its newly evolving brain and growing awareness that it was basically different from other creatures, had multiplied to an estimated three million people and was steadily, if slowly, increasing in numbers, stimulated by such developments as its discovery that cattle, horses, and buffalo could be persuaded to plow, the wind to sail a ship, or a river to grind grain—miracles never before seen on planet Earth. And yet man’s unprecedented growth in the past few thousand years is as nothing compared with his veritable explosion today. What I am coming to is that our population has suddenly spurted after growing at a leisurely long-range rate of 0.002 percent per year for millions of years. For now, we wake up to find it growing at the rate of 2 percent a year or about 1,000 times faster than ever before the nineteenth century!
Of course, explosions of population happen among animals too. You must have heard of the lemmings exploding in Scandinavia and swimming in the sea, of locusts having plagues, of blackbirds in Maryland last spring suddenly exceeding the human population of a small town by an alarming thousand times! But the human population change, which directly affects us all, far exceeds in importance anything the animals have ever done, partly because of the extraordinary effects of its byproduct in human pollution. These I call the three B’s: for babies, bombs, and blight. Did you know that cars are multiplying three times as fast as the people who drive them and five times as fast as the roads they move upon? That there is something called mental pollution in publications, books, and ideas, a phenomenon we will come to again presently? Of course, pollution is so much discussed these days that I hardly need describe it further.
2. So let’s move on to my second evidence of germination, which is man’s winning of the tournament of evolution which has now for the first time given him clear dominance over all other creatures on Earth. A century ago if you went to Africa you would have been in real danger of being killed by the wild beasts, but today it is the beasts who are in even greater danger of being killed by the humans. Most of the big animals now are under some kind of control in zoos, game preserves, national parks, or (in the case of certain fish and whales) international treaties. Even insects and microbes are coming more and more under human control. In many cases, as you know, man’s competition has led to the extinction of other species of life in recent centuries or millenia: notably of a dozen kinds of mammoth and mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, followed by the quagga, the aurochs, and such birds as the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon, the heath hen, and the great auk.
But before that, more than 99.9 percent of all the species that ever lived on Earth had already disappeared (presumably naturally) with only the meagerest fossilized trace left to prove it. For species are not static but come and go and flow like waves on a river. Indeed out of billions of species estimated to have foliated Earth in her five billion years of evolution to date, only a couple of million exist at any one time because each lasts hardly a fleeting million years before it finally branches, withers, or in some way loses its identity. Nor are we running out of them since scientists continue to discover new ones: bird species at the rate of one a week, mammals at the rate of one every two weeks, insects and new smaller species by the dozens every day, the overall rate of gain in species exceeding the loss by a good two hundred times. And if you look closely into this bubbling river of evolution, you can see that man is
Since history began to be recorded in 3600 B.C., more than 14,550 wars have been fought, at the rate of one every 140 days. The absurdity of continuing this pattern is so obvious that perhaps the majority of all educated men now favor a world federation.
influencing it more and more, not only usurping the breeding of dogs and other domesticated animals and vegetables, but in this century virtually taking over the main burden of it, including very soon the breeding of himself!
3. The third of my fifteen factors of germination is man’s virtual completion of the exploration of his planet in this century. Only 500 years ago the map makers knew nothing of what was on the other side of the earth, or even if it had another side. America was unknown even to itself and the extent of Africa was a wild conjecture. Explorers presumed the tropics were made of fire and the earth flat so that ships would risk falling off its edge if they ventured out of sight of shore. The Dutch did not discover Australia until the seventeenth century and the ocean depths and polar regions remained largely unknown even up to the beginning of the twentieth.
In the first decades of this century when I was a child and young man, nobody had been to the North Pole or the South Pole or to the top of the highest mountain or the bottom of the sea. But all these goals have been attained in this century and man has charted not only every detail of every land and ocean deep, not missing the inner heart of the atom, but flown through the whole atmosphere and into space beyond it, including in person to Earth’s satellite, the moon—with rocket cameras to the neighboring planets and hundreds of sophisticated new telescopes, spectroscopes, and other instruments to the very horizon of the freshly conceived Universe. What could more dramatically demonstrate Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration that this is the Day when something unprecedented is happening to the little world called Earth?
4. My fourth evidence of germination is that man’s speed of travel has increased a thousand-fold in less than a hundred years. After about five millennia during which the fastest a human could go was at the gallop of a horse, what might be called an oats barrier was passed in 1839 when a railroad locomotive hit 59 miles an hour, decisively beating the horse, and a succession of locomotives held the record until I was born in 1907. As a matter of mystic coincidence, I recently found out that it was indeed the very day I was born, January 25, 1907, that the record finally left the rails and passed to automobiles when a man named Frank Marriott drove a Stanley Steamer 150 miles an hour on Ormond Beach in Florida. And that record stood for more than 10 years until airplanes surpassed it in World War I. From then on airplanes held the record continuously for over 40 years until Yuri Gagarin, the Russian, went into orbit April 12, 1961, at a speed of better than five miles a second. And it was less than eight years later that Frank Borman, going to the moon for the United States in 1968, went almost seven miles a second. Such translunar speed (slightly exceeded in later Apollo flights to the moon) will probably remain man’s approximate limit for quite a while because one doesn’t need much more speed to go anywhere in the solar system, which is as far as we are likely to go until we head for the stars—and that is untold centuries off.
5. The fifth in this series of evidences is man’s speed of communication which, in case you didn’t notice, has increased even faster than his speed of travel, multiplying itself ten million times in a single step upward in 1844 when the first “instantaneous” message was sent on Earth, in one leap raising the speed of the railway mail pouch to that of the telegram flashing along wire at 186,282 miles a second! There was something divinely mystic about this event which, as most of you know, coincided with the announcement of the coming of the Bahá’í Faith by the Báb in Shíráz, Persia, on May 23 of that historic year which was likewise the day ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was born and the thousandth anniversary of the disappearance of the Twelfth Imám of Islám. And the engineering miracle has been firmly consolidated by successive development of the telephone, radio, and television during the ensuing germinal century in which, although these later inventions have not increased the transmission velocity (speed of light), they have suddenly for the first time made Earth capable of communicating with outside worlds, particularly since powerful television waves began to be broadcast regularly from America and Europe shortly after World War II, resulting in the planet’s radiating out a continuously expanding sphere of TV waves—an abstract bubble of radiation with current radius of 30 light years that already reaches beyond some thousand of the nearer stars and their planetary systems.
6. The sixth evidence is the explosion of knowledge. The earth’s Tree of Knowledge has burst into bloom in this century and Earth can never again be the same. Man’s mind is, you might say, the fovea of this planet’s consciousness, the fovea being the part of a retina that is keenly focused on a book when one is reading it.
In the nineteenth century, slavery was abolished and virtually disappeared from democratic societies. At the same time, women began removing their veils, led by such heroic pioneers as Ṭáhirih, and they demanded the right to own property rather than be property.
An example of this sudden change in man’s mind might be that in the first decade of this century, The New York Times published an editorial saying: “The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics in from one to ten million years.” The date was 1903, the very year in which two unknown bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright completed a seemingly harebrained experiment at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, news of which The New York Times did not deem fit to print.
Within a few decades, of course, things began to look very different, and it became evident that any good engineering firm, even in 1903, given a million dollars to research and develop a flying machine, might have done as well as the Wright brothers. Some believed better. But the fact is that no one in 1903 had thought flying was worth a million dollars or, for that matter, a thousand, even though in a few decades almost every big corporation and government on Earth would be putting a major portion of its budget into research and development.
Meanwhile, during and after World War I, flying developed at an accelerating pace and knowledge germinated explosively all over the planet while fundamental revolutions occurred in most of the main branches of science. And this sudden pooling of knowledge was measurable statistically as an outburst of information that greatly exceeded the increase in population. Indeed, in terms of books, pamphlets, journals, maps, photographs, etc., housed in the world’s libraries, the accumulation is already estimated to total something like a billion items and to be growing at the rate of 3 percent per year and therefore rapidly pulling away from the people who are multiplying at only 2 percent.
One of the consequences of this interrelation is that, by the time a baby today finishes college, the amount of information available to him will have quadrupled. Which imposes an unprecedented strain on twentieth-century children, comprehensible only in light of the volatility of the knowledge now overflowing upon Earth, knowledge that is accumulating so much faster than it is evaporating that a major task of the next century may well be man’s taming and harnessing it in the service of his newly germinated world.
7. A major offshoot from the Tree of Knowledge, of course, is automation, which in one generation has revolutionized the management and technology of the world. At its heart is the computer, whose relation to the earth’s explosions in speed and information is obvious in the fact that man now not only doubles his computation rate (a blend of speed, complexity, and accuracy) every year but, through electronic miniaturization, annually halves its equipment size and (to some degree) its cost. Thus the mental work of multiplying two 14-digit numbers, which took a trained mathematician with pencil and paper twenty minutes in World War II, can now be done electronically in less than 1/100th of a second and with much less chance of error.
Predicting the future of automatic computation is admittedly difficult and controversial, but it is interesting to contemplate the extravagant extrapolation of a leading authority, Marvin Minsky of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who predicted in 1970 that in a decade or so “we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.... a machine able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight.” He added that “at that point, the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months, it will be at genius level” and, not long after, “its powers will be incalculable.”
8. The eighth factor of germination is the sudden shift of poverty towards prosperity on Earth. At the beginning of this century, only 1 percent of humanity, called the “haves,” had an annual income of a few hundred dollars. Today, half the world’s population averages $2,000 annually, and, by the year 2000, presumably the “haves” should reach 90 percent of the world’s population. Although a serious problem has so far persisted throughout the worldwide industrial revolution of an “ineradicable” disparity between the wealth of the “haves” and the “have-nots,” the overall average wealth has been steadily growing. Thus, while the average American has increased his consumption of energy 100-fold in 100 years until he is now using 50 times as much of it as the average Hindu in India, the Hindu has also increased his consumption by at least 5 or 10 times, and, when education enables him to take advantage of his proliferating opportunities, he may well begin to close the gap.
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The first successful telegraphic cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean was laid in 1866. This lithograph depicts the arrival of the cable in Newfoundland on July 27 of that year.
Another aspect of the surging wealth is the abrupt, almost cancerous, growth of cities on this planet that never had a village until a dozen millenia ago, hardly a real town before the fifth century B.C., and as recently as 1800 A.D. only fifty cities with populations as big as 100,000 people. But in the nineteenth century came the ignition point when industry, machines, plumbing, transport, electricity, and the telephone really germinated the urban seeds so that by 1970 Earth was rich enough to have more than fifteen hundred cities of over 100,000 and a good hundred between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000. In the United States now, in consequence, country land is being paved over and urbanized at the unheard of rate of 5 square miles a day and it appears that the majority of all humans will be living in cities by 1990.
9. Evidence number nine of germination is that during the past century a great movement to liberate the captive people of Earth has swept the planet and now, for the first time, women are being given equal rights with men almost everywhere and not only slaves but exploited races and minorities of nearly every sort are progressively gaining equal status with other citizens in all but a few totalitarian states.
Slavery is an ancient social perversion that goes back further than history, even into animal and vegetable orders like the ants, but it evidently evolved among humans only with agriculture, villages, property ownership, animal domestication, and particularly the invention of war which, after all, is what provided the prisoners who became the first slaves. It reached peaks in the days of Solomon who built his temple with 153,600 slaves (Chronicles II, 2, 17-18) and in Roman times when it was so widespread it necessitated constant raiding into “barbarian” countries and began to be abused with distressing consequences like gladiatorial exhibitions and the revolt of Spartacus, the slave who trained and led an army of 90,000 slaves against Rome. Indeed it seemed such an ingrained aspect of nature that the great philosophers of the day accepted it, including Socrates, Plato (rather reluctantly) and Aristotle. Even Christ is not known to have spoken against it for, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “Every man has his own calling; let him keep to it.”
In the nineteenth century, however, almost like magic, slavery, which had become big business, especially among seafaring nations, was abolished and virtually disappeared from democratic societies. At the same time enslaved women were removing their veils, led by such heroic pioneers as Ṭáhirih, the great woman martyr of the early days of our Faith in Persia, and increasingly they demanded the right to own property rather than be property. So not much longer would they rank below pigs socially in New Guinea. Nor would it continue to be possible to buy a wife for $4.00 as was still being done in West Africa when I was there flying cargoes in World War II. Even racial prejudice, notably difficult to purge from peoples’ minds after millenia of injustice between races, is steadily diminishing this century, aided by improved education and legislation for human and civil rights throughout much of the world.
10. My tenth evidence of germination is the sudden great increase in literacy and education all over our planet. As a result, more than 60 percent of humanity can now read and write and the proportions of that majority are increasing about one percent a year as the illiterate elderly die. Predictably the change is accompanied by no little struggle, for literacy is not yet every man’s dish. When an Arab in Algeria was approached recently about letting his wife join a reading and writing class, he asked in astonishment, “You mean my wife should write letters? To whom?”
Yet somehow, little by little, the new ideas take hold, often aided by radio or movies, and the new teachings are having their subtle but profound effect on evolution, particularly on the mental and cultural evolution they are part of.
11. Standardization, the eleventh factor in germination, is rapidly uniting Earth by permeating all science and all nations. For not only does mankind as a whole already use the twenty-four-hour day, the seven-day week, decimals in mathematics, standard scientific criteria from market scales to atomic energy and common traffic rules in shipping and flying, but soon the metric system will undoubtedly become universal, highway signs similar everywhere, and, sooner or later, all countries driving on the right.
12. A universal language that all educated humans can
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Thomas Edison’s electric lighting station in New York City was the first such power plant in the world.
speak and understand is my twelfth factor in this series, which also seems on its way to becoming a reality on Earth. Although about fifty artificial languages such as Esperanto have been devised, which offer the advantages of phonetic regularity, simplicity, and universality, no one of them has yet been officially adopted as the world language because they all bear the heavy initial disadvantage that there is no considerable population speaking them, no government or large institution promoting them, and no literature to give them a tradition. So we are left with the natural evolutionary process of the roughly 4,000 known ancient tongues which fortunately are slowly filtering and amalgamating toward fewer and more universal modern languages with large vocabularies and literatures such as English, German, Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Hindustani, Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Of these, English in the last century or two seems to have moved to the forefront as the one with the best chance of becoming a truly universal tongue, most of all in the last few decades. And today, more than 60 percent of all scientific papers are published in English, work on simplifying it is being done, and it is the standard language of airports all over Earth.
13. My thirteenth evidence is the movement toward a world government which, although appropriately unlucky, has become such an obviously essential step in Earth’s present development that it must be considered one of the factors in planetary germination even though it hasn’t yet happened. Indeed, should man’s narrow nationalism or heedlessness continue to block the establishment of any sort of world political federation for many decades more, humanity’s very survival will be increasingly threatened!
In the evolution of the many millenia just past, starting with families and clans that slowly combined into villages and city-states that eventually became nations, federations, empires, and superpowers, the custom known as war evolved along with political organization in a parallel, feedback interrelation. Of the 14,550 wars fought since history began to be recorded in 3600 B.C. at the rate of one every 140 days, however, they were relatively local until this century, indeed generally conducted like sporting events with participants consisting of professional soldiers following traditional rules and led by individual heroes. And it is only now that suddenly something entirely new has emerged with the advent of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles which makes war not only all-out but so impersonal and instantaneously lethal on such a scale that the “victor” must almost surely be destroyed along with the “vanquished,” not to mention all large cities and possibly half of mankind vaporized in a day.
How Earth will become federated or otherwise united under a world government strong enough to disarm the nations and guarantee peace and order is not yet clear, but the absurdity of continuing the present international anarchy is so obvious that perhaps the majority of all educated people already favor some form of world federation, including the sacrifice of national sovereignty essential to making it work, so it has a chance of finally coming into existence without too catastrophic a birth struggle.
14. The fourteenth factor of germination is the rise of the human spirit which must be swiftly, if invisibly, evolving—along with man’s more obvious material and mental progress—and must, Bahá’u’lláh tells us, soon unite all people in a common bond of empathy that will bring such harmony and peace as was never before known on Earth.
This of course is not a scientific statement, nor is it provable nor (I presume) even believable to most people. Yet it is at the heart of the germination of the planet and must be, in some sense, measurable. I mean that it deals with a profound question, that seems to disturb many serious thinkers: is our world getting better or worse? Are we passengers on Earth evolving as we should? Or are corruption and pollution (with its 3 B’s) overtaking us as we slide hopelessly down the drain?
The answer is not easy. At the very least, it calls for spiritual comparison between life on Earth today and life as it was on Earth a hundred or a hundred-thousand years ago—and it is a comparison bound to be controversial, both because no one lives long enough to gain first-hand perspective over such spans of time and because spiritual things are so utterly intangible and elusive.
Nevertheless, one can look at Stone Age life on Earth today which may be comparable to the pre-Eden days when man was a hunter and knew nothing of farming, his
The earth’s Tree of Knowledge has burst into bloom in this century, and Earth can never again be the same. It is estimated that a billion items are stored in the world’s libraries, and the accumulation grows at the rate of three percent per year.
morality, presumably on the level of the increasingly clever beast he had found himself to be, and whose sense of right and wrong, if it could be called that, depended, as with other animals, on his instinctive urges to hunt, kill, eat, mate, and defend the territory he regarded as his. Then, as man settled into tribal and village life with all it involved in common defense measures, laws of property, adaptability to authority (including gods, devils, and chiefs), inevitably disputes became louder and more frequent, leading to more laws that resulted in more violations as crimes became sins—and the evolution of virtue slowly advanced, significantly changing the killing of a rival from a noble deed to a shameful murder.
Of course, it took a long time with innumerable ups and downs, inspirations, and errors. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages came and went with their interminable killings, often in the name of piety as when Bishop Peter Arbuez burned 40,000 “heretics” at the stake and was canonized as a saint for it.
But perhaps observation of a typical city scene would be enough to show the spiritual temper of the times—so let me say that a poor old man who fell down in the street in 1750 was likely to be left there unaided and, when Horace Walpole saw it happen outside White’s coffee house in London that year, he recorded that the customers inside placed bets on whether the fellow were dead or not. And, when a passerby suggested he should be bled (standard first-aid treatment of the day), they loudly protested that this would interfere with the fairness of the betting.
At the same time, any well-dressed stranger, particularly if foreign-looking, was liable to be jeered as a “French dog,” have dead cats or worse thrown at him and, if he retaliated, he might well be mobbed and killed. And taunting victims in the pillory, staring at the inmates of “mad houses,” or baiting animals, were favorite pastimes, only recently replaced by going to ball games or watching TV.
By such glimpses of history, we can measure in a feeble way the unfolding of spirit through the centuries—noting that in enlightened England, there remained 223 offenses punishable by death in 1817, the year of Bahá’u’lláh’s birth, while the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824, something that a historian was to call the first consciously organized action taken by any species of life on Earth solely for the benefit of another.
By the time Bahá’u’lláh had lived His life, however, and established the Bahá’í Faith as the first truly global religion on Earth, the concomitant germination was well underway, and the twentieth century unreeling its wonders. And since World War II, while the membership of most of man’s religious organizations has been growing about twice as fast as his population, the speed of the Bahá’í Faith to virtually every corner of every country has exceeded all the others.
15. The final evidence of germination on my list is the very profound but hard-to-detect transcendence of the organism man into the superorganism mankind. This also involves the consciousness of mankind which is swiftly unfurling a new dimension as Earth becomes aware of herself for the first time, one might say turning (on a world scale) self-conscious!
It could be usefully compared, I think, to a fish in a school or a bird in a flock engaged in mass maneuvering. For such a fish or bird inevitably loses his individuality and independence and, to some degree, becomes a “cell” in a greater “body”. He must also, in effect, submerge his “self” beyond the equivalent of an ant or bee in order to resurface collectively as an anthill or a beehive. And this means, in the case of man, that he not only transcends individually, each in his own mind and soul, from finitude toward Infinitude, but he also transcends collectively from men and women to mankind while Earth herself (whose consciousness is primarily the mind of man) must ultimately transcend (beyond space-time-self) into what may be described as the divine essence of the Universe.
A Glimpse of the World Center[edit]
Mr. Dahl worked at the World Center temporarily during the Third International Convention in 1973. This article presents his personal impressions of that sojourn in Haifa. Ed.
For most of us who have had the rare and inestimable privilege of working in Haifa for The Universal House of Justice—God’s supreme and infallible House of Justice—the experience is so precious and personal that it defies description. As a temporary helper in Haifa, I found myself briefly in a new and almost unbelievable world where belief was realized in action and where service became my overriding concern.
After arriving in Haifa, I was greeted by a member of The Universal House of Justice, who introduced me to most of the other staff and explained some of what I had been called to the World Center to do. It was as though a new mail clerk for General Motors was being personally greeted by a member of the Board of Directors and made to feel welcome, wanted, and properly oriented to the tasks ahead. My head reeled; I could hardly believe what was happening.
But there was no time for trying to grasp the spiritual significance of the place, the institution, or my own contribution. Unlike a pilgrim, I was there to work, to be of service to the Supreme Institution. Approximately three simultaneous full-time jobs were given me in my first hour, and I was immediately plunged headlong into my tasks.
After some three days of hard work, I was talking with the staff member who does printing for The Universal House of Justice in a refurbished garage next to the Master’s former home. He said that I should speak to one of the members of the House of Justice to request some materials I needed. Not aware of their schedule, I asked whether it would be all right to call then. He said to call the next morning as the person I sought would be in a meeting. At first I thought
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of a committee meeting, or a meeting of one of the departments (the House has approximately ten departments to handle many of its affairs). Then, looking across the street, I saw the second story windows of the oval room where The Universal House of Justice meets, and it struck me that the House was in session at that moment, perhaps discussing an issue that would vitally affect the very destiny of mankind. One cannot really conceive the power and majesty of such an institution; and I certainly had not yet had time to even think about it. I would have felt very scared and out of place had I not known that since the House of Justice had asked me to be in Haifa, that was exactly where I ought to be.
This is the most important lesson I gleaned from the World Center: that we as Bahá’ís must combine in our affairs justice with love, obedience with open communication.
Never when meeting or working with a member of the House of Justice did I sense from him a trace of the feelings of self-importance or pomposity that we frequently encounter elsewhere, and that we unconsciously use as measures of the people we meet, and as guides to determine our own behavior towards them. I could always tell a Senator from a Congressman on Capitol Hill by his demeanor, and I adjusted my own behavior accordingly; but in Haifa, these accustomed cues are absent. The Hands of the Cause, members of the House of Justice, and World Center staff associate together in apparent equality. I was not constantly made to feel conscious of my position; rather, as everyone else, I had to define my own position and then occupy it, unassisted by a rigidly enforced social structure. In other words, one has to decide for oneself how it is appropriate to act towards—let us say—a Hand of the Cause. These individuals, more important to the future of mankind than any corporation president, bear themselves so humbly and are so accessible that one must be ever-so-conscious not to impose upon their kindness. I soon began to understand the predicament of the early believers who, coming close to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, wished only to please Him, while He in turn thought of nothing but serving the servants of God.
One evening two other temporary workers and I were invited for supper to the home of one of the members of the House of Justice. Arriving on foot a few minutes late, we found our host waiting for us in the street to make sure we did not lose our way. Before long we were seated for the meal, and were served by our host and hostess. How contrary to the ways of the world that a humble temporary helper, without special virtue, would find himself waited on at table by a member of The Universal House of Justice. The members of the House of Justice seem always conscious of the fact that as individuals they are not invested with authority; that authority rests with the Institution. This fact they convey arrestingly through their bearing and their example.
Though the members of the House of Justice individually display the greatest kindness, consideration, and friendliness, that is not to say that the World Center operates on love alone. Rúḥíyyih Khánum has likened mercy and justice to the flesh and the bones of the body respectively; the bones are very much in evidence in Haifa. When I received instructions from The Universal House of Justice, I knew that task was exactly what I should be performing, and that its accomplishment was the highest service I could perform for the Cause at that moment. What greater happiness than this?
However, if I had a question concerning just what it was I was supposed to do, or a suggestion about how it should be done, the channels of communication were open. Virtually every member of the 60-odd World Center staff is supervised directly, often daily, by a member of the House of Justice. And one can always telephone if necessary. The feeling is one of fellowship and mutual assistance, certainly not of dictatorial authority. Only in this way can a system of perfect obedience truly function, while drawing out all the talents and warm feelings of the individual.
Then there was the incredible courtesy. In the great rush of activity before the third International Convention, everyone was very busy, of course, and some were hard-pressed to finish their assigned tasks on schedule. In discharging my own tasks, I often came into contact with the staff, and in virtually every instance, I was treated calmly, with patience, and cooperation. What a difference such a happy, cooperative, and spiritual atmosphere makes in pressure-filled times. The effect is that the pressure evaporates and all that is left is happy exhaustion at the end of each day, and the knowledge that one has been of service. True Bahá’í administration is very different from the efficiency-driven, competitive system we commonly borrow from the world around us.
Interestingly enough, the tremendous efficiency of the World Center is something one cannot help but marvel at. I am no expert in the subject, but compared with the production in government offices I am familiar with, I would say output per person in Haifa was at least twice as high (and productive output per person probably several times higher).
In Haifa one is, of course, continually reminded by the presence of the Shrines and gardens of the importance of prayer and of developing a constant spiritual attitude. From the office where I worked I had only to lean out the window and look up the steps of Mount Carmel to gaze on the magnificent Queen of Carmel, the Shrine of the Báb. If we in other parts of the world could carry with us such a spiritual vision to call upon when needed (perhaps in the form of memories of our pilgrimage, of a summer school, or of some other precious event), how different our daily lives and service could be.
When I speak of my experiences with friends they often say Haifa must be like heaven, impossible for us to relate to our everyday lives. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Although none of us can be ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, our only hope is to follow His example, and we must not be discouraged by how difficult it is to follow that example. While our national and local centers will never have the Shrines of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, the magnificent gardens designed by Shoghi Effendi, the presence of many Hands of the Cause, the fair and gentle climate of the Holy Land so much appreciated by the Master, or the presence of The Universal House of Justice, we can continue to create in them the spirit of courtesy, loving service, obedience, accessibility, humbleness, and happiness in the privilege of service to the Divine Threshold. What greater blessing than this?
Bahá’í Heritage Series Note Cards[edit]
Several history-making places at the Bahá’í World Centre have been illustrated in quill and dry-brush drawings by Dr. David S. Ruhe. Eight of these superb illustrations have been reproduced in sepia in a new series of note cards.
Eight cards and envelopes come in a convenient portfolio. An assortment of special-occasion inserts is included so that you can quickly make the note cards into greeting cards if you wish.
There are two assortments, each one with two each of four different views:
- Assortment A (Product Number 20685) shows Mount Carmel and the Shrine of the Báb, the Most Great Prison, the Mansion of Mazra‘ih and the Great Pines at Bahjí.
- Assortment B (Product Number 20684) shows the Land Gate of ‘Akká, the House at Riḍván Garden, the House of ‘Abbúd and Mount Carmel.
These note cards make fine gifts and can also be used for attractive invitations. Of course, they are excellent for correspondence. They are tasteful teaching devices designed so that they can also be used for pre-Bahá’ís.
Your Bahá’í Community Librarian or authorized Bahá’í distributor may have these note card portfolios in stock or may be able to supply you with prices and ordering information. If they are not available in your area, please write to the International Bahá’í Audio-Visual Centre, 1640 Holcomb Road, Victor, N.Y. 14564, U.S.A., for information on where they may be obtained.
