Tending the Garden/Foreword
FOREWORD[edit]
Many religious communities undergo transformative moments in their collective life. The Bahá’í community of Canada is no exception. Tending the Garden exemplifies through letters, papers, and archival documents the story of Rosemary and Emeric Sala. Their love for the Bahá’í Faith has transmuted their personal interests and temperaments into a long life of service to their fellow human beings and to the Bahá’í Faith itself.
What the editor-and-writer Ms. Ilona Weinstein presents us is a tale mostly adorned by the Salas’ own words that inform us of both the mundane and the dramatic aspects of their lives. There is nothing that can distract the reader from anything that does not touch those transformative moments. The book has a collection of remembrances about the historic visit of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to America in 1912, and we hear about the "Montreal Youth Group" of the 1930s whose members were among the first to grasp the significance of the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh as a leaven for the world to cherish and develop.
Sometimes in greater or lesser detail, we follow the impact of the Bahá’í summer schools as they provide the spiritual, social, and educational nutrients of the Bahá’í community. Tending the Garden encompasses the broad sweep of the Ten-Year Crusade of the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith which stimulated the Canadian Bahá’ís to set their vision to territories beyond their familiar ones. Like a pulsating vein, the Crusade allowed the Salas to match their love and dedication for the new religion to the requirements of an age that was beginning to be unmoored from its traditional anchors. Whether in South America or Africa, the Salas bent their will to the needs of the new age: forsaking nationalism, and embracing the vision of a unified humanity.
The Salas recount their personal victories as evidence of the guiding power of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith; their occasional misfortune in the field of service as yet another way a new door has been opened for them to render another moment of service. A blockage over here
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merely serves to divert one’s energies to a higher goal over there. Their letters, papers, and archival documents move the reader between the routine facets of their lives to momentous ones. Surely, contemporary Bahá’ís will long to learn more of the heroism of the Salas.
—WILL C. VAN DEN HOONAARD