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World Order, Series 2 Volume 18 - Issue 4

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Summer 1984

World Order

The Bahá’í Faith:

Beginnings in North America

Robert H. Stockman

Through Pain, Rebirth:

The Poetry of Roger White

Phyllis Perrakis

Communicating toward Unity

Kambeze Etemad

Eleni Lives!

Gary L. Morrison

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World Order

VOLUME 18, NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should send three copies— an original and two legible copies—and should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included. Send manuscripts and other editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

Subscription rates: U.S.A., 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $18.00; 2 years, $34.00; single copies $3.00.

Copyright © 1985, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Toward Balancing Friendship, Justice, Peace

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7 The Bahá’í Faith: Beginnings in North America

by Robert H. Stockman

29 Through Pain, Rebirth: The Poetry of Roger White

by Phyllis Perrakis

38 Broken Oar and Traveller in a gallery

poems by Ian Stephen

39 Communicating toward Unity

by Kambeze Etemad

45 The Distance Most Disturbing

poem by Lynn Ann Ascrizzi

47 Eleni Lives!

book review by Gary L. Morrison

Inside back cover: Authors & Artists in This Issue

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Toward Balancing Friendship, Justice, Peace

TERRIBLE things are happening, things incomprehensible to Americans who may not have much acquaintance with cultures very different from their own. In the Middle East, in Central America, in Europe, kidnappings, hijackings, bombs thrown into cafes, into government and commercial offices of every sort, assassinations—all these horrors have become daily events. The perpetrators of these vicious acts are quick to “take credit” for them, identifying themselves with the ethnic and religious groups whose aspirations and rights they claim to promote, and upon whom they draw down the often uncomprehending wrath of American newspaper readers and television watchers.

Fortunately, leaders of government and of opinion have resisted an understandable impulse to strike out in blind rage, limiting their indignation to the actual perpetrators and promoters of terroristic acts, rather than extending it to the larger categories to which they belong. We as Americans have no quarrel with any of these ethnic groups or religious communities as such; nor have we any animus against such of their members as live among us, as well as elsewhere in the world. As Bahá’ís, we have a particular sensitivity, on the one hand, to the criminal acts of oppressive regimes and religious leaders who persecute our brethren, and, on the other, to that principle, essential to our faith, of the abolition of prejudice. Let us maintain our love of mankind, our determination to live in friendship with members of all religions and all nationalities, while persevering in the struggle to secure justice and the right to live in peace for all the oppressed peoples of the world.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

A NUMBER of our readers have expressed concern over the fact that WORLD ORDER has fallen behind in its publishing schedule, have commented on our penchant for mentioning events that happened after the date on a given issue, and have suggested that the practice will cause difficulties for future researchers. One of the most drastic remedies that has been proposed is skipping from Summer 1984 to Summer 1985. While we admit that such a solution is tempting, we can only imagine how many headaches the missing year would create for librarians and others devoted to cataloging periodicals. Hence we want to let you know that we are taking a slower but surer route—by expanding the pool of volunteers who edit and produce the magazine.

The Editorial Board, from the magazine’s outset, has been a volunteer operation. None of the editors receives any salaries; we have no clerical help; we do all our work after we complete other full-time jobs—all of which, we recognize, leaves us vulnerable to illnesses and other vagaries of life.

But, as they say in the Westerns, the cavalry is on the way. A number of persons have offered to help out and are now being pressed into service. Long before this issue went to press, we began working on the Fall 1984 and Winter 1984-85 issues, which promise fascinating looks at the equality of men and women, higher education in a nuclear age, poetry, literature and Islam, and a native American family.

More meaty articles are waiting to be fitted into the 1985 issues.

* * *

IF BEING behind schedule is a cause of concern to our readers, it is also a problem for the editors. For example, we are delighted to share with you an essay on the need for an international auxiliary language based on a paper written by Kambeze Etemad when he was a junior in high school. Does one look at the Summer 1984 date of the issue and discuss the article in terms of the forthcoming 1985 International Youth Year designated by the United Nations? Or does one look at the publication date—1985—and acknowledge that, as we go to press, we are in the midst of the International Youth Year?

Whichever perspective one chooses, we can only say that the essay was a delight to receive and a pleasure to edit, for however limited the resources were for a high school student doing another assigned project, the vision exhibited—and the command of the language—gives us hope that the youth of this generation will rise to the challenge of contributing significantly to the shaping of societies of the coming century and will, indeed, move the world.

* * *

A BRIEF note on the computer front: The Editorial Board now has access to a computer —Samna software, Corona hardware —that is IBM compatible. Hence we are now able to accept floppy discs from [Page 5] authors whose articles we accept for publication, provided the articles are prepared on an IBM personal computer or on Samna software.

As with typewritten manuscripts, we still need three copies of articles printed from any computer. The manuscripts should be double spaced and have ample side, top, and bottom margins. Lines should not be justified. Footnotes should be numbered serially and appear at the end of the article, not at the bottoms of pages. Manuscripts should be printed out on a letter-quality printer. All pages should be separated and side bands of perforated paper removed.

To the Editor

LSD REVISITED

I am much dismayed that Ursula Samandari [Fall 1983] misunderstood the intent and content of my letter [Winter 1982] regarding the nature of the psychedelic experience. I do NOT advocate, not even “almost,” the nonprescriptive use of LSD-25 or any other psychoactive agent. I have never encouraged anyone to take LSD as a supplement to, or substitution for, the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh.

The essential point of my letter to WORLD ORDER was simply this: The personality profile and motivation of individuals attracted to experimentation with LSD-25 has little or no resemblance to that of alcohol and barbiturate abusers.

People come to the Bahá’í Faith from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, disciplines, and lifestyles. There is no need to invalidate aspects of their pre-Bahá’í life, especially subjective experiences, which they perceive as being of significant value to their personal growth.

Once a person becomes a Bahá’í, submitting to the unerring guidance of Bahá’u’lláh’s divinely ordained Universal House of Justice, that individual recognizes the spiritual stimulation of God’s Revelation “Suffices above all things.”

BURL BARER

Walla Walla, Washington

INSPIRING OR CONFUSING?

I write to you in the hope of improving the value, to Bahá’ís and their friends, of the magazine WORLD ORDER. Its stated aim is “to stimulate, inspire, and serve thinking people.” To my knowledge this is the only Bahá’í magazine which is available to those who are not Bahá’ís. I have many friends who are not Bahá’ís, and I looked forward to showing them a really lovely magazine that would truly stimulate and inspire them. To my great disappointment I found that it is written by philosophers, using the obscure philosophical jargon, which is incomprehensible to “thinking people” of other disciplines.

Even if the aim of the magazine is philosophy, surely stating ideas in terms which are more easily understood would reach a much larger audience. The more obscure the meaning, the fewer people can be inspired. Unless thinking people can translate the words into inspiration for action, in their own lives, it becomes words ending in words.

Take this example from Volume 17, Number 4, p. 10—“We are habituated to the aberrant and abstruse. . . . We have confused the meaning of the word simple with simplistic. Anomie vitiates perception.”

Please give us something that serves thinking people who live in the world of action, not just for those cooped up in a world of their own, thinking about thinking. Please do not mystify us with words, but give us the inspiration for which we look.

MRS. JOYCE LIGGITT

Limbe, Malawi, Africa

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The Bahá’í Faith: Beginnings in North America

BY ROBERT H. STOCKMAN

We are reprinting below excerpts from a recently published book by Robert H. Stockman entitled The Bahá’í Faith in America: Origins, 1892-1900.* Because this volume is the first detailed history of the Bahá’í Faith in the Occident, we felt our readers would appreciate a sampling of a work that has already been favorably received. Ninian Smart, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has written that the work, the first of a trilogy on the Bahá’í Faith in America, is a “fascinating story that shows how some of the early converts found the religion an answer to their millennial concerns, and how they were taught by a teacher whose knowledge and credentials were shaky and who yet created a community that survived its problems to become the foundation of the vigorous Bahá’í Faith in North America today. It is an extraordinary story that will interest historians of religion and the lay public alike.”

The teacher “whose knowledge and credentials were shaky” was Ibrahim George Kheiralla, a Syrian Christian who became a Bahá’í in Egypt in 1890 and emigrated to the United States in 1892. Despite the fact that he had never met Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith (1817-1892), or Bahá’u’lláh’s son and appointed successor, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921), and with only a sketchy understanding of Bahá’í teachings, to which he added his own ideas, Kheiralla succeeded in winning, between 1894 and 1899, some fifteen hundred converts to the Bahá’í Faith in twenty-five states and one Canadian province.

“Beginnings in North America” (chapter 3 of the book) describes Kheiralla’s efforts to teach the Bahá’í Faith in 1894 and 1895 and discusses his first converts; “The Chicago Bahá’í Community” (chapter 8) details the expansion and organization of the first Bahá’í community in North America in 1896 and 1897 and provides a fascinating look at the social, economic, and religious backgrounds of the early Chicago Bahá’ís. Succeeding chapters detail other Bahá’í centers in the United States and Canada and, finally, the tests and triumphs of the fledgling community that in 1900 was forced to choose allegiance to its first teacher or to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the appointed head of the Bahá’í Faith. It is amazing that the Faith survived, writes William R. Hutchinson, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at the Harvard University Divinity School; “but survive it did; the central ideas got through. Stockman has done an admirable job of telling the story.”

THE EDITORS

---

Opposite: The Bahá’í House of Worship, Wilmette, Illinois, the first in North America, was dedicated by the Bahá’ís of the United States in 1953.

* These two chapters, “Beginnings in North America” and “The Chicago Bahá’í Community,” are reprinted by permission from the publisher from Robert H. Stockman’s The Bahá’í Faith in America: Origins, 1892-1900 (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985), Copyright © 1985 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

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Beginnings in North America

IBRAHIM KHEIRALLA and Anton Haddad left Cairo about 9 June 1892 and after ten days in Alexandria departed for the Occident. Haddad proceeded to the United States to try to sell one of Kheiralla’s inventions, a ticket with space on it for advertising. The two of them had jointly taken out a patent through the American embassy in Egypt and hoped the ticket would be used at the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair that was to begin in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. Upon his arrival in the summer of 1892 Anton Haddad probably became the first Bahá’í to reach American soil.

Kheiralla set his course for Saint Petersburg, Russia, to market a device that would enable people to walk faster. Such an apparatus, Kheiralla felt, would have tremendous military value, for it would permit an army to move more quickly. When the tsar’s government did not buy his invention, he traveled to Berlin to offer it to the Germans instead.

Kheiralla’s original plan was to return to Egypt a few months after consummating the sale. His failure prompted him to write Haddad, and upon receiving the reply that the ticket had not been sold either, Kheiralla decided to proceed to the United States to help Haddad. He arrived in New York City on 20 December 1892. However, no amount of effort proved sufficient to interest anyone in the ticket.

Kheiralla had entered a country undergoing considerable social and religious change. In 1890 the census showed that the last of the frontier had been settled, and in that same year the last great Indian uprising was suppressed when the army massacred the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The United States was becoming an urban nation, with all the attendant problems of big business and industrialization; some months before Kheiralla had arrived, the Homestead Strike against Carnegie Steel had been forcibly suppressed by the Pennsylvania state militia. Racism was the accepted standard everywhere, and in the South was the motive for mob violence; in 1892, 155 blacks were lynched by mobs, the highest number of any year. In intellectual circles in the North, racism took the form of “Anglo-Saxonism,” a belief in the superiority of the English-speaking “race” and its burden to govern the less well-endowed members of humanity. Occidental culture everywhere appeared triumphant, and its destiny to rule the world was confidently asserted. The home frontiers conquered, the United States turned its attention to its international role and to the construction of a modern navy. A few years later—in 1898— [Page 9]the country would fight the Spanish-American War, acquire The Philippines as a colony, and be catapulted into the first rank of world powers.

For religion, the changes in American society represented an opportunity and a threat. The increased complexity of American life had created unprecedented social problems, especially poverty in the midst of unparalleled riches. Churches turned their attention to the slums, and the first stirrings of a theology of social change, of a “Social Gospel,” could be detected. But change also threatened Christianity because the refined powers of modern science were being turned on religion, and the results threatened to sunder forever the two pillars upon which evangelical Protestantism had been based—reason and the Bible.

The pervasiveness of a scientific attitude itself brought on a spiritual crisis. Protestant Americans in the Victorian age had generally been raised in a rural and fervently evangelical culture. Often the Bible had been their reading primer, and they absorbed the standard Protestant interpretation of it in their mothers’ laps. However, as adults living in large, industrialized northern cities, they often found that the assumptions of the old-time religion no longer worked. Some reacted to the changes of modernity by rejecting modern science and insisting upon absolute acceptance of the Bible. Others rejected churches and dogma and became agnostics. Still others fell between these extremes and became uncertain about their belief. Yet most continued to consider themselves evangelical Protestants. They read the Bible, debated its tenets with their friends, thought about ministers’ sermons (if they did not attend church, they could always read summaries or critiques of the sermons in the Monday newspapers), and followed religious conferences, which were widely publicized.

Three issues focused public attention on the clash between revelation and reason in late nineteenth-century America. These were evolution, higher biblical criticism, and comparative religion. Kheiralla soon was exposed to two of these three controversies. Shortly after his arrival in New York City he learned about the “best known heresy trial” in United States history, which was taking place in that city.

The man on trial, Charles A. Briggs (1841-1913), in many ways epitomized America’s dilemma over religion. Briggs received his scholarly training in Germany and became a vocal supporter of the biblical scholarship being done there, which in the late nineteenth century was making such shocking discoveries as the fact that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that Isaiah wrote only about half of the Old Testament book attributed to him, and that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry, but by second-generation Christians who had never resided in Palestine. Whereas Darwin’s theory of evolution only undermined the Book of Genesis, higher biblical criticism denied the inerrancy of the entire Bible. Many felt the survival of Christianity itself to be at stake.

[Page 10] Briggs held that the results of higher criticism could not be denied and had to be accepted. He continued to believe the traditional Protestant creeds and to champion traditional theological positions such as the divinity of Christ, but he vehemently denied the infallibility of Scripture. He went so far as to declare that belief in the inerrancy of the Bible was not based on claims in Scripture itself, was not supported by the earliest Christian tradition, was denied by reason, and, therefore, was a heretical belief. In the conflict of supremacy between the Bible and reason, Briggs opted for the latter.

He boldly voiced his opinions on the Bible in a major public address delivered at Columbia University on 20 January 1891; immediately thereafter he was denounced by conservatives as a heretic. The resulting series of inquiries and hearings and the heresy trial of Briggs placed higher biblical criticism in the public eye on the front page of many newspapers. Although few Christians understood the issues in detail, the question of Bible inerrancy became an important subject of thought and debate. Traditional and liberal Christians began to form separate camps, foreshadowing the polarization that would convert the former into Fundamentalists two decades later. Briggs was not convicted of heresy by his local New York clergy peers, but it proved a Pyrrhic victory: The continuing assaults of the conservatives eventually forced the Presbyterians to suspend him.

Undoubtedly hoping that the controversy had disillusioned Briggs with modern Christianity, Kheiralla visited him to tell him about the Bahá’í Faith. Apparently, the professor was not interested, for, although driven from Presbyterianism, he remained committed to Christianity. He eventually joined the more liberal Episcopal church. Kheiralla subsequently visited at least two other ecclesiastics to whom he introduced the Faith, and he mentioned it to several Syrians in New York City. Most of his time, however, must have been absorbed in perfecting his English and adjusting to the new country.

Money also became a serious concern. The failure of the business venture with the ticket forced both Kheiralla and Haddad to seek employment. Haddad went to Europe in April 1894 and later returned to his family in Syria. Kheiralla remained in the United States, a decision that eventually led to his divorcing his wife in Egypt when she refused to come to the United States. He went into partnership with a fellow Syrian and, in the summer of 1893, traveled as far west as Michigan to sell oriental goods. In order to draw attention to the products, Kheiralla gave a series of lectures on Syria, Egypt, and Middle Eastern religion, a publicity technique commonly used by vendors of imported wares. In this manner he acquired experience in speaking English and had the opportunity to meet many Americans. The tour over, Kheiralla continued west and settled in Chicago in February 1894.

About that time Ibrahim Kheiralla discovered another way to make money: [Page 11] by using the healing powers he believed he had. The only description of his method comes from a later period but probably reflects the nature of his practice from the beginning:

he gives no medicine, but to some patients he gives a hubble-bubble to inhale the fumes of certain herbs. . . . He has another way of healing. A person who has rheumatism in her fingers told me that she went to him twice for treatment and he sat very quietly and held her fingers for a time. This patient was not helped; she was not a believer [Bahá’í]. But a believer told me he had cured her of some trouble . . . he has quite a practice in Chicago. . . . the treatments are two dollars each.

Kheiralla never claimed a philosophy of healing, just a power to heal. Anton Haddad notes that Kheiralla attributed the death of his brother-in-law, Elias Bey Manassas, with whom he had had a dispute, to his “occult powers”; Kheiralla also believed he had the mental powers to conceive of new inventions.

Kheiralla’s belief in healing powers was part of a conviction that he possessed magical or supernatural abilities. To aid his practice and bolster his legitimacy, he took the title of “Doctor,” which he secured by purchasing a diploma “for $20. from a semi-Medical and semi Philosophical School in Chicago, which,” wrote one of Kheiralla’s early American associates, “very soon after was closed [Page 12] up by the authorities.” He also wrote ‘Abdu’l-Bahá requesting that the power to heal diseases be conferred on him, and that he be named a Bahá’í teacher.

Through his healing practice Kheiralla began to attract Americans to whom he could mention the Bahá’í Faith. His effort to teach was aided by the fact that he had arrived in Chicago only five months after what was probably the greatest religious event in the city’s history. The World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893 was one of hundreds of conferences organized in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. The purpose of the parliament was to bring together, for the first time, representatives of all the world’s religions in a spirit of brotherhood and to show the important truths that all held in common. However, in the 1890s the modern concept of religious tolerance was just beginning to take root. Occidental civilization had had little contact with the civilizations and faiths of the East; occidental, more specifically Christian, superiority was still very much taken for granted. Hence the parliament’s ecumenism was an expression of tolerance and openness to some, of apostasy to the Lord to others.

Evangelical Christians criticized the parliament because of its treatment of Christianity as a religion equal to other “false” religions. The speakers hardly reflected a balanced representation of the world’s faiths. The only Muslim who spoke lived in the United States. The proceedings included only a half-dozen Hindus (among whom was the famous Swami Vivekananda), a dozen Buddhists, and a few Confucians, Jains, and Zoroastrians. The Catholics were represented by Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop Keane, and a dozen others, in spite of opposition from conservative Catholics. Several Jews gave talks. But 100 of the approximately 170 speakers were Protestants, and most of them were ministers. Some were missionaries who did not hesitate to make their concept of true religion known.

Nevertheless, the parliament represented an ecumenical breeze stirring America’s evangelical atmosphere. Those searching for religious truth flocked to the conference or carefully followed its proceedings in the newspapers. As a result of the parliament Sarah Farmer, a New Englander with liberal religious leanings, felt renewed determination to foster the development of the Green Acre School of Comparative Religion, a summer religious conference center in southern Maine. Swami Vivekananda became a national celebrity. He remained in this country to lecture and respond to the flock of inquirers, and in 1897 he organized the Vedanta Society.

THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH was not represented at the World’s Parliament of Religions, but it was mentioned. The occurrence was ironic; Edward Granville Browne’s description of Bahá’u’lláh was used to close a paper entitled “The Religious Mission of the English Speaking Nations,” which described the social, political, moral, and religious superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race” and its mandate to [Page 13] Christianize humanity. The author of the address was the Reverend Henry H. Jessup, D.D., director of Presbyterian Missionary Operations in northern Syria and no friend of the Bahá’í Faith.

The parliament stimulated considerable interest in comparative religion among Chicagoans. Precisely how this interest led the first North Americans to investigate Kheiralla’s teachings is not known. According to an 1899 master list of occidental Bahá’ís, organized by the year they began to investigate the Faith, four persons became Kheiralla’s pupils in 1894: William F. James, Marion Miller, Edward Dennis, and Thornton Chase.

Marion Miller, born in 1860 or 1861, was an English citizen residing in Chicago. She was interested in such movements as Theosophy, a group whose Hindu and Buddhist orientation made it the most non-Western of America’s religions, and New Thought, a philosophical group that de-emphasized traditional Christianity in favor of self-help. Her health may not have been satisfactory, prompting her to seek Kheiralla’s aid in the spring of 1894.

Edward Dennis was the owner of a small Chicago business. Born in Indiana in 1853, he was married and had two young sons. William James, a Chicago grain broker, was also married and the father of two children; he was a native of Illinois, where he was born in August 1858. It was James who introduced James Brown Thornton Chase to Kheiralla.

Thornton Chase was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 22 February 1847. He was raised in a staunch, Northern Baptist family and was educated by Samuel Francis Smith, author of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” and at Brown University. A teenage veteran of the Civil War, a poet, and a frontiersman, Chase acquired a profound interest in religion after having a mystical experience in 1874. In his search for religious truth he could accept, he combed libraries for information on every religious movement in the world. By 1894, at age forty-seven, he was beginning to despair that he would ever find a religion in which he could believe.

Apparently Thornton Chase, in his extensive research, encountered the Bahá’í Faith on his own. Articles on the Faith and translations of the Bahá’í writings were printed in English as early as 1889. John Bosch, a close friend of Chase, knew the story of Chase’s conversion, told here by Yale historian Firuz Kazemzadeh:

Thornton Chase became aware of the reference to Bahá’u’lláh by a Christian missionary at the World’s Parliament of Religions. He either read the speech or became aware of its contents and became intrigued. The speech lodged [Page 14] itself in his mind; he had no peace with it and had to find out more. He looked in libraries. Early works by Browne were available, as well as those of Gobineau. As Chase pursued his research in libraries, a pretty clear idea formed in his mind about the Faith; belief also began to form in his mind. Bosch definitely created the impression that Chase was unique in that he found out about and investigated the Faith on his own before meeting any Bahá’ís.

Though it is not certain that Chase discovered Edward G. Browne’s works, yet if he had conducted a careful search of libraries, he could not have failed to find them. His quest for information about the Bahá’í Faith took an important turn when he heard about Kheiralla’s lessons. According to Carl Scheffler, another of Chase’s friends, he learned of them in the following manner:

While writing a poem about God one day he [Chase] was interrupted by the visit of a business acquaintance who expressed an interest in his activity, perhaps because he was so busy typing. Mr. Chase read a portion of what he was writing and he was astounded when his friend told him that he had recently come upon a man who had declared that God had “walked upon the earth”. Immediately Mr. Chase expressed interest and asked to be conducted to this person, who it transpired was Ibrahim Kheirella [sic]. I believe that the friend who led Mr. Chase to Dr. Kheirella was William F. James.

Chase’s own account of his conversion, in characteristic modesty, was in the third person and focused on the teachings that interested him, not on the method of introduction:

In the month of June, 1894, a gentleman in Chicago [Chase] desired to study Sanskrit, in order to further pursue his search into ancient religious teachings. While seeking an instructor he met a Syrian who had come to Chicago from Egypt a short time before, and who told him of the Bahai Movement.

As the statements of the life and teachings of BAHA’O’LLAH, and his son, Abbas Effendi, the “Greatest Branch,” otherwise known as Abdul-Baha, accorded with the declarations of numerous sacred prophecies, and with the agelong expectations of mankind, it was deemed of value to investigate those claims as far as possible.

Although more information is available on Chase’s conversion than on those of William James and Marion Miller, the Bahá’í membership records suggest that James and Miller were the first persons in the United States to study the Bahá’í Faith. A membership list of Chicago Bahá’ís indicates that Miller and possibly James received the Greatest Name in 1894. The 1899 master list, [Page 15] which appears to be chronological, places James first; Kheiralla says James was first, and a prominent early Bahá’í, in a letter to Thornton Chase, refers to James as “the father of the Believers.” Chase and Dennis received the Greatest Name in 1895. It cannot be determined why Chase required at least six months to be enrolled; perhaps his job, which necessitated frequent business trips for weeks at a time, interfered with his taking a series of classes.

After a crisis in the Bahá’í community in 1899-1900, James, Miller, and Dennis ceased to be involved in the Bahá’í Faith; but Thornton Chase remained steadfast. Although Chase was not the first North American to express an allegiance to Bahá’u’lláh (the 1899 master list places Chase fourth), ‘Abdu’l-Bahá called him the first American Bahá’í. Chase himself explained in 1910 that “I am the first (in point of time) of the believers who have stood firm for this Cause, and not only in Chicago, but in America.” Chase’s steadfastness during the crisis, his key leadership role in the early twentieth-century American Bahá’í [Page 16] community, and his sterling character undoubtedly are some of the qualities ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had in mind when He designated Chase the first American Bahá’í.

Chase consiStently cites one date in connection with his investigation of the Faith: Tuesday, 5 June 1894, was the day on which he “learned of the Blessed Manifestation” and “first heard the Glad Tidings of this Revelation.” Chase calls 5 June 1894 the day that was the “very beginning” of the Bahá’í Faith in America. It is possible that this date represents the beginning of a class on the Bahá’í Faith. By 1896 Kheiralla was teaching the Faith by giving a series of from ten to thirteen lessons, one per week; his use of this technique may go back to the earliest days of his teaching in the United States.

The fifth person in the Occident to become a Bahá’í was Mrs. Kate C. Ives. When she received the Greatest Name in 1895, she became the first woman born in North America to accept Bahá’u’lláh. Born Kate Cowen in the town of Orleans, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on 21 August 1863, she was of Canadian ancestry, for her parents were natives of Newfoundland. By 1899 she had moved from Chicago to the Boston area, where she was an active Bahá’í until her death on 30 April 1927. She made major contributions to the growth of the Bahá’í Faith in New England, especially through her work for the Green Acre Bahá’í School.

Kheiralla and the five American converts constituted the beginning of the Chicago Bahá’í community. By 1900 the Chicago Bahá’ís had commemorated the founding of their community by purchasing a seal with the circular legend “First Assembly of Beha’ists in America * Chicago * 1895.” The community was further brought together when, on 8 June 1895, Ibrahim Kheiralla and Marion Miller were married at the home of William James. The newlyweds traveled to Europe for their honeymoon and for a visit with Marion Kheiralla’s relatives in France and England. During this trip her aunt, Miss Marion Brown of London, became a Bahá’í. Although no further teaching in Europe occurred until 1898, the year 1895 marks the introduction of the Bahá’í Faith to the European continent.

Kheiralla had brought six Westerners into the Bahá’í Faith in fifteen months. It was an excellent beginning. The Americans asked him questions about the Faith and introduced him to the works of American religious thinkers, which [Page 17] helped Kheiralla to develop a systematic series of lessons to use in teaching the Bahá’í Faith. The Americans also brought their friends to meet him, friends who soon wanted to study the Faith as well. The chain of interpersonal associations that had been created would, in a short time, lead hundreds of Americans to acceptance of Bahá’u’lláh.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Chicago Bahá’í Community

THE NEED for organizing the Bahá’í community came about as a result of the success of the teaching work and the attendant increase in the number of Bahá’ís. By May 1896 about sixteen persons had become Bahá’ís in Chicago. On 8 December, when around fourteen persons completed Kheiralla’s lessons, the number rose to about thirty. The growth resulted in a great increase in the number of interested seekers, who were accommodated by Kheiralla’s establishing two new classes. When the two groups graduated on 26 March and 6 April 1897, at least thirty-one more persons became Bahá’ís. Chicago now had a community of about sixty Bahá’ís; the number had quadrupled in six months.

The first visible form of organization was a contributions journal, opened in April 1897. Pledges were made by the Bahá’ís to contribute once each month. Some promised as little as twenty-five cents, others as much as five dollars; in April thirty-nine contributed. No other structure was needed because Kheiralla de facto served as the head of the community. After all, he was the only individual who had any first-hand information about the Bahá’í Faith. Since no other Bahá’í communities existed in the Occident, no community correspondent was needed. Maude Lamson, Ibrahim Kheiralla’s secretary, handled his Bahá’í correspondence and undoubtedly could have written letters for the community as well. All correspondence to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá went through Kheiralla because no one in Akka could competently translate from English to Arabic or Persian; letters from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the North American Bahá’ís had not yet begun to arrive, even though the Bahá’ís were writing letters to Him when they received the Greatest Name.

A community of sixty people must also have felt the need for formal meetings, for the Chicago Bahá’ís could no longer comfortably gather in someone’s living room. Probably at about this time Chicago initiated its weekly Bahá’í meetings. The earliest known descriptions of such meetings in America date to 1899 and often come from communities other than Chicago, but they probably reflect practices that began in Chicago. It appears that American Bahá’í meetings were organized on the model of Bible study classes and other informal church meetings. The purpose of the meetings was probably to provide a time for worship, fellowship, and study of the Bahá’í Faith.

Because no Bahá’í scriptures were available other than a few prayers translated by Kheiralla and a few selections in the books of Edward Granville Browne, the Bible remained the scripture of the American Bahá’í community. Meetings usually revolved around the reading and discussion of passages from one of the [Page 18] prophetic books—Revelation, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and probably Daniel. At other times translations by Browne of the words of Bahá’u’lláh were studied, Kheiralla’s writings were discussed, and, as the Faith grew across the United States, letters from other Bahá’í communities were read. By 1899 the American Bahá’ís discovered The Book of the Secrets of Enoch and began to read from it at some of their meetings. Although not written by Enoch, the book’s supposed authorship, and its apocalyptic imagery, made it extremely popular among the Bahá’ís. Talks by a local Bahá’í or, later, by one visiting from out of town became another component of the meetings.

Among those who accepted the Faith in the 26 March 1897 class was Paul Kingston Dealy. In Dealy, religion and visions of a new political order cohabited comfortably. His father, Michael Dealy II, had emigrated from Bantry, Ireland, in 1820 and had settled in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, where he and his father, Michael Dealy, started a successful shipping company. Paul was born there on 1 December 1848, one of nine children. While a youth, he served as a cabin boy on one of the family’s ships. In 1865, at the age of seventeen, Dealy began an apprenticeship as a railroad engineer. Two years later, on 30 March 1881, he married Adelaide Stewart, also of Saint John, and moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he worked on the construction of the trans-Canadian railroad. An inventive man, he also patented a device that ejected ashes from locomotive engines; he eventually sold the patent for three thousand dollars. The Dealys’ first child, Arthur Mercer Dealy, was born in the boxcar that served as the young couple’s home. As a result of an Indian uprising the family left the railroad and moved to the United States. In 1884 they lived in Saint Paul, Minnesota; shortly thereafter they settled in Chicago.

Paul Dealy has been characterized by a grandson as “studious, quiet, inventive, hard-working and fiercely dedicated to whatever was his current interest. . . .” He was an ardent Bible student, as a book he later published on the Bahá’í Faith demonstrates; that interest was a crucial factor in his acceptance of the Bahá’í Faith. But Paul Dealy was also fascinated by politics. In 1895 he ran for “North Town Tax Assessor” on the “People’s Party” ticket— and won, even though he was running against Democratic and Republican candidates.

Paul Dealy’s interest in the job of tax assessor was probably influenced by his interest in the “Single Tax” philosophy. Begun by the American economist and politician Henry George in the 1880s, this philosophy argued that the only legitimate tax was on the value of land. The products of labor or the buildings and machines resulting from investment belonged to the individual; to take [Page 19] them through taxation, therefore, was theft. But land was a resource of fixed extent and its value a function of social forces; consequently, taxing its value was a legitimate source of revenue for society. Henry George believed individual freedom and access to land would be enhanced if all land were, in effect, nationalized and individuals were made to pay rent for the land on which their property stood. The rent would constitute the only kind of tax that society would charge.

Interest in the Single Tax concept peaked in the 1890s, when many large cities had a Single Tax Club and many Single Tax periodicals and pamphlets were printed. The movement, which was especially popular among laborers, made Henry George a national celebrity. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York and might have won had Tammany Hall not tampered with the vote. In 1894 the Midwestern Single Taxers decided that the time had come to demonstrate their concept through establishing a colony run on the Single Tax concept. Land was found on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay in Alabama, and the town of Fairhope was born. In order to foster immigration—for not enough Single Taxers desired to relocate—Socialists were attracted to the colony through the initiation of some communal projects, such as a wharf, a telephone system, a water system, and, eventually, a school system.

After considerable service to the Faith in and around Chicago, Paul Dealy moved to Fairhope in 1898. His wife, Addie, and their four sons joined him in 1899. There Dealy lived out the rest of his life as a struggling farmer—the colony, unfortunately, was situated in an area of poor soil; consequently, most of its members, though educated, were impoverished. Dealy told people about the Bahá’í Faith and by 1899 had converted three inhabitants of Fairhope and four persons in the county seat of Bay Minette.

Also among the 26 March class members were several physicians, including Dr. Frederick O. Pease, Dr. Sarah F. K. Burgess, and Dr. Rufus Bartlett. Another physician, Dr. Eugene W. Sawyer, graduated in the 4 April class. With these individuals contact with Chicagoans interested in healing—both of the ordinary and extraordinary kinds—began in earnest. Drs. Sawyer and Bartlett were members of a secret religious or fraternal society, the “Oriental Order of the Magi,” which mainly had physicians and their relatives as members. Within the order interest in the Faith grew, and many of its members were among the approximately forty-five pupils taking Kheiralla’s next class, which graduated on 18 June 1897.

One graduate on 18 June, also a member of the order, was Dr. Chester Ira Thacher. After receiving his degree from the Homeopathic Hospital College of [Page 20] Cleveland in 1881, Dr. Thacher began practicing medicine of a less traditional sort. He was very much interested in the relationship between magnetism and healing and devoted most of his later life to an exploration of the connection between the two. He also formed the Thacher Magnetic Shield Company, which patented a device that, by bathing the body in magnetic fields, was supposed to cure illness. It did not win acceptance from the American Medical Association, which described Thacher as a “notorious quack.” Bahá’ís who were licensed physicians were presumably a little more charitable toward Dr. Thacher, for there is no suggestion of tension among the Bahá’ís over his methods of healing. Dr. Thacher’s business office was located in the Chicago Masonic Temple; hence he may have been a Mason. By 1900 Kheiralla’s “medical” office was also located in the Masonic Temple. The Oriental Order of the Magi probably rented a room in which to meet, and, judging from its name and from the fact that Thacher had an office in the Masonic Temple, the order may also have rented in the Temple at one time. Hence it is likely that one source of pupils for Kheiralla’s lessons was the network of persons interested in healing that was connected with the Chicago Masonic Temple.

Another of the members of the Oriental Order of the Magi to become a Bahá’í was Louisa (“Lua”) Aurora Moore. Born on 1 November 1871 in the village of Hume, in upstate New York, she moved to Chicago as a young woman and may have heard of the order from Dr. Thacher, in whose home she resided as a housekeeper. Once she learned about the Bahá’í Faith, her zeal was so intense that she did not wait for Kheiralla’s class to finish before she received the Greatest Name individually from Kheiralla on 21 May 1897. She may also have told her brother, Dr. William J. Moore, about the Bahá’ís; he graduated in the 18 June class. Shortly thereafter she married Dr. Edward Getsinger and began immediately to travel and teach the Faith.

The many Bahá’ís, especially women, with the prefix Dr. before their names testifies to the importance of healing as a medium of attraction to the Bahá’í Faith. While Kheiralla did attempt to heal people, he did not mention healing in his teachings, nor did he offer a Bahá’í theory of healing. Hence the connection between the Bahá’í community and healing must have been indirect. Healing philosophies attracted people who often were searching for alternatives to traditional religion, and such people provided a network through which word on the Bahá’í Faith spread to receptive ears. Some of the resulting contact was with people who had even abandoned the churches and espoused atheism. Dr. Edward Getsinger, an atheist who had a degree in homeopathic medicine, was impressed by the Bahá’í Faith. After some months of careful consideration and [Page 21] reflection Dr. Getsinger, too, came to believe in God and Bahá’u’lláh. He received the Greatest Name individually from Kheiralla on 26 October 1897.

The 18 June class also included in its ranks a remarkable political radical, Honoré Joseph Jaxon. Born William Henry Jackson to parents of English ancestry in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on 13 May 1861, Jackson attended University College (now the University of Toronto), where he majored in the classics. After three years of study he was forced to leave school for lack of money. In 1879 he moved with his brother, sister, and parents to the frontier town of Prince Albert, in central Saskatchewan. He quickly became the spokesman for the farmers settling there, who had many grievances with the Canadian government. Soon, however, Jackson came to believe that the earlier inhabitants of the area, the Métis—half-Indian and half-French people who lived through a mixture of farming, hunting, and trapping—had even greater grievances.

In 1884 Louis Riel, the charismatic leader of the Métis, returned from his exile in the United States. Jackson persuaded the farmers to support Riel, which they did until Riel rejected Roman Catholicism, declared himself a prophet, and fomented a revolt against the Canadian government. Jackson broke with his people and became Riel’s secretary. He converted from Methodism to Catholicism, was baptized “Joseph,” and then joined Riel’s religion. The government sent in troops, who caught Riel unprepared and crushed his rebellion in [Page 22] a few weeks; Riel was hanged. Jackson was put on trial and found insane; no sane Protestant, after all, would convert to Catholicism. He was confined in the provincial lunatic asylum, where he relieved his boredom by reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty—the book that launched the Single Tax movement. After a few months he escaped.

Fleeing to the United States, Jackson embarked on a lecture tour of North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois in order to defend Riel’s actions and call for the creation of a separate Métis state. Eventually he settled in Chicago and became a labor organizer. When eight anarchists were put on trial and unjustly sentenced to death for killing seven policemen in the famous 1886 Haymarket Square riot, Jackson espoused anarchism and became a collector for the anarchist defense fund.

About the same time he legally changed his name to the more French-sounding Honoré Joseph Jaxon. He grew his black hair long and wore it straight, which caused many to believe he was an Indian. He traveled and spoke out for the rights of native Americans at a time when such a subject was unthinkable. Jaxon spoke at the first convention of the Populist party in 1892 and in 1893 helped to organize the first world conference of anarchists. He also joined the Chicago committee of Credit Foncier, a company organizing a communal experiment at Topolobampo on the northwest coast of Mexico. Its organizer was Albert K. Owens, a lapsed Quaker with some interest in Theosophy.

After a march of laborers on Washington in 1894, Jaxon decreased his involvement in these movements and became less flamboyant. He married Aimee Montford, a French Canadian school teacher living in Chicago. On 18 June 1897, at age forty-six, he was enrolled as a Bahá’í. Probably such a utopia-minded man was more attracted by Kheiralla’s teachings about the coming of a Millennium than by prophecies of Christ’s return.

For the next fifteen years both Jaxons were active members of the Chicago Bahá’í community. Aimee served on the Women’s Auxiliary, and Honoré contributed time to the committee responsible for purchasing land around the site of America’s first Bahá’í house of worship. He remained an active worker for the American Federation of Labor until expelled from the union in 1907. Divorced from his wife after World War I, Jaxon moved to New York. There he attended meetings sponsored by the New History Society, a small group that had broken from the Bahá’í Faith. Jaxon received considerable newspaper coverage for his protests against various social ills until his death in 1952. His life exemplifies a commitment to social causes and to individualism, although of a more extreme sort than those of Kheiralla’s other converts.

The 18 June 1897 class contained other Bahá’ís of note. Among them were Mrs. Ida F. Brush, Mrs. Rose C. Robinson, and Mrs. Mary Agnew, who all became active in Chicago Bahá’í women’s activities; William Z. Ralph, Arthur Agnew, Isaac H. Doxsey, and Albert Robinson, who became members of the governing board of the Chicago Bahá’í community when it was established in 1900; and Dr. William F. Nutt.

CHICAGO now had over one hundred Bahá’ís. The summer of 1897 was quiet, for Kheiralla was out of town, but when he returned in August he was besieged with students. He began a class, apparently late in the month. Meeting twice a week, the class graduated six weeks later on 7 October; fifty-five more Chicagoans [Page 23] became Bahá’ís. So many wanted to take the classes that two courses of lessons were established to run parallel with each other, both held on Wednesdays. These classes graduated on 15 and 22 December respectively. An additional class was completed on 20 January 1898. As a result of these three classes at least fifty-six persons became Bahá’ís, among whom were George and Mary Lesch and Perry W. Persel, all of whom eventually became prominent in the Chicago Bahá’í community.

The pace of teaching had been exhausting for Ibrahim Kheiralla. In an essay written several years later he noted that for “nearly two years I used to teach classes, one after the other, from one o’clock P.M., to eleven and twelve P.M., and retired to my bed tired out and exhausted.” Although classes only met one or two evenings per week, Kheiralla had a constant stream of visitors who wished to ask questions, of pupils who had missed a lesson and wished to make it up, of Bahá’ís dropping in to learn more or bringing friends who might be interested in taking the classes, of public lectures to give, and of dinner invitations to fill. Consequently, Kheiralla decided to authorize someone else to give his lessons. His choice was Paul K. Dealy. With this appointment Kheiralla created a new institution in the American Bahá’í community, that of “teacher.” No training was given and no special authority was conferred, but a semiofficial position in the Faith was created, patterned after the system of Bahá’í traveling teachers in the Middle East, or after the age-old system of any religious teacher’s authorizing successors to continue his teachings. The continued growth of the Faith in Chicago in 1898 necessitated the effort of many more teachers. Thornton Chase, with the help of a Mr. Jones, offered classes on the south side of the city. Dr. Frederick Pease, Mrs. Maude Lamson, Mrs. Sarah G. Herron, Mrs. Dulcibelle M. Fortune, Charles H. Greenleaf, and Mrs. Harriet I. Walcott also gave instruction.

The lands of origin of many of Dealy’s students in 1898 were different from those of Kheiralla’s earlier students. Up until 1897 most of the students had been born in the United States or Canada, generally between 1840 and 1875, when the two countries were still rural and settling new frontiers. In 1898 [Page 24] growing interest among recent immigrants diversified the group of people attracted to the Faith. Paul Dealy’s fact- and Bible-oriented style of teaching must have been responsible, at least in part. The story of Charles and Maria Ioas is typical. Both were born in Germany, on 23 March 1859 and 6 December 1865 respectively. Both acquired professions in the United States, Charles as a lawyer and certified public accountant, Maria as a photographer. Charles had been born a Lutheran, Maria a Catholic, but in the United States both joined a Methodist church and “were continually seeking something else to satisfy their spiritual needs.” Neither of them investigated any of America’s “new” religions, for as Maria put it, “‘My husband never cared for, as he called them, “isms” and cults. . . .’” But the Ioases were interested in the subject of Christ’s return, Charles having been told by his mother while yet a child that he would live to see Christ come again. After attending Bahá’í classes given by Paul Dealy for several months, the Ioases became Bahá’ís in July 1898. The ten of their twelve children who lived to adulthood also accepted the Faith, including their son Leroy, who later became a Hand of the Cause of God.

The Chicago Bahá’í community had a significant number of recent German immigrants among its active members. In addition to the Ioas family, there were the Schefflers and the Loedings. Gertrude Buikema, another active Chicago Bahá’í, was a daughter of Dutch immigrants; Christian Nissen was a Dane. Although the place of birth is known for only a few American Bahá’ís, among those in Chicago 21 percent were born in foreign lands.

The economic status of the Chicago Bahá’ís is a more complex area of study, for the recollections of individuals can be misleading. In his memoirs Albert Robinson noted that in the 1890s “this Revelation seemed to appeal more to professional men and women. . . .” However, Sophie Loeding, who knew the early Chicago Bahá’ís, did not remember that professionals represented a significant portion of the community, which she recalled as being made up of primarily middle- or lower-middle-class people.

The vocations of Bahá’ís listed in the 1899 Chicago city directory tend to corroborate at least part of Loeding’s recollections, for the directory shows that the Chicago Bahá’í community was middle class and consisted primarily of white-collar workers, most of whom were professionals. A total of 77 occupations were listed for those who took Kheiralla’s lessons. The single largest [Page 25] occupation was clerk (31 of 236 Bahá’ís whose occupations are known), followed by physician (30, 8 of whom were women), then by men in various business careers—manager, manufacturer’s agent, solicitor, insurance solicitor, capitalist, superintendent, secretary (20); stenographer—what today is called secretary—(13); teacher (13); bookkeeper (11); engineer (8); and lawyer (8). The Bahá’í community also included 2 artists, 2 elocutionists, 2 surveyors, 1 jeweler, and 1 telephone operator. Among the more surprising white-collar occupations were one pastor of a Congregational church and one “mind reader,” though neither of these individuals received the Greatest Name and thus never became members of the Bahá’í community. The single most common blue-collar occupation was carpenter, of which there were 3; among the other Bahá’ís were 2 machinists, 2 butchers, 2 bakers, and 1 dairyman. Many women had occupations: Some were white-collar workers—physician, teacher, clerk, cashier; others held blue-collar jobs such as dressmaker, seamstress, or shirtmaker. Notably absent from the Chicago Bahá’í community were the wealthy, the highly educated (such as college professors), and factory workers.

The religious affiliation of the Chicago Bahá’ís before their conversion is also difficult to study, for the statistics are sketchy. What is known suggests that the Bahá’ís were from religiously moderate backgrounds (see table 1). The picture that emerges is of a Chicago Bahá’í community composed of individuals who were fully imbued with the mainstream religious ideas of the United States. Dissatisfaction with the churches caused most of those who subsequently became Bahá’ís to abandon existing religious organizations and become “unchurched.” But it would have been difficult for them to escape the evangelical ethos of their national culture, and those who so wished had few alternatives to consider.

Table 1. Former Religious Backgrounds of Bahá’ís in Chicago Who Converted
before 1912 (compiled from the Bahá’í Historical Record Cards in the National
Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, Illinois, and from other sources, such as obituaries)

PREVIOUS RELIGION		NUMBER
	1897-1900	1901-1911	Total
Protestant:
Episcopal (mainline to liberal)	4*	4	8
Congregational (mainline to liberal)	2	0	2
Northern Baptist (mainline)	1	0	1
Methodist (mainline)	4	2	6
Presbyterian (mainline)	1	5	6
Dutch Reformed (mainline to conservative)	1	0	1
Lutheran (mainline to conservative)	4	6	10
“Protestant" (probably mainline)	3	2	5
“Christian” (probably mainline)	6	5	11
Non-Protestant:
Roman Catholic	3	0	3
“Universal Scriptures”	0	1	1
No religion	1	1	2
Total	30	26	56

* The number includes one Anglican.

[Page 26] Many of the Bahá’ís had conducted a religious search that had led them to various Christian groups with unusual beliefs, such as the Swedenborgian church and Christian Science. Others explored Mental Science, Divine Science, New Thought, Spiritualism, and Theosophy; these groups have been called the “harmonial religions” because of their stress on “rapport with the cosmos” in order to obtain “spiritual composure, physical health, and even economic well-being.” Thornton Chase, in addition to his affiliation with the Swedenborgian church for five years, had the “fortune . . . to receive a thorough instruction in hypnotism and practiced it somewhat.” Corinne True, the most prominent Bahá’í woman in Chicago, was a student of Divine Science, the Unity church, and Christian Science. Eliza Talbot, an early New York Bahá’í who had heard about Bahá’u’lláh at the World’s Parliament of Religions, was interested in New Thought, with whose devotees she filled New York City’s first Bahá’í class. Howard MacNutt, one of the most prominent New York Bahá’ís, had studied Vedanta and at one point had had a swami staying in his home. Mrs. Ida Finch, a prominent Bahá’í traveling teacher, had been a successful Christian Science healer for seventeen years. Ellen V. “Mother” Beecher, after active and dedicated involvement in the church and in social reform movements such as prison reform and temperance, turned to New Thought, Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Theosophy for spiritual sustenance. As Thornton Chase succinctly summed it up, “Nearly all who have accepted the teachings in this country . . . were not Christians, but of differing sects and beliefs, Spiritualists, Buddhists, Theosophists[,] Mental and Christian Scientists, Metaphysicians, etc., etc.”

In another place Chase broadened his observation to include those attracted to alternative ideologies as well as religions:

The Cause has seemed to draw to its ranks great numbers of people who have become formerly imbued with all sorts of doctrines and philosophies, fads and fancies, from “woman’s pre-eminence” to “re-incarnation”, from anarchy and grosser forms of socialism to divine communications and special wires from the Infinite.

However, Chase’s observation, it must be remembered, was made by one who had participated in the rebellion against evangelical Christianity. It obscures the fact that evangelical ideas were in the bones of most American Bahá’ís, for [Page 27] they had been raised in a fervently Protestant culture. It also misses the irony that Kheiralla’s lessons on the Bahá’í Faith, which stressed the Bible and the return of Christ, called the Bahá’ís back to the heritage they had rejected.

For the evangelical roots of most American Bahá’ís were strong—in fact, they were often stronger than those of the average American. Thornton Chase himself was the son of a Baptist deacon; his granduncle was a Baptist minister, as was his tutor, with whom Chase had lived for four years. Lua Getsinger’s mother was born in upstate New York in the 1840s and was very much influenced by Adventism, the belief in the imminent return of Christ, which she impressed upon her daughter. Albert Heath Hall was a minister’s son; Charles Haney’s father and brother were Methodist preachers; both of Honoré Jaxon’s grandfathers were Wesleyan Methodist ministers. Isabella Brittingham was the daughter of an Episcopal clergyman, and Corinne True’s father was a staunch Presbyterian minister. Agnes Alexander, the first Hawaiian Bahá’í, was the granddaughter of two families of New England Congregational missionaries. But perhaps the best example of all was Ellen Beecher, who married the grandnephew of Lyman Beecher, one of the most famous evangelists of the nineteenth century. The percentage of eventual Bahá’í leaders with parents or relatives who were Protestant clergymen was quite high, perhaps because such a background fostered commitment to a search for truth and the development of individualism.

Throughout 1897 the Chicago Bahá’í community grew in size and strength; from 30 members in late December 1896 it had grown to 225 persons by the end of January 1898, when Kheiralla stopped giving his lessons there. Some of its members had been believers for over three years, and individuals such as Paul Dealy had learned how to give the teachings. By 1897 the community had acquired sufficient experience to manage by itself; hence it was possible for Kheiralla to leave it and travel to give the lessons elsewhere. The rapid growth in size of the community also multiplied the number of interested persons living outside Chicago; many began to write Kheiralla and ask him to travel to their towns and give his lessons, which he did. His traveling to teach the Faith began a new phase in the growth of the American Bahá’í community.

[Page 28]

[Page 29]

Through Pain, Rebirth:
The Poetry of Roger White

BY PHYLLIS PERRAKIS

Copyright © 1985 by Phyllis Perrakis

CUT OFF from spiritual nourishment by a barren and materialistic world, modern men and women often have no awareness of a spiritual realm, either in themselves or in the universe. Addressing this area of spiritual ignorance, Roger White, a Canadian Bahá’í writer, provides for his readers a spiritual education that progresses from subtle hints to ever more profound revelations of the existence of a spiritual dimension both within the individual and animating the universe. Never sentimental or dishonest, White is extremely sensitive to the varied ways in which human beings, at different stages of emotional and intellectual growth, can be made aware of another faculty within their natures—a faculty that puts them in touch with aspects of reality that were previously unknown to them. With broad empathy and compassion, he presents a perfectly realized and colorfully varied cast of characters, each responding to a moment of revelation when he or she is touched by the hand of spiritual power.

But White does more than depict the ways in which different individuals respond to spiritual stimuli; he also analyzes the veils that block their response and, in some cases, dissects the psychological impediments to spiritual communication. Indeed, White provides a rare insight into the relation between spiritual and psychological growth and shows how secular self-knowledge and self-discovery can be a necessary groundwork that frees the seeker from irrational obstacles and prepares the way for the discovery of the deeper self that leads to God.

Some of White’s poems, such as “Barred Entry” in The Witnes of Pebbles (pp. 140-41), show how a lack of psychological harmony can be a barrier to spiritual knowledge. Others, such as “Confrontation” (Witness, pp. 106-07), deal exclusively with a psychological moment when the poem’s speaker allows into consciousness a repressed or lost aspect of the self. But, as White’s poems beautifully reveal, there comes a time when the insights of secular self-knowledge, so commonly sought today, must be surpassed, when emotional comfort is no longer enough, when men and women must search for something more to life. It is only when they have undergone such a search that they can gain access to a deeper level of self and find a fulfillment based on satisfying their spiritual cravings.

Where there is no awareness of any deeper spiritual level to the self, life is barren, mechanical, and without hope. White, zeroing in with his camera-like eye on one inhabitant of the modern wasteland, illuminates the painful futility of a life lived in accordance with only the most superficial values of this materialistic age. Such is the predicament of the brisk, efficient business woman of “Who Shall Tell the Sparrow?” (Another Song, pp. 132-36). She has adapted so well to the [Page 30] “Cool, chrome chaos” of her working day that

She has been invisible for years:

indifferently they accept

her crisp presentation, the knowing poise.

But “her glossy smile conceals a scream,” and beneath her powdered exterior lies the ever-ready hysteria. Her days and nights are lived out in fear and isolation. Awakening to “the ordinary terror of the day,” she joins the subway’s cargo “of psychotic, kind and mediocre men, / in equal fear of all.” Home after work, “The door is double-bolted against fears / accustomed as her bathrobe.” Not hearing her name among the casualties on the evening news, she assumes “with an acceptance blunted by a hidden wish” that she has survived, and winds her clock in preparation for another day. Outside her window the heavy night air “seethes and writhes like a strangling sleeper / in an anxious dream.”

Her life also “an anxious dream,” she feels no warmth or commitment to anyone and knows no one who would reciprocate even if she did feel anything. White concludes the poem, “O who shall comprehend the anguished darkness? / Who shall tell the sparrow: God has seen?”

This woman, so unaware of any other possibilities for her life, so caught up in the loneliness, fear, and frustration of her existence, is completely cut off from the realm where she might find solace and peace. The sadness of her plight lies in her taking for granted the terror and isolation of her life as normal and unavoidable.

While some persons are completely unaware of a deeper level of self, for others there is often some unfinished business in their lives, some relationship or experience in the past that has awakened in them an intimation of other possibilities in their lives, of other resources in their nature. Such is the case with the well-to-do society woman in “A Cup of Tea” (Another Song, pp. 19-24).

In a cleverly designed dramatic monologue this woman gradually reveals to a friend how she had been invited to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, at a tea given during the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s tour of the United States in 1912. Intrigued by his romance-like history—

I mean, a prison for forty years and now

at an advanced age coming to America

teaching a message of brotherly love and

peace—it’s like a fable.

she goes to the tea with considerable curiosity. At first she is struck by the strange assortment of people at the gathering, their only link being their devotion to, or curiosity about, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It is the presence of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Himself, however, that profoundly affects her:

he appeared—how shall I say—oh, noble,

majestic, serene—it was rather as though

a great light had entered the room. . . .

As He spoke, the society woman asked herself, “Why is he here; what does he want of us?”

And it came to me that his being here represents

an unvoiced . . . command . . . that

we make an adjustment in our lives.

. . . it bore in on me there in his presence

. . . that he asks us to make an adjustment

of the soul, if I may use that term—to

become spiritually renewed.

But for this adjustment to be fully realized it must take place in a social context and have pragmatic repercussions, and the society woman is ensconced in a marriage and social station that do not give her the freedom to change. Her moment of revelation, when she understands that if she were free she might become a follower of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, that “he might represent a standard to which one could devote one’s life,” is followed by a piercing sense of loss as she realizes that for her it is too late, that her life will not allow her this choice. Overcome by her sense of loss and desolation, she faints. It is with profound compassion that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá whispers to her after she faints, “It is acceptable,” giving her permission, as it were, to be fallible and limited.

White, with an extraordinary understanding of his fictional character, shows the tumultuous effect of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s presence and words on this woman. Even as she thinks of [Page 31] how her husband, Wingate, and her parents “would scorn all my gushing,” she suddenly considers, “Perhaps I do not really know them at all,” and she becomes aware for the first time that she feels “divorced from . . . [her] own life’s center.” To be aware that one is out of touch with the center of one’s being is to open oneself up to the existence of this center and the need to realign one’s relationships and commitments in accordance with it. As the woman questions who she is and what is at the center of her life, she catches a glimpse of mysterious depths within her, beneath her ordinary unquestioned assumptions about her life and commitments.

THE AWARENESS of a deeper self, a more profound center to one’s being, is also experienced by the young woman in the epistolary piece “A Dream of Fire” (Another Song, pp. 97-106). Visiting her missionary uncle in Tehran during the time of the Báb’s revelation, she confides, in a letter to her sister, her spiritual restlessness and a sense that home and children must be “a part of a more imperative destiny.” She also conveys her fascination with and horror at the stories of the heroic martyrdom of the followers of the Báb, thousands of whom are then being tortured and put to death in atrocious and gruesome ways. But it is the fate of a beautiful and talented woman follower of the Báb—a poet named Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, who is strangled with her own scarf—that vividly captures the imagination of the young visitor.

It is a dream about Qurratu’l-‘Ayn that has awakened Veronica in the night and prompted her letter to her sister. In her dream Qurratu’l-‘Ayn stands before her holding a small book, “exquisitely illuminated in Oriental motif.” Removing her veil “with a resolute and deliberate movement,” she hands the book to the young westerner who knew “as one does in dreams, that it was the book of life and that it held the answer to my heart’s deepest question.” But Veronica is unable to remove the thin obscuring veil she is wearing that prevents her from deciphering the book’s pages, although she “tore at it firmly and then with frenzy, . . . [her] heart bursting with anguish.” Finally, awakened by her own screams, she finds her “fingers beating the air and . . . [her] face wet with tears.”

Earlier, she had already expressed some awareness that she was veiled from her heart’s deepest needs when she had prophetically written:

Perhaps if I read my letters at a later time

I shall find some key in them to what I

have searched for all my life; perhaps my

own destiny is written into them in some

cryptogrammic fashion as yet indecipherable

and veiled from me.

To feel veiled from one’s deepest needs, like being divorced from one’s center, suggests the existence of another level of the self, not available to them before, of which these women have been made briefly aware. It is this level of the self that Bahá’u’lláh refers to when writing that “‘He hath known God who hath know himself.’” To come into touch with this aspect of the self—the self that would lead the individual to a knowledge and love of God—requires a journey beyond the secular goals of emotional well-being and adjustment to one’s society. In poem after poem White depicts the moment when psychological and spiritual search diverge, when the seeker after the deepest self must endure suffering and emotional pain in order to transcend one level of self-knowledge so as to achieve another. In exploring the changes in self-perception that such a search brings about, White portrays his seekers abandoning old loves and old ways of seeing the self, based on satisfying the ego only, for a deeper level of commitment—a love of God and acceptance of His laws.

A beginning awareness of the changes that will be necessary to experience the love of God is found in the poem “In the Silent Shrine an Ant” (Another Song, p. 113). Here the doubt-burdened speaker has a first intimation [Page 32] that the love and certitude he seeks will not come about without change and renunciation. The speaker, visiting the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh, longs for faith, courts “a miracle,” but sees only “the candles fail, / the petals rust.” The sight of an ant crawling by “persistent as our doubt,” suddenly illumines the speaker’s “mediocrity and godliness.” Like the ant, the speaker is both ordinary and a sign of God. But, unlike the ant, he cannot just be; he has a special part to play in God’s creation. He must choose to know and worship God, and such a choice requires detachment from the things of this world: “Who chooses love of Me must first choose death.” It was the insistent demands of the worldly self that earlier made the persona feel estranged from God. It was the claims of the ego, the “stratagems and dogma of our curtained lives,” that dulled “the recalcitrant heart.” To choose death is to subdue the clamoring self, to die to the temptations of this world.

Such a choice is not easily made. The price that love of God exacts—the pain of renunciation —the realization of what it means to give up what one has passionately longed for and loved because it is a veil blinding one from seeing and knowing one’s true needs and one’s true love: this is the theme of some of White’s most beautiful poems. Sometimes he casts this insight in the form of a battle for the heart’s allegiance between the long-held, intransigent loves of the ego and the total commitment of the self to Bahá’u’lláh, Whose teachings represent for the poet the highest ethical standard of this age. Here the old loves are given their full due, are presented as compellingly attractive and desirable. But the need to give up these loves is seen as necessary to one’s true well-being because they allow no room for a greater love and more total well-being. Such a renunciation involves a redefinition of who one is and what constitutes one’s happiness. This growth in self-understanding, this giving up of inaccurate or limited ideas about the self and its needs, is not accomplished easily or without a struggle.

The metaphor of battle that White sometimes uses to trace the movement between the two loves is a particularly appropriate one. The fight between the old and the new loves described in “Lines from a Battlefield” (Another Song, pp. 111-12) is both arduous and prolonged precisely because the attachment to the old love is so strong and its giving up so painful:

Come, let me fête you, beloved foe,

for I tire of this old-born war.

It would shorten did I not so ruinously adore

each endearing strategem your consummate cunning devises; . . .

The old love is pictured by White as cunningly enticing, as a mistress of subtle forms of allure. The self, to be free from its attraction to this material love, must be able to see through the tawdry and irrational nature of her appeal, must penetrate beneath the self-deceptions and rationalizations that cover her true nature. In the midst of its absorption in old defenses, caught up in old ways of feeling and perceiving, in the very act of embracing his old mistress, the self must become aware of her limitations and rip her from his heart:

Clasped to your bosom I gauge it for my blade’s dark use.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Caressing your unloosed hair I plait a noose

and with a traitor’s hand I stroke your face.

Furthermore, the battle against the old love, the material self, must be fought in the “graceless hours / when faith strains feebly against the unbelieving night.” The knowledge and confirmation that victory brings are not known beforehand. “Alienated from angels and celestial concerns,” the speaker feels “locked in a grief so ancient as to have no name.” Caught up in an emotional syndrome [Page 33] especially common to modern man, he feels too inadequate and spiritually barren to be able to respond to or appreciate spiritual beauty or grandeur. He is “unmoved by the testimony of flowers,” estranged from excellence, menaced by magnificence. Not even his vices lend him significance; his shame would not “topple the cities, arrest the sun’s climb,” as, in his egotism, he had once thought. How then can he claim heaven’s attention or merit its concern?

Inured to the banality of pain

and the ordinariness of suffering (sanctified or plain!)

it is joy that is remembered.

Finally, it is the joyous memory of those who have triumphed over self and passion that comforts the speaker and gives him hope. He fashions a paean “from shining names on scattered tombs,” and as he “invokes the victors,”

. . . a radiant rank appears,

assuring as sunlight,

familiar as bread!

These “conquerors of continents, movers of hearts,” give the speaker the courage to continue the battle: “Remove the garland, still the lyre, my love. / It is dawn: the engagement resumes.”

This is a war, however, in which one battle is not enough to ensure victory. The struggle must be repeated over and over; but with each victory comes a confirmation that aids in the next encounter.

The poem “Pollux to Castor” (p. 132) in White’s second book of poetry, The Witness of Pebbles, describes another battle at a later stage in the spiritual war. This time the two sides are almost perfectly matched, the battle here being between twins, with the old self, the worldly twin, possessing the “subtler skill,” and the spiritual twin, “the stronger steel.” But this battle is being fought with the speaker, Pollux, having sampled the fruits of earlier spiritual victories. Hence it is his awareness of the great prize that victory will bring, “God’s very sky,” that tips the balance and gives Pollux the strength to prepare to sacrifice “my love, my foe, my twin.”

If “Lines from a Battlefield” and ”Pollux to Castor” convey the appeal of the old self and the difficulties encountered in the battle to change, “Sonnet III” of “Sonnets for the Friend” (Another Song, p. 120) evokes the power of attraction of the new love. To give up one level of the self, to sacrifice a stable if limited sense of identity, requires a motivation strong enough to endure the pain and anxiety involved in the renunciation of one’s old desires and defenses. It is this powerful attraction that is portrayed in “Sonnet III.” White’s speaker, looking back, realizes he would never have submitted to God’s love had he known beforehand the painful price such a love requires:

What love exacts I had not thought to yield,

Nor guessed the crazing dart the Hunter hurled,

Or might have found indifference a shield

And built of gold and pride a dullard’s world.

But God’s love, like a keen marksman’s arrow, catching the heart in an unsuspecting moment, slips past the ego’s defenses and, once finding its mark, begins to overwhelm the recipient with its beauty and power. The speaker’s weakening resistance and growing captivation to his spiritual love are conveyed in images drawn from secular love and bondage: drunk on God’s Word, “heart ravished by His voice,” the speaker “could not seek escape.” Finally, “In passion’s sweeping tide I lost all fear / And could but stroke my Captor’s brow the year.”

The speaker is attracted and held by a force stronger than his conscious will. It is the power of this attraction and its appeal to a faculty whose satisfaction is stronger and more fulfilling than the speaker’s sense of emotional well-being that allows him to endure the sacrifice of the old self and still survive: “What love demands I had not thought to give / Who, dead of this, am yet left here to live.”

The contrast between the secular metaphor drawn from the language and psychology of human love and its spiritual referent gives this [Page 34] poem a strange tension. The reader, asked to see the similarities between these two kinds of love, is made aware at the same time of their differences. On the one hand, the power of the appeal of God’s love to the heart is made familiar and understandable. On the other, the poem suggests the mysteriousness of this appeal—its ability to slip past the speaker’s emotional defenses and worldly desires and reach an aspect of his nature, a susceptibility of his heart, previously unguessed.

WHILE “Sonnet III” suggests indirectly the power of God’s love to move the heart, White portrays this power directly in all its splendor and magnitude in “The Captive” (Another Song, pp. 124-28), a poem about the life of Mary Magdalen. Like Mary Magdalen, modern man begins in a state of servitude to lesser loves, his “heart captive.” And he, too, spends his days waiting for he knows not what, “sometimes weary” of his vain pursuits, “sometimes sad,” his “mind captive.” But Mary had the spiritual vision to recognize that “one who is forever” and to submit to one kind of death in sending away her lesser love. Hers was the spiritual humility to submit her will to that other one and to learn and grow “in grace.” Finally, having “abandoned all love’s lesser claims,” hers was the magnificent fate to die for love, “rejoicing in this death,” “ecstatic in this death for love,” her “soul captive,” her name a symbol of the true believer throughout the ages.

Love does not, however, always start out as so powerful a force. Writing of the gradual beginnings of love in the poem “Shelter” (Witness, p. 49), White’s speaker explains that the new believer does not have instant access to divine realms. Only little by little as he learns to subdue the self and turn to God with more complete detachment does he begin to experience the precious two-way flow of love and fulfillment. The seeker after God’s love must be patient with the fragility of the first shelter that love provides: “Love offers first the suppliant at its gate / faith’s bricks and planks and rusted nails that wound.” Only later “To fragile shelter built to love’s spare plan, / gold-laden, comes royal lover’s caravan.”

“Lines for a New Believer” (Witness, pp. 95-96) deals with the seeker at an even earlier stage in his spiritual quest. The very new believer marvels at the grandeur of the sea of faith. But he does not know yet the dangers it contains. He thinks he can pay superficial homage, write pretty postcards about its beauty, substitute platitudes for real feelings. But the sea demands more; it asks for total submersion as

. . . the dreaming, lovely drowned

who loll and bob in bubbled wonder

tell us

who stand “wistful and incredulous, / along the shore.”

To be able to get beyond the level of platitudes, to be able to change and free oneself from old selves and old loves, one must first have some awareness of who one is and what are the forces and emotions claiming one’s loyalty. Perhaps the soul farthest from God in all White’s poetry is the woman in “Barred Entry” (Witness, pp. 140-41) who, poring over the books of God and mouthing his words, finds, not comfort and guidance, but fuel for her perverted pride and diseased self-love. She is “owned by voices not her own, / their origin forgotten.” Because she speaks the words of others and does not know her own feelings, she is “without a sovereign centre.” Barricaded from this “sovereign centre,” this deepest self, she is denied even the intimations of grace glimpsed by the society woman and the missionary’s niece of “A Cup of Tea” and “A Dream of Fire” and is far more defensive and self-righteous than the business woman of “Who Shall Tell the Sparrow?” Her sense of self-worth wrapped up in needing to feel better than others, she “spends herself on the unrescuable and doggedly doomed.” But, alone in her room, feeling unloved and unaccepted, she is assailed by the terror of self-doubt:

Alone with her terror

she is Stalked by strangulating shadows

that menace from the corners of her room.

Her response to her fear and anxiety is to [Page 35] mouth, in pride and rejection, words she has been taught. “God is love!” she protests vehemently. But the words spoken in anger and self-hatred are powerless to heal her sense of self-division, to put her in touch with the spiritual realm, the deeper self, that might respond to and be solaced by God’s love.

“Barred Entry” vividly conveys the relationship between self-division and inaccessibility to the spiritual realm. It suggests the role that fear and anxiety play in “blocking off authentic religious experience,” as White notes in his footnote to the poem. Hence a fuller understanding and acceptance of one’s emotions is often a necessary prerequisite for reaching that deeper level of the self that allows one spiritual knowledge. A number of poems in The Witness of Pebbles deal with this problem of acceptance of the self in purely psychological terms. For example, in “Confrontation” (pp. 106-07) the speaker is forced to acknowledge aspects of himself that he would rather deny or ignore—aspects associated with a boisterous, untidy, strident, coarse, and bizarre intruder. But these characteristics, associated perhaps with physical desires, are part of the self, too, and must be acknowledged and fitted into their rightful place in one’s overall sense of identity. Left out, they will force their way in and disrupt one’s “chaste abstractions” about the self, like the “slovenly, gap-seamed” female in the poem.

TWO POEMS in 'The Witness of Pebbles, not seemingly related, form a pair, the first recounting the loss, the second the recovery of denied aspects of the self. “Lines on an Unlamented Death” (pp. 125-26) tells of the death of a boy whose ways seemed strange and possibly even demented to the poem’s speaker:

. . . he liked flowers, wrote poems, too,

and painted . . .

he’d prate of love and dreams and weep at beauty.

All these strange antics were discouraged and deplored by the speaker who many times was forced to turn the boy away. Finally, the boy met a “bloodless, silent end.” The speaker, relieved that he is dead, cannot mourn, however, for he tells us, “I wear his slaughtered face.” The speaker has killed a part of himself that was not socially acceptable, that was also sensitive to art, beauty, and joy—interests not generally appreciated or considered desirable.

Paired with this poem of denial and rejection of aspects of the self is the poem “Recovery” (p. 109), which is about the rediscovery and admission into one’s sense of identity of long-lost feelings and characteristics. The speaker, digging among the ruins of his past, searches for the child he once was. This child had vanished like the child in “Lines on an Unlamented Death,” but his faint cry can be heard from beneath the crushing rubble of the years, suggesting that he is still alive. On being recovered,

. . . the rescuer knows dazzling grief

as the boy’s sealed lips move

shedding with each word

a moldering leaf.

He speaks of love.

It is the acceptance of the ability to love both the self and the world that is the beginning of the recognition of those deeper aspects of the self that allow one to love God.

In “Why Do You Come Now, Glistening?” (Witness, pp. 103-05) it is God’s love that the speaker finds in himself many years after he had abandoned all hope of finding it. In the past when the speaker had ardently desired her, this lover had stood

. . . serenely cowled in shadow

on the periphery of vision,

disdainful as death,

estranged by moonlight

as I circumambulated your remoteness,

weeping?

Now when he is

. . . worn coin-thin

by palming of the pedlars of the scrunt

mad-apple

in the seething, carnal market

this lover comes “brimming with promises and bright words / . . . with the innocence of morning.” But by now the speaker has “disposed of recollection” and no longer desires [Page 36] this lover to Stay. He longs only to move “toward the black and birdless thicket” of despair and denial, where the lover cannot follow. As in “Lines from an Unlamented Death,” the speaker here would deny an aspect of the self, but this time it is a part of the deepest level of self—the realization and acceptance of God’s love and closeness.

The denial of God’s love and the embracing of despair are dealt with by White not only on an individual basis but in application to society as a whole. In “News from the Front” (Witness, p. 133) White shows how our whole culture has rejected life and chosen death, refusing to understand the meaning of the signs of the times:

What need we care

If the sky grows dark at noon,

Our sons brood idly

And our women weep

In the heavy stinging air?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Let the winging raven come

And blight our fields

Where the sheaves pale

And no cricket’s heard

To welcome his sooty reign.

The poem’s spokesman admits to the populace that the “brave bird . . . announcing life” “did not lie,” but still he must be stoned. To acknowledge his message would require that the citizens face aspects of themselves that they prefer to deny: It would force them to acknowledge that their present ways are wrong and are leading to disaster; it would require of them the courage to risk hope. It is easier for the populace to kill themselves, in killing the bird, than to risk believing in life or hope:

Who will complain, my countrymen,

That we had a use for life

Or singing bird?

The bird as an omen of hope and the messenger of another kind of reality is found in many other poems and myths. In Yeats’ “Byzantium,” the golden statue of a bird, “more miracle than bird or handiwork,” can “scorn aloud” “all complexities of mire or blood,” symbolizing the power of art to transcend human mortality. In “News of the Phoenix” by the Canadian poet A. J. M. Smith, the parallel with White’s poem is even more exact. Here, the phoenix, the symbol of hope and rebirth, has been reported dead, but the man who brought the message has been shot, “only as a precautionary measure,” whether or not he lied. Again, society cannot tolerate the knowledge that its present ways are denying life and hope.

White, as a Bahá’í, however, is more optimistic than Yeats or Smith about the future, believing that we live in the time of a new religious dispensation that will bring spiritual rebirth to all who have the eyes to see and hearts to believe. But White does not ignore the painful nature of the times in which we live. Rather, he sees these difficult times as the period of tribulation needed to reawaken a spiritually dead, totally materialistic humanity to a renewed belief in God and their own spiritual natures. But White is aware that most persons, when they don’t just ignore the signs of the times, are overcome with despair or fear. He addresses these reactions in the poem “For the Children, Watching” (Witness, pp. 119-20). In a piece that is half poetry and half prose White seems to abandon a persona and directly address the reader, identifying his audience with his own reactions to a news item about the accidental death of one child and the injury of another when a potential suicide jumped from a window and fell on the children in the street below. This bizarre episode, an appropriate metaphor for our confused and painful times, is used by White not as a justification for our need to warily watch the skies, for who can anticipate or guard against such a deed? Our

. . . disbelief will not arrest

the bizarre Icarian plunge of the suicide

falling upon us from the scaffold of his despair [Page 37]

as we lean innocently to scoop our marbles.

Rather, it is a reminder that these chaotic times presage the coming of a new dawn:

It were wiser to stand in Magian silence,

reverent before the admonishing blackness,

and read in its long dark reign

the gathering of an astounding dawn.

Here it is White himself who, in the course of the prose-poem, comes to a new understanding of how to relate to the unpredictable and meaningless tragedy.

TO BE ABLE to discern the workings of a divine plan behind the pain and confusion of modern life, as White does in “For the Children, Watching” requires one to see this present existence in the perspective of an eternal life for the soul. Such a perspective presents this life not as a time for maximizing happiness as best one can but as the necessary training ground for learning to develop spiritual qualities. However, from early childhood, our civilization does not impart to its young the kind of information that would allow them to View life in this larger context. The poem “Primer for a New Day: 1979 UN International Year of the Child” (Witness, pp. 121-24) attacks the false images of life presented to children in their early readers. The poem’s speaker denounces the sugary sweetness of the Dick and Jane primers as both unreal and damaging. His tone sarcastic, a defense against the pain of his own early identification with this plastic world, he makes his judgments in the plural, knowing that the reader, too, will remember the seductive power of those false, but oh so attractive, images that denied the physical and emotional realities of life: the real anger our mothers felt; our fathers’ blistered hands and exhaustion; the reality of the “more shameful staining orifices.” But what hurts the speaker most is that these primers, having denied the truths of the body and emotions, would have also prevented us from knowing the truths of the spirit, “having almost persuaded us that life was or should be / one long indulgence.”

But, the speaker points out, the times have changed. The world has disappeared where people could invent Dick and Jane primers and where children could believe “the life that was . . . [their] life.” That world “we held as lightly as . . . [Dick and Jane held their] imperishably gay red ball / spins drunkenly, inflames, seethes with menace.” Those “ardent few” who have not forgiven the primers for their lies still “feel they have a score to settle,” and “startled cries of terror” rend “the soft fabric of summer evenings / in the most unalarming and discreet suburbs.” But the poem ends on a note of hope and joy, for our sorrow and pain are not wasted; they point us toward the “dawn-spawned words through pain, rebirth.”

“Through pain, rebirth”—the process of transforming material desires and concerns into spiritual qualities and of transmuting pain and hardship into love of God and service to humanity—this is the process that White examines and makes understandable in his works. His poetry and prose provide signposts along the way in the journeys of men and women from complete immersion in the material world, through their first intimations of the existence of a spiritual realm, to the early skirmishes and then bloody battles between the material and spiritual parts of their natures, to the golden moments of awareness when they can see how far they have come and feel at one with the spiritual forces animating the universe. Sometimes White’s works are like brief flashes of lightning illuminating for a moment a whole world; at other times they are like the steady beam of a flashlight, allowing the reader to follow the twists and turns in one individual’s path. But whether revealing one path or lighting up a whole society, White’s poetry and prose sketches take the reader on a journey from the loneliness and frustration of modern alienation, along the path of pain and sacrifice to the discovery of that other realm, that deeper level of the personality that puts the individual in touch with the meaning of life— the self that leads to the knowledge and love of God.

[Page 38]

Broken Oar

Someone had splashed

the brightest paint

on a broken oar,

carried it up

the path to the hill

and planted it there.

Last compass point.

Now from that stance

to take the swayings

of browny greeny rocky blue

in one unbroken gaze.

—Ian Stephen

Copyright © 1985 by Ian Stephen

Traveller in a gallery

He sits side-on,

a cheek at window

and one so near

to Eastern Art.

He sits side-on

in a chair

that curves to root

in parquet floor.

The room rises in ceramic calm;

walls hang with earthbright weaves.

So he swivels cleanly away

from side-on hustle

of disconnecting trams and banks,

money-changers, chains of stores,

not cursing them

but silent-seated:

open faced.

—Ian Stephen

Copyright © 1985 by Ian Stephen

[Page 39]

Communicating toward Unity

BY KAMBEZE ETEMAD

Copyright © 1985 by Kambeze Etemad. This essay was adapted from a term paper written when the author was a junior in high school.

SINCE THE middle of the nineteenth century the peoples and nations of the world have gradually been forced to recognize the importance of the unification of the planet and to work toward achieving that goal. For a variety of reasons isolationism is no longer as possible as it once was, for there is an increasing awareness that nations depend on each other. As a result, a growing number of individuals from various political, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds are striving to exemplify in their own lives the desire and need for world cooperation. United Nations programs, international student exchanges, world hunger drives, antinuclear rallies, and the like indicate that more and more people are looking beyond their own personal interests and those of their countries and are taking an interest in the world as a whole.

The evolution of science and technology has also played a part in unifying the world. In the middle of the nineteenth century, amidst the Industrial Revolution, the development of new types of communications served to link the nations in ways not imagined before. Long-distance communication by foot, horse, and sailing ship was replaced with that by telegraph and telephone—and now communication through fiber-optics and relay satellites. By the end of the twentieth century, it has been predicted, a man in New York will be able to speak to a man in Australia using a wrist-watch-type device and advanced communications satellites.

Furthermore, new modes of transportation have made traveling from one nation, or continent, to another almost as easy as riding across town. With the Industrial Revolution fast ships and later steamships commanded the seas, the railroad and automobile replaced horse-drawn buggies, and a new medium for travel was introduced with the invention of the airplane. Today cruise ships, extremely fast sports cars, supersonic jets, and even interplanetary spacecraft have almost become commonplace. With transportation and communications becoming faster and more sophisticated, “the last great isolated areas” of the world, writes John Huddleston, a Bahá’í thinker, were brought into the main circles of civilization. Now Israel is no longer an imaginary Biblical land, and Rio de Janeiro is just around the corner.

The Industrial Revolution further stimulated world cooperation through trade, which, in turn, has gradually increased interdependence among the nations. The United States, for example, could not function the way it does today without oil imports, and many of the third-world countries, depending on grains and other food resources from other parts of the world, would also face crises if trade were cut off.

The first half of the twentieth century has also witnessed several political and economic efforts that suggest an international desire for cooperation. Institutions such as the Council of Europe, the Common Market, the League of Nations, and the United Nations provide evidence of a willingness of countries around the planet to work together.

[Page 40] ALTHOUGH DEFINITE signs of international collaboration exist, still to be answered is why? Why should mankind, with all its proud diversity, strive for such affiliation? Shoghi Effendi, the appointed Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote in 1936:

That . . . change, which we associate with the stage of maturity inevitable in the life of the individual and the development of the fruit must, . . . have its counterpart in the evolution of the organization of human society. A similar stage must sooner or later be attained in the collective life of mankind, producing an even more striking phenomenon in world relations, and endowing the whole human race with such potentialities of well-being as shall provide, throughout the succeeding ages, the chief incentive required for the eventual fulfillment of its high destiny. . . .

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, elucidating this fundamental verity, has written: “. . . At one time it [humanity] was passing through its stage of childhood, at another its period of youth, but now it has entered its long-predicted phase of maturity, the evidences of which are everywhere apparent . . . That which was applicable to human needs during the early history of the race can neither meet nor satisfy the demands of this day, this period of newness and consummation. Humanity has emerged from its former state of limitation and preliminary training. Man must now become imbued with new virtues and powers, new moral standards, new capacities. New bounties . . . are awaiting and already descending upon him. The gifts and blessings of the period of youth, although timely and sufficient during the adolescence of mankind, are now incapable of meeting the requirements of its maturity.”

Humankind has reached a new period in history, unlike any in the past. Like an adolescent approaching maturity, it is learning while passing through turbulent crises, how to bring all the components of its personality together—harmoniously. And, as it emerges from this cycle of development into a glorious cycle of maturity, or fulfillment, it will achieve ends it was never able to achieve as an adolescent. One aspect of humanity’s new-found maturity will be its ability to live and work together, for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith has written:

The supreme need of humanity is cooperation and reciprocity. The stronger the ties of fellowship and solidarity amongst men, the greater will be the power of constructiveness and accomplishment in all the planes of human activity. Without cooperation and reciprocal attitude the individual member of human society remains self-centered, uninspired by altruistic purposes, limited and solitary in development like the animal and plant organisms. . . . The lower creatures are not in need of cooperation and reciprocity. A tree can live solitary and alone but this is impossible for man without retrogression.

THE INEVITABLE question about how mankind can accomplish the task of unifying the world has many answers. It is clear, however, that before outward changes or achievements [Page 41] can be expected ways must be found to change the hearts of men and women. For personal spiritual transformation must occur in order to produce lasting social changes. Indeed, social modifications will be hollow and meaningless without changes in mentality, understanding, and heart.

Moreover, humanity, as it moves toward political and social cooperation, must not only recognize but come to accept as a matter of fact the oneness of mankind. This essential attitude will greatly improve everyone’s personal life, and it will lay the foundation for world unity:

Humanity shares in common the intellectual and spiritual faculties of a created endowment. All are equally subject to the various exigencies of human life and are similarly occupied in acquiring the means of earthly subsistence. From the viewpoint of creation human beings stand upon the same footing in every respect, subject to the same requirements and seeking the enjoyment and comfort of earthly conditions. Therefore, the things humanity shares in common are numerous and manifest. This equal participation in the physical, intellectual and spiritual problems of human existence is a valid basis for the unification of mankind.

Once man accepts the sensibility and beauty of world unity, he can begin striving to attain its realization by instituting social changes in the world. These social changes will not be end products of world unity; they will merely be means to the end—“catalysts” helping to bring world unity into being. The changes will be of many types, but they can all be classified as doctrinal or institutional. The former consists of social ideals and prerequisites that will be followed by the people, while the latter are tools that will be used by the people for the accomplishment of their goals.

Effective doctrinal changes will basically mean the adoption or formation of political ideologies that embrace the idea of world unity, citizenship, and solidarity. They will need to accommodate the probable future formation of a world commonwealth.

Institutional changes will be of two kinds. One will include the formation of an international parliament (the beginning stages of which we now see in the United Nations), a world court, and other institutions consisting of bodies of people serving to enforce the doctrines adopted. The second kind will include institutionalized media to facilitate smoother interaction between people. Included will be a universal educational standard, a world currency, and an international auxiliary language.

THE LONGING for a universal language has existed for thousands of years. Yet the many living languages proposed as a world tongue have proved unsatisfactory because of nationalistic prejudices or because of intrinsic difficulties the languages chosen presented to peoples from other language groups. An international auxiliary language, however, is one to be used by and between all nations and peoples and is “not meant to displace existing [Page 42] tongues but only to help them out.” Therefore, an international tongue will not necessarily eliminate any existing national tongues; rather, it will provide a neutral medium through which all people will be able to communicate.

But “would it be worthwhile to have a system by which the same symbol, or sound, or gesture would mean the same thing to all men,” asks Mario Pei, a linguistic popularizer. He answers his question with guarded optimism. “It probably would.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is more emphatic: “the very first service to the world of man is to establish this auxiliary international means of communication.” For the world of humanity has reached a stage of maturity where a means of communication among all people is essential for ensuring continued and proper development.

One of the most obvious needs for an international auxiliary language can be found in the field of international diplomacy and in international intercourse, says ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “Today the greatest need of the world of humanity is discontinuance of the existing misunderstandings among nations. This can be accomplished through the unity of language.”

There is no doubt that the use of an international language would eliminate many misunderstandings, both semantic and translatory, in diplomacy. Indeed, for “International organizations, like the United Nations and UNESCO, which give their attention to problems that concern the entire world,” it is quite obvious that “the establishment of an international language would help their work enormously.”

Such an international language would mean that the United Nations, for example, would no longer depend upon time-consuming, tedious, costly, and possibly inadequate translations, both oral and written, of its five official languages. With one language, in which all of the diplomatic presentations were given, there would be a reduction, if not the elimination, of translingual misrepresentation. While one language could not guarantee total elimination of all misunderstandings, it could avoid a large amount of unnecessary distortion.

Commerce, too, both national and international, would benefit from the use of a standard language. Trade policies and codes of ethics would be unequivocal in meaning; semantic and unfamiliar jargon would either be internationalized or eliminated. This would mean that an importer in Hong Kong, for example, would be in a much better position to understand a trading partner in Chicago. Paperwork, due to translation, would be lessened. The barriers of unfamiliarity would be reduced, and trading would run more smoothly.

Just as trade invites the adoption of a world tongue, so, too, does the field of science call for a common language. Scientific discoveries would no longer need to be published in scores of languages; world scientific conventions (or any convention, for that matter) would not depend upon the work of dozens of translators; scientific terminology would be understood by all scientists regardless of where it is used.

Science would reap other benefits as well, for today it is possible for a research lab in Princeton to perform the same experiments, and obtain the same results and conclusions, performed in Stuttgart five years earlier, simply because no American journal has the resources for translating the German findings. An international language would save scientists all over the world much time and enable science and technology to move forward at a [Page 43] faster rate than it does now without a standard language.

While international diplomacy, commerce, and science would all benefit from an international auxiliary language, such a mechanism will be an essential tool for world peace. For with the establishment of world unity the establishment of some form of a world commonwealth and a world legislature is inevitable. When that happens, the members of the new structures must be able to communicate freely and fluently in order to function efficiently. In short, they must speak a common language. Moreover, when the results of their deliberations are broadcast or published, everyone must be able to understand them. An international auxiliary language would serve these needs.

WHILE an international auxiliary language would certainly satisfy some diplomatic, commercial, and scientific needs in the world and would be essential to the working of a world commonwealth, it would also be a great help in many less crucial aspects of life. For it would make easier the ordinary, day-to-day communication between people.

One of the most obvious benefits of an international tongue would be in tourism and travel. Today when persons travel to a foreign country, they are severely handicapped if they do not know the native tongue. The best they can do is depend upon hotel clerks, pocket dictionaries, improved sign language, and a bit of luck. Most certainly, they can visit monuments, museums, public buildings, churches, and they can enjoy the scenery, but if they “can mingle with the natives on some sort of common ground, it’s quite another story.” Then they can take in “the real sights, the atmosphere, the spirit of the foreign country.”

Other advantages of an international auxiliary language include the spread of literature and the arts; the internationalization of public entertainment (television, radio, motion pictures); the availability of religious literature to all; the standardization of geographical names; and the possibility of the issuance of international medical and other professional licenses.

Probably the most substantial advantage is more intangible than all of the others: With the adoption of a world tongue human relations could do nothing but improve. Man’s active participation in upholding the establishment of a world tongue is essential if the human race is to experience true unity. To simply tolerate other people is not enough. Instead, men and women must work and associate in amity with others; they must bring others into their confidence by being able to communicate their ideas and feelings, for “The heart is like a box, and language is the key. Only by using the key can we open the box and observe the gems it contains.”

Effective communication through a world auxiliary language could lead to a decrease in prejudice, which is probably one of the major causes of disunity today. As prejudice decreases, understanding, respect, and harmony will fill its place. People will begin to recognize a kinship as human beings and inhabitants of the same planet. International communication will foster a feeling of world citizenship, and men and women will begin to work toward that goal.

WHILE THE advantages of an international auxiliary language are too numerous to discuss, still there are obstacles to be overcome in accomplishing the goal and objections to be dealt with. One obstacle is the lack of the recognition of the importance of a world tongue. Another is pessimism and cynicism that leads persons to say, “It will never work”—which often means that they are not willing to try a change. Then there is the formidable obstacle of national pride. Pei observes that “The speakers of each language say: ‘Yes by all means let there be only one language, and let that language be ours!’”

[Page 44] Perhaps an easier obstacle to overcome is voiced by those who study, and enjoy studying, national languages and fear that if an international language were established, it would replace the national languages now in use. Such an event, of course, would not occur. The term “international auxiliary language” describes its specific function: communication among people who speak various national tongues. It is to be used alongside the native language, not to replace it. The goal is not to destroy cultural diversity, simply to unite it.

Another major concern is that a world language, because of the size of the planet, would break up into dialects and new languages, in much the same way that Latin broke up into various Romance languages. Again, the fear is groundless, for “We are living in a historical period when communications are many and easy, and ease of communications leads to standardization of language rather than to its breaking up into dialects.”

WHEN THE obstacles and objections to an international auxiliary language are overcome, the next step is selecting a language that will be used by all people. In choosing the language, the voices of all nationalities and cultures must be heard. Otherwise, the final decision will not be considered an international decision, and it will not have international support. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written that “it is my hope . . . that intelligent men may be selected from various countries of the world to organize an international congress whose chief aim will be the promotion of this universal medium of speech.” The congress would be responsible for evaluating all candidates and carefully selecting that which would best serve as a world tongue.

The language would need to be relatively simple to use; it should not have complex grammar and tenses and should have an adequate working vocabulary and comparatively easy pronunciation and spelling. It should be relatively easy to learn in a short amount of time.

Once the official language is chosen, people, in addition to learning their native language, will have to begin learning the international auxiliary language. Pei estimates that, with schools, radio, television, and movies, people all over the world could learn such a language in twenty years.

What may appear as obstacles need not impede the progress of developing and instituting a global language. Already apparent is the recognition of the importance of such a task, as millions of individuals in all countries advocate Esperanto, an auxiliary language developed by linguists. As more and more people, and eventually nations, join the growing number of individuals supporting the progress being made in the endeavor for one auxiliary language, humankind can face the challenges of not only selecting but learning the global language.

What a glorious achievement for the world of humanity! Not only will an international auxiliary language become a tool of the nations and a medium for all people, it will also be viewed as another significant “step for mankind.” Admirable as it will be, though, it will only be one step toward a more worthy goal: the unification of the people of the world.

[Page 45]

The Distance Most Disturbing

No doubt there are magnitudes to be found

Blossoming in the bright gardens of space.

But here am I

Uncommonly lost in my own backyard,

Pulling weeds and still wondering

How far is far,

How near is near.

The distance most disturbing

Is the gulf of God.

What letter, what punctuation

Crosses?

Over and over

I turn these seeds in my hand

Hoping to discern something legible—

An imprint that might inform—

An order, to spring cell doors.

No doubt there are black holes

Between the stars

Which siphon our higher math

Into some kind of matter-less whirlpool,

But here I am

Overlapped like a seed in a hill,

Wondering whether to sink

Or struggle—

In an ever-present.

—Lynn Ann Ascrizzi

Copyright © 1985 by Lynn Ann Ascrizzi

[Page 46]

[Page 47]

Eleni Lives!

A REVIEW OF NICHOLAS GAGE’S Eleni (NEW YORK: RANDOM, 1983; NEW YORK: BALLANTINE BOOKS, 1984), 625 PAGES

BY GARY L. MORRISON

Copyright © 1985 by Gary L. Morrison.

IT WAS only by chance, an abiding interest in Greece and Greek culture, and a vague recollection of having read a favorable review of it somewhere some time ago that I happened to buy a paperback edition of Nicholas Gage’s Eleni during a recent summer trip. Sometimes from chance, however, come great encounters. Few books have moved me as deeply as Eleni—a combination of biography, mystery, adventure, and historical epic woven together so brilliantly into an accurate, honest, contained, and detailed picture of a time and place as to remain indelibly etched in the reader’s mind and heart.

Nicholas Gage was nine years old in 1948 when his mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, arranged for her children to escape from the Communist guerrilla-controlled village of Lia on the Albanian border of northern Greece. He was sent to be with his father, a Greek immigrant in Worcester, Massachusetts. His life was changed forever. Forced to remain behind with one of her children, Eleni was arrested, jailed, tortured, and executed. Fourteen years later the author returned to Greece to his childhood roots in the mountain village of Lia to discover who his mother was, how and why she was executed, and to find and take his revenge on his mother’s killers.

Eleni is primarily the story of a Greek village and villagers through World War II and the ensuing Greek civil war, the story of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her village of Lia—the “Amerikana” who never left her village world and whose husband, an immigrant in America, was cut off from her by war and revolution, making her responsible for the care and survival of their four daughters and one son. It is also the story of Eleni’s favorite child, her son Nikola, and his pursuit to uncover the story of his mother and to seek out those who were responsible for her death. The interweaving of the two stories is skillfully handled and culminates in an emotionally riveting climax and denouement when both mother and son—the one a simple Greek village peasant, the other a naturalized American, university-educated journalist with the New York Times—become extraordinary, even heroic, exemplary human beings.

The author, a former investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, interviewed the remaining aging peasant men and women, former Communist guerrillas, Greek nationalists, friends and enemies who could remember his mother and what happened in Lia. He gathered testimony from his relatives and the recollections of himself and his sisters. With this evidence he recreates the world of Eleni Gatzoyiannis vividly and accurately. He deftly guides the reader through the labyrinth of the war years and the postwar abortive Communist revolution. In the process we learn much about Greek village life, customs, and culture and the modern history and political upheavals of twentieth-century Greece. We come to know and understand Eleni Gatzoyiannis as if she were one of our own family.

Eleni’s story should be of particular significance to Bahá’ís at a time when Bahá’ís [Page 48] are being attacked, persecuted, tortured, and martyred in Iran. Eleni is the story of how an otherwise ordinary individual becomes heroic and finally exemplary by holding fast to human decency and faith, by allowing devotion to traditional values of family and the survival of one’s children to determine one’s choices and actions. Jailed, tortured, executed, and left in a shallow grave in an obscure ravine, Eleni paid the ultimate price to have her children escape and survive. It is an act of love and devotion that the author undertakes to learn her story. And along with the author the reader moves from discovery to discovery toward a shattering climax. Filled with hate and vengeance, the author finally confronts his mother’s executioner only to realize that to kill him would be to become, like him, devoid of all humanity and compassion. A bullet kills but once. The act is done, and may be forgotten. But to bear witness to truth, as Nicholas Gage has done in this remarkable document, is an act of vengeance against the executioners of the world that can never be forgotten. More than that, the author has expressed through the art and power of literature a genuine triumph of the human spirit. What links mother and son is the legacy of love. “On the road to vengeance . . .” the author quotes Andre Malraux, “one discovers life.” Eleni lives—transcendent, exemplary. Eleni touches the soul.

[Page 49]

Authors & Artists

LYNN ANN ASCRIZZI is senior editor of Freedom Press in Farmstead, Maine, where she and her husband are building a log cabin.

KAMBEZE ETEMAD was a junior in high school when he wrote the paper from which his essay on the need for an international auxiliary language was adapted. He is now eighteen years old and a sophomore at Brown University.

GARY L. MORRISON, a frequent reviewer of books and movies for World Order, holds a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies from Yale University and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. In 1985 he was elected secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Hawaii.

PHYLLIS PERRAKIS, a part-time professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa, has just spent a year in Paris. She is interested in the changing views of women presented by women in modern novels, especially those of Doris Lessing.

IAN STEPHEN lives off the coast of Scotland on the Isle of Lewis, where he was born and now works as an auxiliary coast guard. He holds a degree in English literature from Aberdeen University and has published poems in the New Edinburg Review and Other Scottish literary periodicals.

ROBERT H. STOCKMAN, whose undergraduate studies led to a degree in geology and archaeology, holds a master’s degree in planetary geology from Brown University and a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, where he is now pursuing a doctorate in theology in the history of religion in America.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by Herbert W. Wong; p. 1, photograph by Steve Garrigues; p. 3, photograph by Camille O’Reilly; p. 6, photograph, courtesy of the Bahá’í Publishing Trust; p. 11 left, photograph, courtesy of the American University of Beirut; p. 11 right, photograph, courtesy of the National Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, Ill.; p. 15, photograph, courtesy of the National Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, Ill.; p. 21, photograph, courtesy of the National Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, Ill.; p. 28, photograph by David L. Trautman; p. 46, photograph by Steve Garrigues.

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