A couple of days in Hollywood

I was in Hollywood Monday evening, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. No, not that Hollywood; not the one with the name of the town in white letters on the hillside. No, I was in the original Hollywood, in Northern Ireland, just along the south side of Belfast Lough from Belfast City Airport (or George Best airport, as we are now supposed to call it).

I was there to speak at the Northern Ireland Baha’i summer school, located in Lorne House, a Girl Guides activity centre. Lorne House is a rather splendid house built in the Scottish Baronial style by Henry Campbell in 1875. Set in 21 acres of lawn and woodland overlooking Belfast Lough (although the trees make it difficult to see the Lough in the summer), it’s a pleasant place to stay. The Baha’i Council for Northern Ireland has held its annual summer residential school here for the past couple of years.

Flying from Heathrow on one of the hottest days of the year (not the hottest - that record was reserved for the day I returned) is a wearing business. The best part of an hour on the Tube from King’s Cross, check and wait in dubiously air-conditioned parts of Terminal One, on to the plane, 15 or 20 minutes taxi to the end of the runway, and then a long wait, followed by an announcement that something had gone wrong with the plane and we’d have to return to the terminal. In the end I arrived three hours late at Belfast City. The return journey on Wednesday was a doddle by comparison. I even indulged myself and took the expensive, but air conditioned, Heathrow Express into London - far preferable to the slow and meltingly hot Piccadilly Line. Mind you, the one step from the train onto the platform at Paddington was a step from a coolbox into an oven.

I’d been asked to give three talks at the summer school on these topics:

• The Universal House of Justice’s 2002 message to the world’s religious leaders
• One Common Faith
• Approaches to Challenging Questions

The third topic really engaged people, since any Baha’i may find themselves faced with questions for which the answers given by the Baha’i writings do not align with the so-called ‘liberal consensus’ (which can be as dogmatic and extreme as many a religiously fundamentalist doctrine).

I also spoke to the Baha’i youth and junior youth about the denial of access to higher education suffered by the Baha’is in Iran.

And I did a late-night story-telling session on the life of Sarah Ann Ridgway, using the book of that name by Madeline Hellaby (published by George Ronald). Sarah Ann Ridgway was a silk weaver in the north of England in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She became a Baha’i at the end of the 19th century while she was living and working as a silk weaver in the United States. She corresponded with ‘Abdu’l-Baha and was actively engaged in teaching the Faith in the silk mill in Pendleton where she worked, and while taking part in the activities of her local Unitarian church. Madeline’s book reads like a detective story, telling how she struggled to track down information about Sarah Ann’s life. There were some working class Baha’is in the north of England in those early days, but their lives are not well recorded - even the official documents, such as birth certificates and the Census are not always complete or accurate.

What Madeline has done in documenting Sarah Ann’s life is important, not least for bringing to light a life that was previously obscure. She also places Sarah Ann’s life in the context of the Industrial Revolution and gives a real sense of her struggles and of a life lived at a time when poverty, illness and lack of education were often the lot of the working class. Sarah Ann was clearly a doughty lady and she’d gained enough education to give a paper to a church literary society about a best-selling novel of the time, to carry on a literate correspondence with ‘Abdu’l-Baha and with her friends, some of which was in French. And she adopted a little-known faith, catching the vision of a world order governed by justice and love.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Northern Ireland, religion