Faith Initiative is a wonderful inter faith magazine that started under the aegis of the United Religions Initiative in the UK (URI UK), but subsequently was set up as an independent charity. The magazine is edited by Heather Wells and always includes some really inspiring and interesting material by writers from the different faiths (including the Baha’i Faith).

Faith Initiative has just launched a brand new website. I recommend a visit.

Technorati Tags: interfaith, inter faith, Baha’i, faith

My reading from the Baha’i scriptures this morning took me to paragraphs 2:48 to 2:50 of The Tabernacle of Unity, the collection of Tablets (or epistles) revealed by Baha’u'llah for various Zoroastrians who had asked questions of Him. The first of these is addressed to

That dread moment when the alarm goes off. It’s 6 a.m. and Erica and I drag ourselves out of bed to eat breakfast before the sun rises. We should probably bound out of our pit with joy, in expectation of another wonderful day of fasting. But I have to be honest and say I did not feel the least bit joyous at six o’clock this particular morning.

I hadn’t slept particularly well, for one thing (see my previous post about the effect of the moon on my sleep). I felt as if someone had sandbagged my head. The house hasn’t warmed up yet, so on with a teeshirt, some socks, my sloppy old trainers and my dressing gown and into the kitchen.

During the fast we always lay the breakfast table last thing at night to reduce the effort first thing in the morning. Erica shoves the fruit and leaves she’s prepared before we went to bed into the juicer. The eggs are beginning to rattle around in their pan of hot water. I scuffle around blearily for the muesli and the marmalade. Cut myself a slice of bread for toast. The kettle’s boiling for tea. Fill a jug with water.

The dog always lies down right next to my chair, so I have to climb over her to get my knees under the table. And I have to climb over her again, when I get out to fetch my toast from the toaster. She’s old and rather rank smelling, but she’s been the family dog for more than 13 years, so she’s earned some privileges, one of which is the last corner of crust from my toast - and that’s why she tucks herself in close to the legs of my chair.

The juice (spinach, apples ginger and a few other ingredients) hits the back of my throat. Aah, it’s got a real wake-up punch, wonderfully refreshing, a great start to the day. And so on to the muesli, the boiled eggs, the toast, the tea.

Erica and I eat, buried in our own thoughts for a time. Then se look up, smile at each other. We talk about what’s in our diaries for next week. We could invite our Tom, Vicky and Maya (our son, daughter-in-law and our new granddaughter) over next Saturday, which is free. I’ve various meetings in London. Erica is keeping up with her hours for George Ronald (how’s that for a bit of product placement).

My final act for breakfast during the fast is to drink down several pints of water. I managed 3 pints this morning. (For the metric amongst us the translation mnemonic is this: “A litre of water is a pint and three quarters”. Now go do the math.). One of the challenges during the fast is to keep oneself irrigated. I find that drinking such a large quantity of water first thing in the morning helps prevent those headaches that come from not drinking enough.

At 6.40 a.m. the sun rises and we stop eating and drinking. We pile the dishes into the dishwasher and set it going. And then we return to bed for prayers. It’s a magic time. The sun has just risen. It’s not yet fully light outside. The birds of the dawn chorus are singing their hearts out with the cooing of doves in the background. And Erica and I sit up in bed to recite that wonderful prayer every verse of which begins with this invocation:

I beseech Thee, O my God…

and finishes with this refrain:

Thou seest me, O my God, holding to Thy Name, the Most Holy, the Most Luminous, the Most Mighty, the Most Great, the Most Exalted, the Most Glorious, and clinging to the hem of the robe to which have clung all in this world and in the world to come.

We read this prayer verse and verse about. And then it’s time for private prayer and reading. I found myself deeply into a couple of passages from Tabernacle of Unity about creation, pre-existence, and “the realm of subtle entities” (2:48-2:50, pp. 47-49). Mind bending stuff, and I’m still not entirely sure what it means.

Then I read a few chapters from my bedside novel (The American Boy by Andrew Taylor), before lying down to catch up on a bit more sleep.

There’s something about the fast that makes one more aware of the days and hours. It’s partly because we live to a different timetable; every day we check sunrise and sunset times; we breakfast earlier than normal, we eat our evening meal earlier than normal. Come lunch time my stomach is signalling that it requires food. By mid-afternoon the mind begins to lose its edge, so one really needs to do one’s most challenging work in the morning. When dinner time comes the hunger pangs have often passed and one has the illusory feeling that one could go on fasting for ever.

And there are none of the usual cups of coffee, snacks, lunch and so on to punctuate the day. So the day can sometimes seem rather long, especially at weekends.

Seventeen more days to go before Naw-Ruz.

Oh, and here’s the beginning of Jay Howden’s fast!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, fasting, prayer, Naw-Ruz

When I was a child at boarding school, I never slept well when the moon was full. Was I a werewolf? Well, no (I bet you’re reassured about that), but small boys are often superstitious. We had heard (from whom does one hear these things?) that you would go mad if you stared at the full moon through glass. We half believed it. Sort of. Anyway, I’m sure that my inability to sleep at full moon had more to do with the absence of curtains over our dormitory windows than with madness or nascent lycanthropy.

At about half past ten last night, we saw something that would, in former times, have prompted superstitious fears. A dark shadow crept slowly across the face the full moon, until the moon was now more than a dim coppery disk in the sky. A total eclipse of the moon, as the earth comes directly between the sun and the moon and casts its shadow on the moon’s surface is less dramatic than a total eclipse of the sun. But it is awe-inspiring, nonetheless.

I tried to take a picture. My digital camera fired its flashgun vainly into the sky. I turned the flash off and pushed the zoom button until the lens had extended as far as it would go, but really! How could I think to take a decent picture with a small camera held by wobbly hands of an object some 400 million kilometres away? A triumph of vain hope over the ineluctable laws of physics, I think.

So there’s no picture here, but there is one in the BBC story. And there are some wonderful pictures here.

By the way, the last total eclipse of the sun visible in the British Isles took place on 11 August 1999. Erica and I were at the Baha’i Academy for the Arts, which was taking place at the Quaker school in Sidcot in Somerset (not far from Cheddar). Everybody was outside at around 11 a.m., as the eclipse approached totality. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day, so we couldn’t see the eclipse clearly (standard warning: do not look directly at the sun, even in eclipse!), but we all fell quiet as the gloom deepened into a strange half light.

Of course, it is an astronomical event with a well understood physical explanation. But I can understand why people who had no notion of physics or astronomy were fearful of the daytime darkening of the sun, why they attached superstitious significance to it. Even now, an eclipse inspires awe and wonder.

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