Posts from — August 2007

There’s not a lot one can do to resist such a look from a granddaughter!

Tom, Vicky and Maya came to visit yesterday - and, coincidentally, we had the first summer day for what seems like months. We were actually able to sit outside in the sun and eat.

I’m off to Italy tomorrow for a conference at the Baha’i Studies Centre at Acuto. I’m a tad concerned about weathering a jump in temperature from our current 20

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The trouble with changing the them of one’s blog is that one has to fiddle around to make it exactly as one would like it to be. When I started to change, I had another theme in mind than the one I’ve ended up with. I found that the first theme I chose didn’t have certain features I’d hoped for, so I swapped to the Cutline theme. This does most of what I want, but not everything. Either that, or I haven’t fully figured out how to get it to do what I want.

One of the great things about Cutline is that it allows the person using it to customize it by including a custom CSS sheet. That’s OK if you know something about CSS. Well, I know some stuff about CSS, but what I know is very “bitty” and disorganized. If I had that kind of knowledge about the mechanics of cars, I would not advise you to bring your car to me to be repaired or serviced!

The upshot is, I’m not all the way there yet. You may well see further changes to the look of the blog. Don’t be surprised. Don’t be alarmed! It’s still Barnabas Quotidianus at heart.

Technorati Tags: Barnabas Quotidianus, blogging, themes, Cutline

Please excuse any hiccups while I manage the changeover to the new theme I’ve chosen for Barnabas Quotidianus. There will be adjustments over the coming days and weeks (more realistically it will be weeks…). For a start off, the header picture will have to change.

Technorati Tags: Barnabas Quotidianus, blogging

This video by the Muslim Network for Baha’i Rights cleverly spoofs a tourist ad for Egypt to highlight the denial of ID cards to Baha’is and others in Egypt who are neither Muslim, Christian or Jewish.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0aylHuBHKQ 320 240]

Human Rights, Egypt’s most precious treasure - not for everyone

The new computerized ID cards will soon become mandatory for everyone in Egypt. No longer will people be able to use the old paper IDs. Baha’is cannot get the new ID cards because Baha’is won’t lie about their religious affiliation. Without the ID cards, life in Egypt will become impossible for the Baha’is. You can read more about this here.

The Muslim Network for Baha’i Rights is continuing to do a great job of highlighting human rights abuses against Baha’is in Egypt and Iran.

Hat tip: Mark Bamford & Tessa Scrine.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Egypt, ID cards, human rights, religion

Barnabas Quotidianus has signed up to support Blog Action Day.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone

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One of the great joys of the Baha’i summer school in Bath was the music. I wish, I wish I could have been a competent musician, a singer-songwriter like the members of the Smith family from Cornwall. Sadly I drive good people to distraction with my piano playing, but I utterly lack the natural musicianship of Geoff and Michaela Smith and their daughter Rosie Smith. Their son Jordan is also part of the family band.

The Smiths kept us in music throughout the the recent Baha’i summer school in Bath. I could have wished them to play on and on and never stop. I can highly recommend their albums, particularly Fragile Leaf, Geoff and Michaela’s latest output, which I listened to about five times yesterday.

One morning they sang the prayer Baha’is know as the Long Healing Prayer to a setting of their own devising.

This was one of the most uplifting, spiritual experiences of Baha’i worship that I have ever had: Geoff Smith played a continuo on guitar, Rosie Smith on drum, Jordan Smith on maraccas, Michaela sang the verses - starting with “I call on Thee O Exalted One, O Faithful One, O Glorious One!” and led the chorus. Those of us sitting in the auditorium sang:

Thou the Sufficing, Thou the Healing, Thou the Abiding, O Thou Abiding One!

It was a kind of musical meditation.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, musicians, Geoff and Michaela Smith, worship

It might seems highly unlikely at the present time to sit down with 30 or 40 young people to talk about life after death and to pray together. And yet that’s what I had the privilege of doing during the recent Baha’i summer school in Bath, UK.

Young people are gaining such a scary reputation - hoodies, knife crime, bullying, vandalism are all things that are blamed on teens and early 20s youth. But there are plenty who run counter to the stereotypes the media are providing us with right now, and I sat with some of them on the second and penultimate evenings of the summer school.

Come the end of the main evening programme at 9.30 p.m. and I descended into a basement area of Kingswood School known as The Piazza to enter into conversation with young Baha’is aged anywhere from 12 to around 23. During the first of these evenings we conversed about identity, starting by asking “Who am I?” and going on to consider what are the markers of our identity and what it might mean to identify oneself as a Baha’i.

On the last but one evening of the summer school we talked about death, life after death, near death experiences, the soul and so on. I quoted one of my favourite mystical poets, Jalaluddin Rumi:

On the day I die, when I’m being
carried toward the grave, don’t weep.

Don’t say, “He’s gone! He’s gone!”
Death has nothing to do with going away.

The sun sets and the moon sets,
but they’re not gone. Death
is a coming together.

And the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction.

This led on to a discussion of the nature of time and eternity as we sat illuminated only by four candles and by a series of slides projected onto the ceiling. The young people sat on chairs, lay on cushions all around, and listened, offered their thoughts and asked questions.

An hour of discourse and discussion segued perfectly naturally into prayers and music. The youth, some of whom would only just have finished their first year of secondary education and others of whom will be going to university or on to a year of voluntary service in September, picked up prayer books and, without any encouragement, without any priest or prayer leader (following Baha’i practice) recited prayers revealed by Baha’u'llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha. Eighteen year old Arjun, who has just won a place at Cambridge to study medicine, played his guitar and led us in a couple of prayerful songs.

There was no sense of strangeness in this group of young people praying together. It was the most natural thing to do as we closed the session around 11.15 p.m.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, youth, young people, prayer, life after death, spirituality

OK, sorry about that. I was at the Baha’i summer school in Bath last week - and a wonderful summer school it was, too. Unfortunately my server went down late on Friday night just before I went to Bath and didn’t come back up until Monday morning. The summer school took place at Kingswood School, whose campus had a definite touch of the Hogwarts.

Kingswood School dining hall. Photo by Anne Maund

Sadly, though, we couldn’t send any owls from Kingswood, nor yet write our blogs or send emails. No wifi! Nail bitingly irritating for internet addicts like me. Erica and I found a Starbucks one day and used their wifi hotspot, but it was such a hassle that we didn’t repeat the exercise. It was too far to walk from the school to the city centre lugging our computers (and a very steep return walk up Lansdown Hill), and Bath has the most horrendous traffic congestion. So, I wrote only one rather lame blog entry last week. Excuses, excuses!

But I do want to tell you something about the summer school. When I became a Baha’i in 1966 and heard talk of winter schools and summer schools it all sounded rather off-putting. Who wanted to spend their summers studying? But now that I’m almost 60 I rather like the idea of studying in a congenial setting, surrounded by good friends (old and new). There were around 200 of us - from 18 month-old toddlers to seniors in their 70s and 80s, from diverse ethnic backgrounds - at the summer school.

As it happens, I did my studying ahead of time. I spent my week at Bath co-tutoring one of the summer school courses with my good friend and colleague Pete Hulme. One of the wonderful things about preparing a course is that the tutor learns a great deal about the subject matter ahead of time and learns even more from the interaction and discussions during the course itself.

Pete Hulme is fourth from left in this photo.

Our course went under the rather grand title of “A New Etiquette of Expression”. Some years ago the Universal House of Justice, the Baha’i world governing council, wrote to the Baha’is in the United States about individual rights and freedoms in the World Order of Baha’u'llah. One of the freedoms the House of Justice wrote about was freedom of speech and foresaw the birth of “an etiquette of expression worthy of the approaching maturity of the human race”.

Baha’u'llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, extends the scope of and gives new meaning to self-expression. However, he also warns of the dangers of speech used maliciously or idly. “The tongue is a smouldering fire and excess of speech a deadly poison,” he says, and advises moderation, appropriateness and timeliness in our use of speech.

Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can everything that he can disclose be regarded a timely, nor can every timely utterance be considered as suitable to the capacity of those who hear it. [Writings of Bah

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I am sorry about the downtime my server suffered over the weekend and the absence of any posts on the blog for some time. I am currently at one of the English Baha’i summer schools - in a rather wet Bath (the city, not the tub).

I hope to be able to write later in the week, but please be assured I haven’t abandoned the blog. I’ve bought an hour’s wifi time at Starbucks and am trying to get through a LOT of emails.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, summer school, Bath, blogging

Do the religious, the non-religious and the anti-religious annihilate each other, like matter and anti-matter? Or can they work fruitfully together to common ends?

My experience says they can work together.

Yesterday morning - sunny but cool - I took the Piccadilly Line from King’s Cross to Holborn, bought a latte in the Costa at the corner of High Holborn and Southampton Row, dodged the London traffic and made my way to the offices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in Bloomsbury Square for a meeting of the Religion and Belief Consultative Group on Equality, Diversity and Human Rights (RBCG).

The RBCG first came together in October 2004 as a reference group for a Muslim and a Humanist who were members of a government committee that was preparing the way for the establishment of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). Somehow I found myself in the chair of a group that included representatives of the major churches and faiths, of the Inter Faith Network for the UK, of the British Humanist Association and of the National Secular Society.

Three meetings, I said, and then someone else can do the job. Well more than 20 meetings later I’m still chairing and the group still meets. Actually, the group has gelled, has a sense of solidarity, does real, solid, work. And we laugh together. A lot.

Yesterday we met to produce an agreed set of answers to a number of questions about the priorities for the work of the CEHR when it opens its doors in October. We had collected responses from individual members of the RBCG to the questions, but we had decided that our answers would have greater impact on the CEHR if they were agreed and submitted by the RBCG as a whole.

One member of the RBCG had kindly produced a two-and-a-half page draft. Reviewing and reworking the first page took us over an hour. The discussion was intense, searching, frank, focused - and seemed never-ending. At one point I commented that I thought I might be losing the will to live. Each time I thought we had arrived at consensus about a paragraph, someone would raise another question or issues - and sometimes those questions and issues led to a great deal more discussion, much of it most illuminating.

Challenging to chair such a discussion? Yes, but absolutely fascinating to observe the process flowing through and around the group, to note people’s body language and facial expressions, to call on someone whose face said they wanted to speak but who hadn’t raised a hand.

Throughout this intense discussion there were no personal attacks and no attacks on others’ beliefs. People listened carefully to what others had to say, spoke frankly, but without rancour, about their different views. There was genuine respect, even at the most tense and difficult moments.

I felt privileged to be chairing, to be the one who (I hope) facilitated and enabled the discussion to flow and to come to a good conclusion. We completed the document in six minutes over the 150 minutes that we had scheduled. I came away elated, feeling that we had achieved something of moment, that a group of people with, in some cases, mutually opposed views about the legitimacy of religion’s having a place on the public square had been able to agree a significant document to submit to the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, and that this had been accomplished in a good spirit and with a real sense of solidarity.

Back in October 1985, the Universal House of Justice (the elected world governing council of the Baha’i community) addressed The Promise of World Peace to the peoples of the world. In that ground-breaking call for a concerted effort by the world’s peoples and leaders to bring about peace, the Universal House of Justice made this plea to religious leaders:

The challenge facing the religious leaders of mankind is to contemplate, with hearts filled with the spirit of compassion and a desire for truth, the plight of humanity, and to ask themselves whether they cannot, in humility before their Almighty Creator, submerge their theological differences in a great spirit of mutual forbearance that will enable them to work together for the advancement of human understanding and peace.

The RBCG is not a group of religious leaders, but it does comprise accepted representatives of the major faiths as well as of the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society. We did not achieve everything that the paragraph from The Promise of World Peace calls for. But we did take a further step along that path.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, religion, humanism, secularism, CEHR, equalities, human rights, interfaith