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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