How can young people express their spirituality?

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.

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