Posts from — December 2007

Photo © Angharad Weights

So, here we are, four generations of our family together to celebrate my 60th birthday yesterday, all Baha’is bar one. We had a wonderful day.

Technorati Tags: Bahai, Baha’i, Barney, 60th birthday, family

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I have hit the big six-oh. How can that have happened?

Photo © xurde. Transformed by John Barnabas Leith under a Creative CommonsAttribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike Licence

Technorati Tags: birthday, 60

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Photo © Kuw Son under a creative commons licence

Erica and I had a real scare yesterday. As we were just about to leave to spend the day with our eldest son and his family, we locked ourselves out of our house.

I usually lock the front door last thing at night and leave the key in the lock. Each morning I unlock the door and retrieve the key. Well, yesterday it was Erica who unlocked the door. However, she had an armful of food and presents she was taking out to put in the car and she did not take the key from the lock.

Time came to leave and, not realizing that the key was still in the lock, I slammed the door shut. As soon as I had done I suddenly thought I’d better check if Erica had the key. Well, she had her own key, but mine was in the lock inside the house. I took Erica’s key and tried to unlock the door. The key slid into the locki, but it wouldn’t turn.

You know how it is when something like this happens. I couldn’t believe I had done something so stupid. I kept on trying to turn the key, but to no avail. It was not going to shift. Erica and I stood in the rain and I panicked and swore.

What to do? All the windows were shut and locked and we had no phone number for a locksmith (and in any case what locksmith would come out on Christmas Day?). Perhaps we could use a coat hanger to hook the key out of the lock.

I phoned our son to say we’d be late and we went to the garden shed to find a wire coat hanger. Leaving the hook intact I untwisted the hanger and thrust it through the letter box flap. It quickly became clear we couldn’t steer the hook and that we’d never reach the key that way. The only thing left to do was to break a window. We chose one of the double-glazed panels in the front door.

Back round to the shed to pick up a hammer, a board to cover up the broken pane, and some nails from the shed and then we returned to the front door. We decided we’d leave the window intact until we returned home yesterday evening, so we went to put the board, the nails and the hammer into the boot of the car.

Before I put the hammer in the car I thought I’d see what happened if I used it to tap the outside of the lock. I gave the lock a couple of taps. Erica slid her key back into the lock and … lo and behold, the key turned. The tapping with the hammer had dislodged the key on the inside of the door enough to disengage it from the mechanism and we could get back into the house without breaking any windows.

We were both greatly relieved, as you may imagine. Another phone call to our son to say we were leaving and away we went.

Technorati Tags: key, lock, house, locked out, panic

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The Barber’s Diaries is a film crying out to be made. In fact, David Henderson, a very good friend of mine in Washington DC, has been working with Charles Ellis’s descendants and with contacts in the movie industry to persuade someone to fund the production. They are also looking for a novelist or a scriptwriter to write the movie. David and the head of Outpost Pictures have produced the video at the top of this post as a story treatment to show to potential supporters of the project.

It’s an inspiring treatment - and, indeed, an inspiring story. Charles Ellis, a Black American (or Negro, as he would have been referred to at the time), remained with his family in the Midwest town of Altamont, Illinois, despite the terrible race riots, lynchings and house burnings of the 1920s and 1930s. He was the town barber and the only Black man in town. In 1933 the Great Depression forced him to close his barber’s shop and hitch-hike 1,500 miles to Arizona to continue his trade and keep his family together.

In 1927, on his 40th birthday, he resolved to bring focus, meaning and inspiration to every moment of his life, and he started to write a diary. He kept the diary faithfully for 44 years until his death in 1971 at the age of 84. In those years he wrote 2,600 pages in 6 volumes, reflecting on world events, on his family, and on his intellectual and philosophical journey. In his Altamont barber’s shop he would have heard many conversations, but he would have been silent and all but invisible to his white customers. Yet, whatever his white customers thought, he had, as his daughter Adrienne says, a life of the mind.

This is not the diary of an angry man. Nor is it the diary of a victim. Far from it. Rather, this is the diary of a quiet, reflective, spiritually strong man, who resolved to live by his faith and principles, whatever the challenges and tests he faced in life.

I am honoured to count Dr Wilma Ellis, one of his daughters, amongst my good friends. When one meets Wilma - and I am sure the same is true when one meets other descendants of Charles Ellis - one can see the fruit of Charles Ellis’s life. Wilma’s penetrating wit and intelligence maker her a spiritually uplifting person to know and converse with. Amongst her many other qualities and accomplishments, her years of service at senior levels to the Baha’i Faith, including her time as the Baha’i International Community’s representative to the UN, are, I am sure, a reflection of the spiritual and intellectual quality of her heritage.

A poor Black barber Charles Ellis may have been on the face of it, but the tree of his life has produced the most remarkable fruit.

If you know of anyone who might be willing to fund the project or a novelist or screenwriter who might be willing to write the script, please let David Henderson know. Visit his blog and click on the email me link.

Technorati Tags: Black, African American, diaries, film, racism, faith, hope

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December mist, Woolmer Green, Hertfordshire

One of the joys of living where we do is the freedom to walk out of the house and into the Hertfordshire countryside. Erica pointed out the mist lying in the shallow valley in which Woolmer Green, our neighbouring village, sits.

As we walked down towards Robbery Bottom Lane we found this lone tree shrouded in mist.

And then the tracery of the trees in small copse that lies alongside Robbery Bottom Lane, misty against the sun in the background.

All photos © John Barnabas Leith under a Creative Commons License

Technorati Tags: UK, Hertfordshire, countryside, winter, trees

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Photo © John Barnabas Leith

Erica and I have been running a weekly study circle on the theme of reflections on the life of the spirit since mid-September. We’ve been using the first book of the Ruhi Institute materials. For the past few sessions, we’ve been studying the third unit of Book 1, which is about life and death.

Last Wednesday, we got into some pretty deep stuff with Lindsey and Val, two of the ladies who’ve been regular participants in the study circle. Lindsey’s husband passed away about 15 years ago, when their daughter was 5, and she’s been searching for an answer to the question “Why?” ever since. She’s a strong person; she’s made her own life and brought her daughter up by herself, but she still wants to know why God deprived her daughter of a father.

The third unit of Book 1 takes us into a deep study of some of the most thought-provoking passages from Baha’u'llah’s Writings about life after death. At some point in the discussion I rushed to fetch my copy of Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah. Only that morning I had read a passage that seemed to me to express exactly what needed to be shared at this particular juncture in the study circle:

O My servants! Were ye to discover the hidden, the shoreless oceans of My incorruptible wealth, ye would, of a certainty, esteem as nothing the world, nay, the entire creation. Let the flame of search burn with such fierceness within your hearts as to enable you to attain your supreme and most exalted goal—the station at which ye can draw nigh unto, and be united with, your Best-Beloved….

That prompted me to think about this anyonmous quotation I picked up from Roger Prentice’s excellent website:

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

Perhaps you see the common theme. It is to do with the shorelessness, the unlimited nature of the Transcendent.

And then I found this poem by Mary Oliver (I read it in Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds, published in 2007 by Bloodaxe Books) to read to the group. The poem seems to me to ground us and, at the same time, offer us a glimpse of the life beyond. Mostly it expresses our need for meaning and to live a meaningful life:

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my lie something particular and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Did all of this prompt a moment of that heart-felt recognition that is known in Arabic as irfan? I got the feeling that it may have done.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, spirituality, transcendent, divine, life, death, life after death

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It’s five years from the next census in the UK, but the Office of National Statistics (ONS) is already planning for the great day of reckoning.

Census 2001

Census 2001 saw the inclusion of a question about religion for the very first time in a census in England and Wales. People were asked “What is your religion?” Although this was a voluntary question (most census questions are compulsory), ONS say that around 92% of people responded to it. Of course, not everyone understood the question in the same way. For some people it was a question about their public religious affiliation. For others it was a question about their inner beliefs or even about their “cultural” religion - in other words, about the religious community they were born into. What it didn’t do was to give an accurate picture of the numbers of people actively engaged in religious life and practice.

In the run-up to the 2001 Census the faith communities and the Office of National Statistics had prolonged discussions about the religious question. Initially, the government was not keen to ask about people’s religious membership. Once persuaded that this was a good question to ask, the government had to take legislation through parliament to make it legal to ask the question. And then there were heated exchanges about which religions would be given their own tick boxes (”check boxes” for my US readers) and which religions would end up as “Other, please write in”.

In the end there were tick boxes for Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs. And there was a tick box for “no religion”. Jains, Zoroastrians and Baha’is were relegated to the “Other, please write in” category.

Census 2011

So what about 2011?

Yesterday I took part in a meeting of faith representatives with Office of National Statistics officials to discuss the religious question for the next census.

The wording of the question has changed. We are now going to be asked, “What is your religion or belief?” I don’t know what you think, but it seems to me to be a potentially confusing question for people as they complete the census form. If I ask you what your religion is, you may well think in terms of your public membership of a particular religion. But if I ask you what your belief is, you are more likely to think that I am asking you about your inner beliefs rather than your public affiliation.

I think what’s happened is this. The phrase “religion or belief” is taken from human rights and equalities language. Here in the UK, “belief” is increasingly being used in public policy discussions to refer to non-religious beliefs, such as Humanism. That means that government officials and those of us who work in human rights and other public policy areas are very likely to understand the question “What is your religion or belief?” as meaning “What is your religion or your non-religious belief. But most people wouldn’t understand it in that way at all. They are much more likely to see it as a question about their inner beliefs.

But never fear, all is made clear when we come to the first tick box under the question (which will still be voluntary, by the way):

What is your religion or belief?
• This question is voluntary.

☐ No religion (including Humanist, Atheist or Agnostic)

Now I am really confused. Does “no religion (including Humanist…)” mean that “Humanist, Atheist or Agnostic” are regarded as religions or quasi-religions? Or does it mean that this is the box to tick if you are a Humanist, Atheist or Agnostic amongst other things? Well, yes, I’m sure it’s the latter.

Those who aren’t Humanists, Atheists, Agnostics, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims or Sikhs are “Any other religion or belief” and are invited to write in the name of their religion or belief. So Pagans, Jains, Zoroastrians and Baha’is are still “Any other”. It seems clear that no one is going to get a separate tick box unless their numbers rise to at least half a million.

Technorati Tags: census, religion, belief, Baha’i, Bahai

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The Australian Baha’is have a sharp new website - great design, inviting and clean and with interesting stories.

The Australian Baha’is do some great spiritual and moral education work in schools and in after-school clubs, particularly with the 11-15 year olds. This story covers some of that work.

The whole site is well worth a visit.

(Hat-tip: my good friend Michael Day, who is now the Australian Baha’i community’s media officer.)

Technorati Tags: Australia, Baha’i, Bahai, youth, schools, moral education, spirituality

Photo © riacale

Human Rights Day 2007 sees the launch of a year-long campaign to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 2008. Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has written:

This campaign will engage the whole UN system in promoting the Declaration’s ideals and principles of justice and equality for all of us which changed the landscape of international relations and gave substance to the aspirations to freedom and dignity of humankind. But the celebrations are meant not only as tributes to an extraordinary human achievement. They will also be reminders that the goal of making the Declaration a living reality for everyone has yet to be realized.

Photo © Sherwin!!!

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has published this most significant message for the day:

On this Human Rights Day, we launch a year-long commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The entire UN family will take part in a campaign to promote the Declaration’s ideals and principles of justice and equality for everyone.

The campaign reminds us that in a world still reeling from the horrors of the Second World War, the Declaration was the first global statement of what we now take for granted — the inherent dignity and equality of all human beings.

The extraordinary vision and determination of the drafters produced a document that for the first time set out universal human rights for all people in an individual context. Now available in more than 360 languages, the Declaration is the most translated document in the world — a testament to its universal nature and reach. It has inspired the constitutions of many newly independent States and many new democracies. It has become a yardstick by which we measure respect for what we know, or should know, as right and wrong.

The Declaration remains as relevant today as it did on the day it was adopted. But the fundamental freedoms enshrined in it are still not a reality for everyone. Too often, Governments lack the political will to implement international norms they have willingly accepted.

This anniversary year is an occasion to build up that will. It is a chance to ensure that these rights are a living reality — that they are known, understood and enjoyed by everyone, everywhere. It is often those who most need their human rights protected, who also need to be informed that the Declaration exists — and that it exists for them.

May this year reinvigorate us in that mission. Let us make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights an integral part of everyone’s life.

The UK Baha’i community and Baha’is around the world are already planning activities to mark this significant anniversary. It’s a good time to for all of us to think what we can do in our neighbourhoods and our work places to raise people’s awareness of human rights and of the aspirations (all too often unfulfilled) of the Universal Declaration.

By the way, the Know Your Rights website is an excellent resource - well worth a visit.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, human rights, UDHR, UN, Ban Ki-Moon

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Photo © riacale

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

No doubt you clocked that today, 10 December, has been Human Rights Day. Were you able to do anything special to mark the day?

Happily I was able to spend the afternoon at an excellent conference on the theme of Human Rights Based Approaches to Campaigning.

The conference was a joint enterprise between the British Institute of Human Rights(BIHR), a wonderful NGO dedicated to human rights research, education and consultancy, and Campaigning Effectiveness, a programme of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, and was hosted at UK Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre.

This was one of the best delivered training events I have been to for several years. Most of the programme was interactive. The presentations were short, clearly focused and, in one case, moving.

The key message of the conference was encapsulated in BIHR’s five principles for human-rights-based campaigning.

Five principles

1. Look at the issue through a human rights lens.
2. Identify who is accountable for respecting, promoting, fulfilling human rights.
3. Empower people to know what their rights are and how they can claim them.
4. Facilitate the participation of those affected in an active, meaningful, accessible and inclusive way.
5. Aim to tackle inequalities and prioritise the most marginalised.

As the BIHR say on their website:

The underpinning rationale for this work is that for domestic and international human rights to have meaning for or benefit everyone they need to be animated, understood, applied and claimed outside of the courtroom and by a much wider range of people and organisations.

As a Baha’i, I find myself very much in tune with the human rights approach. The Baha’i community is committed to universal human rights as a matter of principle. For us, human rights can provide a space and a framework for human flourishing and are the responsibility not only of governments but of all of us:

The realization of human rights does not involve only action by the government or freedom from unjust government interference or oppression; rather it requires the construction of a progressive social order from the ground level upwards. It demands a new awareness of the reality of human unity and the development among all peoples of an all inclusive notion of community that extends from the family, to villages, towns, cities and localities, to nations, and, most importantly, to the boundaries of the planet itself. Moreover, given that rights cannot exist without corresponding responsibilities, each member of a community has a responsibility to uphold the rights of the other members based on a recognition of their unity and interdependence.(Baha’i International Community statement to the 49th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 18 January 1993)

Did you do anything special for Human Rights Day?

Technorati Tags: human rights, Baha’i, Bahai

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