Posts from — March 2008

Here are a couple of shots of me speaking during the Nordic Bahá’í Youth Conference (see immediately previous post).

Both pictures © Safa Hovinen

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Nordic Baha’i Youth Conference, Barney

This is what I saw when I looked out of my bedroom at Hotel Vihiluoto in Kempele, between Oulu and Oulu airport, in Finland’s frozen north. The Gulf of Bothnia is just beyond the trees. The temperature never rose above -3ºC the whole time I was there (20 to 24 March) and fell as low as -25ºC at night.

View Larger Map

And this was the hotel.

But I didn’t go to Oulu for the hotel or the snow. I went because the Baha’is in Finland had invited me to be the main speaker at the annual Nordic Baha’i Youth Conference.

Photo ©Patrik Jansson

There were around 120 young people, mostly Baha’is, some not, from Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK, sleeping on air mattresses in a modern high school building on the edge of Oulu. Some had driven huge distances to get their. One car-load had driven almost 1,400 km from Oslo; the UK group had flown to Stockholm and then driven from Stockholm to Oulu, a distance of over 1,100 km around the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia. Both groups drove for more than 12 hours to get there and were facing equally long drives to get back.

My presentations and workshops

My task was to speak about “Applying the Bahá’í Teachings in Your Life”. I gave three 90-minute presentations and ran four 2-hour workshops. The presentations covered virtues, prayer, fasting, other laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, and why we should obey the laws of Bahá’u'lláh. I wove some of the story of Bahá’u'lláh’s life into the second and third presentations.

Applying the Bahá’í Teachings in Your Life

The workshops covered: (1) inter-faith relations and religion in public life; (2) who am I and what makes me who I am? (for this I played the fascinating video from TED of Jill Bolte Taylor speaking about her experience of a brain haemorrhage and its impact on her consciousness, on her ability to handle language, and on her sense of who she was; and (3) how to approach the “difficult” questions that arise out of the Aqdas, such as the outlawing of homosexual relations, the prescription of the death penalty for murder and arson (with life sentences being an allowed alternative).

The first day’s presentation (on virtues, ethics and laws) and workshop (on religion in public life) didn’t really hit the spot with the audience, but the second day’s presentation went down a treat - you could have heard the proverbial pin drop at the point where I was telling the story of Bahá’u'lláh in the Síyáh-Chál. It certainly showed the power of story telling in getting to an audience. The second day’s workshop (with the Jill Bolte Taylor video) was hugely popular and prompted a great deal of discussion covering a wide range of issues (consciousness, near death experiences, personal identity, science and religion…). The third day’s presentation and workshop also seemed to hit the spot.

Bright young things

When I began to prepare for the conference I really had no idea how to approach the topic. It’s a long time since I’ve been to a Bahá’í youth conference and a very long time indeed since I’ve been a youth! How would I be able to win the interest of an international gathering of this kind? How stimulate their thinking? I had been asked to speak in English without translation (English is the common language for these young people, even if their English is not always as good as it might - although always better than my Finnish!), so I had to go reasonably slowly and not use too many of my favourite multisyllabic latinisms.

Some of the young people were frighteningly intelligent, asked some very sharp questions and made cogent observations. Others were quieter, but also made useful contributions to the discussions in a less intellectual but often just as perceptive key.

Other workshops

Others also ran workshops on topics such as the characteristics of Bahá’í administration, balancing your life, and learning how to be understood the way you want to be.

Interstitial conversations

I think I had just as much fun with the informal conversations at meal times or in between sessions. We got into some pretty deep stuff at times, such as the relationship between sexual orientation and personal identity; and conceptualization, ontology, onticity and reality.

Artistic talents

The young people included some talented musicians and artists. There were daily arts workshops on digital photography, origami, stand-up comedy, and sports. And, of course, there were evening performance - most of which I missed as I needed to return to my hotel in the evenings to rethink my next day’s presentation and workshop in light of the discussions that had happened during the day.

My great disappointment

My great disappointment was not to see anything at all of the city of Oulu itself. The school was located next door to an entirely modern shopping mall/area on the outskirts of Oulu. All I saw was the school, my hotel and the very uninteresting road in between.

Return to the UK

My return Finnair flights to London from Oulu involved a high-speed change of aircraft at Helsinki airport. The time between arrival from Oulu and departure for London was supposed to be 40 minutes - tight, by anyone’s estimate - but we left Oulu late and arrived late into Helsinki. This cut my transfer time to 30 minutes. Now Helsinki’s Vantaa airport is not Heathrow (thank goodness), but they do provide foot-propelled scooters for staff (I didn’t see any passengers using them) to get from one end of the airport to the other. When we landed at Vantaa the aircraft got parked on an outside stand, so we had to be bussed to the terminal; then I had to make haste to the international terminal (which seemed to be about half a mile away) to get my London flight. I’d checked in all the way through from Oulu to London, so I didn’t have to go through security again, but it was a damned close-run thing.

A nice feature on Finnair is that they show details of departure times and gates at Vantaa on the screens of flights coming into Vantaa, so even before you land you can see where you have to go for your transfer.

As you may imagine, I was somewhat stressed during the first part of the journey. I sat as near the front of the flight from Oulu to Helsinki as I could, knowing I’d need to make a dash, so I could see the cabin crew making a meal of counting passengers and agreeing the passenger manifest with the captain. The minutes ticked away and I wanted to leap up and say, “For God’s sake, get this bloody flight going!” And then the wait for the passengers to load onto the bus at Helsinki - aaaarghgghhh!

After all that we arrived at Heathrow right on time.

And my baggage arrived too!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, youth, Nordic, Oulu, Finland, faith, virtues, ethics, laws, flying, airports

Oulu City House, originally uploaded by ptrktn.

I’m off to the city of Oulu in Finland to attend the Vikings Youth Conference, a conference for Baha’i youth from the Nordic countries.

No, please don’t laugh. I know I’m a year or two older than what could reasonably be called “youth”, but for some strange reason I’ve been asked to speak there.

It’s a long way north, and the weather forecast is for cold (i.e. always below freezing - well below freezing - the highest temperature while I’m there is forecast to be -6ºC and the lowest -25ºC).

I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to blog while I’m away.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Vikings Youth Conference, Finland, Oulu, Nordic

Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill University Faculty of Law, speaks before Congress the US Commission on International Religious Freedom on February 21, 2008, for a hearing on “Human Rights & Religious Freedom in Iran.” This comes in four segments. Professor Akhavan is himself an Iranian Baha’i, living in Canada.

Hat-tip to Jim for alerting me to the fact that Prof. Akhavan was speaking before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and not the US Congress.

You can watch the entire proceedings of this hearing (2 hours and 42 minutes) on the C-Span site. Type “Human Rights and Religious Freedom in Iran” into the search box. It seems that two of the other interviewees had interesting things to say about the Baha’is in Iran.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, human rights, religious freedom, minorities, US Congress, McGill, Payam Akhavan

This is remarkable video of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, recounting her experience of a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. She describes the big lesson she learns, that stilling the brain chatter of our left hemispheres and allowing the all-at-once, here-and-now, all-embracing perceptions of our brains’ right hemispheres to break down the barriers between us. It’s well worth watching. Deeply inspiring!

Technorati Tags: brain, stroke, haemorrhage, Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist, world peace, inspiration

A Jew (man), a Christian (woman), a Muslim (woman), a Hindu (man) and a Baha’i (man) were interviewing candidates for the post of Assistant Director of the Inter Faith Network for the UK. Sounds like the opening line of one of those jokes, but it isn’t. This is exactly what happened today - and I was the Baha’i on the interviewing panel.

The candidates were from four different faiths.

Of course, knowing the religious affiliations of the candidates told us very little about them as people. Religious affiliation says nothing about their wide range of skills, nothing about their personalities, nothing about their moral and spiritual lives, nothing about their vulnerability as they grappled with the questions put to them by us the interviewers, nothing about the impact they had on us. Words descriptive of their religions might conjure up some stereotypical pictures in your mind, but I can guarantee that none of the individuals we interviewed today would come anywhere near any of your stereotypes.

Despite the fact that we were interviewing people for an inter-faith post, the panel’s focus was very little on their formal religious identity and much more on their human qualities.

And I could say the same about the interviewers.

It was a fascinating day and, despite the interviewers’ cultural and religious diversity, our perceptions of the four candidates were very similar. And we all agreed that we had learned a great deal in the process.

Oh, and the fact that I was in the middle of the Baha’i fast provoked a great deal of discussion about fasting, about the different practices of the different faiths represented there.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, religion, faith, inter-faith, fasting

I’ve only just found out about this excellent site designed to help study of the Bahá’í Most Holy Book, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas.

Borna Safai, the site’s webmaster, says:

During one of his Thursday evening study classes, Mr. Dunbar mentioned that we should attempt to cross-reference everything in the Synopsis and Codification of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas to the verses, questions and answers and notes. I decided to start doing that.

After starting with the referencing, I realized that I had pretty much everything already in the database to put the entire Aqdas online. Even though there are plenty of sites available with the content, I still hope this site can provide something of use, mainly thanks to the search, cross-referencing and fullindex functions.

I can warmly commend this site, which includes the full text of the published edition, for anyone who wishes to study the Aqdas, this central Sacred Text of Bahá’u'lláh’s Revelation.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Kitab-i-Aqdas, scripture

This used to be the Millennium Dome. Erica and I took part in the Dome’s grand opening in the presence of HM Queen after a reception in the House of Lords on the night of 31st December 1999 and into the early hours of 1st January 2000. What a night that was! Since then, the dome - after almost coming to the point of demolition - has transmogrified into an entertainment venue known as “O2″. I shall always think of it as “the Dome”.

I passed the Dome today on my way to a conference organized by the Greenwich Peninsula Chaplaincy. I also passed these spring flowers.

The Greenwich Peninsula is a major regeneration area, transforming itself from

to

The aim of the conference was to examine two questions:

1. What makes a good community?
2. What is the contribution which faith communities make to a good community?

I was one of four speakers in the morning session:

• Professor Hilary Russell, European Institute for Urban Affairs, Liverpool John Moores University.
• Seema Ahmad, National Executive member of the Islamic Society of Britain
• Barney Leith
• The Ven. Christine Hardman, Archdeacon of Lewisham

I quoted Universal House of Justice’s definition of community:

… it is a comprehensive unit of civilization composed of individuals, families and institutions that are originators and encouragers of systems, agencies and organizations working together with a common purpose for welfare of people both within and beyond its own borders; it is a composition of diverse interacting participants that are achieving unity in an unremitting quest for spiritual and social progress.

I have to say that this does seem to be a much more purpose-driven vision than most people would have of the nature of community. The UK government’s Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) defines sustainable communities like this:

… places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.

This definition is more about meeting needs that the House of Justice’s definition, which focuses much more on what people do (or ought to do) in their “unremitting quest” for spiritual and social progress.

My focus was more on communities as networks of relationships: of people to each other, of people to their environment, of people to the place where they live. I also stressed the Baha’i understanding that we relate at different levels to our families, our neighbourhoods, our towns or cities, our countries, and the whole world. Our loyalty to one level cannot conflict with our loyalty to another level.

I concluded with the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá from the first selection in Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in which He recommends:

… harmony and fellowship, and love and solidarity; indeed it is compassion and unity, and the end of foreignness; it is the being at one, in complete dignity and freedom, with all on earth.

Surely this is the basis of true community.

Anyway, if you would like to read my paper you can download it here.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, London, Greenwich, chaplaincy, community, community building, neighbourhood, unity, solidarity

British young people seem intent on drinking themselves and British society in a complete stupor. Our government believed that it could change the traditional British drinking culture of knocking back the booze until you fall over into a continental-style café culture of allegedly civilized drinking by allowing pubs and clubs to obtain licences to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.

This would, the story went, help regenerate run-down city centres into civilized piazzas with restaurants and bars and cafes frequented by well-heeled patrons eating and drinking moderately and enjoying their evenings out.

But the drinks industry, a monstrous beast whose main aim is to sky-rocket its profits, which it can do by selling vast quantities of cheap beer, wine, alcopops and spirits to 18-24 year olds, helped subvert the government’s café-culture dream world and turned it into a booze-filled nightmare of over-consumption and violence.

Of course, the drinks industry was swimming with a fast-flowing tide. A generation which was raised with a belief in its unlimited entitlement to whatever it wanted whenever it wanted it and which is the inheritor of a very long British history of binge-drinking (stand up and pour it down your neck until you fall over) was unlikely to resist the blandishments of the “happy hour” and cheap hooch. It was definitely not going to learn to sit for hours with its little finger crooked over a small white wine when it could blast its brains out 24-hours a day with high-alcohol-content drinks that tasted like lemonade.

in denial

Whose fault is this? The government’s? Well, I am sure that anyone with any brains left over after a stimulating night out could have told them the likely outcome of their strange fantasy about Britain becoming like an ad man’s version of France. According to Reuters, the government is in denial:

Despite violent crime between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. rising by more than a quarter, the government will say the total amount of alcohol-related offences has fallen by three percent, the Daily Mail reported.

But Sir Simon Milton, the chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA) and leader of Westminster council, has labelled the new laws a “mistake”.

Is the fault of the drinks industry - manufacturers, pubs, clubs and retailers? Who’s going to turn down the opportunity of lots of lovely moolah when the government gives you such a legislative present?

What about local authorities? Shouldn’t they have exerted more control? Or the drinkers? Shouldn’t they have exercised more self-discipline?

There are plenty of people to blame for turning our city centres into weekend battlegrounds. And, what do you know? Everyone is passing the blame onto everyone else.

Anyway, we can be happy in the knowledge that 24-hour drinking will continue. The government has no intention of changing those laws. Instead, it will punish retailers who sell to underage drinkers and put out adverts warning of the dangers of excessive drinking. So that’s all right then.

But a combination of a “two strikes and you’re out” policy for retailers and public health messages for the drinkers really seems to miss the hard core of the problem. Yes, retailers should make sure they keep within the law, and, yes, public health messages make us all feel better – even if they don’t change our behaviour. But the root of this particular complex of problems lies in a moral crisis and a cultural narrative that says that getting ratted = having fun.

a fundamental moral crisis

According to Udo Schaeffer (in Baha’i Ethics in Light of Scripture: An Introduction)

We are facing a fundamental crisis of morals with far-reaching impact on the stability of the body politic. (p. 101)

What is the cause of this process and where it is leading us? In my view, the crisis of morality is a consequence of the crisis of religion. (p. 103)

The crisis of the Christian faith is closely connected with the the crisis of morality. Norms and moral values are of an axiomatic nature and cannot be proved exclusively by reason. They are linked to convictions, to faith. One must believe in them. Religion has been able to create a system of transcendent values and ideals, to sustain a hierarchy of values, declaring some of them to be absolute and universal, others to be relative and particular. (p. 105)

In the absence of a strong religious foundation for ethics and people’s ethical commitment, we try to rely on reason to derive our ethical principles. But the rational justification of morals fails precisely because there is no guarantee that everyone will be convinced by any given reason for a particular norm, no matter how cogent; there is no longer any “public, shared rationale or justification” for morality, as Alistair MacIntyre states in After Virtue

This means that there are no unconditional duties and no universally binding norms. Each one of us becomes the judge of our own morality and the arbiter of social order.

When these notions are detached from human self-responsibility and from the commitment to the common weal, they become nothing more than expressions of egoism and selfishness. (Schaeffer, Baha’i Ethics, p. 107)

Zygmunt Bauman points up the conclusion of this relativisation of value:

In the plural and pluralistic world of post-modernity, every form of life is permitted in principle, or, rather, no agreed principles are evident which may render any form of life impermissible. (”Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.” Telos, no. 78, pp. 7-42.)

Says Schaeffer:

Society cannot survive once its members have lost the ability to share and sacrifice, once everyone emphasizes only his own rights and strives to serve only his own interests, once the highest aim in life is “fun”, once society is governed by hedonism and egoism…. The cultural crisis of the West … has developed into a global crisis of human civilization, one which gravely endangers the survival of mankind. (p. 108)

This is what Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha’i Faith wrote in in 1936 in one of his extraordinarily far-sighted World Order letters:

No wonder, therefore, that when, as a result of human perversity, the light of religion is quenched in men’s hearts, and the divinely appointed Robe, designed to adorn the human temple, is deliberately discarded, a deplorable decline in the fortunes of humanity immediately sets in, bringing in its wake all the evils which a wayward soul is capable of revealing. The perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished. (Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u'llah, p .187)

Future perfecting

This would be a downbeat note on which to end this post. However, I believe that a new, religiously and spiritually founded morality is possible. Well, more than possible, it actually exists in the sacred Writings of Baha’u'llah, embodied (in embryonic form) in the life of the Baha’i community. As Baha’u'llah writes:

The purpose of the one true God in manifesting Himself is to summon all mankind to truthfulness and sincerity, to piety and trustworthiness, to resignation and submissiveness to the Will of God, to forbearance and kindliness, to uprightness and wisdom. His object is to array every man with the mantle of a saintly character, and to adorn him with the ornament of holy and goodly deeds. (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 299)

The alcoholic crisis of our city centres will never be solved by partial fixes to the licensing laws, nor, indeed, by a return to the status quo ante. No amount of policing is going to stop what is in fact a symptom of a deep spiritual and moral crisis. Nothing short of a renewal of a genuine and well-founded faith-based moral orientation is going to do the trick.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, alcohol, 24-hour drinking, licensing laws, morals, ethics, spirituality, Christianity

Yes, I’m back from Oslo, where I spent the weekend running a training course for local Baha’i representatives in the mystic arts of external affairs in the beautiful Baha’i Centre.

We covered a range of subjects, from how to arrange and conduct a meeting with your MP to dealing with the media.

I stayed here with Britt and Lasse Thoresen:

Amongst other things, I went to see the excellent Centre for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, which is housed in this castle, formerly the home of the notorious Vidkun Quisling, fascist Minister President of German-occupied Norway during the Second World War. The castle (actually called Villa Grande) has been beautifully refurbished inside and out, and the exhibition about the Holocaust is designed in such a way that it touches the heart as well as the head.

I found myself in helpless tears in the basement room whose walls were covered with the names of the Jews deported from Norway by the Nazis. There are many, many names on the walls of that room, but one hit me with great force: it was the name of one of my Jewish friends in London. For a second I thought, No, how can that be? And then I understood. All these were the names of people’s mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, cousins, aunties, friends. All these were the names of persons, members of the human race, who had been carted off to some of the most inhumane places on the planet and cruelly killed or allowed to die.

Relief from the oppression of that place came from the view from a small balcony high up the tower of Villa Grande, the view in the evening twilight over Oslofjord and the departing Copehagen ferry.

No doubt Quisling and his wife enjoyed this view, while the Jews of Norway were deported to their deaths in cattle trucks.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Lasse Thoresen, Norway, Oslo, Holocaust, Jews, Quisling