A song from Benin
- On God’s Holy Mountain - and away from my blog
- International Convention is under way
- Results of a genuinely global election
- A song from Benin
- Who learns from whom?
- Returning home
- International Bahá’í Conventions - photos on Flickr
- In the prison cell of Bahá’u'lláh
- International Bahá’í Convention - official photo
- In the House of ‘Abbúd
- Reviving the world and regenerating its peoples
- If you love diversity, look at this…
This morning, a thousand delegates from some 150 countries to the International Baha’i Convention in Haifa, Israel, stood in silence as sirens sounded outside the Convention Centre to honour Holocaust Memorial Day. After this powerfully solemn and moving period, a delegate from Benin, who had been speaking when the sirens sounded, ended his contribution with a song that the Baha’is in his cluster had written as a way of teaching basic facts about the Faith.
In a moment the whole Convention was singing. Wonderful!
We’ve heard some wonderfully inspiring stories from Baha’i communities in Kiribati, Samoa, Senegal, India, UK, and many other countries. The stories are of learning, success, struggle. Almost 17,000 people becoming Baha’is in one year in India. Increasing declarations of faith from 2 or 3 per year to 20 during the Fast last in Senegal.
I had intended yesterday to provide this link to the Baha’i World News story with the names of the newly elected members of the Universal House of Justice, but my iPod battery ran out.
Right now I’m sitting outside instead of being in the session, trying to digest a good lunch and a fascinating conversation with a Baha’i who is both a cosmologist and a scholar of the Writings in Persian and Arabic. We talked in great depth (on his side at least) about some of what the Writings say about science and religion and the nature of revelation as a rational and non-arbitrary process. No time or capacity to write about this now, though.
Technorati Tags: Bahai, Baha’i, Holocaust, Israel, International Convention, science, religion
4 comments
Cosmologist and scholar.. that can only be Steven!
Thank you so much for sharing the little details from this grand and amazing process. We are agog (there’s a word I’ve wanted to use and finally can
!
Well guessed, Prema! Oh, and I love the word “agog”.
My dear friend, thank you very much for the words that so kindly served to make us be there, even for a glimpse!
Of course (at least me!) would be delighted to read more, but when I wrote you my first comment on the Convention I thought you were going to write after you returned, so, accept my sincere gratitude for these wonderful texts!
I have only one question: did all the NSAs have at least one speaker, or were there some kind of selection on the delegates who were to talk in the sessions? I really cannot have a glimplse on how it works: a national convention cannot, by no dreams, be compared with this unique event (in terms of the consultation process), right?
Sam, individual delegates are free to line up at one of the microphones to take their turn in speaking particularly on the theme of the session, or on whatever is in their hearts. There is no system of pre-selecting speakers.
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