Baha’is in the streets of Hatfield
I’ve been hoping to find time to share some stories and thoughts about my experience last weekend on the streets of Hatfield talking to people about the Baha’i Faith.
Unfortunately time has shot past and I’ve been tied up with meetings or urgent things to do and unable to make time to write here. What’s more, times in the coming days when I’d hope to write some posts have now been lost to more meetings!
Intense experiences
Anyway, I will say that the weekend’s experiences were intense: lots of prayer, study, consultation, and then talking to all sorts of people, some receptive to hearing new things, others not. There were times of elation and times of desperation, especially towards the end of a long day on the stump and facing a street of obdurate doors.
There were also some very tender moments. One Gujurati family (all Hindus), whom we would never had met had we not knocked on their door and asked if they would like to learn about the Bahá’í Faith, were open-hearted and welcoming. We met them on Friday, and returned (at their invitation) on Saturday to continue our conversation. Language was a difficulty. Their English needs working on. I am completely ignorant of Gujurati and Hindi. And yet we managed to communicate
Sharing the Baha’i Faith in Gujurati
Last night I sat for a couple of hours in this lovely family’s home and listened to a Bahá’í from London who speaks Gujurati talking with Madhu, one of the family, about the Bahá’í Faith. Madhu read out the introduction to a Gujurati translation of the Hidden Words and had plenty to say in her own language about what she was reading. (Madhu is a person of some capacity, with an LLB and having worked in Gujurat as a counsellor, but she is stuck in a relatively poor household with two young children, and unable to develop and use her potential largely because of the limitations of her language; she is desperate to learn English.)
Learning
What have I learned? It takes me a lot of spiritual preparation to step so far outside my comfort zone - and even then I found knocking on doors and inviting people to take a bit of time to learn about my Faith really quite stressful.
But, doing this brought me (and other Bahá’ís) into contact with people I’d never have met in a month of Sundays in any other way. Many didn’t want to know - and we did not push anything on anyone - but a significant number were very happy to learn about the Bahá’í Faith and have asked to continue these conversations and to find out more.
And I am now committed to working with Madhu and her family as they continue to study the Bahá’í teachings.
Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Hindu, Gujurati, prayer, teaching, religion, Hatfield
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10 comments
Thanks for sharing your experiences Barney. My wife and I are anxious to go to a community where we can experience this –and I too wonder how comfortable I would be doing it. But on the other hand if there are people who respond positively then perhaps the discomfort is worthwhile. The home visits though are an entirely different thing and I can see myself looking forward to this quite a bit! Maybe we can can come to England someday and you can take us with you
Ah, this is the story I’ve been waiting to hear since I heard you would be doing direct teaching in the ‘hood. Thrilling, even just to read. We here in Tacoma are having similar experiences of meeting families we would not have met otherwise unless we had knocked on their door.
Last night, along with another brand new Baha’i, just four weeks since her declaration, we visited once of these precious souls in what is our 6th home visit in the last two and a half weeks, staying for three of those visits for a full 90 minutes, having begun study of Ruhi Book 1.
The wisdom in Baha’is undertaking this kind of outreach is that it places us in contact with people who we very likely would never meet otherwise because they might not live in our neighborhood or would be hesitant to come to our homes.
In the U.S., we have certain specific criteria to identify neighborhoods that are receptive to door-to-door teaching. The receptive neighborhoods tend to be lower income, immigrant or minority, with many children visible out of doors.
I think the result of this getting outside our comfort zones will be a Baha’i community more representative of the population as a whole. Ultimately, this will have an impact on social justice. After all, the Baha’i communities in the West should not be majority Iranian. Rather, they should reflect the makeup of the countries in which they grow and flourish.
Brian, George, Bill, thank you all for your wise and perceptive comments.
I cannot think of two days in my recent life when I learned so much. I don’t mean that I learned what I would pass an exam with. What I learned was really about myself and my capacity to tolerate anxiety as I knocked on each door, while thinking that perhaps this was the door behind which I and my teaching partner would find someone who would fall in love with Baha’u'llah.
It’s not easy (for me, at least) to sustain for a whole day a spiritual and loving approach to blank doors looking for the response of the soul behind the door. Without prayer - a lot of prayer - it is not possible.
Bill, I wanted to say how much I agree with your view that the only way the Baha’i community is going to become more representative of the population as a whole is if we go and knock on people’s doors - at least to get ourselves started.
Yes, it’s an important step to social justice. I can’t see how else we can accomplish Bahá’u'lláh’s aim of uniting humankind and building a new global civilization based on justice.
It’s called dogfooding, Barney.
Hi Barney! I was curious to know how your experience would be. Thank you for sharing this. We will be trying this soon here in Iceland. Actually a good friend of mine came back recentry from such a project in Merton, London area, with very inspiring stories. Take care and good luck with all this
Thanks for sharing your experience Barney ! We are planning to go door to door in the nearby town of Penzance for our intensive in August. I must admit that I did not want to do this in our own small village -children that go to my school live there- but the relative anonymity of a larger town seems easier.
[...] as Bill pointed out in his comment on my first post about teaching at people’s door, the answer to this question may have something to do with [...]
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