A Baha’i misses Blog Action Day!

I’m ashamed of myself. I failed to post on Blog Action Day!

Now, I’m sure that the absence of a post by me on any day of the year about eliminating poverty isn’t going to make a whole heap of a difference to the world’s poor. But I had made a commitment and I should have kept it.

Now the whinge

OK, here come the excuses. But first, a health warning. If you want to avoid the sound, taste and sight of a grovelling blogger put your fingers in your ears, hold your nose, close your eyes, look away now.

I’ve been away (as you might have gathered from a couple of previous posts here and from Twitter). When I came back, it took me a whole day to get my desk and my emails straight again. This was quickly followed by days of meetings.

And then I fell into an unaccountable depression. I get like this from time to time. Something like Churchill’s “black dog” – but without Churchill or the dog. A sort of down-in-the-dumps feeling, heaviness, a weariness of the soul. Was this what the mediaevals used to call “melancholia”.

And to accompany this I felt like I was getting ‘flu or a cold. Happily (now there’s a word I like to write), I didn’t get either the ‘flu or a cold.

Pipped at the post

I started to write a post for Blog Action Day – on the day itself. Foolish, really, I should have written it ages ago. And as I wrote I realized that I really wasn’t qualified to write about poverty. I fiddled around trying to find some good graphics – and then I had to rush out to catch a train to London long before the post was finished.

When I got back, I was exhausted (see the above reference to my melancholia) and just could not be bothered to do anything very much.

So I didn’t. I’ll write an apologia the following day, I thought. But I didn’t do that either. So, here I am a couple of days after the Day itself trotting out my excuses.

Open your eyes

OK, those of you who turned away when I started my self-pitying whinge can open up again. Oh, and you can take your fingers out of your ears. Hello?! You can start reading again.

What I would have written

‘Cos I’m going to tell you what I would have written on Blog Action Day. Well, maybe not all of it. I didn’t get round to writing all of it – or, let’s be honest, to thinking all of it.

But I wanted to share some thoughts from a Bahá’í perspective about poverty and its elimination.

I was going to tell you about the principles of unity and social justice that infuse the Bahá’í Holy Writings. If applied wisely over time, these would eventually eliminate the huge gap between the rich and the poor in the world.

No quick fixes

Bahá’ís have come to understand that there can be no quick fixes to the situation humankind has got itself into. There has to be a deep-rooted transformation of individuals and societal structures.

But before we can do this we need to get to grips with two things (at the very least).

Who are we? Why are we here?

We need to have a clear idea of who we are as human beings, what purposes our lives have and how we should live those lives.

We also need to be aware of two parallel processes – disintegration and reconstruction – that are going on in the world right now. Of the two, disintegration is the noisier and the more obvious, but reconstruction is also happening, often more hidden and more quietly, but it is going on.

As I was writing the post I never published, I dug out some slides from a presentation I gave some time ago about a wonderful and illuminating Bahá’í document called One Common Faith. For what they are worth, here they are.

Two parallel processes

Self-understanding is essential

Core spiritual values

Materialism has failed

One of the key messages of One Common Faith is that the kind of dogmatic materialism that took over the world in the 19th and 20th centuries has failed the world’s peoples. The motive was not bad – we all want to improve the lot of humanity – but the means was based on a false premise, that human needs are satisfied only by material goods.

Spiritual transformation

I don’t deny that we need material means. It would be foolish to do so. But as a Bahá’í I believe that we humans are essentially spiritual in nature and that deep-rooted and sustainable solutions to our problems demand that we understand and act on this basis.

Compassion and unity and the end of foreignness

One of my favourite extracts from the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’u'lláh’s eldest Son and the Head of the Bahá’í community after Bahá’u'lláh’s passing in 1892 until His own death in 1921, emphatically points to the spiritual element necessary for the kind of global prosperity that Bahá’ís envisage:

O peoples of the world! The Sun of Truth hath risen to illumine the whole earth, and to spiritualize the community of man. Laudable are the results and the fruits thereof, abundant the holy evidences deriving from this grace. This is mercy unalloyed and purest bounty; it is light for the world and all its peoples; it is 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.

The quotation goes on to compare human beings to the leaves, blossoms and fruits of a single “world-tree” and says:

It is needful for the bough to blossom, and leaf and fruit to flourish, and upon the interconnection of all parts of the world-tree, dependeth the flourishing of leaf and blossom, and the sweetness of the fruit.

For this reason must all human beings powerfully sustain one another and seek for everlasting life; and for this reason must the lovers of God in this contingent world become the mercies and the blessings sent forth by that clement King of the seen and unseen realms. Let them purify their sight and behold all humankind as leaves and blossoms and fruits of the tree of being. Let them at all times concern themselves with doing a kindly thing for one of their fellows, offering to someone love, consideration, thoughtful help. Let them see no one as their enemy, or as wishing them ill, but think of all humankind as their friends; regarding the alien as an intimate, the stranger as a companion, staying free of prejudice, drawing no lines.

Who’s responsible?

I think this puts the responsibility firmly on my shoulders. And yours, too, of course. But we don’t discharge that responsibility solely by sending money to our favourite famine relief charity or development agency.

There’s more to be done. We have to learn to act within the framework set out by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Who was, by the way, a one-man poverty relief agency in Akka and Haifa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – He knew whereof He spoke).

Gotta rush

That’s something like what I would have written on Blog Action Day. I could write tons more, but I have to rush off right now!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, poverty, Blog Action Day, spirituality, materialism, disintegration, reconstruction, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, solidarity

Tagged as: 'Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i, Blog Action Day, disintegration, materialism, poverty, reconstruction, solidarity, Spirituality