Category — Community

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

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Hat-tip to Matt Weinberg of the Baha’i Internet Agency for this interesting piece.

Fellowship may spawn community involvement
Saturday, March 03, 2007
By Matt Vande Bunte

GRAND RAPIDS — The best way to reach out is to focus inward, according to a scholar who studies the civic role of religious congregations.

Churches, synagogues and mosques impact society less by adopting a “changing-the-world kind of agenda” than by concentrating on their primary spiritual purpose, Nancy Ammerman said this week at Calvin College.

“Doing good in the world depends, ironically, on congregations willing to spend most of their energy on worship, religious education and fellowship,” said Ammerman, professor of sociology of religion at Boston University’s School of Theology. “Congregations that don’t tend to their internal well-being end up running out of gas.”

Ammerman spoke as a guest of the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics. Her research, based on a sample of the 300,000-plus congregations nationwide that provide a point of community engagement for about half of Americans, is published in “Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners.”

Ammerman said fellowship spawns “a broad and busy range of activities,” such as committee meetings and fundraising campaigns that ultimately
benefit the public good by inspiring people to volunteer and develop civic leadership skills.

Ammerman said congregations function as a “kind of first-response social service agency,” meeting the needs of members, and provide “person power” to a variety of religious and secular nonprofit organizations and government agencies, such as schools.

“Just going about what congregations think they ought to be doing builds a kind of infrastructure that’s critical to the larger community,” she said. “The more they participate in their congregation, the more likely that initial leap into volunteering is going to happen.”

It seems to me that there is something for Baha’is to reflect on here (and people of other faiths). And it provides a practical answer to those secularists who would like to push religion off the public square. Faith communities provide a huge amount of social service not only in the US but also here in the UK. For example, if the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish community were to withdraw from providing education, our educational system would be in terrible trouble.

Technorati Tags: faith, spirituality, congregations, community, social service, education, churches