Category — Travel

Princes Street, Edinburgh

Yesterday’s treat was a flying visit to Edinburgh to launch the Bahá’í Religious Education Agency (Scotland) on behalf of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the UK.

Up at 5.30 a.m., and drove to Luton airport by 7.30 a.m. for my budget flight to Scotland’s capital city, where I arrived at 10.30 a.m.

Baha’i Religious Education Agency

I met with the three members of BREA (Scotland) at the Edinburgh Bahá’í Centre, briefed them about their terms of reference, and consulted with them about their work plan.

Religious Education in Scotland is undergoing something of a renaissance and it is a good time to be putting the case for the inclusion of the Bahá’í Faith in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. As things stand, Christianity is still seen as the “sitting tenant” in Scotland, as it were, and other “world religions” will be included in the RE syllabus alongside it.

Children in Scottish schools are to learn not just about the religions but from the religions too. Religious and Moral Education should give them opportunities to consider who they, what their values are and what their values might be.

The members of BREA (Scotland) are three enthusiastic women with experience in education and in public life. I know that they will do a good job.

Edinburgh wander

So the meeting finished sooner than I had expected and I was free to wander. I chose to head along Waterloo Place and to take the steep stair up to the top of Calton Hill on this very gloomy day.

Regent Bridge, Waterloo Place

An Edinburgh tenement building seen from Regent Bridge

City Observatory on the top of Calton Hill

Looking north towards Leith from Calton Hill

The National Monument on Calton Hill (also known as Edinburgh's Shame)

The Royal Palace of Holyroodhouse - Arthur's Seat in the background

Monument to philosopher David Hume in the Old Calton Cemetery

Old cemetery on Calton Hill

Edinburgh is a wonderful city for wandering around in. It has all sorts of nooks and corners, particularly away from the main tourist beat. It has a fascinating history and I found some of that history in the old cemetery on Calton Hill. Philosophers, worthies, rebellious characters and ordinary folk are jumbled together in this fascinating place with its classical style monuments.

More gloomy photos

You can find more of my photos (taken with my mobile phone - I’d forgotten my camera) of a gloomy Edinburgh here.

Home again

By 8.30 p.m. I was home again in the south of England, having had a great day and plonked a great carbon footprint in the atmosphere.

All photos © 2008 John Barnabas Leith

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Edinburgh, religious education, RE, Calton Hill, David Hume

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Our Bahá’í conference at Acuto in sunny Italy has finished and I shall be back home and back to the blog tomorrow - God willing and the creeks don’t rise!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Acuto, Italy

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Some years ago Mrs Barnabas and I took a holiday in the Basque region of south west France, close to the Spanish border.

One of the attractions in the area the tiny settlement of l’Hôpital St Blaise (more detailed page on French Wikipedia) on the Way of St James, the ancient pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela (St James of  Compostela). The star building was a tiny 12th century Romanesque church with features that were clearly derived from Islamic architectural practice.

There are waymarks along the pilgrim route and, sadly, these get vandalized with graffiti. Curiously, and doubly sad for me as a Bahá’í, some of the waymarks have had the letters BAHAI or BAHAI.ORG painted on them, as the reports on this website show.

What people thought of the Bahá’ís

One pilgrim commented in March this year:

In the evenings in the albuerges this led to quite a few heated discussions, someone had found out that it is the name of a non-christian religious group. Well, I don’t know anything about them or if it really was a member of this group but whoever did these graffitis didn’t do this organization a favour….

An old woman in a village told us that they appeared between December and February.

Others took a more moderate view:

I’m sure we all condemn such vandalism - and many of the waymark stones on many of the routes are vandalised in some way. Simlarly there are those who disrespect the routes by throwing litter and trash all over the place.

However I’d make a plea that we don’t get into any controversy about the authorship of this particular graffiti - http://www.bahai.org appears to be the website of the Bahai faith which is clearly not Islamic.

And:

I agree. When I walked the Camino in December, the ‘Bahai’ graffiti had been freshly done. I too found it irritating, but my thoughts turned to the poor (and perhaps damaged) individual who found it necessary to spoil the environment in that way. I did not imagine for a moment that it was the expression of a group. Followers of the Bahai faith are respectable and peaceful people and would not be in sympathy with an individual who spoiled the environment in this way. Neither - in all probability - is that individual anything to do with them!

Bahá’í graffiti condemned

As a Bahá’í I absolutely condemn the use of the name of my faith as graffiti to damage the waymarks on this (or indeed on any other) pilgrimage route - of whatever faith. Pilgrimage is an ancient, respected and universal religious practice and one that Bahá’ís share.

Sadly, it seems that the person who perpetrated this outrage was a Bahá’í, as this entry on the pilgrimage site shows:

Afraid the chap got a bit cocky, and left his details in the visitors’ books along the way.

He is a 56 year-old, from Metz in France, named Jean-Marc Tesson. I even have his National ID number that he left in the book in Arzua.

I find it difficult to believe that a Bahá’í perpetrated this outrage and I am deeply ashamed and saddened that this is the case. What did he hope to achieve? It clearly was not the act of a balanced or rational person. I hope his conscience is giving him a hard time.

Interestingly, a number of the pilgrims were more inclined to be forgiving towards this vandal than I am!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, pilgrimage, pilgrim route, Santiago de Compostela, St James of Compostela, Camino, Way of St James, vandalism, graffiti

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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.

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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

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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

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As you read this, I am in Oslo at the invitation of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Norway to help train representatives of some of the Norwegian local Baha’i communities in basic external affairs skills. I shall be working on this with my colleague and friend Dan Wheatley.

While we’re there we shall be attending the Nineteen Day Feast that starts the Baha’i month of fasting - a month that runs from sunset on 1 March to sunset on 20 March. Of course, we don’t fast solidly for 19 days; we refrain from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset each day (unless we are ill or travelling or breast-feeding - which I shall not be doing - or too old).

Back on Monday!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Norway, Oslo, external affairs, fasting

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Amazingly I got through airport security at Heathrow very quickly (it was early in the morning and Terminal 4 was quite empty). My flight was completely problem free - left on time, arrived on time.

So now I am here:

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, travel, Israel, Haifa

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Snow at Helsinki airport. Photo © John Barnabas Leith under a Creative Commons license.

Come Thursday I’m going to have put up with the stressful business of negotiating the “security” checks at Heathrow airport before boarding a flight to foreign parts.

This New York Times op-ed highlights the absurdities and irrelevance of much of the current “security” regime at airports.

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

The truth is, regardless of how many pointy tools and shampoo bottles we confiscate, there shall remain an unlimited number of ways to smuggle dangerous items onto a plane. The precise shape, form and substance of those items is irrelevant. We are not fighting materials, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur.

So I shall pack the fluids I need to take in 100ml bottles and put them in a clear plastic bag. I shall take my shoes off and extract my laptop from my carry-on bag. And I shall stand in a long early-morning queue, waiting to be patted down. Will I and all my fellow passengers be any the safer for it?

Technorati Tags: travel, airport, security, terrorism

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Two railroads come together at Harpers Ferry, the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road, which runs along the Potomac River, and the Winchester and Shenandoah Rail Road. They cross the Potomac on bridges which converge at the mouth of a tunnel in the black cliff on the other side of the river. The sound of American engine whistles echoing off the rock faces in this beautiful and historically significant location is deeply evocative.

Technorati Tags: railroads, railways, trains, USA, Harpers Ferry

Erica and I have returned from our ten-day trip to Virginia and Washington DC.

We spent our first three days in Winchester, VA, a great centre for touring the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

Courthouse, Winchester, VA

The excellent Museum of the Shenandoah Valley is an essential starting point. The museum is well laid out and shows what life in the Shenandoah Valley has been since Europeans began to settle the area in the 18th century. Winchester itself is an attractive city, at least in the residential and downtown areas. Like most American cities, the centre is surrounded by a rash of malls and shopping areas. Unfortunately the centre, which depends on tourists, was a dead zone so early in the season.

We managed a short hike in the George Washington National Forest on Masanutten Mountain. We stopped off at a cafe in Strasburg on the way back to Winchester and found ourselves in conversation with a great-granddaughter of Joseph and Pauline Hannen, early American Baha’is. She herself is not a Baha’i, but she clearly had a great fondness for her Baha’i heritage.

Erica walking in George Washington National Forest

We also took a trip to Harpers Ferry, a place of considerable historic significance at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers.

The history of Harpers Ferry has few parallels in the American drama. It is more than one event, one date, or one individual. It is multi-layered

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