anonymous cowgirl

Allowing ourselves to be full of joy is a skill. It can be learned, and it contributes to providing the environment envisioned in the courses of the training institute.

• On Friday, Negin and I sat down with a group of junior youth in our neighborhood. They were practicing tricks on their BMX bicycles and were very happy to explain what they were doing. Out of this conversation among equals, a very honest discussion emerged – the sort of discussion that would occur between close friends.
• On Sunday, we were singing a song about justice with a group of children in a nearby town, and the kids started laughing hysterically – which is a pretty awesome sight to witness – but they kept on singing through their laughter. Pretty soon everyone in the room – parents, teachers, older siblings and children were cracking up as well.
• Stop motion animation brings me joy. Here are a few good ones:
  • Shirin and Na’im made their own stop motion animation – “Newspaper Hats and Paper Pipes.”
  • Oren Lavie’s stop motion music video for “Her Morning Elegance” is pretty great.

Anyway, that’s what I learned this week. What did you learn?

Some things that have come across our desk this week.

• DenDen and friends “raise capacity within a population to take charge of its own spiritual, social and intellectual development.”
• Handmade Weddings: In the Moment (aka Golriz + Devon)
• Rethinking prosperity: sustainable production and consumption
• Lowell Handmade’s Etsy page.

Was going to embed a video of Golriz+Devon, but that seemed incorrect. Go read the Etsy write up instead. And to satisfy the video fix, here’s Mi Leaozinho from Saman Maydani on Vimeo.

Reprinted with permission of the Bahá’í World Centre

Talia at Advancing the Spirit of Economics posted on the role that community plays in individual and social transformation. One of the prompts was:

“What if our true identity, as a community, is spiritual, consisting of members working together to enable each individual to embark upon a process of learning to become protagonists of their own spiritual and material development?”

This image of community as people “working together to enable each individual to embark upon a process of learning” is beautiful. It places knowledge at the center of community life.

Community can often seem like a nebulous concept — what do we really mean when we use the word? Given this confusion, many phenomena are called community. So we see online social networks that are really just affinity groups for people interested in the same passtimes, and we call them communities. But if the generation and application of knowledge for spiritual and material development is placed at the center of the community, then whole worlds open up. Now our community has a purpose. The endeavors undertaken with this new conception of community would be more than gathering together to watch a favorite television show or a favorite sports team.

In practice

In efforts to expand a program for the spiritual empowerment of young people in our region, we begin to see that placing knowledge at the center of our endeavors for building community effects how we approach everything. If generating knowledge is our function, then we derive joy from this undertaking, even when things don’t run as smoothly as our theories say they should. Each new group, each new experience, is one more opportunity to learn.

Reprinted with permission of the Bahá’í World Centre

This is a thank you to the seven Iranian Baha’i leaders recently sentenced to serve 20 years in Gohardasht Prison, west of Tehran. Thank you for receiving these persecutions with radiant love and strength. Out of respect for this sacrifice, we will “persist in [our] efforts to learn the ways and methods of community building in small settings.”

More than 50 years ago, during a time of similar persecution, the following message was sent on behalf of Shoghi Effendi.

The entire world is saddened by the reports that have been received of the persecutions of the firm believers in Persia, the Cradle of the Faith. Certainly these persecutions will release a very strong spiritual influence throughout the world; and the Bahá’ís everywhere, outside of Persia, should arise with renewed effort, in order to take advantage of this spiritual power, and teach the Cause very vigorously. If the Faith spreads rapidly in all other parts of the world, then it will mean that the Persian believers will not have suffered in vain.

The Guardian hopes that the believers who have relative freedom will realize under what difficulties the main body of believers are serving in Persia, and will therefore arise, in accordance with the spirit of the time, to disperse to new centres, to establish Spiritual Assemblies and to increase the Bahá’í fold. (From a letter by Leroy Ioas, Messages to Canada)

Earlier this year, Roxanna Saberi described the strength she witness from two of these seven individuals.

And Fariba had been in solitary confinement for four months, and they had not seen their lawyers yet. And from them, I learned many lessons of strength. They were pressured to make false confessions about themselves, but they wouldn’t agree to do it, even though they probably could’ve been freed that way. (Roxana Saberi, Morning Edition)

Reprinted with permission of the Bahá’í International Community

The photo above was taken in Ivel, the same village where the following report takes place – from a similar act of violence two years ago. Baha’i World News Service reports:

GENEVA — Homes belonging to some 50 Baha’i families in a remote village in northern Iran have been demolished as part of a long-running campaign to expel them from the region.

The demolitions are the latest development in an ongoing, officially-sanctioned program in the area which has targeted every activity of the Baha’is.

“They’re being forbidden to associate with Muslims, or even offer service to their friends and neighbours,” said Diane Ala’i, representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations in Geneva.

“Even the smallest acts of good will – such as taking flowers to someone who’s sick in hospital or donating gifts to an orphanage – these are being seen as actions against the regime.”

Read the full story: Homes demolished in campaign to drive Baha’is out of Iranian village.

Reprinted with permission of the Bahá’í World Centre

On a 90 degree weekend, we tried to complete Unit 3 of Releasing the Powers of Junior Youth. Building off what we learned about training junior youth animators last week, here is an update on the second weekend:

• Not everyone read all of Spirit of Faith during the week, so we split into small groups, each of which studied one section. Than we reconvened to share what we had learned. Participants who had been quiet in the big group ended up sharing wonderful insights in this smaller space. And the whole group developed a deeper appreciation for the material.
• At the end of Unit 3, we split into groups with our co-animators to make plans. Each group made some kind of commitment to enter the field of service, and the tutors compiled a calendar of these pledges.
• The participants are amazing individuals, all of whom are willing to contribute time and effort for the betterment of society. Adults often underestimate what young people are capable of doing, but it was clear from both weekends that these young people (age 14 to 60!) are amazing. Oh yeah – we had a 14 year old classmate of one of the participants come for the second weekend. She is a rising sophomore in high school, and she contributed a lot to that group’s planning discussion.
• Pictures! There’s a small set of photos up on Flickr called Animator Training June 2010.

As we step into the field to visit with the junior youth, these words from the Universal House of Justice come to mind: “There is every indication that the programme engages their expanding consciousness in an exploration of reality that helps them to analyse the constructive and destructive forces operating in society and to recognize the influence these forces exert on their thoughts and actions.”

Reprinted with permission of the Bahá’í World Centre

This last weekend, we completed two units in Releasing the Power of Junior Youth, a training course for animators of junior youth groups. Here are a few things we learned:

• Having a sense of purpose changes the environment of a study circle. When the participants are there because they intend to help adolescents contribute to the betterment of their communities, then everything we talk about – everything we read – everything we do – is in light of that commitment to study and action.
• Preparation is super helpful! Tutors should get together beforehand and read through any material to be covered that day. Look for places in the text that may require a different pace, or a different approach to study. What are the major concepts or themes? Is there relevant guidance that might apply to discussions when they arise?
• Youth will invite other youth! This has been one of the best parts. When participants are excited, they will invite their friends. Then the conversation is enriched with diverse expression.

Will share more after round 2 this weekend. Have you been in one of these trainings? What did you learn at yours?

Dear friends,

Just learned that another court date has been set for the Baha’i leaders imprisoned in Iran: June 12th. Please keep them in your prayers. Here’s a link to Lev’s last post on this topic, describing Roxana Saberi’s account of her time with the Baha’is in Evin Prison.

Also want to point you towards the website for the Ziba Kazemi Foundation, named after the Canadian photojournalist who was imprisoned in Evin prison and came out in a coma, with signs of physical and sexual abuse. She died soon afterwards but her son has developed this foundation to try to seek justice. I believe their main income (to pay for court fees) is from selling her photos. The ones from Haiti are particularly timely, so please check them out. (I learned about it from Zahra’s Paradise, a webcomic about Iran, featured in the Economist recently – also worth a gander.)

Wasn’t my wife’s last post well done? She’s such a good example of putting meaningful thoughts on this blog. She’s also left me the perfect segue to a new post on maturity.

As the growth of the junior youth empowerment program continues in our region, and as Negin and I look at the next few years, it seems like we’re entering a new phase. As such, I’ve been seized by an organizational bug – trying to arrange my hopes and goals for potential doctoral programs, trying to be more systematic about the continued growth of junior youth groups, even going to bed earlier! The following passage from Baha’u'llah sums it up nicely:

My friend and advisor Sam Sommers recently published a post on his blog “Science of Small Talk” on the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” Facebook group. His post examines how political correctness has become a pejorative term and why that seems misguided (and also whether the idea of opposing PC-ness has any bearing on the religious responses to the SouthPark/Facebook frenzy). It’s much more complicated than I am going to describe here – but I encourage you to read the whole post.
An excerpt:

…After all, [political correctness] comes from a good place with good intention to which most of us would subscribe: to make sure that all people feel comfortable and even valued. It doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing to err on that side of caution much of the time.
We live in a far more open, tolerant, and equitable society today than people did 50 years ago. The flat-out rejection and demonization of political correctness strikes me as a repudiation of much of this progress.

It is, for Muslims, incredibly offensive to try to portray the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in any way. Christians tend to not understand this, because there is a long historical tradition in Christian art of portraying Jesus the Christ and pretty much everyone associated with Him. (And often His Holiness Christ is portrayed with seriously Eurocentric features, but I’ll save that discussion for the essay I’m working on for the Mirror of Race website.) So for people coming from a Christian/ western understanding of the world, it’s an issue of free speech and common practice. For people coming from a Muslim religious background, it’s just ineffably horrifying.

Anyway, usually I’d chalk it up to old frameworks and lack of cross-cultural understanding and willingness to take perspective, etc, but I caught a fragment of a news story that this whole Facebook thing (and probably some other motivating factors) has led the government of Pakistan to place a ban on Facebook. And Youtube, Flickr, etc. Now this has gotten political – and because of my sister’s current residence, personal. So I thought I’d explore this a bit.

My interest is in framing this at a more personal level. In essence, what’s taking place here is: If A does something which offends B horribly, and A feels B’s response is inappropriate, then A will keep doing that offensive act, because A deems it important to exercise A’s right to free speech. Meanwhile, B gets frustrated and furious in response to what feels like a direct attack in utter disregard of all B holds sacred.

To look at this only in terms of free speech is to come at it from an individualistic framework. It is certainly clear that American culture and institutions value the right of the individual to self-expression. Cultural psychologists have been making this point for decades. In this case the prioritization of the individual (A) above all else is clear. But it isn’t everything.

The response (B) is coming from a deeply held religious belief about the offensiveness of a certain form of that expression – and unfortunately sometimes this is transmuted into calls for violence. The reactionary nature of that type of response – to shut down communication, or go on the attack – is truly harmful, and suggests a lack of faith in human nobility/ integrity.

Either way, I think we can do better. I honestly believe we as a human race are more mature than this – or at least capable of more maturity. For Baha’is, this issue is placed in the context of humanity’s relationship with God. The Universal House of Justice explains:

“The prohibition on representing the Manifestation of God in paintings and drawings or in dramatic presentations applies to all the Manifestations of God. There are, of course, great and wonderful works of art of past Dispensations, many of which portrayed the Manifestations of God in a spirit of reverence and love. In this Dispensation however the greater maturity of mankind and the greater awareness of the relationship between the Supreme Manifestation and His servants enable us to realize the impossibility of representing, in any human form, whether pictorially, in sculpture or dramatic representation, the Person of God’s Manifestations.”

More on maturity later…