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?

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.”

Copyright © 2008 The Ruhi Foundation. All rights reserved.

Last Saturday, the junior youth group in Lowell got together. We said a prayer, and then took a walk down by the canal, which had recently been emptied. M. talked about wanting to make the neighborhood better for her younger siblings and for the other children. Over the course of the conversation, we identified two lines of action:

1. Offering homework help on Fridays to the younger kids
2. Helping with children’s classes on the weekend

So it looks like M. will start helping us teach children’s classes! When we finally got down to the canal, Negin noticed a purse with its contents strewn about the path. While M. and I talked about the power of expression and how it can be used to transform the world, Negin was quietly sorting through the contents of the purse. When we walked over to her, she explained that the purse could have been stolen, and M. decided that we should try to contact the owner. When that proved difficult, we set out to drop the purse off at the police station and explain what we had found.

Copyright © 2008 The Ruhi Foundation. All rights reserved.

We could tell M. was excited and nervous about actively engaging in this endeavor. During the walk over, she practiced explaining what we had found. Watching her gather up the courage to talk to the police officer was very inspiring, and seeing the excitement on her face after following through on her commitment was even better.

We hope that in a small way, M. saw how the power of expression can be used to make our communities better.

Related links:

• Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program (comments from participants)
• Louis Gregory Baha’i Institute junior youth program
• Short videos presenting the junior youth program
• Development Learning Press

Today is Blog Action Day 2009, a day for bloggers all over the world to focus their collective work on a single topic. This year: climate change. Here at Anonymous Cowgirl, we’re continuing an examination of individual and institutional action, the Baha’i Faith, and how it all relates to climate change.

Training institute held at the Baha’i Centre in Funafuti, Tuvalu (Copyright 2006, Baha’i International Community)

Still mulling over yesterday’s post on the connection between individual and social transformation and a post from almost two years ago, “WorldChanging and the End of Earth Day.” In that older post, we examined WorldChanging’s concept of “the myth of individual responsibility.” The basic argument was that we’ve become so focused on what individuals can do – recycle, drive less, eat less meat, use less water, and so on – that we’ve forgotten the concerted institutional change that drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require. The unrelenting focus on personal responsibility clouded our minds to the structural changes that were needed, according to the good folk at WorldChanging.

Wary as always of dichotomous thinking, we now have to ask whether the way forward on climate change won’t require some synthesis of individual action and institutional change. If reality is one, how do these two spheres of action fit together into a coherent whole?

If the only action I take is to reduce my own greenhouse emissions through eating less meat or driving less, then small island nations like Tuvalu (some Tuvalan residents pictured above) will still be subsumed by rising sea levels. But can our existing social institutions really rise to the challenge of climate change? I suspect a way forward lies in the concept of “walking a path of service.” From the Ruhi Institute:

According to this vision of social change, the Ruhi Institute directs its present efforts to develop human resources within a set of activities that conduce to spiritual and intellectual growth, but are carried out in the context of each individual’s contribution to the establishment of new structures, whether in villages and rural regions or in large urban centers.

At this moment in history, Baha’i social action is largely focused at the neighborhood scale. Visiting neighbors in each others’ homes to share stories, caring for the intellectual and spiritual development of children, empowering young people to contribute to the betterment of the community. But within these efforts are the seeds of new social structures.

I guess my conclusion is that we’re going to see more bad times before it gets better. Drought is real; rising sea levels are real; 7 billion of us are spewing CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Until we develop both the individual discipline and the institutional cooperation needed to address climate change, we won’t see many improvements there. But if we want our social institutions to function better, we need to start walking a path of service today that lays the foundation for new social structures.

Related Links

• Presented at the UN Climate Change conference in Poznan, Poland December 2008: Seizing the Opportunity: Redefining the Challenge of Climate Change (pdf)
• Ethics are ‘missing dimension’ in climate debate, says IPCC head
• Presented at the UN Summit on Climate Change September 2009: Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change: Appeal to World Leaders (pdf)
• Therese over at Interns@BIC blogs on Global Civil Society and Climate Change
• Make this Earth Day your last! (WorldChanging)

A study circle in the fields of Kamashi, Rwanda, in June 2004 (Copyright 2006, Baha’i International Community)

Therese over at the BIC Interns Blog posted on last month’s opening session of the UN Summit on Climate Change. She writes honestly about the speed with which political institutions have responded to climate change, and about the challenge of “developing an adequate institutional framework for intergovernmental cooperation.”

Her comments reminded me of this passage from the Ruhi Institute:

The Ruhi Institute tries to understand the process of the transformation of human society in terms of a far more complex set of interactions between two parallel developments: the transformation of the individual, and the deliberate creation of the structures of a new society. Moreover, just as it does not view the human being as a mere product of interactions with nature and society, it does not identify structural change only with political and economic processes. Rather, it sees the necessity of change in all structures—mental, cultural, scientific and technological, educational, economic and social—including a complete change in the very concepts of political leadership and power.

–The Ruhi Institute

What do these two things have to do with each other? Therese points to the need for a new institutional framework to approach climate change as a global community. This seems consistent with the quotation from the Ruhi Institute, but it is unclear to me how we get from one to the other. The Ruhi Institute approaches social action as neither limited to individual transformation nor solely focused on transforming social structures. Rather, the intellectual and spiritual development of the individual is expressed not through personal salvation but through a set of activities that contribute to the establishment of new social institutions:

This continuous interaction, between the parallel processes of the spiritualization of the individual and the establishment of new social structures, describes the only dependable path of social change, one that avoids both complacency and violence and does not perpetuate the cycles of oppression and illusory freedom that humanity has experienced in the past.

–The Ruhi Institute

Dear reader, what do you think? What is the role of social institutions in addressing climate change? How can the individual contribute to such seemingly out-of-reach efforts?

In Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger discusses how groups of practitioners learn by pursuing a common enterprise. He defines practice as a shared history of learning — shared experiences of histories of participation and reification in the world. For example, the Baha’i world community is currently pursuing an enterprise of growth. Together, we are learning about growing the community. The practice of growth is actually a shared history of learning. Some of that learning is reified into statistics, Ruhi books, and guidance from the institutions of the Faith. But those reifications are meaningless without participation — people all over the world carrying out acts of service, practicing new ways of interacting with each other, trying new ways of being that are sometimes challenging or scary. The interplay between participation and reification builds up over time, and the community learns about growth.

At the Association for Baha’i Studies (ABS) conference, Mr. Lample spoke about frameworks for learning. He encouraged the friends to imagine frameworks for learning about other aspects of our lives: Social action, discourse, social and economic development, and even scholarship. Learning about growth is an enterprise the Baha’is are engaged in right now, but this does not mean that we should stop learning about other parts of human existence. What is important is to approach each of these aspects in an attitude of learning.

In his talk, Mr. Lample reminded the friends of steps that Baha’is have previously taken to translate belief into action:

1. Read the guidance
2. Reflect on experience to date
3. Ask what works? What has worked in the past?
4. Define initial lines of action. (They can always change later.)

Which brings us to the title of this blog post: A Framework for Learning about Baha’i Scholarship. Learning about scholarship will probably require elements of both reification and participation. For example, we can read about teaching children’s classes, but we also have to physically experience organizing a class and interacting with children. Otherwise the knowledge in our heads is two-dimensional. What do you think this looks like for scholarship?

Links:

• Workbook on “Scholarship, Service & Social Action in the Context of the Divine Plan” (pdf)
• Resources for Baha’i Scholarship at the Assocation for Baha’i Studies website
• Podcast of Paul Lample in Nashville, Tennessee at The American Baha’i, 24 August 2008 (requires login)