This post is the result of honest exchanges on the challenges, the tensions, the heartaches that many of us have found in the process of integrating the Ruhi study circles into our communities and our lives.
Among the questions addressed in this post are: pro-Ruhi vs. anti-Ruhi; how do we judge if is it a good or a bad methodology? Painful Ruhi experiences, successful Ruhi experiences, rigid attitudes and disenfranchisement of fellow Bahá'ís, discarding firesides and deepenings for Ruhi, dealing with narrow community responses, participation and abstention, fostering change. And throughout reflections on the Ruhi model, on tutoring, and on Books 2 and 6 of the Ruhi sequence.
The following, then, is one attempt at understanding the place and implementation of the Ruhi model in the processes of community growth and cultural change, and addressing some of the very real and painful tensions that arise along the way.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the world Bahá'í community today is the imperative to a change of culture whose magnitude we are still, it seems, very far from begining to conceive. The timescale contemplated for this change stretches from 1996 to the year 2021, the end of the first century of the Formative Age of the Faith.
I don't think the vast majority of us, myself included, have grasped the degree of change that such a timescale implies. Rather, we seem to approach, with great frustration, the changes being introduced into our community processes as a rather full-scale make-over, which nevertheless remains purely cosmetic. We are yet far from recognising 1996 (the moment when this process of conscious culture-change was propelled by the Universal House of Justice), as "a turning point of epochal magnitude." (Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 153, 1996)
As this process has gathered momentum, it has become increasingly, virtually universally, linked to the Ruhi Institute, bringing in its wake, the world over, both great successes and formidable cultural tensions. In the midst of the undoubted trials accompanying the profound tranformation we are undergoing (and it is a profound transformation, which, as these exchanges aver, is painful all over, however pregnant with promise), I find solace, direction and power in the moving and instructive words of the Universal House of Justice.
"Let no excessive self-criticism or any feelings of inadequacy, inability or inexperience hinder you or cause you to be afraid. Bury your fears in the assurances of Bahá'u'lláh. Has He not asserted that upon anyone who mentions His Name will descend the "hosts of Divine inspiration" and that on such a one will also descend the "Concourse on high, each bearing aloft a chalice of pure light"? Step forth, then, into the arena where all His loved ones are equally summoned, equally challenged and abundantly blessed. For to teach, Bahá'u'lláh Himself affirms, is to do the "most meritorious of all deeds". And at this extraordinary moment in the history of the planet, nothing whatever is of more critical importance than inviting people of every sort and every gift to the banquet table of the Lord of Hosts." (Ridvan 152, 1995, p. 3)
What I frequently feel in discussions of the Ruhi process is the presence, explicit or implicit, of "excessive self-criticism" and/or "feelings of inadequacy, inability or inexperience", which generate frustration, can provoke disunity, and, in the end, "hinder" us, and cause us "to be afraid", for the future of the Cause, the viability of its processes, or our own space and sense of belonging within its community. And really, it is only through that spirituality that breaks through us when "the heart giveth way, and willing or not, turneth humbly in prayer unto the Kingdom of the Lord", that the promises and assurances of Bahá'u'lláh achieve the inner plausibility and eventual certitude to act as a genuinely compelling counterweight to the ubiquitous material evidences of our inescapable "inadequacy, inability and inexperience", before what, with the eye of faith, is a Plan which is firmly in the mighty grasp of God, under the stewardship of His Universal House of Justice.
I have seen and shared in dismal, disempowering study circles. As I reflect upon them, my negative experiences of Ruhi have teded to take place at early stages of its implantation in a new cultural context, be that a national community or a cluster or locality. I remember it from the very beginning of the process in Scotland and encountered it again much later at a similar stage on the local level in different places, and again when I moved to Tenerife. There are two tendencies which I see in the early stages of the application of Ruhi, and which I have personally observed in some 5 communities in different countries, and heard echoed in other places too. One is to take a minimalist approach to Ruhi, which basically, as the experiences so reccurrently shared in this dialogue also painfully illustrate, may mean that only those who have done the relevant book are to do the core activities. Alternatively it may mean that only the core activities are to be done, and the anecdotes shared about Auxiliary Board members declaring that deepenings were a thing of the past, or the local discouraging of firesides, or the dismissing of Association of Bahá'í Studies meetings because they lacked a skills component, etc. This flies in the face of all the guidance which on the contrary urges us to be entreprneurial as individuals, to experiment, to initiate, wherever we might be or not in the sequence. The other extreme, which I have seen in the early stages too, is the maximalist extreme, where the instruments, instead of mastered, are altogether recast into alien if more familiar configurations. Here Ruhi becomes a poor deepening. A third hamstringing of the Ruhi model is, in my experience, to divorse it from the simultanoues and equally crucial elements of the new paradigm of growth, namely, the concept of the cluster and its stages of capacity building, and the concept of core activities. Isolated from these complementary elements, the effectiveness of Ruhi in consolidating and propelling community development becomes mutilated and hence distorted.
On the other hand, I have also found consistently, in my own personal experience, the Ruhi model's power to transform, to motivate, to unite and inspire, both new and old believers, from all social classes and levels of education and understanding, at the same time. In a recent Book 1 that finished last december, I had the precious gift of tutoring a circle which began with 10 non-bahá'ís and 3 Bahá'ís. The beginning was wonderfully fun and challenging, with an age range of 16-82, all women bar me. By the third or fourth session there were only 5 of us who could make it regularly, me the only Bahá'í, with occasional "parachutists" who dropped in and spiced the circle. They all became Bahá'ís. One more who had to leave the circle, became a believer the week after, and finished the book in her own town with different tutors. The transformations were palpable. One man, disabled and obese, with low self esteem and a serious problem with his temper, transformed so dramatically within the first few weeks, actually within the first few days of initiating the excercise of reading the writings morn and eve, with the single prayer he had been given, that first he remarked upon it, then his mum phoned another participant, without any idea that her son was involved in anything, to say that he had tranformed beyond recognition for the better. The atmosphere itself was transforming, so that one old lady that two of the participants were employed to care for, and who did not really follow very much, softened and revived, to the point that her relatives and acquaintances asked her carers whether they had been putting new make-up on her because she looked so well. I could go on with the stories. They proved successful in raising human resources too. The four new believers had been attracted in the first place by the single new believer with whom we started the circle. Only last week, some three months after ending book 1 and one month into book 2, the same man I mentioned, who has no eloquence, no apparent "leadership" qualities, and very limited knowledge, brought another soul into the Cause. The neighbouring circle had similarly strong results, with three of the four participants becoming believers and the other one a closet Bahá'í. One of those new believers brought, almost concurrently, the week after her declaration, another soul into the Faith. Another of those believers initiated a regular devotional in her home. For unit convention, they could not make it, but all sent postal ballots. The believers in my circle had had no previous contact with the Faith. One was a mormon, another a Catholic, another a more synchretic seeker. From the other circle they all recently went to the World Centre on a 5 day visit, without much money, all of which they spent on the trip. You can understand that such an experience can be deeply moving, and it was so for me. The bonds I have made I will take to the next life with me.
Now, this is just one successful experience. As I say I have also had pretty poor ones. And anecdote by anecdote we can build either picture. What is going on? That the process of developing, implementing, refining, transplanting, implementing, refining, multiplying, refining again, and disseminating reformulated models of cummunity learning, is a developmental, laborious, time-consuming and non-linear process, that obeys the more general dynamics of Bahá'í community-building:
"The Faith advances, not at a uniform rate of growth, but in vast surges, precipitated by the alternation of crisis and victory."
(The Universal House of Justice, A Wider Horizon, Selected Letters 1983-1992, p. 53)
"The Faith of God does not advance at one uniform pace. Sometimes it is like the advance of the sea when the tide is rising. Meeting a sandbank the water seems to be held back, but, with a new wave, it surges forward, flooding past the barrier which checked it for a little while. If the friends will but persist in their efforts, the cumulative effect of years of work will suddenly appear."
(27 July 1980, written by the Universal House of Justice to a National Spiritual Assembly)
(The Universal House of Justice, 1993 Nov 09, Promoting Entry by Troops, p. 11)
We are, still, in the "cumulative years of work" stage. In this respect it is instructive to recall the stirring, and to many of us dangerously so, call from the Universal House of Justice for pioneers. Whereas in the past pioneer movements obeyed a spatial priority, where do we need more Bahá'ís to create or sustain fragile National Assemblies, the priority today is qualitative: where do we need more Bahá'ís to establish successful models of community that may be applied to communities in earlier phases of the community development process, understood in terms of cluster categories. When we have this critical mass of working models of community generally, and of the core activities specifically, it is logical to expect the focus to shift from model-building, to diversified application and adaptation of tried and tested models of success. I imagine and sense however that we are close to a qualitative leap, the "sudden effect", for the empirical base of good practice is very rapidly accumulating, built on multiple and formidable piles of average, mediocre and plain bad practice in our efforts to reach the heights, like the many dead ends, detours and scenic routes one takes to find the way to the centre of the labyrinth. Such meanderings are indispensable and inevitable parts of the process of finding the right track, however, once that track is found, and mapped from different starting points, the subsequent comings and goings are smoother and infinitely and more efficient. One can begin to focus on beautifying the paths, rather than simply discovering them.
This to me is precisely the point of getting the system fully in place and understood before judging and modifying it. Book 6, for instance, suggests that the process of launching a teaching campaign focused on a receptive population might and should take something approaching two years of preparation, consisting of a number of systematic, iterative pilot projects, evaluation and refinement. That kind of rigour or such timescales for a teaching campaign is not something we are used to. Likewise, I think the timescales involved in establishing, implementing, and understanding the three new concepts of core activities, sequential training, and capacity-building segmented clusters, are much longer than most people work with to arrive at judgements of their efficacy or adaptability. I am sure, and several letters allude to this, that after a good few years more, during which uniformity of format allows for validity of comparisons, there will be a phase of regional modification and adaptation, but one based on a worldwide, large-scale empirical process of action research, over several years, going on even as we speak and stewarded by the ITC, with a solid statistical and qualitative base in each country of the world. Only then will we be in a position to know what is essential and what is non-essential to the working models we have only begun to put in place.
The simple process of selecting those concepts, (core activities, sequential training, and capacity building segmented clusters) to build the present working model, took close to a decade of cross-cultural comparison, pilot projects and experimentation, as I discussed in my paper, not to mention the decades that went into building the alternative models from which the selection was made. Anyone with professional experience of community development will recognise the timescales and incredible resistance involved in incorporating participatory structures into communities, and the even longer timescales involved in making them work, as well as the conflict they almost inevitably engender as they disrupt existing structures and replace, not do away (in this I agree with the sceptics) existing hierarchies. What changes, in my view, is not the existence of hierarchy, but the more widely accessible processes underlying them, and the more transparent criteria and processes for establishing them. Again, anyone with solid grassroots experience in participatory democracy, will know how in the process of change a good number of immature power-games operate, on all sides, which become increasingly marginal, if the strategy is truly participatory and process focused, as the new structures gather momentum, familiarity and efficiency, that is, as they become integrated into the commonality of a new community culture.
I agree entirely that to see Ruhi-propelled firesides, devotionals, etc., as the invention of the wheel is both inaccurate and inhibiting. As I suggested in earlier messages, the distinctive element of this Epoch is that Bahá'í activities are integrated in a subtle and complex yet overarching context that involves Ruhi, not as a stand-alone activity, but as part of a system and model of community building and community development that also includes clusters categorized in accordance to community capacity and core activities tried and tested and eventually arrived at as the key generators of Bahá'í community. I this respect it is interesting to note that the quest for these key elements, for the most important activities to focus on to build and develop communities, began systematically in the first 9 Year Plan, and only after immense experimentation and further systematic pilot projects it was found that these three, now four core activities, are the support of the proverbial lever.
In other words, what makes the new paradigm of Bahá'í community distinctive is not the concrete activities. As Century of Light explains, by the 1980's there was not an activity or approach that had not been tried. Rather it is their integration into a coherent, globally applied systemic model that enables systematic community learning to take place, and, out of the immense range of Bahá'í activity, identifies, not on the basis of theory or personal preference, but on the basis of exhaustive trial and error across decades and countries and ethnicities, those "core" elements that have the capacity, within a sufficiently large yet coherent geographical area with a basic institutional and community capacity (several functioning LSA's , a good number of capable believers who understand and support the new systemic processes of growth), to achieve a multiplication and enrichment of
Bahá'í community activity, and a context that facilitates growth. This coherent and shared model makes possible the meaningful comparison of data and achievements, which in turn enables refinement to the model. Thus the core activities began as three, but as the model was applied in a variety of contexts, it became apparent that the education of junior youth played a no less important, foundational role in the gestation of community as the previous three activities. We now have 4 core activities. Again, the devotional meetings and study circles were originally built into the model as Bahá'í only activities. The accumulation of comparable experiences within a coherent model allowed for a further refinement that first encouraged further experimentation in opening these activities to the wider community, and then made such involvement of the acommunity of interest in these core activities absolutely pivotal to the global model we are applying, going as far as designating them portals for entry by troops. This change was reflected in the new statistics of non-Bahá'í participation that began to be gathered. In the Canaries, devotionals that don't include non-Bahá'ís are no longer quantified, for the statistical needs of the model have moved on.
The point I'm making is that by linking our individual initiatives to the new mechanisms of this epoch, the core activities, the Ruhi focused institute process, the cluster and its area committees, the community of interest, the capacity building movement through cluster categories, what we are doing is not merely, or I would argue primarily, contributing in a frequently haphazard way to our local community. Rather, we are participating in a systematic process of cummunity learning on a global scale that, for community development professionals, is an incredible, awe-inspiring achievement. We do so, not only by our own reflection on how to make the new tools work for us, but specially by furnishing a unqiquely individual, precious atom of experience that, when systematically viewed alongside thousands of similar contributions, will reveal, under the inspired guidance of the Universal House of Justice the parts of our experience that are genuinely in tune with the potentialities of our moment, those which are redundant, and those that are obstructive. This is a feedback loop that makes the community, as opposed to individual, insights incomparably keener, more widely accesible to more diverse participants, and better skilled at growth, change and maturation.
In this light, it is important to recognize that Ruhi itself is very far from static, and that the empirical evidence that has been and is being gathered through its application in diverse cultural contexts has already dramatically changed its contents from its original Colombian incarnations. To cite but one example, in Colombia the arts played no significant part in the Ruhi methodology. In book 7 it is critical. Again, in Colombian Book 7 itself did not exist, and the sequence was not always the same. Originally Book 1 began with Life After Death. So, as with every other tool (examples could be added of change in our modelling of clusters, and I am certain the same will happen before long with junior youth, as the three core materials become tested and tried in enough environments for enough time).
With this in mind I, for one, consider myself very far from being in a position at such an early stage in the game and with such geographically limited experience, to really get what Ruhi is about. Each time I study it some more, and particularly each time I creatively and receptively apply it once more, as well as each time I see it applied in a new cultural or social or even individual context, I realize that there is more to it than I previously thought. What I feel though is enough confidence to recognise when its failures are due to parrochial and inevitably ephemeral applications of the process, and when they appear to stem from structural aspects in the methodology itself. The biggest barrier to the successful implementation of Ruhi, not as either an exclusive endoeavour, or as a panacea for all challenges and problems, but merely as a crucial tool in propelling and integrating the learning-in-action of our community on a global scale, is the often alien and particularistic conceptual models we use to approach it and define it even before studying or experimenting open-mindedly with it in a spirit of learning to use a new instrument.
An example of such particularistic "either/or" models, which the Ruhi books set out, in fact, explicitly to challenge, is sadly furnished by the examples, which I have also seen in many, many places, with similarly discouraging impacts on so many Bahá'ís who feel disenfranchised when the either/or becomes naturally embodied in us/them relationships (both by advocates and detractors of Ruhi), is the perception that firesides and deepenings are somehow, if not a thing of the past, then at least in competition with Ruhi study circles and at a lower order of priority. Faithful application of the books' methodology, however, shows this to be a serious distortion of the model. The House of Justice letters on this subject are almost repetitive. Not only is Ruhi not a replacement for firesides but on the contrary firesides are enjoined as an essential part of the current pattern of community activity, for many years now, and measured in the statistics as measures of community capacity, vitality and progress. Deepenings, likewise, far from being marginal to the process, are the main service activity together with home visits of book 2, and there are many letters suggesting their indispensability and complementarity. Again, many letters emphasize the inadvisability of replacing other activities with Ruhi, rather Ruhi is seen as an engine to stimulate a multiplication of precisely such activities. That in early stages the result is the opposite is to be expacted, as the priority becomes having a core of trained resources. That happened here in Tenerife, as it happened in Nottingham, the two areas of which i have some close experience of the process. Then, as the priority for completing the sequence became less when a sufficient number of tutors became available, the focus precisely shifted onto the complementary activities indispensable to the success of Ruhi. Thus, the Ruhi sequence hardly covers the administrative order, and we have found that as new enrolments take place through Ruhi, devotionals and firesides, the need to deepen on this theme was pressing and obvious.
ut even within this framework, the minimalist approach, can be excessive, so that deepenings that are not vernatim recitations of Ana's talks, or firesides that likewise depart from the given texts in Books 2 and 6, are somehow seen as deviations, or at most approximations with regard to the ideal deepening and fireside. When one reads them closely, one discovers that the deepening, home visit and fireside contents are not prescriptive but indicative. Book 2, for instance, specifically suggests that the talks provided are starting points. The participants, including the tutor, have enormous room for creativity when applying the basic concepts and skills cultivated in book two to thei specific local and individual contexts, another thing that is explicitly encouraged in Books 2 and 7. The same applies with Book 6. The teaching campaign is offered, like Ana's talks in Book 2, as a template, but the group is encouraged to arrive at its own daily programme and campaign through consultation on its specific needs. The public talks suggested as part of an intensive campaign have titles that bear at times no resemblance to the templates given earlier. It is here that is suggested that the process of identifying a receptive population, getting to truly know and understand its needs, developing appropriate materials and approaches, and finally designing, on this basis, a comprehensive campaign, is likely to take some 2 years. Hardly a reified prescription or a rigid formula to be followed...
All this is very well in theory, but what to do when face to face with narrow attitudes (on either side of the proverbial fence), with inadequate implementations of the process, or with categorical judgements of its merits wholly on the basis of personal preference, local experience, or anecdote? What to do when a community, local, regional or national appears to be either apathetic about the nationally adopted Ruhi model, or else excessively, discouragingly and polarizingly rigid in its application? After all, what prompted this discussion are the real life experiences of pain before inadequate applications of the model, regardless of the merits that it may possess in theory, or that it may possess in paractice in more receptive or more experienced environments.
In the last analysis, what is described in such negative, and very, very far from universal experiences, is to me simply more evidence of the conceptual distance yet to be traversed by one community to understand better what the Universal House of Justice, and for those who care to read attentively, the Ruhi model itself, advances.Here, as in everything in the Bahá'í community, the nobility of our endeavours lies in our persistent arising before an ever more palpable consciousness that we are but mere approximations of what we most cherish and seek and are bidden be. We can retard things, but not stop them, The Word trumps all things, soon or late, every time, for love, in the end, rules in our hearts. If the House of Justice says, deepen, have firesides, do home visits, do external affairs, scholarship, SED, as well as the "core" activities, then, some communities quicker than others, we will respond, because the power of the Covenant ultimately impels us. You can only ignore the guidance, with good intentions, so many times before you "get it", then it's there for keeps. Now, the responsibility we bear in understanding and responding to it with promptitude is undoubted, and our progress, our "spiritual velocity" and community development are dependent on that. Thus there have always been diverse levels of achievement and vitality in different communities, as some engage fully with the guidance earlier or more wholeheartedly than others. Nor is this static. The British Bahá'í community was at the very vanguard of the world Bahá'í community, precisely because of the promptitude and consecration of its response to Shoghi Effendi's guidance. A recent message from the Universal House of Justice suggests that this community lost vitality over many long years, and has only just reclaimed its destiny, through a leap in response to the guidance of the Supreme Body. I found it interesting that, in highlighting the most distinguished achievements in community building, Century of Light dwelt exclusively on communities in the global South, even war-torn communities such as those in Liberia, with none of the more established communities with clear destinies, such as the United States or Britain, being singled out for praise, save in the area of external affairs. And while the institutions have an essential, a critical role in leading the community's engagement to the guidance of the Supreme Institution, there can be no doubt that the power of response is fundamentally vested in us as individuals, and it is when a sufficient numbers of individuals respond fully and intelligently, within and outwith institutions, that a community achieves the potentialities that invest it with destiny and vitality.
I am sure that is the case with Ruhi as well, with some communities having a more rounded and engaged perspective than others. I also think this is why there is such a focus on priority A clusters, because we need a good number of functioning models of the potential of the new processes, not only for expansion but also for consolidation, for a community that is rich and varied and rounded and abundant, in diverse contexts, to be able to disseminate that learning and change, gradually, entrenched or short sighted attitudes and cultures in less discerning or responsive contexts. To return to the example of the British Bahá'í community, it was the success of the American 7 Year Plan that prompted the UK Bahá'ís to request a plan of their own, being given a ridiculously ambitious 6 Year Plan by Shoghi Effendi. Far from responding on time, the British community lagged dramatically in it arising, so that the Guardian was forced to offer to postpone the deadline a few months, saying it is the most I can do. Hugh McKinley tells of Marion Hofman visiting every believer in the final year of the Plan to say: "Friends, you know why we are not accomplishing more? Because we don't understand the station of Shoghi Effendi. Not his function as Guardian, but his spiritual station as the Sign of God on earth, as the Will and Testament refers to him. If we did, we would not delay one instant." This message, as well as the Guardian's urgent pleas, in other words, the vitality of their love for the Centre of the Covenant, made them finally arise with such vigour and sacrifice as to win all goals in time and have the distinction of being the community which, in war-time and under the Blitz, sent forth more pioneers, some 60% of the community uprooting themselves entirely, if memory serves. Perhaps a more spiritual, more loving, more reverent and consecrated understanding, not only of the function, but of the station of the Universal House of Justice might accelerate and refine our level and quality of spiritual response, and in that leap increase not only our commitment, but our spirituality and success.
And in the meantime, here we are, still, with the same question: all that is very well, and the community may indeed advance gradually toward its destinty, and all things get better, but in the meantime, we are, many of us, still confronted with unpropitious community environments, feel left out, see better ways of doing things, would wish Ruhi study circles would be applied in different ways, and that frustration does not go away, and sometimes carries on growing.
Here I sense the importance and urgency of people who would not naturally gravitate toward Ruhi (I include myself), to get deeply involved in its processes, to go through the sequence, learn to make it work for them, increasingly, and then, from the spiritual leadership that success in close alignement to the guidance and thrust of the Plans naturally engenders (I'm not talking institutional leadership, but the simple power of attraction), we are in a position to bring our individuality to bear on the collective processes, and ensure, through our diversity, that the notes we hear that pass others by become part of the music, and that the notes we cannot yet make sense of and others seem to hear so clearly gradually resonate within our consciousness. This is not a narcisistic endeavour, but rather one the Universal House of Justice explicitly furthers:
"The advancement of the Cause is an evolutionary process which takes place through trial and error, through reflection on experience and through wholehearted commitment to the teaching Plans and strategies devised by the House of Justice. Believers ...who appreciate the opportunities thus provided, can be of great assistance by encouraging their respective countries and assemblies to similarly invest themselves in the process." (22 August 2002, to an individual)
In fact, not only as a tutor, but even as a participant in the Ruhi process one can stimulate such rounded applications of the process, simply by carrying out the practices involved in a way that personally makes sense. Anyone who gets to book 2 has an ample field indeed, as part of the course, even as a participant, to initiate a wide-ranging series of deepenings. That is an essential, critical part of Book 2's requirements. One of the key skills it seeks to develop. I have found that in my participation, even when the tutor is not switched on to the practice elements of the books, which are increasingly being emphasised at all levels now that the hurry simply to complete the sequence is over and the focus is on completing it well, I can, simply by offering a personal initiative to fulfill the Book's requirements, not only make deepenings and home visits happen, but stimulate others to feel more confident about doing so too, and in any case imparting an impulse to this dimension of the process.
Now, if one does not participate in these books, if one does not bring one's power of individual initiative and spiritual leadership based on attraction and consultation, if one does not engage with the actual practices of the learning process that lift the method from a conceptual, spiritual excercise to a life-engaging, life-challenging, and life-transforming iteration of prayerful study, action, and reflection around a common and spiritually informed purpose, then, as Moojan points out, the speed at which we will finally apply effectively the Ruhi system, with its concommittant implication of a multiplication of deepenings, firesides, teaching projects, arts events, and social interactions, will be much slower. The Faith relies on our diversity to achieve maximum effectiveness. As long as all the people who are instinctively resistant to the initial applications, and conceptualisations, of the Ruhi process, fail to become engaged in enriching and transforming it to fully include their distinctive orientations, the process will be distorted by the undoubted insights, and undoubted blindspots, of that population of Bahá'ís that resonates immediately with its early, woefully inadequate application.
The Native American experiences and perspectives on the Ruhi process, shared earlier, are highly instructive in this regard, and echo my own experiences of seeing the sequence applied the sequence in a Spanish, evangelical gypsy context. If, when encountering applications of the Ruhi sequence that silence the voice and diversity of the Native American, or Gypsy, or any range of populations relatively marginal to the cultural bias of a given Bahá'í community's culture, (might one include the formally trained scholarly population?) the reaction was non-involvement, not to speak of passive resistance, the maturation of these new processes would be hamstrung and retarded. It is on the contrary by their full engagement with the core guidance that unites and makes equal all Bahá'ís, that a space is created, a very empowering space, to broaden and enrich the cultural content and practical expression of the shared model of the Ruhi process. And, again and again, we find that that process will engender resistance, but more consistently and lastingly, engenders success, such as that reported among the Native American believers and their community of interest, and in the growth engendering circles here in Tenerife, and in the successfully inclusive study circkes in Nottingham and in the groundbreaking study circles with evangelical ministers among the gypsies of Spain. It is that success that eventually leverages cultural change, for the drive to succeed in applying the divine guidance is ultimately a more powerful motivator for Bahá'ís than that of preserving the status quo, which we cannot but be, if it is our primary cultural referent, very strongly attached to.
When I hear the reports of the distorted implementation in these very early stages of the process, and personally witness them too, and then hear the voice of those who feel somehow disenfranchised by the current application of the new processes, I silently pray that those, the disenfranchised, become fully engaged in the processes, "even unto tutoring", for I know that on this depends, in very significant measure, the pace of our eventual arrival at the working model that Ruhi has been systematically tested and modified to be, over several decades in several continents, or, in our case, to become. When it is fully in place, when we can say that the overwhelming majority of Bahá'ís in a community are applying the Ruhi methodology in all its aspects, with the proliferation of devotional meetings, deepenings, home visits, personal teaching plans, firesides, small group teaching projects, artistic creativity and empowering of local artistic traditions, and intimate informal socializing, all focused on a multitude of small groups of increasingly spiritually intimate friends deeply engaged with and authentically enriching their family, work, neighbourhood and friendship networks, only then, will we have a basis to judge the effectiveness of the Ruhi system, and be in a position to identify, from a position of experiential as well as statistical and theoretical insight, the adaptations and modifications that might refine its workings in a given local or national context.
This may sound like pie in the sky, but it is in fact the daily, if far from prosaic experience of a multitude of study circles the world over, which as yet constitute but a tiny proportion of the whole. This whole, the entirety of the thousands upon thousands of study cricles running worldwide, may be said to be distributed, in different concentrations en each national and local community, along a spectrum ranging from simple learning by rote, skipping "boring" or "simplistic" sections, else turning them into interminable discussions of personal opinions, without a practical or even an emotionally or intellectually engaging component, and an artistic element, if any, at most stretching to doing kids' drawings ;-), where membership is limited, sometimes by design, to Bahá'ís only, and only the right kind at that, (I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been part of such scary circles); all the way to empowering, dymanic and intellectually and spiritually exhilarating study circle experiences such as those described by in Native American communities, and such as I witnessed among the ministers and leaders of the Gyspy evangelical churches, and in my own little group, and such as doubtlessly many, many more people have experienced, dotted around the globe and building slowly a critical mass of good practice. When this is in place, when we have finally enough truly compelling, and sufficiently diverse "successful embodiments" of the Ruhi process the world over, its maturation beyond the simplistic polarities of an early conceptual framework with a budding and in many communities virutally non-existent and undiversified experiential base, will, I am certain, dramatically accelerate, as we stop having to reinvent the wheel, which we still largely have to do in most local contexts.
In this, as in all things in this Cause, in the absence of a clergy, depending entirely on the ultimately unfettered consent and participation of the individual, else his or her non-involvement, change takes place, engagement is effected, participation is leveraged, reflection and reconsideration are prompted by, primarily, the mighty power of example. Hence the priority now is, clearly, achieving the necessary number working models, of compelling examples, of a rounded, abundant application of the Ruhi process and the other key processes associated with this Epoch, that can be relevant, not universally but singly, to large rural communities, large urban ones, tiny urban ones, tiny rural ones, mainstream, alternative, ethnically mixed or homogenous, upper, middle, working class, and "lumpen", global North and global south.
As time goes by, and I understand better the Ruhi method, and get more experience under my belt, and put more fire into it in my own process of maturation, I find that my wonder increases, and my sense of its immense potential deepens. It also emphasises for me the developmental nature of the skilling and capacity building process. In our cluster Ruhi almost paralysed everything for some two or three years. Now it is beginning to act as a catalyst of further activity, but that is also linked to the equally developmental and still unwieldy tools of the cluster itself, of the area committee, and especially the budding intensive cycles, all of them new tools we are but learning to develop. It took the World Centre itself, as I discussed in my paper on community, some 5 years to develop a working model with hand-picked communities. We are but 6 years into a process of integrating counter-cultural methods into frequently ill-equipped communities without the benefits of direct and daily support, participation and guidance from the Counsellors . To judge the effectiveness of these tools at this point in time seems to me a bit like trying to measure the worth or beauty of a building when the foundations are still being laid, or the speed and maneuverability and flair of a car while driven by someone who only just got their license, and frequently by those like me who are still learning to drive.
Be that as it may, it seems to me that the reply of Candide to the theoretical meanderings of Pangloss after a long journey of personal experiential testing of reified mental models, is most apt: "all that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden." Let's create, each one of us, models that work, that we can share and contribute from our individuality and diversity, within the shared context of the processes of this Plan, which will give the fruits we pluck from our individual plot, a currency and impact that will undoubtedly go far beyond our little garden. It may be that some of the communities that don't get it, might do so yet, and that when they do the potential for making up for lost time might very much be there.
It makes me think of one of the most suggestive and touching passages of the Master:
"The blessings of Bahá'u'lláh are a shoreless sea, and even life everlasting is only a dewdrop therefrom. The waves of that sea are continually lapping against the hearts of the friends, and from those waves there come intimations of the spirit and ardent pulsings of the soul, until the heart giveth way, and willing or not, turneth humbly in prayer unto the Kingdom of the Lord."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 192)
That is how I see the processes of the change of culture, of the new mechanisms and the inherent, hidden blessings in the Universal House of Justice's guidance in this challenging new Epoch: as lappings of divine grace against the hearts of the myriad variegated communities that make up the people of Bahá. Eventually, each and all will give way, and, "willing or not", discover the bounty of knowing that He is the prayer-hearing, prayer-answering God. In the end, as that tablet further declares: "Ye live, all of you, within the heart of 'Abdu'l-Bahá."
Is that not beautiful and brimming with certainty?
With love,
Ismael
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