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16/04/2022 by Pete Hulme
Given my plan to explain more fully what prepared my mind for my encounter with the Bahá’í Faith in 1982 it seems appropriate to republish this poem which tried to capture at least part of how it felt at the time.
15/04/2022 by Pete Hulme
Given my plan to explain more fully what prepared my mind for my encounter with the Bahá’í Faith in 1982 it seems appropriate to republish this sequence from 2013 which tried to capture my journey, but sold some aspects short possibly. This is the last in the sequence.
As I’ve said in an earlier post , I was asked if I had prepared an account of how I came to join the Bahá’í community. I’ve now completed the story at least in draft. I was planning only to send it quietly to the Bahá’í Histories website and leave it at that, in the hope that very few would read it outside the Bahá’í community. But then I wondered why I should be so quiet about it. Yes, I think it’s a fairly ordinary story about a fairly ordinary person, and to that extent, why go public? But then also it is just about the most important thing that ever happened to me and connects very closely to two of the other most important events in my life. So, I thought, ‘Share it and see what happens.’ It might do some good and probably won’t do any harm. So here goes for Part Four, the last of the sequence. In the previous part , having encountered a book that would challenge my atheism fundamentally I had taken a leap in the dark and gone to the Bahá’í Centre in London perhaps dimly sensing where that might take me..
My first three hour visit to the Bahá’í Centre in London induced a buzzing energetic state of mind which I became aware of only when I finally stepped into the street and lasted for a fortnight, and which hours of meditation would have failed to achieve for me. In that time, I read my way through a bagful of books with only about four hours sleep a night – those close to me who know my aptitude for sleep will testify to how remarkable that was.
The next week was a whirlpool of activity. In addition to all the intense reading I was doing, I went to all the Bahá’í meetings that I could. I met the Ghandi family who welcomed me into their home with a warmth I will never forget, even at a difficult time for them when their father, who was secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of India, was in London for urgent heart surgery. This was the first expression of a connection with India that continued with my subsequent marriage to someone from that country.
As I read book after book I could find nothing to disenchant me. Almost everything unequivocally confirmed my sense that this was right and true. There were, admttedly, some small points that troubled me such as there being only men on the Universal House of Justice, but when I placed these in the pan on the side of the balance which said this will not work and I placed everything else in the other pan that said this is truly the way forward for all humanity at this time, the result was never in doubt – the pan that held the evidence that seemed to show me that this was indeed the way far outweighed the other.
I remember feeling, though, that I was being carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment and I would do well to press the pause button and take my time getting to know more about this religion. At the same time I was also very conscious that, whatever step I took would involve determining the nature of my relationship with Bahá’u’lláh and that this was the key concern. If did not join this community it had to be because I did not believe He was Who He said He was and not because I was upset with how some Bahá’í or other had behaved or because of some relatively small quibble with a point of doctrine. Also if I did decide to set out on the Bahá’í path, it had to be because I believed in what He said and Who He was, and that holding to the Covenant would be the key, not feeling what a nice bunch of people the Bahá’ís were. The clarity of this position turned out to be of critical importance in what happened next.
A key event took place at a youth meeting. The man who printed the Bahá’í Journal at the time announced to the assembled
believers and friends that he needed someone who could work an offset lithograph machine to help with the publishing of the next journal. As it happened, when I had been a teacher in Kilburn many years earlier, I had helped with the printing of a magazine on exactly that kind of machine. I put my hand up to offer to help and was mortified to hear that, according to the policy of that time because I was not a Bahá’í, I couldn’t do ‘work’ for the Faith anymore than I could contribute to the Bahá’í Fund. I was outraged.
I’m not sure now whether what happened next was at the end of the same meeting or at another meeting later in the week. At some point in a break in this meeting, I found myself sitting next to someone I hadn’t met before. He introduced himself as Simon.
We talked at some length about how I felt about what I was learning about the Faith. When I explained how closely everything I so far had understood mapped onto what I already believed, he asked me what I was waiting for. I really had no answer. After all, unless all I had protested that I believed in was pure hypocrisy, I surely should put my money where my mouth had been all these years. He produced a declaration card and I immediately signed it. I had only known about the Faith for seven days.
So much for my decision to give it a lot more time. Yet again I had come to a virtually split second decision and made another ridiculous leap in the dark – the second of three major commitments in my life. (The other concerns my decision to marry the lady who is still my wife after nearly 40 years – but that is another story altogether. The other was the decision to work in mental health that I described in an earlier post .)
Was this then perhaps the final answer to the prayer of 12 months earlier, I wondered? Again this apparently crazy decision also was to prove exactly the right thing, though apparently flying in the face of every dictate of commonsense. My friends at the time thought I was crazy and predicted that it was a fad that wouldn’t last six months. Nearly forty years later they would seem to have been wrong.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that when I decided to follow the Bahá’í path I did not feel I was abandoning a previous belief system to adopt another quite different one – a process of conversion. Quite the opposite.
I felt I was finding a system of belief and practice that exactly corresponded to what I had always believed, could never have articulated so well and had always wanted to find in something else apart from somewhere behind a fog in my own mind.
So strong was the sense of home-coming that when I went on pilgrimage four years later, I ended up at the gates near the Shrine of the Báb, overcome by waves of relief and gratitude, such as a person who had been decades in exile might feel after a long and arduous journey as he looked down from a nearby hill top on the sunlit roofs of his birthplace.
It was almost two years after the signing of the declaration card that I married (as I indicated earlier, my last major leap in the dark – another decision that I had intended to defer for six months only to find myself in a situation that showed me the true nature of my feelings). We pioneered to Herefordshire in January 1985. A year after the birth of our son we all went as a family to Israel on pilgrimage in 1987.
I was unable to enter the Shrine of the Bab the first time I saw it. I had come there with a friend also from Herefordshire. She had come on pilgrimage with us. My wife had stayed with our son in our hotel room but I could not resist getting closer to the Shrine. It was evening and the Shrine was closed so I had to stand some distance away, as the sun was beginning to set, and lean against an iron gate. I found myself uncontrollably sobbing. This was not the pool of tears I was so used to from my encounter group experiences. These were tears of profound relief – a return from exile, as I said.
This was the beginning of a completely unexpected sequence of reactions to the whole experience of pilgrimage. I was completely unprepared for the power of this sense of return.
The following day I stood at the door of the Shrine of the Bab totally unable to cross that particular threshold. It was not until several others had entered before me, while I stood there dithering, that I could bring myself to go inside. Then, somehow, I managed to force myself to enter. Completely contrary to my expectation at the time, I felt waves of immense power pass over me and the whole air vibrate with an irresistible intensity.
I had expected a completely different experience altogether. I had expected something like a warm glow of love to envelope me. It would have fitted more with the sense I had of the Bab’s personality.
Each Shrine that I stepped into on that pilgrimage had its own particular impact. The Shrine of the Master glowed gently with a warm acceptance, much as I had thought it would. So expectations were not contradicted here. However, the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh at Bahji, on the other hand, also totally defied my expectations. Here was where I had expected the raw power, but felt instead enveloped in a loving embrace of such unconditional completeness that I sobbed uncontrollably once more.
Entrance to the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh at Bahji
These were the closest I have ever got to what might be called spontaneous mystical experiences. (Earlier ones, during my exploration of Buddhism, had taken hours of dedicated meditative practice, as next Monday’s post will explain in more detail.) They set the seal on that moment at the Bahá’í Centre in London when I had set my foot upon this path. I don’t like such terms as ‘I became a Bahá’í.’ I’m still working on that project. I didn’t feel for the reasons I’ve explained earlier, that it was a conversion in the sense that I shifted from one definite view of the world and what it means to another very different one. It was more of a homecoming.
It made sense, for me, of the phrase used by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to describe faith: ‘ conscious knowledge .’ Till I found the Bahá’í Faith, it seems to me, my faith was unconscious, blind, deaf, dumb and desperate.
Of course, my journey of discovery is not over. It would be very boring if it were. Becoming a Baha’i, as I have said, is a declaration of intent. I am constantly working at improving my understanding of its teachings and striving to increase my love for God through interacting with the Words of Bahá’u’lláh and reflecting on His life.
But as I said, the search is now a lot less desperate. I’m not at sea now in a storm, at the mercy of the waves, nor even on that desolate beach. I’m on dry land under a bright sun and feel I am moving forwards in something far closer to the right direction.
I just need to remember to keep looking at the map, that’s all. Carrying it in my back pocket doesn’t work too well.