the horror, pt. 1
I was traveling in Canada. I went to Canada on retreat, to get away from my life and meditate on my coming months of war. I had already gone on pilgrimage, and it had prepared my heart for death, in the best possible sense; it was my one lifelong obligation as a Bahá’í, and, having prayed at the holiest spot on Earth, I felt a connection with Bahá'u'lláh that would not brook rivals. On the other hand, pilgrimage made me eager to teach the Faith and pursue a life of work in the service of humanity, goals which I would be able to pursue at best obliquely during the coming year in Iraq. Pilgrimage had not provided me with the jewel, but polished it and revealed its splendor; but now I needed time to figure out how to keep it safe until I could come back and begin the work of sharing it with those who were seeking it.
I went to Canada, popular destination of those seeking shelter from dubious wars. I spent a couple of days tooling around in Vancouver, then headed over the Rockies to my real destination, Banff, a resort town tucked into the east side of the range. Driving the Rockies in the middle of winter should not be undertaken lightly even on the widest and cleanest of American interstates; nonetheless, I felt sure a road called "the Trans-Canada Highway" would not be a small, steep, mostly unlit mountain pass lacking even reflectors or guard rails along the curves.
The drive was harrowing. I left on the 23rd, two days after the shortest day of the year, so no matter how early I left I would have been driving in the dark for a significant portion of the trip. But as I traveled inland and upland, British Columbia's perpetual winter rains turned to snow, and as I passed one vehicle after another that had slid into a ditch or flipped onto its side, and as the "road" degenerated into two black ruts weaving uncertainly through slick, dirty snowpack, I began to realize I was in for a long, dangerous night.
But I had company, as my shoulders ached from keeping constant tension on the steering wheel; while I peered into the dancing darkness looking for the next place where the highway would fling itself with nihilistic abandon to the left or right, Wendy Hoopes of Daria fame was reading Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry aloud to me. Ms. Hoopes, who played Jane Lane, Daria's deadpan fellow-sufferer in high school, brought much the same sense of aloof and bitterly amused detachment to this reading, mirroring the book's sly determination to hold back how much of the story is really a dark comedy.
It's a story about a young woman of desperate and depressing worldview, one of those characters from Nersesian or James Salter who drift through awful, dry-rotted relationships and think deeply about art and have nothing to contribute to the world but fail to contribute in a witty, self-aware, and annoyingly charming way.
Still, she was a good companion in the high Rockies, obssessed as she was with the extreme conditions under which men have resorted to cannibalism. Of course there were shipwrecks -- most famously the Essex, a partial inspiration for Moby-Dick, and the Medusa, which inspired a painting by Géricault. Katherine discusses this painting in detail, but the stories that meant the most to me, obviously, were the horror stories about foolhardy and ill-fated attempts to cross America's forbidding range during the winter. She mentions the Donner Party, obviously, but spends more time on solitary and questionable figures like Alferd Packer. Packer took a group of prospectors out into the San Juan Mountains in 1874 to search for gold and other minerals. But the group planned poorly and the winter was harsh; supplies fell short rather rapidly. Details got murky after that, but two months later Packer emerged from the frozen and windy mountains looking surprisingly unthin and providing curious and unconvincing tales about what had happened to the others.
Both Ms. Murray and Katherine take a certain amount of joy in imagining the final interactions between Packer and his associates. And as I threaded my way through narrow, icy passes, the light of my headlamps falling away in a curtain of snow and dark, I, too, felt a grim friction of pleasure in considering the worst fates of those who had crossed this range before, on foot or in wagons, and without heaters or fleece hats. But that kind of pleasure is the above-ground, intellectual portion of a fear, an awe whose roots creep down deep into the soil of the heart. Because they are vaster, grander, and infinitely more powerful than you, the mountains in winter put you in direct contact with the ultimate, universal question: does the world -- does God -- care about us? If everything in nature is a reflection of some aspect of the Lord, what are we to make of the vast, harsh, unforgiving forces -- the mountains, the sea -- in the face of which we are made small, puny, insignificant? Is it any wonder that men, driven to extremes of survival, might be forced to eat the flesh of other men? But likewise, is it any wonder that, as Katherine observes in the novel, people once driven to such extremes might develop a taste for that kind of domination over other human beings? After being brought face to face with their utter powerlessness, some may kneel and pray, but others may seek to assert their strength over something, someone, somehow.
Banff is primarily a winter sports resort. Nearly everyone I met there asked, "Do you snowboard?" I don't. I had gone to Banff because I heard it was beautiful, and so during my days I would go out and walk. On my first day, with little but half-remembered directions from a snowboarder to some set of steps up the side of a mountain that I never found, I set out along the main road running past the hostel, and went a couple of miles into the mountains, enjoying, now that I wasn't driving them, the fearsome swoop of the roads through the evergreens and snow. Most signs of civilization (aside from the road itself) quickly, quietly dropped away, but a parking lot near an overlook marked, at least, something pretty to look at, and, as it turned out, a trailhead. This trail, perhaps a mile, ran the edge of a steep dropoff into a wide valley, where a river, in springtime, ran and turned and split and rejoined itself; now it was frozen. The trail itself actually split soon enough, one side running along the very edge, up a series of low, wide steps now covered with ice and snow, the other side a smoother, more conventional trail following a small ridge uphill. The trail closest to the edge afforded the best views, of course, and also access to the signs and diagrams explaining the views -- if you needed such a thing. I marched swiftly up the icy path, although my boot had begun to come apart and moisture was seeping in, every now and then sending a chill through my sock.
At a certain point, I stumbled out between the trees onto the real view -- the moment when you are exposed before the forbidding majesty of Mt. Rundle, when the mountain gazes across the valley at you, huge, brutal as a stone knife, unforgiving. If the sea is the mystery of God, His vast depths in which uncounted pearls are hidden, the mountain is the blunt symbol of His power, His sheer awesome grandeur. It took me back to Murray's book, back to men driven to awful lengths by the pressure of a force so vast and yet so terrifyingly uninterested in us. I could see it easily -- the desire for greatness and adventure that caused men to climb those high, treeless ridges, and the way such endless rising walls of rock and ice, one after the other, must have been too much for them. What on earth were our ancestors thinking? What kind of courage, all but unsummonable for most of us fleshy moderns who have our food delivered to us by Sysco, must it have taken to stand before that massive, brooding shoulder of unimpressed stone, or look down into that river frozen solid and unresponsive on the valley floor, and think that one could even survive here? I wanted to lie down in front of that mountain and die in the cold.
By chance, though, I looked to my right. And there, directly in the path of the river and tucked neatly into the vast cleavage of two mountains, was the Banff Springs Hotel. Built in 1886, it was explicitly meant to take advantage of the railroad that was being laid through the heart of Canada as well as the fashion for spas and getaways then exploding among mad Victorians with too much money and imaginary maladies. And there it sits, a ridiculous pimple of cheerful commercial optimism on the ass of God's creation, absolutely ruining the effect of all that austerity -- and for that reason, I find it comforting. I imagine all the people in that warm hotel who are so overly heated that they go out and play in the snow all day, paying thousands of dollars to glide very quickly downhill. Are they any weirder than I am, driving thousands of miles to walk out into the snow to ponder the intimidating awfulness of God's creation?
But I wasn't done yet. From the overlook point the trail stumbled away and looked around indecisively. Then it seemed to pick up some heart and made a thin, determined line into the trees. I followed it and started thinking about God's more mundane terrors. I started wondering how far away from civilization you have to walk, in this kind of landscape, before you start to find the wildlife. Is a mile from the parking lot far enough for a mountain lion, a bear? In midwinter hungry animals are everywhere, trails crisscrossing the snowy path, birds, rabbits, small cats, coyotes, deer, and larger predators. I found spoor on the trail a couple of times and, more disturbing, the fresh tracks of something small and vulnerable and, picking them up and following, something larger and doglike.
There's an argument to be made, vis-a-vis God and suffering, that all the terrible things that happen to us are, in some way, for our spiritual edification -- presumably up to and including being eaten by Alfred Packer in the Sierras. Whatever ills we suffer in this world only strengthen our faith and our reliance on God, and our compensation in the next world will be so great as to render pain in this one a very cheap cost indeed. This is appealing, as far as it goes -- and it goes a long way. It nearly removes the whole problem of theodicy, and if there were nothing in the universe but human beings, it would probably carry us across the finish line.
The trouble, as I see it, is that we are not alone. God has created a universe far vaster than our meager concerns, and it is not only human beings, with our consciousness and eternal souls, who suffer. Granted that we may derive strength and wisdom and spiritual grace from all the persecutions of this world -- but what is that to the sickly deer felled by wolves or the rabbit who lives his life in a perpetual state of alert agitation, always sniffing for foxes? Or, to look at it from another perspective, what is it like to be a hungry wolf, when all the deer have fled or died of illness? The world is terrible, filled with pain and bloody death, and not just for us, but for unthinking creatures who, having no eternal part, can presumably derive no benefit from it.
When I found the first pile of spoor, I began to feel the icy trickle of alienation from the gorgeous, snow-blanketed scenery. I was out here in the woods in the most naked way possible -- without the tools of either modern or ancient men, without even a pocketknife to protect myself. I picked up a small but sturdy-looking stick with one sharp end -- pretty decent if I were able to make just the right strike, but what was the likelihood of that if a mountain lion came at me with claws and teeth ready? It was stupid to go on -- I could see there were animals out here, some of whom might be hungry or simply irascible -- but it was equally stupid to go back -- I was perhaps three miles from the Banff youth hostel, after all; I was not Jeremiah Johnson. I stood frozen for a few moments, trying to figure out where reason lay, and then I went on.
I kept going for a good while, daring nature, half fearing and half hoping for that primal confrontation. But, like the Banff Springs Hotel, I had no part in the austerity of this scene; I was a silly, festive thing that clomped heavily in the woods and confused both prey and predators, half rhinoceros and half peacock. Nothing was going to attack me. I walked, unmolested, as the trail split and split again, down to the capillary level, until finally it became no more than random spaces between the trees. When I had started into the woods, the trail had been covered with bootprints as well as animal tracks. Indeed, one might have believed, at the start, that the trail was manmade, another sign of our ability to trample nature before us. But a mile or a mile and a half in, it became narrow, made by smaller and nimbler feet than ours, and began to dart unpredictably around trees. First there were fewer bootprints, and then the ones that were there were soft and shallow, deformed by recent snowfalls, and then finally there were none.
Then I succumbed to more realistic concerns that if I kept going I might miss a turn on the way back and be out here after dark. I turned around, following my own footsteps, carefully distinguishing which prints were mine where the trail forked and split. I made it easily back to the parking lot, and back to the youth hostel, where I cooked dinner and chatted with a couple from Quebec while another group made their own dinner and drank too much and called each other silly names in French until it was time to go to bed in a warm room full of people.
The Camel
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chastity is optimism
Chastity is optimism. Chastity looks to the future. Chastity believes things will last. Chastity will never take the sex of the moment, because chastity always insists that the relationship has more to offer, that there is more to come. Looking to the spiritual existence above all, chastity believes that we can never go wrong by getting to know each another first, that we will never be disappointed by cultivating love first.
This is not mere pie-eyed idealism, a schoolgirl's sweet, weightless dream of a perfect first time; it is a radical act of faith, given the tenuousness of existence. Things change all the time -- we fail to continue to love each other; we fall prey to old habits; we cannot sustain trials of distance and disease; we die. We are always leaving each other, and yet even at the most extreme end chastity must make the argument that we have loved each other better in this short time by not having slept in the same bed. I love you, deeply, joyfully -- and yet if I died tomorrow, chastity argues, I would have loved you more truly by never having pressed my teeth and lips to yours, bruising you in desperate passion; by never having kissed all the different textures of your skin; by not knowing the smells of your hair after one, then two, then three days without washing.
The Aftermath
I don't know yet, can't possibly tease out at this point, what will be the full impact of pilgrimage on my life in the years to come. Confidence certainly comes to mind; praying at the Shrines, even when it was difficult, seems to have imbued me with a greater certainty of the power of my prayer and to have dissolved much of my anxiety about the future. But I'm sure there is more to come. Nearly every Bahá'í knows these words of Bahá'u'lláh, which appear in the front leaf of most prayer books:
Whoso reciteth, in the privacy of his chamber, the verses revealed by God, the scattering angels of the Almighty shall scatter abroad the fragrance of the words uttered by his mouth, and shall cause the heart of every righteous man to throb. Though he may, at first, remain unaware of its effect, yet the virtue of the grace vouchsafed unto him must needs sooner or later exercise its influence upon his soul.
Day 9
The girls, with some justification, begin to doubt my land nav skills and want to take a cab. But I've got the bit in my teeth and my head down at this point, and I don't want to stop. I ask an elderly man where Hatzionut St. is -- he eyes me warily to see if I'm putting him on. "This is Hazionut St."
Day 8
There is a definite, deliberate tapering off of the historical significance and mystical splendor of the sites we visit toward the end of the pilgrimage; I think perhaps this is the House of Justice's way of gradually weaning us off the intensity of the experience. Of course, it is also because the program moves in roughly chronological order, and however much we may love and adore and desire to emulate 'Abdu'l-Bahá, drawing near to the places He has been doesn't carry quite the same potency as entering the rooms of Bahá'u'lláh.
Still, there is a great deal here to be touched by, and a great deal of historical interest. This is the house where 'Abdu'l-Bahá wrote the first two parts of His Will and Testament, which, along with the Kitáb-i-Aqdas comprises the charter of Bahá'í civilization. It is also the place where He, pacing and meditating in His tiny rooftop apartment, awaited the ship coming to take Him to prison. (While the ship was en route, however, the Young Turks' rebellion deposed the Ottoman government; things were thrown in chaos, those on the ship were now fugitives, and He was never arrested.)
Day 7
Fortunately, after the spiritual storms of the previous night, we have a light day. We gather at the gate closest to the Arc to begin our tour of the administrative centres of the Faith. I have a friend at home, not a Baha'i, who likes to refer to the House of Justice as the "Hall of Justice" -- "Did you meet Aqua-Man?" he asks on hearing from me -- and there is something heroic about this architecture, but mostly it's dignified and stately and something else. Ready, perhaps -- this is an architecture that seems entirely equal to the challenges of providing spiritual leadership to an emerging global civilization, greeting the leaders of nations, developing the institutions which can guide and channel the powers of millions for the benefit of all of humanity.
Day 6
This time, although the Spirit is there, I find the flesh flagging; after perhaps ten minutes I can barely keep my eyes open during a recitation of the Tablet of Ahmad, and I decide that not praying would be preferable to falling asleep in the Most Sacred Precincts, so I quietly back out of the Shrine and decide to spend the rest of the time -- it is already after 7 -- walking the gardens and circumambulating the Shrine: good, wakeful, vigorous activities which are also spiritual and contemplative.
After walking once around the Shrine, I sit for a moment on the steps behind the Shrine (where, surprisingly but thoughtfully, there are bathrooms) and try to take a long-exposure picture of one of my beloved path-breaking trees. The photo never really comes off, but while I'm taking it, tiny drops of rain land on the screen. Thinking about the theological implications of a tree in one's path, it pleases me to seek shelter under the tree. But as soon as I do, the gentle mist of rain immediately erupts into an unrestrained downpour. I stand there for a moment in the rain, already drenched, wondering where I can possibly go that is dry and warm. The Pilgrim House is too far, I can't possibly... and, of course, it's right in front of me. I run to the front door of the Shrine.
Day 5
This is a powerful thing -- that God will "forgive" and "have mercy" on those who "draw nigh" and "remember" her, and "grant their desires," and "bestow... whatever be their wish." Because it has become quite clear, both in my prayers at the Sacred Thresholds and in my conversations with Nina and Farideh during the past day, that my wish is to serve at the World Centre. It started as a sort of declaration of our love for this place -- "Wouldn't it be wonderful to serve here?" But I quickly realize that for me, perhaps a little more than for them, the desire to work here is an unacknowledged longing, who knows of what duration, which has only now, in response to the physical reality of the place, begun to sing out in a pure and insistent voice.
Day 4
We enter the room a few at a time. The floor is the same bright white stone as the hall, but it is covered with straw mats and, in one corner, a small carpet which no one sits on. Some plaster has come away from the vaulted ceiling. The small window is barred, of course, but beautiful Mediterranean light pours in and fills a brilliant white rectangle on the wall, and the sea laps peacefully outside. There is very little left here of the horror and suffering that caused Bahá’u’lláh to name 'Akka "The Most Great Prison." Still, one can imagine it -- the cold, filthy cell, the lack of food or drinkable water, dozens crowded into this small suite of cells, 'Abdu'l-Bahá forced to sleep in the morgue below.
Day 3
The display of manuscripts in the personal handwritings of the Bab and Baha'u'llah speak to me much more directly than the portraits ever can. Many of the tablets have been written with a great deal of space left around the page, as though something else should come later, and Shoghi Effendi brought a great Persian artist to the Holy Land to illuminate many of the original manuscripts. He never worked on reproductions, but painted directly on the very sheets the Baha'u'llah had written on. And the paintings are perfect -- exquisite -- their abstract geometrical patterns swirl and dart around the Blessed Beauty's flowing hand with flawless grace. They are the pinnacle of human achievement, and I am, I realize, deeply pleased that this is where the greatest artistic effort has been expended -- in celebrating, not His physical form, but His words, which have the power to recreate men.
Day 2
The great beauty of the Shrine, then, is that everything in the "sacred precincts" -- the area around the Shrine, its gardens, the building itself, the inner court, and finally the Holy of Holies -- is that it is all directed to reminding you of the meaning of your approach. Whereas the path from the Pilgrim House in Haifa to the Shrine of the Báb is rather short and takes a few turns before reaching the sacred door, the path to the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh is a straight path of bright white gravel that leads for quite some distance -- perhaps as much as a quarter of a mile -- in a straight line. The first part of the path is an expansive avenue of bright white gravel, secluded from the rest of the world by hedges and trees. Closer to the Shrine, however, there is a large gate of iron grillwork, always attended by two or three Bahá'í youth. After you pass through the gate, the quality of the stones beneath your feet changes -- I believe they are, again, those smooth white stones collected from the Sea of Galilee -- and to either side the view opens to reveal the gardens surrounding the building of the Shrine itself.
Day 1
The Shrine of the Báb also houses the remains of 'Abdu’l-Bahá, and we are told before entering the gardens that the first door will be the Shrine of 'Abdu’l-Bahá, while the second will be that of the Báb. I calm myself a little with the thought that I can start by visiting the Master and work my way up to the Báb, but in what will become a recurrent theme of my pilgrimage, I am caught off-guard -- of course they lead us to pray at the Shrine of the Báb first -- and suddenly, there is no avoiding it: just as He did in history, the Báb arrives unexpectedly, and I am forced to go in and worship at the Threshold whether I am ready or not.
P minus 1
I haven't really slept -- certainly not in a bed -- in almost 48 hours. Nonetheless, I'm so turned around on the time, and so jazzed up with the excitement of travel, that I barely sleep an hour on the plane from London to Tel Aviv. This proves to be a mistake of truly awful proportions, despite getting most of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity read and doing a little writing. The funny thing is, I can see the mistake coming; I still have enough neurons firing to reason through what a stupendously bad day I have coming, but not enough, apparently, to change my behavior and wind down for some sleep.
P minus 2
The grave is, of course, immaculate. It's not just that the "Bahá'í Cemetery," as the official signs call it, shows the same signs of life and use that all the normal, well-visited sections do (while trying to find it, I also wandered through the Catholic and Greek Orthodox areas). Manifesting exactly the same care that Bahá'ís dedicate to the grounds in the Holy Land, the area around the Guardian's memorial is not merely groomed, but peculiarly flat. Most of the other graves -- even the lovely, expensive ones -- don't lie exactly horizontal, either side-to-side or back-to-front, and there is in general a homey lumpiness to the surface of the cemetery, as though the deceased were not so much buried as all sleeping peacefully together under one blanket. But the Guardian's area -- perhaps fifteen by thirty feet, and bordered with a low, unpretentious hedge -- seems to have been bulldozed flat, which is indeed perhaps the only safe way to put up a memorial pillar, but which also makes it instantly identifiable as someplace set apart even from the rest of the hallowed grounds.
new wine into old wineskins
Can one imagine, indeed, if the Bahá’i Faith becomes, as we Bahá’is believe it will, the dominant religion on the planet? What then would be the effect on billions of devout Bahá’is if a future Manifestation of God were to declare that alcohol was now no longer forbidden? Impossible? But it is not written on alcohol, or on any other thing, "this is unlawful."
looking for authorship in the Christian world, pt. 6
And here we reach an insoluble point of faith. If we believe in the possibility of Jesus as a supernatural being, with access to the understanding and expressive ability of an all-knowing and providential God, then we are likely to believe that the passages with the greatest clarity and power are those closest to His historical words. On the other hand, if we take, as many secular scholars seem inclined to do, the presupposition that Jesus must have been an itinerant Jewish preacher, possibly millenarian, possibly with delusions of anointment, but in no way connected to a higher understanding (if we consider Him, as Metallica memorably put it, "The God That Failed"), then the reverse might almost be true: we might see the most sophisticated and unified passages in the Gospels, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the prophecies at Passover as developed by later Christian thinkers from the scattered and perhaps incoherent statements leftover from the true words of Jesus.
looking for authorship in the Christian world, pt. 5
If Jonah's poem seems like an obvious interpolation of possibly genuine revelation from the Prophet into a book which otherwise, to all appearances, seems like it was written by someone else, perhaps it is also the case that whole pieces of Christ's Revelation have been handed down to us by the authors of the Gospels, at least in substance. Indeed, if this is not the case, reading the Gospels can serve very little purpose, but the question of what, in the Gospels, constitutes His Word will be more easily resolved if we begin to see this pattern of interpolation and interpretation as common to the ancient records of the Prophets and Manifestations of God.
this wondrous System
The upshot of all these threads of Bahá'í law, coupled with the realities mentioned above, seems to be that in a future society which is largely or entirely Bahá'í, and in which people are spiritually educated to such a degree that they will find disobeying or rejecting Bahá'u'lláh's laws abhorrent, this law will be enforced primarily on a voluntary basis. That is, people might, of their own accord, approach the Local House of Justice, admit their transgression, and pay a fixed amount as punishment.
This surely a radical concept in the development of human law, but perhaps no more radical than voluntary taxation, which after all is what the Húqúqu'lláh amounts to in a practical sense. These ideas rest on an awareness of the spiritual nature of, on the one hand, justice, and on the other, wealth, and a radical re-alignment of values wherein believers would come to see, for example, the spiritual wealth to be gained from an act of sacrifice as being of greater personal value than the material wealth being sacrificed. Likewise, they would come to accept a certain amount of embarrassment before society (or its representative, in the House of Justice) and a material fine as a small price for the spiritual cleansing they afford.
looking for authorship in the Christian world, pt. 4
From the texts themselves, then, it is hard to see how some of the more extravagant claims of Christian orthodoxy can be sustained. The idea, for example, that the New Testament is nothing but divinely inspired text from stem to stern hardly seems supported. Where are the affirmations that these are the words of God, received by a specific person (or Person) in a specific place, as we find in Deuteronomy and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Daniel and Hosea and Joel and Amos and Micah and, not least of all, the Revelation? The Gospels (let alone the epistles) are a different type of beast, and it's no good pretending they aren't.
removing the dross
Scripture, if appearing in a stack of books, will rise to the top. Mundane books will not be stacked on top of it. Moreover, there is a mental order of precedence, so the the Kitab-i-Aqdas cannot be placed under any other book (it is, as its name states outright, the "Most Holy Book"); other books of Baha'u'llah and the Bab are next, followed by Scriptures of other religions, followed by books of Abdu'l-Baha. Books of Shoghi Effendi and compilations of letters from the House of Justice need not be on top of a stack of secular books, but should be treated deferentially. Obviously, this system creates quandaries -- is a prayer book, full of Scripture by several Authors, more holy than a Ruhi Institute workbook, which quotes liberally from the same Authors but also has many passages of ordinary man-made analysis? (Yes, by a kind of "percentage-holy" ranking.) What about Lights of Guidance, which is a compilation of quotes from the Writings as well as letters from the Guardian and the House of Justice, both authoritative but neither considered the Creative Word? (Tricky, but I say it goes below the prayer book -- 100% Creative Word -- but above the Ruhi book, which after all has many non-authoritative sections.)
