Baha'i thriving in North
Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jan 17/01) - It's Friday night and six people sit around a glass coffee table sipping tea, eating dates and cookies while the problems of humanity dissolve in the words of one Baha'u'llah.
They talk about a new world, unity and divine love with the same certainty as describing the weather.
And they could be. There are no ornamental frills to this setting; no clergy, no chalice, no candles, just a livingroom with couches, a stereo, a woodstove. There is nothing overtly religious here, just the topics of conversation.
They call these gatherings "firesides".
This is a normal Baha'i gathering, the informal religion, pockets stretching across the North from Iqaluit to Inuvik to Yellowknife to all over the world.
They start with a prayer.
"I bear witness, Oh my God, that Thou hast created me to worship Thee...."
At the end of the prayer, one of the members, Paul Carroll, a Yellowknife musician, leans forward and says tonight he's giving the talk. But he's not clergy, he's just an average joe who's giving his feelings on the words of Baha'u'llah.
"I'm just giving some of my thoughts and impressions," he says. "It's just me, just another schmuck in the Baha'i community."
Laughter.
Tonight he's talking about revolution. The greatest ever known, so Carroll says.
A steaming pot of jasmine tea is passed around.
There are 80 followers of the Baha'i faith in Yellowknife.
According to long-time Baha'i follower and Yellowknife resident Bill Carr, the religion first touched down half a century ago when Dr. Arthur Irwin came to Yellowknife in 1950 as a geologist with DIAND. He spent five years here and met Noland and Bernice Boss. Noland Boss ran the old Mine Rescue station on 49th Ave.
By 1962 the Yellowknife Baha'i community consisted of nine members.
"The first person to declare their faith in Yellowknife was reporter," says Carr.
A little over a hundred years earlier, a 27- year-old named Baha'u'llah lay on a dungeon floor in Teheran. The year was 1857 and state authorities, spurred on by Muslim clergy, were trying to quell the rise of a dissident sect created by a merchant only known as the Bab who had been executed seven years earlier.
The Bab claimed his appearance was prophesied in the Koran and humanity was on the cusp of a new age. He said his mission was to prepare humanity for the coming of a universal messenger from God as prophesied in all the world's great religions.
Baha'u'llah supported the Bab's claims which triggered his eventual imprisonment.
"We were consigned for four months to a place foul beyond comparison...no pen can depict that place, nor any tongue describe its loathsome smell," he wrote near the end of his life.
Here, according to Baha'i history, Baha'u'llah dreamed a dream that changed the course of his life and created a new dimension of reality for the world. After the dream he knew he was God's messenger in the same line as Buddha, Christ and Mohammed.
"Every limb of my body would...be set afire. At such moments my tongue recited what no man could bear hear," he wrote about the experience.
On his release he was exiled. He fled to Iraq and then to the mountains of Kurdistan where he wandered alone for two years until the remaining followers of the Bab drew him out and the fledgling religion, with Baha'u'llah as its messenger, sprouted from the sands and into the world.
Carroll says the Baha'i faith is the second most widespread religion in the world with followers numbering in the millions. And tonight he's talking about it changing the globe.
"It's time for man to undertake a spiritual revolution," says Carroll to the rest who sit on couches and chairs sipping tea and nibbling on dates.
Carroll turned to the religion after a friend introduced it to him. He says he thought about and it made absolute sense.
He recently finished a CD project where Baha'i writings were translated into six different Dene languages. The project took two years to complete and the first CDs were distributed for free to the Hay River Reserve and Fort Smith.
Main priority is to love God
The CDs have now been distributed to Deline, Ndilo and Rae-Edzo. According to Carroll there is no dogma in Baha'i, the main thing is to love God and follow the words of Beha'u'llah and everything flows from there.
"You'll want to follow his words," says Carroll.
Elain Gillespie converted to the religion in Yellowknife last August. The fifth year engineering student from the University of Alberta started attending weekly firesides through a friend.
"I really liked being around these people," says Gillespie, "I incidentally learned about the faith."
It's like a method for personal and societal growth," says Gillespie.
"It gives you instructions on how to be a better person," she says.
Even though Baha'i is a missionary religion, proselytising is forbidden.
"We don't push it on people," says Carroll, "if someone is searching and they want to learn more they can, but we do not judge."
There is no heaven or hell in Baha'i teachings. The new world is to be established in this world.
When a person dies they go on to a spiritual world. The purpose of this physical world is to build up spiritual limbs for the next one.
"We are spiritual beings having a physical experience," says Erin McNeil, on of the members of the Baha'i community.
But apart from the afterlife and the metaphysics, Carroll says that love is the essence of Baha'i.
"Love is what makes the world turn," says Carroll, "no one knows why certain atoms are attracted to other atoms, it's love." No one sitting in the livingroom questions these words, they all know it's true. To them the world has rhythm and God is the tambourine player, their lives are caught in this tune and it is their belief that someday the whole world with sing the same song.
The tea is nearly gone and dates are almost eaten but no one seems to want to leave and it's nearly 1 a.m. The fireside started at 8:30 p.m.
"Know thou of a certainty that Love is the secret of God's holy Dispensation, the manifestation of the All-Merciful, the fountain of spiritual outpourings," Adu'l-Baha, son of Baha'u'lla.
