Swallowing Tablets of Stone

Humourists know that the best jokes are mined from the most serious topics. Morality is no exception.

Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”

(From Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar: page 78)

Nobody likes taking tablets at the best of times so who’s going to take kindly to swallowing tablets of stone, especially when they taste so bitter to so many palates? After all, when was the last time a great religion told us to covet our neighbour’s wife?

The humour lies partly in drawing our attention to the conflict between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ that Susan Neiman discusses so perceptively.  What we should do is so often in conflict with what we would like to do yet we know we ought to like doing what we should: we just can’t seem to get to that point somehow. Commandments are forever over-riding instincts that refuse to go away.

Part of the reason for this is that we have evolved to think in the short term and be unduly influenced by concrete specifics in the here and now, including the stories people tell us as well as what we experience ourselves. We’re particularly poor with probabilities (Dan Gardner‘s book, Risk, deals with this brilliantly so I won’t go into that here).

Let’s focus on consequences and time scales. Smoking provides an easy way to illustrate this. The table gives a few pointers in each box just as examples. If I’m a smoker, the short-term costs are virtually invisible: I enjoy my addiction so it doesn’t feel like a cost and buying cigarettes looks like choosing to dispose of my income as I feel like.  The habit tastes sweet for the benefits it brings which I value greatly and are very obvious to me. The distant disasters my present pleasure could well bring seem very remote and unlikely to my primate brain. So I show a callous lack of empathy for my future self whose suffering I don’t trouble myself to imagine. After all, things like that don’t happen to me.

And if that wasn’t enough to make sure that I’ll carry on smoking (or indulging in any other ‘vice’ you care to mention) the same examination of what quitting would feel like stacks the odds even further against giving up. The present becomes soured with discomforts of all kinds while future benefits fade into invisibility in the mists of distance. The gain in disposable income will probably weigh little in my mind compared with the horrible unsatisfied cravings alone, never mind the weight gain and the social costs.

In short, the long-term costs of continuing to smoke and the long-term benefits of quitting have far less impact on behaviour than the short-term costs of stopping and the immediate pleasures of continuing the  habit. And this is true for almost any insistent pattern of behaviour you care to name including those which are morally loaded. Virtue goes against the grain of our animal nature in similar ways.

We are though animals with some very special powers, rational thought being one of the most obvious – well, perhaps not obvious all the time. So, we shouldn’t give up on the idea of giving up our bad habits, as Neiman explains:

You think that what failed in the past will fail in the future?  Kant reminds us of how many sheer technological advances have disproved this old saw. . . . . If we don’t abandon efforts where science hopes we may create technology, how dare we abandon them where morality demands we create justice? . . . Of course ideas of reason conflict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas are meant to do. Ideals are not measured by whether they confirm reality: reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. (Her emphasis.)

(Moral Clarity: page 153)

However, she does not underestimate the difficulty of acting on this realisation.

If you tell yourself that a world without injustice is a childish wish-fantasy, you have no obligation to work toward it. . . . Keeping ideals alive is much harder than dismissing them, for it guarantees a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Ideas are like horizons – goals toward which you can move but never actually attain. . . . . The abyss that separates is from ought is too deep to bridge entirely; the most we can hope to do is narrow it.

(pages 159-162)

And that can seem like a bad bargain — too much immediate discomfort for too little immediate gain once more. However, reason may not be as feeble and error prone as we sometimes think and there may be more at work in the world to push towards virtue than is immediately  obvious. Even if we are not convinced there is a God or that we have a soul that survives death, the way the world works should give us pause for thought.

Philo of Alexandria

Robert Wright‘s perceptive analysis, of how morality is essential (and perhaps inevitable) if civilisation is to progress and chaos to be avoided, deserves close attention from both the materially and the spiritually minded, as Neiman’s does also in its different way. It begins to tip the balance against the inertia of bad habits and hints that there is more to life than matter.

The same thread of thinking runs through the whole of his book, The Evolution of God, so a small sample of his argument will have to suffice. One of the most charming facets of this argument, that morality is a social cement that we ignore for long only at the risk of chaos, comes in his discussion of Philo of Alexandria.

The order at work [in the world] is the Logos, and it came originally from God. He set up the world so that mere self-interested learning – the study of cause and effect, and preference for happy effects  – would steer people towards virtue. So when Proverbs reports that ‘whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on the one who starts it rolling,’ we can think of God not as pushing people into pits and pushing stones back on people, but as the one who designed the social ‘gravity’  that brings these effects.

(page 227)

Virtue seems painful, if you accept this line of reasoning, only to those who do not understand its value. The difficult task for education and parenting is to enable developing minds to defer immediate gratification long enough to secure the benefits of self-restraint — benefits that accrue both to the individual and to society. I will return to that issue in a future post, drawing amongst other things on some useful recent material, while recognising that this delay might not help any of us deal with present temptations.

A last thought for now.

Perhaps this perspective, if they would only pause to consider it carefully, would help those who kick against moral constraints, whatever their origin, to understand the words of Bahá’u'lláh when He explains:

3. O ye peoples of the world! Know assuredly that My commandments are the lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of My mercy for My creatures. Thus hath it been sent down from the heaven of the Will of your Lord, the Lord of Revelation. Were any man to taste the sweetness of the words which the lips of the All-Merciful have willed to utter, he would, though the treasures of the earth be in his possession, renounce them one and all, that he might vindicate the truth of even one of His commandments, shining above the Dayspring of His bountiful care and loving-kindness. . . .

5. Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere code of laws. Nay, rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of might and power. To this beareth witness that which the Pen of Revelation hath revealed. Meditate upon this, O men of insight!

(Kitáb-i-Aqdas)

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Human Dignity

From Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress'

What is Freedom?

This is a topic on which Bahá’u’lláh challenges many of our (mostly Western) assumptions. One such challenge is particularly difficult and particularly important.

Say: True liberty consisteth in man’s submission unto My commandments, little as ye know it. . . . The liberty that profiteth you is to be found nowhere except in complete servitude unto God, the Eternal Truth. Whoso hath tasted of its sweetness will refuse to barter it for all the dominion of earth and heaven.

(Bahá’u'lláh: Synopsis & Codification of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas: 123-5)

From His perspective dignity depends upon curtailing our freedom in certain respects. Liberty, in the sense of licence, debases people and they lose their dignity: they need restraints to protect them from their own ignorance. From a spiritual point of view, the best restraints are God’s commandments and obedience to them is true liberty. Licence traps us in the coils of appetite: obedience to God frees us from debasing desires.

Of course, as Eric Reitan makes plain, we must take care that the God that we follow is ‘worthy of worship.’ Other posts on this blog have explored the relationship between our ideas of God and our ideas of good and the implications that relationship has for our conduct. I won’t rehearse them all again here.

Here is one of the paradoxes of spiritual growth. We are prone to licence and cannot transcend this tendency and achieve true freedom except through the power of Divine Assistance which will involve self-restraint.

For far too many of us in the West, for whom dignity has become more or less synonymous with virtually unbridled self-determination, this is an awkward pill to swallow. Depriving ourselves of its medicinal potency will however only make a bad situation worse.

I accept that a significant number of people would not agree that the pill of Divine Assistance, the afterlife and/or a specific religious faith needs  be swallowed at all. We are perfectly capable, many would argue, of improving ourselves and our society without it.

Robert Wright‘s position on this is interesting. He writes:

Some people will take heart from the idea that to seek a personal salvation linked to social salvation is to align yourself with a cosmic purpose manifest in history, and some won’t (either because they don’t agree that the purpose is manifest or because they don’t care). But however you describe the linkage, whatever the nature of the incentive structure, the linkage will have to be made in a fair percentage of human beings around the world for it to work.

(The Evolution of God: page 441)

What should we use this kind of freedom for?

It is not only for our own benefit that we need to exercise restraint and cultivate virtues. We need to do this to improve society as a whole and build a better civilisation.

All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization. The Almighty beareth Me witness: To act like the beasts of the field is unworthy of man. Those virtues that befit his dignity are forbearance, mercy, compassion and loving-kindness towards all the peoples and kindreds of the earth. Say: O friends! Drink your fill from this crystal stream that floweth through the heavenly grace of Him Who is the Lord of Names.

(Proclamation of Bahá’u'lláh)

Unity underpins all the benefits that accrue including the dignity of all.

The Blessed Beauty said: “All are the fruits of one tree and the leaves of one branch.” He likened the world of existence to one tree and all the souls to leaves, blossoms and fruits.  . . . Thus the friends of God . . . must purify their sight, and look upon mankind as the leaves, blossoms and fruits of the tree of creation, and must always be thinking of doing good to someone, of love, consideration, affection and assistance to somebody.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Bahá’í World Faith)

This degree of unity, respect for the dignity of all human beings and perfect justice are interlinked.

When perfect justice reigns in every country of the Eastern and Western World, then will the earth become a place of beauty. The dignity and equality of every servant of God will be acknowledged; the ideal of the solidarity of the human race, the true brotherhood of man, will be realized; and the glorious light of the Sun of Truth will illumine the souls of all men.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks: 7th Principle)

Such a state of affairs will not arise of its own accord:

It is . . .  clear that the emergence of this natural sense of human dignity and honour is the result of education.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: The Secret of Divine Civilisation)

Virtue and the effort it entails need to be taught. A sense of dignity, other people’s and one’s own, is an essential part of what needs to be taught and will not develop without teaching.

Will this take long?

What implications have contemporary Bahá’í thinkers derived from these ideas?

There are many social evils antithetical to human dignity. Racism is one of the most pernicious. Achieving its eradication will not be simple, quick and effortless.

For too much of history, the evil of racism has violated human dignity. Its influence has retarded the development of its victims, corrupted its perpetrators and blighted human progress. Overcoming its devastating effects will thus require conscious, deliberate and sustained effort. Indeed, nothing short of genuine love, extreme patience, true humility and prayerful reflection will succeed in effacing its pernicious stain from human affairs. 

(BIC Document #01-0321, 2002, Page 2: Bahá’í International Community)

This statement could be applied unchanged with equal appropriateness and force to every corrupt attitude inimical to human dignity. It implies that solutions must be capable of crossing generational boundaries as well as those of class, gender and creed.

Education, then, emerges as an indispensable tool – a tool of active moral learning. To accomplish the broad objectives of ensuring the “full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity” and promoting “understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial, ethnic or religious groups,” education must strive to develop an integrated set of human capabilities-intellectual, artistic, social, moral and spiritual.  There is no other way to raise up positive social actors who are builders of amity and agents of service and probity.

(Bahá’í International Community: Belief and Tolerance)

There are also powerful interactions to consider, not least between the individual and the society of which (s)he is a part.

As a consequence of the deep connection between individual and social well-being, programmes of education need to instill in every child a two-fold moral purpose. The first relates to the process of personal transformation – of intellectual, material and spiritual growth. The second concerns the complex challenge of transforming the structures and processes of society itself.

(Ibid.)

The link between these concepts and the idea of World Citizenship is very clear.

Meeting the challenge to the education system to promote responsible global citizenship, the Bahá’í concept of World Citizenship begins with an acceptance of the oneness of the human family and the inter-connectedness of the nations of “the earth, our home.” While it encourages a sane and legitimate patriotism, it also insists upon a wider loyalty, a love of humanity as a whole. It does not, however, imply abandonment of legitimate loyalties, the suppression of cultural diversity, the abolition of national autonomy, or the imposition of uniformity. Its hallmark is “unity in diversity.”

(U.K. Bahá’í Community: Community Cohesion: a Bahá’í Perspective)

True freedom is not the same as individualism

The Prosperity of Human Kind explores these issues deeply and is worth quoting at length though selectively. It begins on this issue by saying:

Justice is the one power that can translate the dawning consciousness of humanity’s oneness into a collective will through which the necessary structures of global community life can be confidently erected.

And develops this further:

At the group level, a concern for justice is the indispensable compass in collective decision making, because it is the only means by which unity of thought and action can be achieved. Far from encouraging the punitive spirit that has often masqueraded under its name in past ages, justice is the practical expression of awareness that, in the achievement of human progress, the interests of the individual and those of society are inextricably linked. (My emphasis)

And culminates in an insight of astonishing reach and of great relevance to the nurturing and protection of human dignity:

At the heart of the discussion of a strategy of social and economic development, therefore, lies the issue of human rights. The shaping of such a strategy calls for the promotion of human rights to be freed from the grip of the false dichotomies that have for so long held it hostage. Concern that each human being should enjoy the freedom of thought and action conducive to his or her personal growth does not justify devotion to the cult of individualism that so deeply corrupts many areas of contemporary life. Nor does concern to ensure the welfare of society as a whole require a deification of the state as the supposed source of humanity’s well-being.

Goya's 'El Tres de Mayo'

In short, the enthronement of either individualism or state supremacy inevitably devalues human rights and thereby human dignity.

Its summarizing sentence at the end of this particular passage is masterly:

Only in a consultative framework made possible by the consciousness of the organic unity of humankind can all aspects of the concern for human rights find legitimate and creative expression.

In other words, the consciousness of the organic unity of humankind makes true consultation possible: such consultation allows us properly and effectively to express a concern for human rights (and dignity).

Trusteeship

The section ends by discussing a central concept in Bahá’í spiritual administration – trusteeship – and extends its necessary application to the world as a whole.

Since the body of humankind is one and indivisible, each member of the race is born into the world as a trust of the whole. This trusteeship constitutes the moral foundation of most of the other rights – principally economic and social – which the instruments of the United Nations are attempting similarly to define. The security of the family and the home, the ownership of property, and the right to privacy are all implied in such a trusteeship. The obligations on the part of the community extend to the provision of employment, mental and physical health care, social security, fair wages, rest and recreation, and a host of other reasonable expectations on the part of the individual members of society.

Humanity dignity would be guaranteed in such a context. It is all but explicit that without it human dignity would not exist.

In Bahá’í discourse certain key concepts are connected and interdependent. These crucially include: unity, justice, submission to the Will of God, trusteeship, education, the individual, society, civilization, love, patience, consultation, human rights and human dignity.

It will be crucial to the well-being of future generations that as many of us as possible start or continue unpacking their implications without further delay and translating them as rapidly as possible into concerted and focused action.

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Many a slip – more meditations on mortality

My parents' wedding

My visit to the gravesides in Stockport, described in a previous post, triggered a lot of memories. It also reminded me of the sayings that almost always spring to my mind when I am working towards some particular outcome. ‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched’ and ‘There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip’ are the two main ones. I have had to learn to enjoy the process of getting there without becoming too anxious about the destination, but even so these two stress-inducing sentences can come bursting through at times of high arousal. Being so concerned about an outcome adversely affects my ability to achieve anything. Understanding better the possible nature of the over-concern helps me to control it.

The life courses of my relatives on my mother’s side gives me some clues as to why the disconcerting mind-tapes might be there. Their unlucky stories were being drip fed into my consciousness as far back as I can remember.

Aunts and Uncles and Such

Uncle Harold, who was 11 in 1901 at the time of the census I looked at, married an Irish girl called Nell. They called their son Richard after Harold’s father. He had some kind of learning problem. By the time I knew anything about him the son was called Dick, and was a very big man, probably in his forties.  Harold’s wife died young and he had to bring his son up alone. His end was very much in character. When he was in his eighties I heard that he had tried to carry two one-hundredweight sacks of coal, one under each arm, back to his house one winter. He succeeded, only to find his legs swelling up soon afterwards. He was diagnosed as having a heart condition. A year or so later he died.

Aunt Ann, who was eight at the time of the census, was the elder daughter and the second eldest child. Like Uncle Harold, she failed to complete her education: she had to leave school and earn some money to help the family out. I cannot remember what work she did but think it was secretarial. She was a great walker, like Uncle Harold, and played a lot of tennis, I believe. She married my Uncle Joe who was a tailor. He fought in the First World War  and was wounded in the arm (his left, I think). He damaged a nerve which never mended properly and caused him a lot of pain throughout the rest of his life.

They had no children of their own. Aunt Ann had more than one miscarriage. They treated my older sister Mary very much as their own. She used to visit them often and stayed at their house for long periods. Mary died on 11^th January 1939, four years before I was born. Aunt Ann was almost as distressed as my parents were. The exact sequence of events at the time of Mary’s death is hard to disentangle because Aunt Ann’s account and my mother’s differ somewhat.

They both agree that Mary died of something they refer to as septic pneumonia. She was twelve years old and died in great discomfort, with foul fluid issuing from her lungs. (Incidentally, watching a programme called The 1940s House, in which a family lived through a re-enactment of the war years for several weeks, made me realise just how traumatic this whole period would have been for everyone including my parents and my older brother, Bill, even if they hadn’t had to cope with Mary’s death near the beginning of it.) In my childhood I received a highly idealised view of Mary from a portrait tinged with almost intolerable sadness that my mother painted in bits and pieces over a long period of years. My father never spoke of her at all, though I know from everything my mother said her death affected him very badly. I tried to capture what I sensed in him in a poem:

I’d creak my way upstairs sometimes and dare
the backroom where my sister, Mary, died
before I was born. ‘Her lungs were putrid
at the end,’ my mother said. ‘I couldn’t bear
to see.’ I’d stand there questioning the air
for traces of some meaning it might hide.
On the wall above the iron bedstead,
fading in his photograph, my father,
his broad shoulders stretching his jacket tight,
held a huge bullcalf by a rope, half-stern,
half-smiling, proud: younger than the grim grey
man I knew – and straighter. Then the thought:
a man that to trench-fire did not bow, the burn
of one small child’s loss bent easily.

To return to my grandparents’ family, the next oldest was Tom, who was five at the time of the census.  I know very little about him and rarely met him. He lived in Stoke by the time I was born and visited us only once that I can remember for Uncle Frank’s funeral. Tom was some kind of engineer or boiler maker. The only things I can remember about him are that his wife had Parkinson’s disease and he nursed her for many long years. By the time I met him she had died and he had remarried.

Uncle Frank’s story is probably the saddest in the whole family. He was the youngest – two at the time of the census. He fought in WW1 as did most of that generation. (When I think of the difficult lives of my uncles and my aunt, it’s tempting to think that the luck of the menfolk at least was all used up in surviving the First World War.)

He survived, returned home and married. He had two or three children. At some point later, he developed a tumour on the brain, which affected his behaviour. His wife attempted to get him permanently hospitalised. My father apparently thwarted this plan by refusing to leave Frank alone at the crucial moment. Frank’s wife then disappeared with the children and he never saw any of them again. He had an operation which cut away part of his skull to remove the tumour. They inserted a plastic flap in the temple area to protect his brain from the pressure of the skin. As time went on the plastic wore away and he knew that when it wore out he would die. I am not quite clear why surgical practice was not able by the time of his death in 1960 to renew the plastic “skull”. When, as a child, I visited him or met him in the street, it was hard to tear my eyes away from the deepening pothole clearly visible on his right temple. It made my interactions with him tense and awkward and I’m sure he sensed this. I was 17 when he died.

The Impact on my Life

Mirzá Mihdí

I have often reflected upon the combination of factors which blighted the lives of so many of that family.

Their histories explain the keen sense, with me since childhood, that this life is transitory and our hold upon it weak in the extreme. That feeling has not left me even though modern medicine and the quality of life we enjoy in the developed world has strengthened our ability to postpone death and prolong health.

It has given me a strong sense of fellowship with the bulk of humanity that do not share my good fortune, though I don’t act on that feeling as often or as vigorously as I should. I now regard that inheritance as a gift not a curse, though this wasn’t always my attitude towards it, and perhaps it goes some way towards explaining why I was so drawn to the Faith when I found it and moved by the suffering of its Founding Figures. Having seen at close hand my parent’s suffering over the death of their daughter gave me a porthole to a deeper understanding of Bahá’u'lláh’s pain at the death of His youngest son in the prison city of Acre than I would otherwise have had, I think. It helped me resonate, at the least to some degree, to the magnitude of the sacrifices He made to spread the Word of God with such wisdom, compassion and persistency and spurred me to a pale imitation of it.

I started this post by considering the way in which the suffering of my ancestors might have contributed to my special form of performance anxiety, and have ended with a greater awareness of how much it has probably contributed to my choosing the spiritual path I am striving to tread. A good example of how working towards one goal often brings another quite different one into reality – not so much a slip between cup and lip, then, as an inexplicable transformation, en route, from tea to coffee.

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An Unusual End

On Armistice Day 2009 the Hereford Baha’i community held a memorial meeting for Dave Black who was buried exactly one year ago today. Prayers were said indoors and memories of his life shared. It was a moving celebration of his life in which sadness and laughter were mixed in roughly equal measure. Dave would definitely not have wished for the final mood to be one of sadness, so everyone went outdoors to mark the occasion in a playful symbolic way. These photos tell the whole story.

How does it work?

Let's try this.

Perhaps not!

This looks better

So far so good.

This is getting scary!

Definitely the right idea

Here it goes!

Going!

Going!

Gone!

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Expanding the Moral Imagination

Any religion whose prerequisites for individual salvation don’t conduce to the salvation of the whole world is a religion whose time has passed.

(Robert Wright: The Evolution of God page 439)

I am getting towards the end of Robert Wright’s fascinating book  – I’ve been fitting the reading of it into the narrow gaps between other major commitments recently. I’ve just got to the point where he discusses how the expansion of the moral imagination (page 428)  can ‘bring us closer to moral truth.’

His line of argument will not appeal to everyone: it’s probably too materialistic for many religious people and too sympathetic to religion for many materialists. He states:

The moral imagination was ‘designed’ by natural selection . . . . . to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.

He is aware that this sounds like a glorified pursuit of self-interest. He argues, though, that it leads beyond that.

The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.

(page 428-429)

He rescues this from cliché by pointing out that the idea of common humanity may be a self-evident point when we read or hear it, but it’s far from obvious if you look at the way we act. This is because we are under the illusion that we are special.

We all base our daily lives on this premise – that our welfare is more important than the welfare of pretty much anyone else, with the possible exception of close kin. . . . We see our own resentments as bona fide grievances and we see the grievances of others as mere resentments.

(page 429)

He links the progress of humanity with the application of the unifying insight in daily life.

. . . . the salvation of the global social system entails moral progress not just in the sense of human welfare; there has to be as a prerequisite for that growth, a closer encounter by individual human beings with moral truth.

(page 429)

He feels that it is inevitable that we will either move closer to moral truth or descend into chaos.He feels that

. . . history has driven us closer and closer to moral truth, and now our moving still closer to moral truth is the only path to salvation . . .

(page 429)

by which he means salvation of the social structure. He feels (page 430) that religions that have ‘failed to align individual salvation with social salvation have not, in the end, fared well.’

As I have quoted in an earlier post, Wright argues (page 435) that as social organisation grows God tends to draw ‘a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.’

I find this tremendously encouraging after the evangelical atheists have, for what seems an age, been partially successful in their attempt to sound like the only scientific take on God. Wright’s view and Reitan’s complement each other beautifully. Eric Reitan contends in Is God a Delusion? that, while you cannot prove  the existence of God by rational argument, it is entirely reasonable to believe that there is a God: Wright appears to agree and he speaks from the point of view of evolution, the world-view that Dawkins has sought to colonise and exploit as providing an absolute refutation of God’s existence for all time.

As Wright’s words quoted at the start of this post explain, the challenge now is for all religions everywhere to recognise that the time for making special and divisive claims about their God is well and truly over. The core of the moral vision of all faiths, though often encrusted with contradictory and partisan traditions, is that all human beings are members of the same family – the human family. Any religion that does not express its recognition of this courageously and persistently is doomed and may doom everyone else along with it.

The Universal House of Justice wrote to the world’s religious leaders in 2002, exhorting them to do all in their power to combat religious fanaticism, and stating:

. . . that interfaith discourse, if it is to contribute meaningfully to healing the ills that afflict a desperate humanity, must now address honestly and without further evasion the implications of the over-arching truth that called the movement into being: that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one.

And they close with the following appeal:

The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. Whatever justification exists for exercising influence in matters of conscience lies in serving the well-being of humankind.

Wright and religion are definitely not a million miles apart. Bahá’ís believe that our moral imagination can and must expand to embrace the whole of humanity within its compass of compassion.

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A Fine and Private Place

My cousin's grave

I’ve had a graveside week of it this week.

That’s not quite as morbid and unpleasant as it sounds. The visits I made to gravesides in my home town were full of interest and contained at least one fascinating surprise. The visit to the resting place of the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith along with other members of the Hereford Baha’i community was a spiritually rewarding one.

We went up to Stockport to see my cousin’s husband. My cousin died recently and we wanted to keep in touch with him during this difficult period. Obviously we also visited her grave, which awaits the headstone once it has settled. When we told him of our plan he mentioned that my grandparents’ grave was close by in the same cemetery. I was astonished because I had never realised this, even though I had had many conversations about their parents with my aunt and my mother before they died. It was amazing to me that they had never mentioned where my grandparents were buried, nor could I remember their taking me with them to visit the grave.

Not surprisingly then my wife and I could hardly wait to search for my grandparents’ grave. We found it without too much difficulty apart from soggy turf and uneven ground. Then I had another shock. My uncle Frank, whose funeral I attended in 1960, was also buried in the same grave. How could I have stood there when his coffin was lowered and not realised? The only explanation that occurs to me is that the stone was not visible at that time he was buried and, as I had never been particularly close to my uncle, I had not visited his grave after the stone had been replaced. It also makes sense of why neither my aunt nor my mother ever thought to tell me where my grandparents’ were buried.

Alice and Richard

Because there was very little information on the stone, we called in at the cemetery office on our way out to see if we could learn anymore. The lady there was very helpful. We saw the register of Catholic burials for that period and to my surprise I learned that my uncle and his parents had lived at the same address from at least 1937, when my grandmother died, and he had stayed there after their deaths. I had visited him a couple of times in that same tiny terraced two-up-two-down red-brick house, with its steep narrow stairs and dark interiors, but never realised that this was where they also had lived for so long. I thought they had lived and died in Heaton Norris, not off Shaw Heath as it finally turned out.

This news gave me a link to them that I never knew I had: I knew the house they had lived in till their deaths. They had both died before I was born. Memories of what I had been told about them came flooding back.

Alice, my grandmother, from what I can make out from what is left in my memory from all my mother’s accounts, was a very brave and resourceful woman. Richard, her husband and my grandfather, had been a signalman on the railways, a skilled and well-paid job by the standards of the times. This would be at the turn of the nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth. In the census of 1901 he described himself as still a “railway signalman.” He was 37 years old: his wife Alice was 36. My mother wasn’t yet born.

They had both converted to Roman Catholicism as a result of the influence of Cardinal Newman in the wake of the Oxford movement. While he was able to work the family would’ve been reasonably comfortable. Sadly, when my Uncle Harold, the eldest child of the family, was fourteen years old and not very long after my mother was born, Richard had an accident which sprained his ankle. Nobody thought that was much of a problem at first and he carried on working as best he could. It didn’t get any better. His doctor said it was nothing serious but he ought to rest it for a while, which he did. Even when he rested it still got worse. The pain got so bad that he could not bear the leg to be touched. Eventually Richard went to another doctor who explained that the situation was serious. The sprain had turned gangrenous and an amputation was necessary. They cut off his leg to save his life. I am not sure whether he was able to return to work after that. I have the impression he did, but to lighter and less well-paid duties. The family coped with the downturn in their fortunes reasonably well.

The final and most disastrous blow was when he fell on the ice of a children’s slide one winter and damaged his hip. After that he could not walk at all easily or well and therefore could not work. There was no longer a wage coming in. Harold had to leave school and give up his piano classes, at which he was doing very well, and go to work to earn some money to help the family who were now struggling very hard. Their savings were too little to manage on. They had had to pay so much to the doctors (there was no Health Service or Social Security in those days). His sister, my Aunt Ann, also had to go to work. This would have happened by about 1904 I reckon. My mother would have been about three.

It was apparently my grandmother’s resourcefulness that kept them going. She fixed and mended and did odd jobs for extra cash. She was creative and tireless. The strain did eventually take its toll on her also. She developed a heart condition which caused her death after a long illness in the late nineteen-thirties. Still, she survived into her early seventies.

My grandfather, Richard, who survived her by four years, had his own way of coping with the drastic change in his circumstances. He had a passion for music and had been instrumental (sorry about the pun!) in encouraging Harold to keep up his piano practice. Though he couldn’t read a note of music he had a good sense of pitch and rhythm and knew immediately if Harold made a mistake. He loved to go to listen to concerts and the opera at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, so when Harold and Aunt Ann were earning enough they used to treat him to surprise trips there. He also had a wide-ranging curiosity about other countries and about nature. He used to get hold of books on these subjects from the library and read them all voraciously. His memory for what he read was apparently excellent.

Implications

It may just be a coincidence that I share his love of books – not noticeably, of course – and found a new Faith which I enthusiastically embraced rather as he seems to have done. (His passionate and accurate ear for classical music rather missed me out though!) On the other hand a combination of genes and the experiences my mother shared with me about him could easily have influenced me in that direction. Either way my identity owes more than a little to his influence.

But for him my visits to the Guardian’s Resting Place might never have taken place. Who knows!

Graveyard encounters don’t just evoke our ancestors though.

Andrew Marvell

Two views of mortality are strongly connected with images of death such as skulls and tombs: memento mori and carpe diem. Each view of mortality has a different take on morality, interestingly enough:’Gather ye rose buds while ye may’ (Herrick) versus ‘be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin’ (translated from the Vulgate‘s Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus 7:40). It is a rare sensibility that manages to look both possibilities squarely in the face as Marvell‘s lyric masterpiece To His Coy Mistress succeeds in doing. Shira Wolosky has written a brilliant critique of this feat in The Art of Poetry pages 70-79. She states:

The poem offers, then, not one, but two topoi [themes]: the overt “carpe diem” and a subversive remembrance of death inscribed into the text alongside the call to seduction. . . . . . Both topoi are urgent calls, calls to weigh your life to see what, in its short compass of time and space, you really can accomplish; what, in its short span, really has value; what you should be striving for.

(page 79)

Which view we take hinges as a rule on whether we believe in an afterlife or not.

I have dealt at length in earlier posts with this issue in terms of its truth value and usefulness. It is interesting to add into the mix Robert Wright‘s evolutionary perspective. It is not as dispiriting as you might think.

Evolution and God

In The Evolution of God he attempts to show how the image of good Christians being welcomed by Christ into heaven

may have been crucial in the eventual triumph of Christianity. This image gave it an edge over the religions  that didn’t offer hopes of a pleasant afterlife and kept it competitive with the many religions that did.

(page 310)

This image was also a lever to help ensure that people who became Christian behaved in ways that helped the faith succeed socially:

The message has not just got to attract people, but to get them to behave in ways that sustain the religious organisation and spread it. For example: it would help if sin is defined so that the avoidance of it sustains the cohesion and growth of the church.

(page 316)

He ties in the value of a religion with its capacity to create solidarity amongst all the diverse people’s brought together within a developed civilisation. When it is inclusive enough to prevent conflict between all those that  trade and travel bring together it works for the benefit of all.

Resting Place of Shoghi Effendi, London

There is a catch for us though:

But [the] modern-day effectiveness is a more complex question. When Christianity reigned in Rome, and, later, when Islam was at the height of its geopolitical influence, the scope of these religions roughly coincided with the scope of whole civilisations. . . . . Today’s world, in contrast,  is so interconnected and interdependent that Christianity and Islam, like it or not, inhabit a single social system – the planet.

(page 324)

He sees the progress of civilisation, which has now reached a global level, almost inevitably driving the development of a global faith in only one God with one name.

[As] the scope of social organisation grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.

(page 435)

He sees this as compatible both with a materialist view of the process and a sense of God working through the logic of the universe to bring about this shift in consciousness. He argues that its explicability from a materialist viewpoint does not disprove the religious case.

Which is how my graveyard encounters have led to both a keener sense of the contribution of my ancestors to my view of the world and, with the help of Robert Wright, a keener sense of how awareness of our mortality can underpin an expanding consciousness of God’s purpose for all of us not just for some of us.

Those who wish to see the grave as leaving no room for God are free to do so. Personally, I’ve made a different choice which I believe is equally rational and valid.

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