‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Leroy Ioas and the red rose

This year is the centenary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s journeys to the West after decades of imprisonment. Today is the Commemoration of the Ascension of  Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. This story seems an appropriate one to share at this time.

Leroy Ioas, a young boy in 1912, was blessed to meet the Master on His visit to Chicago. One day, on the way to the Plaza Hotel to hear ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, he decided to buy Him some flowers. Though he had but little money, he managed to find a large bouquet of flowers which he himself especially liked – white carnations! But in approaching the hotel, he had a change of heart: he would not give ‘Abdu’l-Bahá those flowers after all, he told his father. His father was genuinely perplexed. Why, when the Master so loved flowers? Young Leroy gave his answer: ‘I come to the Master offering Him my heart, and I do not want Him to think I want any favours. He knows what’s in a person’s heart, and that is all I have to offer.’

With that for an answer Leroy’s father went upstairs and presented the flowers to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. How the Master enjoyed them! Their fragrance delighted Him and He buried His face in their midst, as He was inclined to do. During the talk, Leroy sat at the feet of this great Teacher, completely fascinated. Those dynamic, ever-changing eyes! Those ‘majestic movements‘! That charm!

After the talk, the Master stood up and shook hands with each guest. To each He gave one white 
carnation. Finally only a few remained. Leroy, standing behind ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, thought, ‘I wish He would turn around and shake hands with me before they are all gone!’ With that thought, the Master turned and saw him. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wore a lovely, red rose, which He then pulled from His coat. pricking his finger in the process, and gave the rose with a drop of His blood to Leroy. Leroy knew the Master was aware that he it was who had actually  brought those carnations.

(Adapted from the accounts in both Annamarie Honnold’s Vignettes from the Life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, – page 98 – and in Earl Redman’s ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in their Midst – pages 109-110)

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Deserving Boots

A Story told by Muriel Ives Barrow Newhall (see link)

[I met this also for the first time as recounted in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in their Midst by Earl Redman - pages 269-270. This book has collected so many beautiful stories of this kind from so many different sources it is a treasure house of inspiration. Posting it during the Centenary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's travels to the West, and on the Holy Day celebrating both the Declaration of the Báb, who foretold the coming of Bahá’u’lláh, and the birth of  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh and named by Him as the Centre of His Covenant with humanity, seems perfectly fitting.] 

It was at the home of the Kinneys that Abdu’l-Baha stayed the second time he came to New York and it was from this home that He left to return to Haifa. The day before He was to take ship to leave He asked Mr. Kinney if there was something amongst His belongings that He might offer as a gift of farewell. At first, Mr. Kinney was reluctant to choose, but finally he admitted that well, might he be given a pair of Abdu’l-Baha’s boots? Those boots that had sheltered the feet that walked with such serene certainty upon the Path of God? Mr. Kinney would cherish these above all else.

So, with smiling love, Abdu’l-Baha gave a pair of His boots to Edward Kinney. Reverently and joyfully, Mr. Kinney laid them in a bureau drawer in his bedroom, carefully wrapped in a nest of tissue paper. Very rarely – since the boots were such an intimate and precious thing, were they shown to anyone though Mr. Kinney touched them frequently as he prayed.

Then one day, he did wish to show them to someone. He went to the bureau, pulled out the drawer – and the boots were gone – completely gone. No sign of them in the tissue paper, no sign of them in any other drawer, no sign of them in any part of the room which was searched carefully. There simply were no boots anywhere.

So Dad Kinney (he bacame ‘Dad to all the hundreds who loved him) began to pray and he prayed, shaken, from the depths of his troubled soul. Why had the beloved boots been taken from him? Where had they gone? What could have happened? Was he had he become – unworthy to possess them? And, at last, he knew this was it. He was no longer worthy to hold the precious boots. Then why was he no longer worthy? What had he done between the time when he had last held the boots in his hands and the moment when he had discovered their absence?

It had been, he estimated, some two, possibly three weeks. So in deepest meditation, he went back, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment over this period. He remembered his actions; he analyzed his motives; he reviewed his thoughts. And suddenly, in a blaze of illumination, he knew what it was. Deeply selfish materialism; clouded hypocritical motives; unjust actions. He had been guilty of all these. But he had deluded himself by calling them such fair and pretty names. No wonder the boots had been taken away. In all justice he had proved himself in no way worthy to hold such treasure. Humbled and ashamed, he prayed abjectly for forgiveness – and then, mournfully, he went to the bureau drawer – just to touch the tissue paper that once had protected the boots. And lo! the boots had returned. They were there, real and tangible; the leather soft beneath his fingertips, the well-worn soles smooth to his touch. They were there, but the warning was never forgotten – the lesson was well learned.

Told to me by Edward Kinney
in New York 1937

[Sceptics might be put off by this story because of its element of the miraculous, but the true point does not depend upon that trigger. I feel that it is worth reflecting on because it is about how we can be enabled by any of life's challenges at any time to step out of our customary skin and see ourself through the eyes of pure love and lift ourself up as a result to greater heights. But then I would say that, I suppose.]

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Quiet (2/2): tempering temperamental differences

Towards the end of the previous post of this pair, drawing from Susan Cain’s fascinating book, Quiet, we touched on something that can impact on close relationships between extraverts and introverts. This was the idea of a Free Trait Contract, where, for example, the extravert who wants to have a big dinner party every Saturday compromises with his introverted spouse and goes for every other week instead and allows her to have quiet conversations on the sidelines rather than have to stand centre stage as he does. She has given ground as well by agreeing to the fortnightly parties.

As an introvert married to an extravert I’m well used to this kind of give and take which is perhaps the most obvious way in which these two temperaments have to accommodate to each other if the relationship is going to survive. Susan Cain explains (page 227):

This was a painfully common dynamic in the introvert-extrovert couples I interviewed: the introverts desperately craving downtime and understanding from their partners, the extroverts longing for company, and resentful that others seemed to benefit from their partners’ “best” selves.

The last part relates to how introverts with a commitment to a demanding ‘core project’ of some kind (see previous post), exert themselves during the day for that purpose but come home frazzled and tired wanting only to collapse into silence to recharge their batteries (ibid.):

It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day.

This lack of understanding is, of course, a two-way street (page 228):

It’s also hard for introverts to understand just how hurtful their silence can be.

You would think that the solution is obvious. Why don’t they just talk to each other? Unfortunately it’s not quite as straightforward as that, given that the two temperaments have two different communication styles (page 229):

Just as men and women often have different ways of resolving conflict, so do introverts and extroverts; studies suggest that the former tend to be conflict-avoiders, while the latter are “confrontive copers,” at ease with an up-front, even argumentative style of disagreement.

That’s tricky. She draws out the distinction very clearly with an example (page 232):

When Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she’s being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show. But Greg thinks she’s checking out or, worse, that she doesn’t give a damn. Similarly, when Greg lets his anger fly, he assumes that Emily feels, as he does, that this is a healthy and honest expression of their deeply committed relationship. But to Emily, it’s as if Greg has suddenly turned on her.

So, how do we deal with that? Again, I know from personal experience that this mismatch of styles is very upsetting to both parties when what starts out as a discussion ends up as an argument. One possibility, she suggests, is to learn from the Swami and the snake (page 232):

In her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris recounts a story about a Bengali cobra that liked to bite passing villagers. One day a swami—a man who has achieved self-mastery—convinces the snake that biting is wrong. The cobra vows to stop immediately, and does. Before long, the village boys grow unafraid of the snake and start to abuse him. Battered and bloodied, the snake complains to the swami that this is what came of keeping his promise. “I told you not to bite,” said the swami, “but I did not tell you not to hiss.”

“Many people, like the swami’s cobra, confuse the hiss with the bite,” writes Tavris.

Basically, then Greg as the extravert and the introverted Emily (ibid.):

. . . . [b]oth have much to learn from the swami’s story: Greg to stop biting, Emily that it’s OK for him—and for her—to hiss.

This undoubtedly works, but both sides have to vigilant otherwise the introvert hiss becomes inaudible and the extravert hiss becomes ear-piercing.

I hope these posts have given a flavour of how useful and intriguing Susan Cain’s exploration of introversion is. Given that the success or failure of a society, a marriage or a family depends to a large extent upon the effectiveness of its communication, there is much of value to be learned from this book. Our communities have to find a place for both temperaments. Her references to the studies of the 2008 recession give a powerful example of exactly why.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) are characteristic of an introvert’s more cautious approach to life and its decisions. She explains its relevance (pages 163-164):

Disdain for FUD—and for the type of person who tends to experience it—is what helped cause the crash, says Boykin Curry, a managing director of the investment firm Eagle Capital . . . .

“Each time someone at the table pressed for more leverage and more risk, the next few years proved them ‘right.’ These people were emboldened, they were promoted and they gained control of ever more capital. Meanwhile, anyone in power who hesitated, who argued for caution, was proved ‘wrong’. The cautious types were increasingly intimidated, passed over for promotion. They lost their hold on capital. This happened every day in almost every financial institution, over and over, until we ended up with a very specific kind of person running things.”. . .

“People with certain personality types got control of capital and institutions and power,” Curry told me. “And people who are congenitally more cautious and introverted and statistical in their thinking became discredited and pushed aside.”

Stand by then for the quiet revolution!

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Quiet (1/2): transcending our traits

Susan Cain

For a long time, during my rewarding years as a psychologist working with and fascinated by people, something which ran alongside an active engagement with the Bahá’í community, I puzzled over how all that could be reconciled with a highly introverted temperament.

Susan Cain’s inspiring book, Quiet, gives a fascinating insight into the dynamics of introversion and dispels many of the myths attached to that label. Her book covers a huge amount of ground and it would be impossible to do justice to its complexity in a couple of blog posts. So, I’ve chosen just two aspects to look at in more detail: Free Trait Theory and Introvert/Extravert partnerships.

The first of those is one of the most important in her book, at least for anyone who wants to combine introversion with social effectiveness. It helps resolve the puzzle that perplexed me for so long. She discusses the extent to which we are prisoners of our temperament. This thread runs through the whole book but there is a particularly telling section towards the end. It concerns this concept of Free Trait Theory. What she means by that will become clear as we go on.

Clearly if introversion condemned introverts to pass their days as hermits many of us, not least all Bahá’í introverts, would have a huge problem with that. Many of us want to be making an impact of some positive kind on the social world within which we live and, as Cain explains, there is no reason at all why we shouldn’t be able to do exactly that and very effectively as well. This is where Free Trait Theory comes in (pages 209-210):

According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits — introversion, for example — but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.”

In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.

There is a sense in which this could fairly be seen to involve some degree of forcing oneself against the grain. This doesn’t mean that a socially active introvert is some kind of hypocrite.

Felix Aylmer as Polonius

She quotes Polonius from Hamlet: ‘To thy own self be true.’ The full quote, which she doesn’t include, continues: ‘And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ As a former English teacher I am always uncomfortable when a writer of any kind quotes one of Shakespeare’s characters and assumes that the words exactly represent what Shakespeare the man believed. Whether these words of advice about integrity, given by the officious and duplicitous busybody, Polonius, to his son Laertes, are to be taken at face value in the context of the play is a question we’d better park for now. Sue Cain is using them as a clear and well-known reference point. She continues (page 210):

. . . we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or a professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.

She uses a friend of hers, Alex, as an example. He states (page 211):

“I could literally go years without having any friends except for my wife and kids,” he says. “Look at you and me. You’re one of my best friends, and how many times do we actually talk—when you call me! I don’t like socialising.”

Somehow, though, he also found a way to become (page 210) ‘the socially adept head of a financial services company.’

Cain looks as some of the factors that might make this possible (page 212):

How was it that some of [the] pseudo-extroverts [in a study] came so close to the scores of true extroverts? It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.”

She goes on to state that ‘self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behaviour to the demands of a situation.’ There are those who feel that this is somehow deceptive (page 214). This may be more than a touch unfair as the motivation for reading and responding smoothly to the social cues may not be to look good or to gain a personal advantage, but to avoid a faux pas and to be more effective at achieving objectives that are not self-serving but socially useful and helpful to others.

Which brings me back to perhaps the most important driver that enables introverts to transcend their natural reserve and sustain that transcendence over long periods of time. This is having a project of intense importance and value that we want to pursue. She calls it a ‘core personal project.’ It therefore becomes important to find a way of identifying what such a project might be if it’s not already obvious. She explains (pages 217-218):

I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. . . . . First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. . . . . Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. . . . . Finally, pay attention to what you envy.

This last one might seem a bit puzzling. What she means is watch out for those people whom you envy for engaging in an activity you long to do yourself.

However, it is important to bear in mind that this kind of trait transcendence is not achieved without strain. Steps have to be taken to make sure our batteries are re-charged (page 219):

. . . . . the best way to act out of character is to stay as true to yourself as you possibly can—starting by creating as many “restorative niches” as possible in your daily life.

And we also need to ensure that we deal with any close personal relationships with extraverts in the same spirit. The creator of Free Trait Theory, Professor Brian Little (page 220)

. . . . . calls, with great passion, for each of us to enter into “a Free Trait Agreement.” . . . . It’s a Free Trait Agreement when a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the fire work out a schedule: half the time we’ll go out, and half the time we’ll stay home.

The costs of failing to make those necessary arrangements can be high (page 222):

Double pneumonia and an overscheduled life can happen to anyone, of course, but for Little, it was the result of acting out of character for too long and without enough restorative niches. . . . . When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you.

And this brings us neatly to the point where we need to deal with introvert/extravert relationships – the topic for the next post.

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In Memory of Patrick Hamilton

Here ‘farrash’ means attendant

For more information about Patrick Hamilton, see this link.

Follow this link for information about Badi.

For picture see this link.

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Women & Religion

I’ve been catching up with an intriguing three part series called ‘Divine Women‘ in which Bettany Hughes looks back through the mists of history to bring into the light of day the important part women can be shown to have played in the development of religion. The link is now only to a 30 minute group of extracts. I’m posting this quickly so those in the UK who are interested can download it before it disappears on Friday.

In the first episode, When God was a Girl, she goes back for clues to a 12,000 year old site at Gobekli Tepe and what she described as the oldest religious building so far discovered. A nomadic people, with no complex settlement, had shifted 16 ton blocks of stone to erect it. She made the interesting observation that such a site preceding a settlement strongly suggests religion is key to forming human society rather than the other way round. In terms of her main thesis, the prominent position of the picture of a woman carved into the rock suggested that women played an important role in the religion of that time. She looks at the same trend continuing on the artefacts found at other site throughout the immediately succeeding millennia.

The next part Handmaids of the Gods, leapt to the age of the Greeks. Professor Judy Barrington could be seen declaring: ‘If you take women out of Greek religion, it’s basically empty.’ Then things get really interesting with the Romans and the rise of Christianity.

She begins with a text, not included in the Bible, that describes the acts of St Paul and Fekla (the Cyrillic form of the Greek ‘Thecla’ and the Latin  ’Tekla’). Bettany Hughes feels that the ‘end of the world’ emphasis of Paul’s message at the time would have released women from the burden of their traditional roles which suddenly ceased to matter. ‘Motherhood! Why bother?’ captures the feel of it. There’s no need to struggle to keep the population up when it’s all going to be over soon anyway. Even when the end of the world was seen not to be nigh at all the position of women was more firmly established. They were seen very much as equal in the early Christian Church.

50% of Rome’s early churches were apparently founded by women. As is widely recognised, in the catacombs there are images of women presiding over the Eucharist and one is clearly wearing an alb, a long white robe worn by priests and other ministers.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the whole of this programme came when Bettany Hughes spoke to Father Scott Brodeur at the Gregorian University in Rome. He prepares men for the priesthood. He quotes from St Paul to the Romans (16: 1-2) as follows:

1 I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae.

2 I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.

(This is not the wording in every translation: my own copy refers to her as a ‘servant.’ Others have his wording: see link for an example.) And Father Brodeur claims Paul was asking the Christians to be guided by her in understanding his message to them. This was in his view testimony to the real importance of her position in the early church.

She locates one of the key influences in reducing the status of women in the church to St Augustine, of  ’Lord, make me chaste but not yet’ fame. He apparently contended that the state of original sin is perpetuated by the sexual act that produces us. Because Eve had encouraged Adam to sin the role of women was increasingly sidelined and the history of the church rewritten to bring it into line with that version of reality. The Council of Nicea in 393 A.D. defined women as laity, setting its seal of approval on the relegation of women in the Western church.

In the east, covered in the third part, it was rather different. St Theodora, though vilified in the west, was admired in the east and played a huge role in the formation of the foundations, legal and religious, of the Byzantine Empire. To her is attributed the idea of ‘innocent until proved guilty’ for example. In early Islam also women such as Khadija, the first wife of the Prophet Mohammad, and Aisha, his second wife, were central to the development of Islam in its early years.

When it comes around again as it probably will, this series is well worth a look.

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