Shoghi Effendi’s thirty-six year labour has been an inspiration of unparalleled importance to my work as a junior youth(13-15), as a Baha’i youth(15-18) and as a pioneer(18-63) in the last fifty years(1957-2007) of my life. Many of my poems I dedicate to him. They are written about him directly or involve his ideas and writings. Some are included below. I have also included two essays dedicated to Shoghi Effendi. One essay is about Edward Gibbon and his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Guardian's favorite book for leisure reading and a model of English expression. The other essay is about my personal experience of sociology which Shoghi Effendi encouraged Baha'is to study, among other subjects. Sociology was a subject that has helped me understand man and society even if it did not help me in the job-hunting game as, say, psychology, engineering, medicine or law would have done.

They were ready to launch,

after nearly a hundred years

of divine guidance,¹

twenty-five years after

the Product of that mystic

intercourse had come West,

a service of such heroism

as to find no parallel in the

first Baha'i century.²

Yes, exhausted, again

and again and again as

the nadir of an old world

was bottoming out, bottoming out,

still bottoming out at this climacteric

of history; and Caesar is killed again³

and again before the world sees

the birth of the new, the Pearl of

great price, no simple grain of sand,

some mysterious concentrate of sublime beauty.

Both men felt their account of the immensity and wonder of what they saw, which they each termed the most dramatic and aweful scene in the history of humankind, was plainly inadequate. Although they were dealing with different periods of history, they drew heavily on the metaphor of theatre. Their performance was being enacted before an audience; the plot and the script was history and they themselves were the directors. Every page both men wrote is pregnant with the deepest observations and the most lively images.

This process continues in the work of the trustees of the Guardian’s legacy. The work on detailed definition and the evolution of grand design, which Shoghi Effendi elaborated over thirty-six years in the crucible of his interpretive mind, has now passed to the Universal House of Justice. Baha’u’llah’s purpose and the sum of Baha’i experience have become fused in this institution which one can utter with one breath: the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice. The British historian, Macauley once said that we are "unable to estimate the grandeur of an object when there is no standard by which we can measure it."(2) We are in all probability too close to this apex of the Baha’i Order to gain any just, any appropriate, estimate of its grandeur. The goal of this institution, its ideal end, is to unify the thoughts of the believers in the essentials of their Faith. A secondary goal, but no less important, is to direct and guide the Baha’i community through the period of transformation in which it is moving. This goal is being achieved in a number of ways not the least of which is the continued building of the Administrative Order.

Thought, especially thought that finds its home in writing, is always related to action. It must serve some purpose. It must urge, inform, confirm, orient, or amplify action. Exegisis, as Glenford Mitchell once put it, "evolves with the community."(3) It is an exegisis that both satisfies and transcends "the need of the moment and thus serves the future as well as the present."(4) The drama of it all, the drama of the process of exegisis, became in the work of the Guardian, a tool of instruction. It heightened the horizon of the Baha’i community and intensified its vision. It gave meaning to history and assigned the prospect of exciting vistas to the future, to a time of humankind’s spiritual maturity. We find again, as Mitchell puts it, an unparalleled power of definition in the writings and vision of the Guardian. The Universal House of Justice has inherited the mantle of authority to interpret this vision to a degree not yet appreciated. Their letters, their messages and now their work at the "focal centre of divine illumination and power,"(5) in completing the Arc, in completing the work begun by the Guardian, has been superlative, inspirationalto the body of the believers who have laboured in recent decades to achieve the goals of a Movement which is claiming to be the emerging world religion in our time for a time on the horizon of history, just around the corner.

I would like, in this introductory essay, one of my first on the Guardian, to place the work at the Baha’i World Centre, the Arc Project, in some broader context. I have been sending booklets of poetry to the BWCL, some forty booklets and some two million words, poetry from the years 1987 to 2000, the years when the Arc Project has been moving toward completion. This poetry and my many essays and interviews say a great deal about the Guardian and the Universal House of Justice. They offer some of that broad context that I am after here, a comment on that wondrous vision which the Guardian laid before our eyes and which the House of Justice is laying out in even more detail for us at the Baha’i World Centre in these passing years at the end of this century, this fin de siecle, we are rapidly moving through.⁶

(1) Harold Bond in The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, David Womersley, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1988, p.215.

(2)Glenford Mitchell, "The Literature of 2Interpretation: Notes on the English Writings of Shoghi Effendi," World Order, Winter 1972-3, p.17.

(3) ibid., 24.

(4) idem

(5) Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, P.277.

(6) This essay is a revision of an early, first draft, 18 September 1995.

 Ron Price

19 August 2000

It was a bewildered and bewildering

world that this Cause entered in the

West—and there was no turning back

from an intellectual dust, scattered on

all sides, unable to collect, cohere:¹

poetry became tailored to the pulse-rate,

the breathing of the poet, ensuring a kind

of psychic myopia, exploration, a kind of

anything goes, where the serious artist

created his world and style from scratch

from a quite idiosyncratic view for whoever

wanted to read it. This was no massive

middle class entertainment complex with

its ideological commitment from a firm

land of common belief and agreement.

And so there has come, in these our years,

a striving for identity, to define the social reality

of our times in all its concreteness and abstraction,

in terms of poets’ internal clocks, aiming their

imagination at themselves-point blank, probing

dispassionately into the extremes of inner space,

trying to find that control, delicate artistic sensibility,

to handle intense subjectivity, to express with balance

and subtlety an inner life that is the basis for any poetic

success or failure, for a self-renewal that is sustaining

beyond any exhaustion, pain, anxiety, sturm und drang.

Perhaps these poems, in all their new and strange

variety, are a premonition of things to come,

the future foretold at a time of new beginnings,

the early years of this tenth stage of history, when

the spiritual and administrative Centre of humanity

is taking its beauteous first shaping. But this poet is

no unacknowledged social worker, no person aiming

to create a public life, create a pop-poem, something

Bohemian in his non-conformity. What I am doing,

over all these pioneering years, is trying to take an

often confused and precarious reality and transmute

it into artistic order and coherence; for these are early

days, even now, the onset of a universal, cosmic,

global, mystic, mysterious and inter-galactic history. 

The following essay, of a more autobiographical nature, contains some of the thrust of my own journey through print, the print of one of the disciplines of the social sciences, a discipline that one poetry critic, Karl Shapiro, says is but a new form of poetry. It is a discipline, too, that helps me form my own vision, my own articulation of the meaning of man and society. The Guardian encouraged Baha'is to study sociology, among other subjects, like history and philosophy. These were my major subjects at university and have been essential in articulating my own understanding of the Cause, of society and myself.

Karl Shapiro is quoted as saying that sociology is the discipline where poets are found. But such poets usually don’t know they are poets. They think of themselves as students of sociology. Sociology, he says, is the poetry of the educated.(See The Poet’s Work, Reginald Gibbons, editor, Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1979, p.109) Keeping this idea in mind, I give you my life experience as a student and teacher of sociology in the paragraphs which follow.

_____________________

I’ve been dipping into Individual Voices, Collective Visions: Fifty Years of Women in Sociology recently. This book was edited by Ann Goetting and Sarah Fenstermaker(Temple UP, 1995). The short account of my own experience of sociology which follows is the result of reading the stories of these sociologists. They tell of their families, their careers, their heartaches and sorrows, their joys and excitements. My plan here is to do the same, for I find myself at the age of 63 still reading sociology after leaving the classroom as a teacher of the subject in 2005. I am not looking at books as fat as bricks, as I once did and for many a year. For the internet gives memy sociology in smaller doses at any one time. Still, I get mental fatigue weighing through what is often the densest of languages, again trying to simplify what are often complex journeys for the mind so that I can bring life to what T.S. Eliot alluded to as 'rats' alley' trips for the emotions, where 'dead men (lose) their bones'(Wasteland, A Game of Chess, lines 115-116).

My relationship with sociology started in the third week of September 1963 at McMaster University in Canada. My first lecture with a Dr. Jones kept my pen busy, although after finding Ken Pizer I stopped worrying about notes because Ken could write faster than a speeding bullet. Ken took my notes and I was freed to watch Jones pace back and forth expatiating on the wisdoms of the sociologist Talcott Parsons who, at the time, had 16 more years to live and many more obscurities to write. I remember, as clearly as if it was yesterday, my attempt to read our class text in sociology. You could not read more than a page without wondering in unutterable language what it was you had just read. It all sounded clear and simple when you boiled it down to individual phrases, but when you put two or more phrases together you got lost in a fog of what you later came to call jargon.

I remember that first year, which ended in early May of 1964, just before I got my summer job checking telephone poles for internal decay, there was a tutor who was able to explain the mysteries of Parsons better than anyone. Everyone admired him as if he was a brilliant theologian who had just arrived from the Vatican with authoritative pronouncements for us all to write down on our A-4 note paper to be regurgitated on the April examination. He was an Englishman, if I remember, rather slim and a good talker.

For a year I had no contact with sociology, except for a short period of time toward the end of that second year at university, 1964-5. I got to know a young woman of 27 who had one son in early childhood and who studied sociology. I took her ice-skating in about February of 1965. I can’t quite remember how I met her but for two or three months I went to the occasional lecture with her in sociology. She had a passion for helping Africans and I had a passion for her. Our mutual passions interlocked nicely and it was this reciprocity that led us to join together in third year sociology.

I took six courses in sociology that year, enough to bring the dead to life, or should I say enough to kill any enthusiasms for sociology. In retrospect it was fortuitous that Canadian universities begin in mid-September with exams starting in mid-April. With the Christmas break, the week off for Easter and exam study the student is left with six months of lectures-reading-tutorials. That is about all the average person can stand of reading sociology—and I was about as average as one can be, at least at that point in my life. The cold Canadian winters kept all the sociology on ice as the chill of winter became filled with the chill of sociology. There was, then, nothing like a brisk walk to class in sociology 3A6 to examine the essence of Marxism, if there was an essence, or to engage the tutor in the intricacies of functionalism to raise my anxieties. Part of me always wanted to take sociology seriously and part of me found it such a burden of words that my already incipient depression just got another kick-start on its way down the proverbial emotional drain.

Anyway, I got through my third year and found myself with a BA bracket sociology end-of-bracket. I did not get my degree until November because when the transcript came out in June I was four or five marks short of a passing grade, 60%. I had to pay a visit to the Head of the Department, a gentle spirit who frequently imbibed a white wine, a beer, a claret and who had taught me sociological statistics. This was the most mysterious of all the arts in this youthful discipline of about 100 years of age. I remember, yes, as if it was yesterday, sitting in his class writing down as much as I could in the hope of unravelling it leisurely at home in a quiet evening where I lived over a restaurant in the small town of Dundas, 15 minutes away on a good hitch-hike. Of course I never did, unravel it I mean; night after night I’d ponder these mathematical and literary symbols in the hope that sincerity and effort would pay off. In this case they did not and here I was eight weeks after the end of the year asking him for a few marks. He came to the party, probably because it was late afternoon and by then he’d already had a few relaxing, perhaps, gin and tonics and he was one of those drinkers who gets friendlier after knocking back a few.

I had periodic dalliances with sociology after that graduating year of 1966. At teachers’ college we had a sociology unit. I had to go to a teachers' college in 1966-7 to get some practical qualification because sociology was good for absolutely nothing insofar as a career was concerned. I could have tied it to social work as well as teaching, but untied to anything about the only use it had was at a bar in the evening, with your girfriend discussing your(and her) inner life, driving a taxi and sitting around filling in time reading books. However useful sociology may be in this private domain, you can’t take it far as the cornerstone of a career to earn money and the accountrements of middle class life.

I came to teach sociology in 1974 to trainee teachers in Launceston, in 1975 to library technician trainees in Melbourne, in 1976-78 in Ballarat to engineers and social science majors. When I lived in Katherine I taught it occasionally in adult education to evening classes and in Port Hedland to students in management courses. In the early 1990s in Perth I taught sociology in Certificate courses and from 1997 to 1999 I taught sociology to human service worker trainees. After thirty years(1963-1993) I found myself combing library shelves at universities and colleges of advanced education for books which I had first sen from 1963 to 1966 with hundreds of new additions. Some of the material was highly stimulating; I had always found this so; but some was as dry and coagulating as a sewer after a long period of no rain. The books were still as fat and I found I could not spend more than an hour hunting them down. An immense fatigue always set in toward the end of the first hour in any library and I had to scoop up my allotment of seven or eight books to read in the leisurely quiet of my home with a cold or a hot drink in my hand. I was never sure if this fatigue was a function of my age, the lack of oxygen in the library or the simple weight of the books.

I look forward in my dotage to a long and happy life with this strange field I chanced upon some forty-four years ago when I was trying to avoid the world of work and its deadening and so often predictable stamp of boredom. The labyrinthine channels of sociology one can travel in forever; the library shelves are getting more extensive; it is a burgeoning field as are all fields now. The river of sociology, perhaps now in its middle age, will flow on into its third century while I get old. Now that my days are long and I am freed from the work-a-day world and its routines I can play among the waters of sociology, bathing myself in its endless streams, having learned how to avoid drowning in its heady froth. I only sample its choicest and its freshest fruits now, as glasses of refreshment. For I am now an accomplished but still amateur connoisseur of its mysteries. I am now in the earliest years of late adulthood, a period psychologists of human development call the years from 60 to 80. I am ready for my final hour and until it comes I will take an occasional dalliance into the intellectual paddocks of this old friend.*

Ron Price

16 March 1997

(revised: 4/10/07) 

* In July 1999, two years and two weeks after writing the first draft of this essay, I retired from the teaching profession and from teaching sociology. By March 2000 I had seven arch lever files of notes in my study in our home in George Town, the oldest town in Australia. These notes were the residue from those many years of dabbling in sociology. By the turn of the millennium I had begun to sample only the choice bits of the field that I enjoyed the most: sociological theory. I continued what I had done since my first contact with sociology in 1963, enlarge my understanding of the Cause through the insights of this useful discipline. I had taught my last bit of sociology, as part of a social science course, in a School for Seniors until May 2005. My final hour had at last begun.

This afternoon I was reading Ugo Giachery’s Shoghi Effendi and came across an arresting image which, if I had once known it, I had forgotten. The image was of Shoghi Effendi having "each word of the Tablet of Carmel ever present in his mind."¹ It was this inspiration, among many, which guided him. I started to memorise this Tablet many years ago, perhaps as early as the 1970s. It is one of the few tablets that I have memorized in my life, although I must stop occasionally even now to check the words while I am reciting it. While I was walking in the woods tonight I was stuck by the contrast between this energizing image of Shoghi Effendi reciting this Tablet and the sorrow and despondency which we also know shadowed his brow, particularly in his latter years.-Ron Price with thanks to Ugo Giachery, Shoghi Effendi,, George Ronald, Oxford, 1973, p. 57.

He carried around all those words

and their wondrous meanings during

his indefatigable labours. Perhaps

these words were part of that spiritual

force which seemed to emanate from him.

Perhaps these words helped him to keep

those sorrows and that desolation of hopes

at bay in those last years. He had become

the embodiment of May my life be a sacrifice

to Thee. He knew, too, that God had bestowed

upon him His bounty and directed towards him

His steps. His eyes were cheered; he was filled

with delight; He turned his sorrow into gladness

and his grief into blissful joy.¹ But not all that

sorrow was neutralized, at least not until that

final hour, 4 November 1957, when the thrilling

voice of his pen ceased, at long 60-years-last.

Yes, Guardian, I spread it around,

stayed out of the biggest places,

like, now, to keep it well under

one hundred thousand. Haven't

found them very receptive in these

towns either, at least since, say, '62

when I started all this moving around,

to the Northernmost Territories of the

Western Hemisphere and in Canada's

glorious mission overseas where I will,

one day, lay my bones in His soil

and yield, I trust, to true glory.¹

1 From Sir Francis Drake's Prayer

Ron Price

28 September 2001

By the time you defined our world

in terms of nine concentric circles¹

the whole thing was moving from

lines and hierarchies to circles and

curves. So much seemed distortion,

but it was all a question of perspective.

It all fitted into an immense complexity.

My postwar world has been like

a frightening and not-so-frightening

tempest: unpredictable, unprecedented

and unimaginably glorious in its ultimate

consequences, sweeping my wide world---

Tongues of Diamond round and round,²

fingers of Enamelled Fire near my ground.

And so do our words elude the net

in these confused and unconnected times,

as our reason and virtue pursue, as best

we can, the generating powers of this

spiritual springtime¹ and as we observe

the extravagent and infinite wanderings

of vice and folley and our long road.

And, for me, always within a commitment

to my own narrative voice, the coherence

it creates, its rich and flexible twistings

and turnings, its contradictions and incon-

sistencies and its unimaginably mysterious

workings and consequences, I observe a

complexity of thought and expression

producing an astonishing unity of form.²

And the performance I watch, the plot and the

script, comes down to me from the mysterious

dispensations of a watchful Providence,

a divine ordering, a schema, of history.

Ron Price

3 January 1999

For the Baha’is, during the four epochs that was the temporal framework for my experience and that of my community, they too faced crises, as great or greater than those faced by the American Bahá’í pilgrims at the turn of the 20^th century before WW1. There were crises that threatened to arrest the community’s unfoldment from time to time and, as Shoghi Effendi once said threatened to "blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered." Shoghi Effendi provided for me an exegisis of the Baha’i teachings as they applied to my life and times. The following words of this leader of the Faith from 1921 to 1957 are examples of his interpretive words, words that set a context for my life, a background, a framework of meaning and interpretation of history and the times I was living in, often unbeknownst to my everyday self, busy as it was with everyday things and, in my childhood years, having absolutely no idea of the paradigms of meaning Shoghi Effendi was providing for this small band of believers back then and for their epigoni.

________________

In August 1944, the Guardian was anticipating "the cessation of hostilities" from WW2. This cessation would open before the Baha'i community "fields of service of tremendous fertility." The climax of the "raging storm" had passed, a climax synchronizing with the termination of the first Baha'i century. Society itself was "disillusioned," "disrupted," a "wreckage." As my second birthday approached in July 1946, while we still lived on Morden Avenue in Hamilton Ontario, my mother, father, grandfather and I, did not know of the two year "respite" from teachings Plans ended. The aim in 1946, as the Baha'i community commemorated the 25th anniversary of the passing of 'Abdu'l-Baha, was to have 175 LSAs by April 1948. "The shadow of war's tragic aftermath" wrote Shoghi Effendi in January 1947, about the time my family moved to Burlington, was "deepening." A thirty-four page letter from the Guardian in June 1947, during my first summer in RR#1 Burlington, just before I turned three, entitled The Challenging Requirements of the Present Hour presented an accurate picture of the present state of the Baha'i community, in both North America and in the world.

While I played in the autumn leaves, built snow forts in the winter of 1947/8 and 1948/9, worried about 'the boogie-man,' got my first wack with my mother's hair-brush by my father, played a little red pipe organ, waited in vain with my folks for the Pantings to come to dinner one Sunday evening and watched my dad work in the garden evening after evening, the Guardian was encouraging the Baha'is to take their Faith around the globe.

These were 'modest beginnings,' as the Guardian described the first ten years of the Plans: 1937-1947. "The initial clash between the forces of darkness and the army of light," was "being registered by the denizens of the Abha Kingdom." While I went from the ages of three to five in my second house, the second residence, of my life, on Bellvenia Avenue, "the first sittings" of a "spiritual revolution" were being experienced, at least in part, due to "the hands of the little as yet unnoticed band of pioneers." Within fifteen years I, too, would join that band. The road ahead, wrote the Guardian, was "long, thorny and tortuous." And so it was. The "lowest ebb in mankind's fast-declining fortunes," had yet to eventuate. The "testing period" ahead for society may well become the entire period of my life. Looking back from a distance of nearly fifty years it certainly appears to have been the case.