PSYCHOLOGY

Community


COMMUNITY AND BIOGRAPHY

With penetrating detail, crisp style and emphasis on the compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages, with a concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. Facts about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain fashion. Abdul-Baha whips them up and plays with them in His book: Memorials of the Faithful. Readers will find a review of that book below at two of the following links. These reviews and this book have much to say about the individual in community. I have also added a link about current efforts in the Baha'i community to build community.

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/  (Readers need to scroll down on the access page to click on this review)

http://www.transformingneighbourhoods.org

http://www.upliftingwords.org/Reviews/Memorials

http://bahaiblog.net/site/2011/09/27/5-year-plan-talks-by-tom-price/




COMMUNITY AND SOLITUDE

Melvin I. Urofsky's biography of Louis D. Brandeis( A Life: Pantheon) presents readers with a great mind, perhaps the most brilliant of all Supreme Court justices in the USA. Brandeis was a crusader against oversized institutions, and a luminously eloquent exponent of free speech and privacy—”the right to be let alone.” In spite of the strong social dimension of the Baha'i Faith, what the secretary of the NSA of the Baha'is of the USA for 30 years, Horace Holley, once called 'this social religion,' sociability is not compulsory. Individuals who prefer to remain by themselves are also eulogized. Abdul-Baha does so in His book Memorials of the Faithful written in 1915 before His Tablets of the Divine Plan.
Brandeis was a complicated, conflicted, and interesting man. A religion with pretensions to unify the planet and provide the cultural and community contructs for a new Order, a global society to fill the spiritual vacuum of the 21st century, must provide a spiritual home for all types of people. Not everyone likes to fill his house with people and eat meals with 20 others in the room.


For a perspective on the concept of Community in Diversity: The New Man go to this article by Peter Hulme published in Bahá'í Studies Review, 1:1 Association for Baha'i Studies of English-Speaking Europe, 1991--at this link:http://bahai-library.com/hulme_community_diversity

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 6 OF
MY JOURNALS/DIARIES

Volume 6 of my diaries was begun on 26 July 2009. Writing a personal diary can be fraught with danger, laying one’s soul out for view as it were, but nevertheless, such documents provide one of the best, if not the best, way of understanding the day to day activities, the thoughts and aspirations of the diarist, whether those entries seem important, mundane or of no interest at all to a later reader. This is true whether the diarist writes on a day-to-day basis or, as I do, just periodically. I would like to think that readers will find here in my diary or journal a fascinating first-hand account of the life of a Bahá'í in the first decade of the 21st century, a life at a veritable fulcrum-time, a hub of crucial Bahá'í experience, the opening years of a new Baha’i paradigm, a new culture of learning and growth. This diary is of an ordinary Baha’i, an international pioneer from the Canadian Baha’i community, and his life at a critical stage in the wider experience of society at a climacteric of history. It is a life in the form of a detailed, readable and absorbing account of the emergence of a person whom some regard as a fine writer and poet, whom others denigrate and criticise and whom most people know little to nothing of at all. I have placed this account in the section entitled: Psychology: Community because one can learn a great deal about community from the account of only one of its members.

I now have two 2-ring binders of diary-entries for this Volume 6.  These entries provide some resources from other diarists, people who kept journals of various kinds. The first of these two-ring binders was begun in 2005 but it contains items gathered over many years before that date, some of the items as far back as the 1980s when I first began to keep a diary.  In July 2010 it became necessary to open a second 2-ring binder and this introduction is written on the opening of that second file/volume.

Ron Price
15 July 2010

DIARIES: SOME COMMENTS

Some posts on the internet in relation to my diary and the subject of diaries:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/ronprice9/journal

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread

http://bahai-library.com/Ronprice

http://www.chasingthefrog.com/forums/showthread

http://hubpages.com/hub/Franz-Kafka-and-Diaries


The Baha’i community and the secular society I describe both cover millions of individuals with the most diverse sensibilities. Their experience is a protean one and what individuals choose to marginalize or centre from their direct and vicarious experience, from their beliefs and values, attitudes and meanings is incredibly diverse. My intent in much of my writing about community is to present what I like to think is a balance between the memory of my society and the Baha’i community on the one hand and to draw on my own idiosyncratic view of history, mine and others on the other. This whole exercise interests me only insofar as it serves the living and breathing community of individuals. There is a way of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates, as Nietzsche said in the opening paragraph of his On the Use and Abuse of History For Life.  It is my hope that there is little atrophication and degeneration as I go about bringing one life to life.
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FIFTY YEARS PLAYING THE GUITAR: 1961-2011 and SIXTY YEARS OF LISTENING TO GUITAR
                                               ++SINGALONGS: 1951-2011

Being in the generation that came into their teens in the mid-1950s, I was there when rock-and-roll was in its first decade. When the first LARGE wave of youth joined the Cause in the West in the 1960s with the guitar as one of its centrepieces, one of its icons, I was there struggling to get those singalongs off the ground. The guitar was the quintessential instrument and it was just about impossible not to get into the guitar if one had any sense of rhythm, listened to the top 40 and wanted to utilize singing as a teaching medium.

The first guitar I bought was some time in 1961. I tried to learn classical guitar but gave up in despair after two or three months.  I think it was about October of 1967 when I had been pioneering on Baffin Island that I bought another guitar.  I gave it to an Inuit kid in Iqaluit on Baffin Island in May of 1968 after purchasing yet another guitar. The kid’s name was Henry and he was in grade 3. Seven years later, and living in Tasmania, I put my first booklet of songs together for singalongs. By 1974 I had enjoyed singalongs for over twenty years, my first experiences being around the piano at home with my parents and friends beginning in 1951(circa).  We had a piano until 1957 when it was sold for financial reasons. The singalongs that evolved in the 1970s were a combination of popular folk and rock, solid gold from popular music of the past and what was then a small repertoire of songs with explicit, overtly Baha’i themes and content.

That first booklet of songs was revised again when I lived in Victoria(1976-78) and several times thereafter until singalongs began to fade, at least for me, in the 1990s as I faded into late middle age. This booklet of resources reflected these several booklets of material I put together over those years. By 2005 I had enjoyed more than 50 years, on and off, of singalongs. They had given me and others much pleasure. But for various reasons they insensibly began to fade from my experience, at least my guitar-playing part. Baha’i choirs had begun to emerge; Baha’i artists were beginning to put out CDs by the late 1990s, but getting people to sing informally, even with the song sheets from my booklets, seemed to be harder than ever. Slowly but surely over the ten years, 1995 to 2005, singalongs with the guitar became rarer and rarer events. I felt as if I had done my share when in 2003 I put up my guitar on the hook of retirement and in 2005 I retired from the local choir I had been a member of for three or four years.


I put a booklet of songs together in 2005, probably I thought at the time, a final booklet, for those rare occasions that did arise for a singalong in the years ahead. A resource that was used a great deal, then, in the twenty years 1968 to 1988 became a rarity in the following fifteen, 1988-2005. By 2001 I had a weekly program in Launceston for half an hour utilizing some 50 Baha’i CDs; a Baha’i radio station came on-line; professional and amateur choirs were popping up all over the world. The Baha’i music scene was developing a rich and diverse base. But singalongs seemed relatively scarce for a population that seemed more intent on watching people sing than singing themselves. My own disinclination to lead singalongs had led to a new phase of community music for me. As I say, I took part in a choir in George Town once a month(2001-2005).

Then in 2008 I began to lead singalongs once a month at an aged care facility in Launceston using mostly “songs from the sixties.” Another phase of singalongs was opening in this my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80). I have tried here in this brief statement to capture some of my musical experience in groups over more than half a century, 1951-2011, and my experience playing the guitar for singalongs from 1968-2011. Youth at this site may find this historical perspective of value. What will be their story in half a century? Time will tell, eh?
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The call of Abraham and of his subsequent pilgrimage has become part of the primordial journey of the Jewish people. "It is part, too, of that theophany, that appearance of God to man, that has been sedimented in narrative" writes George McLean and has become part of that biblical "primordium around which a people" has been shaped.(1) This primordium, Peachey says, needs interpretation and application in the changing circumstances of time and place, our time and place. And that is what I am doing here in this brief comment as I relate this theme to "community building."

Having embraced a new theophany and become a part of a new Faith community which claims descent from this original Abrahamic experience, I am in possession of a new tradition, arguably now in its third century, which possesses a richness of detail that was scarcely perceptible in that first primordium, but which has been enacted again in the life of Baha'u'llah, the Founder of this new community. I have been engaged in building this new community for half a century. This new narrative and its history of some two centuries now(2), not unlike Abraham's, is of immense value to the international pioneer in the Baha'i community as he or she goes about their engagement in community building.



Most of us are involved in community-building in some form or another around: family, some volunteer group we have joined, a tribe, a town or city, a nation state. In the last century or so a new community has emerged: the global community and the Bahá'í Faith has been involved in building this global community, a global community within the larger global community.

Contemporary religious practitioners usually have little direct engagement--historical, archeological, sociological--with that seminal Abrahamic-primordium of community about 2000 BC. Tradition and its institutional configurations overshadow this ancient narrative and, to a lesser extent, are animated by it. But, for me, in the Baha'i community, Abraham's story has found eschatological and apocalyptic significance in what you might call a contemporary rerun. In this globalizing, individualizing, pluralising world, a prophet, a manifestation of God, has been forced, not called, out of his country, taking his kindred with him on the journey. I find in my life and in pioneering over four epochs, that the narrative of Baha'u'llah's exile, his journey-narrative, is one I can shape as I become more familiar with it and as it shapes me. In a world of some 20 million refugees and millions more living in countries in which they were not born, Baha'u'llah's exile could be seen as a metaphor for our times.

"Learning the existing Abrahamic story, its language and its logic," says Peachey, "enables individuals to experience on their own in the terms of that story or to use it as a foundation for new and expanded experience."(3) Learning the story is like learning a language. Learning a new tradition, any tradition and becoming a part of that tradition is also like learning a language. Learning this language is essential if one is to function within that tradition's parameters. The story of Abraham is the beginning, the first chapter, of the Israelite narrative; the story of Baha'u'llah is the end, the last chapter, of this same narrative extended into our time, our age. Such is my view.

This idea of learning the language of community has similarities to anyone’s efforts to build community: a football club, a family, the people in a work-place even a loose and informal group of friends. “You pays your money and you makes your choice,” as they say—and you spend your days building community in some shape or form—and then you die and you leave behind you whatever community with whom you have been engaged.

From the father, the first patriarch, the birth, of the Hebrew people about 4000 years ago, if not before, right up to our time, our modern age, in the person of Baha'u'llah, this pattern of leaving one's country and going to another land is, in some ways, the basic myth, model, metaphor, for the international pioneer. The Baha'i pioneer goes and makes his home "to develop the society God calls"(4) Baha'u'llah's followers to build. "I will make of you a great nation,"(5) God says to His people in The Bible. The international pioneer is also in the same position, only he is at the beginning of a global, a planetary, system, a world Order, that he is helping to establish. This is the core of that pioneer's service to humanity. God will train both the pioneer and the Baha'is, it would appear, following the metaphor right back to Abraham, in a series of sacred-historical events different from, but similar in other ways to, the great literary-metaphorical history that is The Bible. Abraham's leap of faith is ours, too, as we walk into history.


Baha'u'llah's exile over forty years(1852-1892) took place only once, as did Abraham's journey, but each inaugurated the history of a divine-human relationship which will go on unfolding for centuries, millennia to come—such is the belief of those who call themselves Baha’is. Just as Abraham had little comprehension of the nature of his call or of his destiny at the beginning, so, too, are we in a similar position, although we do have some glimmering, indeed, much more than a glimmering, of the future given to us in the Baha'i writings. At the very start of the building of this World Order of Baha'u'llah, of community building, it is difficult to fathom the process, the reality, the meaning. The narrative takes unexpected turns; uncertainty enters in from time to time. Faith is at our core, in the centre of our narrative, as it was for Abraham.

But history, for the Jewish people, and for the Baha'is, is seen as an extended course of instruction filled with lessons and tests by which God seeks to educate us for our redemptive work. In this narrative is found the meaning and purpose of our lives. To help establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Just as Abraham went from his country, kindred and father's house so does the international pioneer, launched on a mission to other people, to all people, wherever he goes. The journey has gone on in our own time in the life of Baha'u'llah. That great journey of the Abrahamic peoples is the paradigmatic, the metaphorical, vehicle, that the pioneer takes on board as he becomes a part of a wondrous tradition that weaves its way through the holy Scriptures of four of the world's religions. For the pioneer's story is the story he will find there in that holy writ. Therein will he find his life's meaning and purpose.
--------------------------FOOTNOTES-----------------------------------
(1) Paul Peachey, "The Call of Abraham," in Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, Series 1, Vol.7., George McLean, editor.
(2) If one takes the history of the Baha'i Faith back to 1806 when Shaykh Ahmad, the chief precursor of the Babi Faith, took up residence in Iran for the last two decades of his life.
(3) idem
(4) ibid.,p.75.
(5) Numbers 23:9.
Ron Price 8 April 2010
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EMPLOYMENT-JOBS AND COMMUNITY

The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi--to use two still commonly used Latin phrases. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Such people, and other types as well, often have very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person’s teens through to their late adulthood even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin and never moved from the parental nest. That reference to the head of a pin was one of the theologico-philosophical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This metaphor has interesting applications to the job-hunting process but I will leave that for another time.

This process of extensive change in people’s lives is even more true in the recent decades of our modern age at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the electronic media. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.

This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of travelling-pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history’s long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites.

This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs."

I post below a link to a recent article in The New York Times. The article is about job satisfaction. In my several decades of being jobbed I would put my job satisfaction in the 'A-category' that is at least 75%. The experience of job satisfaction is an importnat index of the sense of community in which one dwells. This is especially true in the jobs I have had over the last half century. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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