As a magician used to say,

“You’ll like this.

Not a lot, but you’ll like it.”

Going to Church

Throughout the 1960’s, I attended the Church of Scotland every week (at my parents’ insistence) and worked my way through junior and senior Sunday School, Bible Class, and finally Young Communicants Class. In my mid-teens I found myself about to ’sleepwalk’ into joining the Church. With only a week to go, I finally began to question whether my beliefs were compatible with the teachings of the Church. I don’t know if it was my interest in computers and planned career as a computer programmer that made me use logic as the test:

Contradiction 1:

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (King James Bible, John 14:6)

OK, but Jesus wasn’t a Christian, was he? He was a Jew, and followed the teachings of Moses… but if Jesus is the only way to God and Moses lived a thousand years or so before Jesus, then Moses couldn’t have followed the teachings of Jesus. If Jesus is the only way to God, then Moses must have gone to Hell… and yet Jesus still followed his teachings… THIS DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!!!!!!!

And don’t give me that bit about Jesus walking with Moses. Even if you let Moses play this ‘Get out of Hell free’ card, it still leaves him as a false prophet who let his followers go to Hell, as they didn’t follow Jesus. It’s all just a ‘fudge’ to get round inconvenient logic, and about as unbelievable as Imams going down wells.

Contradiction 2:

On one hand, you say that God is loving, kindly, fatherly and forgiving. You also say that He is omnipotent. On the other hand, you say that God allows many ‘false’ religions to exist; Buddhism, Bahá’í Faith, Hinduism, Jain, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism – and anyone who follows one of these ‘false’ religions goes to hell. So you are saying that God is playing a game of ‘Russian Roulette’ with us, except that only one chamber in the gun is empty and the other eight or more contain bullets. How can you believe that God does something to us that would get a human father locked up for a very long time?

So, I left St Andrew’s church (which no longer deserved a capital letter) to look for an alternative. I knew that they existed, but in 1970 Falkirk was hardly a bustling centre of multi-culture, multi-race or multi-faith. The closest thing that our family had to a challenge to our tolerance was that one of my aunts was Catholic. We didn’t find it hard to pass that test. Everyone that I knew in Falkirk was Scottish, White and Christian/Atheist/Agnostic. I can’t remember meeting or even knowing about anyone who wasn’t until I went to college. One of my classmates there was black, but this diversity didn’t last as he left the course after a year. The only ‘alternative’ to St Andrew’s ended up being to go to a different church. I think that I only went to appease my parents – it was never going to work out, was it? I drifted away after a year or so, and that was that.

Prejudice

Not everyone was tolerant of others. While at college, I had a summer job at Glasgow Corporation in their computer department. I remember that one of the programmers would constantly ‘have a go’ at the guy sitting at the next desk; for example, calling him a ‘Tim’ (derogative slang for Catholic) or castigating him for observing Holy Days. I always felt uncomfortable about this, but it was considered to be normal workplace banter in those days.

When I left college with my nice shiny new HND in Computer Studies, the first company to offer me a job was GEC at Rochester in Kent. After four months ‘on the dole’, I was ready to take any job I was offered, even if it meant ‘crossing the border’ and ‘going south’. After a year, I could come back to Scotland and get a more permanent job… I was with GEC for 14 years to the day when they eventually made me redundant! There were four Graduate Engineers beginning work at GEC on the same day; myself, one from Edinburgh and two Geordies. Terry (one of the Geordies) and I became close friends. He was born just 6 weeks after I was, his father’s birthday was just before my dad’s, and his mother’s just before my mum’s. Our similarities didn’t end there either. On the other hand, Terry hadn’t been brought up to go to church, so religion just wasn’t part of our lives. Over forty years later, he now lives in Yorkshire and we still keep in touch, though perhaps not as much as we should.

Hearing Voices

I am glad that the Bahá’í Faith teaches us that we all have guardian angels. Between 1980 and 1990, I rode motorcycles. One night I was in Rochester. I have a vague recollection that I had left Gillingham to visit my parents in Scotland, and stopped at a convenient cash machine for petrol money. With some cash in my pocket, I rode down Blue Boar Lane and stopped at the traffic lights at the end, waiting to turn left onto Corporation Street (the main A2 through Rochester). The give way lines were set back 10 feet or so from the junction, restricting my view of traffic coming along Corporation Street from my right. As the lights turned green, a voice in my head said, very clearly, “It is two o’clock in the morning. Other vehicles might just disregard the traffic lights”. I’m not aware of ever hearing a voice like that before or since, but it felt like the kind of advice that it would not be wise to disregard. With unusual caution, I rode forward slowly – only to have a previously unseen car race through the lights in front of me while they were at red for him and green for me. If I hadn’t listened to that voice…

While on the subject of motorbikes

Dad was a painter and decorator. While he was highly regarded (previous customers would prefer to wait for Bob to become available than have someone else do their decorating, and I heard that at the time he retired, there was a 3-year waiting list for his work) he was never well paid, so the family cycled everywhere. I still do. Mum was 66 when she was knocked off her bike by a careless car driver for the second time. She suffered a neck injury in the first accident and a cracked ankle in the second. “You’re not going to be able to ride that bike for ever” I told her. “I’ll need to see about getting you a little motorbike with an electric starter”. From Easter all through the summer of 1982, every time I spoke to her on the phone (at least once a week) her stock reply was “Oh, we’ll talk about it”. By August I was feeling it was about time I did something, and after a bit of research, bought a bright red Honda Melody moped, and sent Mum a brochure in the post. “WHY WOULDN’T YOU TALK TO ME ABOUT IT?” she demanded, on my next phone call. I told her that I didn’t care if she never used it, but every time that she went out, she would have a choice of transport. I packed it into the back of the car and took it up at Christmas, but it was the following April when her varicose ulcer had healed that she felt well enough to give it a try. She rode about a mile and a half to my aunt’s house (the Catholic one) and by the time she was on her way home, she was thinking “You know, this is nice and easy. You twist the throttle and the bike does all the work. I think I like it”! Soon after that she was doing about 700 miles per year on it and, realising that motorcycling isn’t as dangerous as she had previously believed, stopped worrying about me riding a motorbike. My aunt thought that it was scandalous that she should be on a motorbike at her age. My Dad’s thoughts were, frankly, unprintable. After he retired, dad rarely left the house, so the only way that mum could get some time by herself was to go out, and that meant the moped, so nothing was going to stop her using it. The biggest problem was where to put her ‘disabled’ badge! With a fluorescent red jacket and on the red moped, she would pull up outside the newsagent to collect dad’s daily paper, and before she could get it up on the stand, someone would see her and dash out to pop the paper into the basket! The town council pedestrianised the High Street shortly after, and as a ‘concession’, allowed disabled people access in their cars on a Tuesday. Mum thought it was unreasonable that if she happened to be unwell on a Tuesday then she was, in effect, banned from shopping for a whole fortnight. So she rode (with care) down the High Street whenever she wanted, and no-one ever objected. Ten years later, she went out and bought herself a replacement moped because the engine on the red one would occasionally cut out if it was raining. When their house was hit by a flash flood around 1986, Ebrahim Farzin (the nearest Bahá’í to my parents) came round the next day and got the moped running so that mum had some transport to get around while they were in temporary accommodation, waiting for the house to dry out. I don’t think he knows what an enormous difference that made to their situation, and how much it was appreciated. It was 10 years after buying the white moped that mum finally stopped using it (by this time, she was 86!). If anyone ever tells you that you are too old for something, just remember my mum and go out there and give it a try anyway. If you really want to do something, you can probably find a way.

More prejudice

While working at GEC around 1986, I remember a conversation with my manager and our small department about religion. I think we were all rather shocked (to say the least) when he assured us that he honestly believed that he would not see his own father in heaven, because his father followed the ‘wrong’ branch of Christianity, and so would go to hell. He was probably the only follower of any faith in the department, and I can’t say that any of the rest of us found such intolerance appealing. I just felt pity for him and his poor father.

Hearing about the faith for the first time

In 1991, Terry’s boss at GEC asked him to be his best man for his forthcoming marriage. Because the bride was a Bahá’í, it would be a joint Methodist/Bahá’í ceremony, and Terry had to learn about this unfamiliar faith. As Terry found out more about the faith, it began to crop up in our conversations with unusual frequency, so I eventually asked him if I could learn about the faith, too. “I’m not interested for myself, but I don’t want to say the wrong thing and offend someone unintentionally.”

So in late 1991 I began to attend firesides and unity feasts in Terry’s small community in Rochester-upon-Medway, learning from Bahá’í’s like John Firman and his wife, Mary. The more I learned, the more I saw the answers to my problems with Christianity.

If the Holy Spirit entered Jesus when he was baptised, and entered Moses when he talked to the burning bush, and entered Buddha when he achieved enlightenment, and entered Bahá’u’lláh in the Siyah-Chal, then following the Holy Spirit is the way to God, through whoever is the manifestation of God that speaks to your heart! Just be true to the original teachings of the faith, and be wary of any corruptions that might have crept in over time.

It now occurs to me that many – perhaps even most – Christians never think about what they ‘believe’ – they just accept it because they are supposed to. If asked, almost every Christian would say that they believe that Christ will return. They just don’t add the personal (to them) qualification ‘but not in my lifetime; I’ll never see it happen’. After all, if they really believed that Christ would return, it could happen tomorrow, and if he did return tomorrow, how would they recognise Him? In the back of their minds, they have this image of a physical man, with a beard and white robes, descending out of the clouds on some kind of celestial elevator! Of course, if they ever thought about it, they would accept that he wouldn’t return like that, but that would require them to consider just how they would recognise him. For some, even this concept is too cerebral, and they assert that they would ‘just know’. It’s not surprising that they have managed to miss his return – not once, but twice!

Perhaps because she lived so close to Terry, we were taught mostly by Afagh Vahman, an elderly Iranian lady, who took great pleasure in persuading us to eat “just a little rice”. Her concept of ‘just a little rice’ was to pile the largest plate she could find with as much rice with meatballs/chicken/lamb etc as she could put on the plate without it falling off!

How long do you have to wait for the answer to a prayer?

By early 1992, Terry had declared and I was often attending Feasts (with only about 7 Bahá’ís, Rochester-upon-Medway held Unity Feasts). Around May/June, there was a Feast at Afagh’s house. Afterwards, when everyone else had left, Terry and I stayed behind to keep Afagh company while she waited for her daughter, Ferry, to come and visit from Hemel Hempstead; about 1½ hours’ drive away. Time passed, and by the time that Ferry was 1½ hours late, Afagh was getting concerned. Terry asked if Afagh would like him to read a prayer. “Ah,” I thought. “I know what prayer you’re going to read!” Terry then surprised me by reading a prayer for travellers, so I asked “Would you like me to read one too?” and picked up a UK prayerbook, thinking “I hope I can find it…”. There it was, Prayer number 2, right in the middle of the first page; the prayer I thought Terry had been going to read. I took a breath and began. “Is there any remover of difficulties save God…” I had only just laid the prayerbook back down on the table when the phone began to ring. After a brief conversation in Farsi, Afagh put the phone down with a huge smile on her face. The M25 had been closed after some incident, so Ferry and her husband had been crawling through the country lanes of Essex along with the rest of the motorway traffic. They had just reached the Service Area at South Mimms and had stopped for a coffee. They should arrive in a little over half-an-hour. “Wow!” I thought. “That was a pretty good response time for a prayer!” Ferry must have started dialling the instant I finished the prayer.

The Martyrdom of The Báb

Not long after that, I was back in Afagh’s house to attend the commemoration of the Martyrdom of the Báb. I couldn’t help being moved, picturing the scene in that army barracks in Tabriz. For the rest of the meeting, I kept thinking to myself “You’ve been learning about the Faith for months now. And don’t forget that prayer. Isn’t it time that you got off the fence? Are you going to become a Bahá’í or aren’t you?” After the meeting, Terry and I went back to his house. It would appear that he had been thinking along the same lines, as we had hardly sat down when he asked “When are you going to become a Bahá’í?” Terry would sometimes say of someone that they had “all the subtlety of an atom bomb”. He also acknowledged that the phrase could sometimes be applied to him. Terry produced a card which listed 12 principles of the Bahá’í Faith.

“Do you believe in the oneness of God?”

“Do you believe in the oneness of mankind?”

“Do you believe in the oneness of religion?”

Twelve ‘yeses’ later – “Well?” I’m not sure whether I made the decision at Afagh’s or at Terry’s, but that was the point where I could actually acknowledge it. I then surprised Terry by declining to sign a declaration card. “Everyone in Rochester community has been involved in teaching me” I explained. “I think it would be nice if they were all present when I declare”. Terry got on the phone to the more distant members of the community to invite them to his house for that evening, while I jumped in my van and drove round to Shahla’s and Afagh’s to invite them in person. When I got to Afagh’s, I had hardly stepped out of the van when she came running up the path and threw her arms around me.

I don’t live in Rochester/Chatham. I live in Gillingham. Gillingham community didn’t ‘do teaching’. At this point, I had met one Gillingham family on one occasion. Regrettably, we still don’t ‘do teaching’. If you have lots of enthusiasm and energy and enjoy teaching, please come here. It’s a nice place to live, and we have an LSA which does lots of other things. We just need help with teaching. Anyway, John and Mary phoned the secretary of Gillingham community out of courtesy, to let him know that he was about to have a new Bahá’í join them. The secretary’s wife was a friend of Afagh, so phoned Afagh straight away. You can just imagine the call.

“I hear that Robin has declared”

“No he hasn’t”

“Yes he has”

“He was in my house just an hour ago. If he had declared, I would know”

“Well, John and Mary have just phoned to say…”

I wish I could have been there to see Afagh take that call.

Ten-and-a-half people

With everyone invited, I went back to Terry’s house. “You might not want to sign a declaration card until this evening, but in the meantime you can fill out this form” he said, and produced an application form to attend the Bahá’í World Congress in New York later that year. As soon as Terry declared, he applied to go himself, and took the precaution of obtaining a second form ‘just in case’. As a close friend, he had asked me to go ‘on holiday’ with him to America. We had already started making plans for the trip, so attending the Congress wasn’t a big change. Once the form was completed, we spent the rest of the time until everyone arrived talking about our itinerary.

Saturday – Fly to New York

Sunday – Registration at the Congress

Monday to Thursday – 4 days at the Congress

Friday – Fly to Orlando

Saturday to Thursday – Magic Kingdom, SeaWorld, Epcot, Space Shuttle Discovery launch, etc

Friday – Fly to Chicago (24 hours to see the temple at Wilmette)

Saturday – Fly back to the UK

We agreed that we would both like to have time to meet up with an American Bahá’í family for a while, but the itinerary was so full, there just wouldn’t be time to fit in a visit, even if we could meet them. Never mind, we would make the most of our visit. Then everyone started to arrive. In the end, there were 10½ of us in Terry’s little living room; 7 Bahá’ís from Rochester-upon-Medway, myself, Terry’s mum had just come down that evening from Newcastle for a visit, and as we were just about to start, Tom (a friend of Terry and me) unexpectedly knocked on the door and was persuaded to stay. Tom still visits me twice a week, but ‘Is Not Interested In Religion’. Never mind. Horse, Water, Drink. And the Half? Afagh brought her dog, Zeba!

America: New York, New York

Just over 4 months later, Terry and I are in New York. If you haven’t been, it’s pretty much like London, apart from the cars. They drive on the ‘other’ side of the road so you have to think carefully before you cross the street, and they use their horns more that they use their accelerators. I wondered how we would manage to sleep, but it quietens down around 10pm. At registration, we are allocated to the ‘morning sessions’. The congress was taking place in the biggest conference facility in New York, and it could only cope with half of us at a time, so each day the ‘morning session’ was repeated in the afternoon for the other half. After all, we were taking up one sixth of all the hotel beds in New York! The conference centre staff were extremely impressed with us; they had to get 15,000 people from all over the world into the hall and seated for each session. As the many queues would enter the hall, the staff would have to stop and start each queue to prevent a crush forming, but all they had to do was hold up their hand and a thousand people would immediately stop and patiently wait to be admitted. This is NOT normal behaviour in America! Being in the morning sessions, we had the afternoon and evenings free to go sightseeing and so on, but no matter where you were staying, you had access to the conference facilities at all the major hotels to meet and chat with other Bahá’ís. You spent so much time walking in and out of The Hilton, The Waldorf, The Sheraton… It felt rather good.

Each evening, before retiring, Terry and I would visit a coffee shop about a block from our hotel. One evening, we arrived to find a Bahá’í couple talking to a lady. The couple, like most people at the congress, had their pass badges on show as a form of proclamation, and the lady was wearing a Bahá’í pin badge on her lapel. The couple left but Terry and I stayed, doing our best to talk to her; her English was limited, and we speak nothing else. It was when she said “I really believe all the things that Bahá’ís believe.” that I realised that despite the badge, she wasn’t a Bahá’í. I ascertained that she normally spoke Spanish and Portuguese, and I hurried along to the Sheraton Hotel to find an interpreter. One of the thoughtful touches at the Congress was the army of ‘helpers’, identified by ribbons on their lapels, who were able to give directions and so on. I explained my need for someone to interpret for us, and within two minutes was on my way back to the coffee shop with a sixteen-year-old boy who had volunteered to assist us.

It turns out that the lady had arrived in New York that morning from Brazil. She was an interior decorator, and had come to collect some art for her business. She had met some Bahá’ís on her arrival, who had given her some pamphlets and leaflets. She had read these with interest, but had one concern. The leaflets had an address for Bahá’ís in Brasília, but she was from Rio de Janeiro.

“I don’t believe there are any Bahá’ís in Rio de Janeiro”

I was shocked. “Of course there are! Where are you staying?”

“The Sheraton Hotel”

“How long will you stay here in the coffee shop?”

“About half an hour.”

“In that case, I will meet you in the foyer of the Sheraton Hotel in about half an hour and introduce you to a Bahá’í from Rio de Janeiro!”

Have you seen the film The Blues Brothers? I was on ‘a mission from God’, and I would fulfil my promise.

Terry and I headed back to the Sheraton, where, not having any better ideas, I proceeded to ask everyone with a suntan “Are you from Brazil? I need to find someone from Rio de Janeiro”. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t having a lot of success. Everyone I asked turned out to be Iranian. It made a change when one gentleman said “No, I’m from Orlando”. “Oh that’s interesting, after the Congress, we’re going to visit Orlando”. “I think that someone from Rio de Janeiro has just gone up those stairs.” I thanked him, and, leaving Terry chatting to him about our holiday plans, dashed up the stairs. I arrived in another meeting room, to be told that “Yes, he is from Rio de Janeiro, but you’ve just missed him – he’s just gone down those stairs over there. If you hurry, you’ll catch him.” With a rising feeling of optimism, I continued my quest. Sure enough, I found the gentleman I had been seeking. Hastily I explained why I had been looking for him, and we headed into the foyer, just in time to meet Terry and the lady from the coffee shop. They were able to exchange addresses, so Terry and I bade them farewell. Terry had some news for me. “We have been invited to appear on Bahá’í Radio Orlando on Sunday. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve accepted on your behalf!”

America: Orlando

The following Sunday morning, having spent our first day in Orlando exploring Disneyworld and the Magic Kingdom, we were picked up from our motel and driven to the radio station. Bahá’í Radio Orlando was a one-hour programme, broadcast each Sunday on a local multi-cultural radio station. Together with a lady who ran a Bahá’í school in Belize, Terry and I chatted happily about our impressions of attending the Congress, and some background about where we came from. After the broadcast, Riaz (the gentleman from New York) came rushing up to us. He had been listening on his car radio on the way to the station. “That should have been two hours long, not just one hour!” He then generously paid for everyone to have lunch at a local Vietnamese Restaurant, and, as we had no other plans, took us to see the Greater Orlando Bahá’í Centre in downtown Orlando. It is a traditional-style house, and a credit to the community. Having enjoyed our visit there, he then invited us back to his house for the evening. He has a lovely home and we very much enjoyed our time there – so much so that we were in the car being driven back to our motel when I suddenly remembered our wish, back on the 9^th July, to meet an American Bahá’í family. We had been so caught up in the moment that both of us had completely forgotten about it.

And back home again…

A few days after our return to the UK, I met up with the Gillingham Bahá’ís at the Feast of Masáil (Questions). During the social part of the Feast, I offered to show them the video I had shot in New York and Orlando, as none of them had gone to the Congress. Suddenly, our treasurer (who didn’t go to America for the Congress) calls out “Oh, look! There’s Riaz”! Surprised, I asked “Yes that’s right, but I haven’t mentioned his name. How do you know him”? “Oh, we were brought up together in Pakistan”!

A little while after that, Terry was telling the story to a community about 15 miles away. “Yes, I know” said one lady, “Riaz is my brother!”

You can think whatever you like about this story, but I’m sure that the prayer was a big hint that this was ‘the right path’, and the sequence of events in America was confirmation that I had made the right decision when I declared. Someone later attributed it to “the Abhá Department of Coincidence”. If so, they must have been doing a lot of overtime on this one!

Later I took Afagh to Scotland to visit my parents, who hadn’t mentioned to me the reservations that they felt about my declaration. Mum and Dad would have been in their mid-70s then. They all got on like a house on fire, and were really sad when I had to bring Afagh back to Kent. Afagh thought that they lived in a beautiful town.

Afagh also said that she had never felt so welcomed into a family since she came to the UK. She offered to cook a Persian meal for us, a gesture that mum and dad were delighted to accept. Afagh felt really part of the family when she was given free reign in the kitchen, and no-one fussed over her, letting her cook however she wanted. After talking to her, mum and dad had no more reservations about me following the Bahá’í Faith. They are now probably all reminiscing together in the Abhá Kingdom.

In 2001 I had the opportunity to join the Voices of Báhá choir, conducted by Tom Price. I didn’t sing (I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket!) but I was able to assist in other ways, running errands and selling CDs to help with the choir’s finances, and so on. In return, I received the wonderful opportunity to visit Bratislava in Slovakia, Madrid in Spain, Barcelona in Catalonia, Thonon-Les-Bains and Paris in France, Wernigerode and the Bahá’í Temple, Frankfurt in Germany, and finally the World Centre in Haifa, Israel. All this with the chance to travel with a 200-voice choir from around 50 countries, and hearing them perform public concerts in all those cities! A few months later, I returned to Haifa on Pilgrimage.

Since declaring, I have been privileged to play a small part in our LSA and our local Interfaith group, and have done my best to promote events like the Week of Prayer for World Peace, Climate Week and so on. The first Interfaith group in our area was started by a Bahá’í, Dr Mehdi Dabestani, who chaired our LSA for many years. As soon as I learned of its existence, I joined the group and went on to serve on the steering committee. Eventually, by 1998, members had died or moved out of the area, and I ended up almost running the group on my own, setting topics for discussion, writing the newsletter and organising events. In 1999, the Revd. Noel Beattie started another group in Medway, so the few remaining members of the original group joined the new one. I still keep in touch with four or five people from the original group. As a consequence of my activities in Interfaith, I was invited to the opening ceremony for the Bluewater Shopping Centre, and was able to serve the new group as treasurer for around 3 years, eventually resigning when I felt that I wasn’t giving the job the attention that it required. A few months later, in November 2015 I think, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. That was almost 6 years ago, and as I reassure people every so often, “I’m not dead yet!”

Robin McQueen

Kent, August 2021