doberman pizza. a baha'i (bahai, bahá'í) blog.

hey—just in time for the Fast, I’ve calculated and posted Ottawa’s Baha’i fasting times for 2009, along with links to print out fasting calendars for other major Canadian cities. Hope you find them useful, and here’s wishing you and yours a joyous and spiritually transformative Fast.

Read more about the Baha’i Fast, here and on bahai.org.

a night of cold, blowing wind follows a quiet, gloomy friday’s worth of work. winter stubbornly spends its last few nominal weeks like an angry tyrant who knows his demise looms and who is bent on causing as much hardship as possible to his long-suffering subjects before that fateful day. on some streets, there are still puddles sitting, liquid and rippling; on others, strong gusts have thrown them up and frozen them into rough, icy cobbles.

funny how my heart is so warm in the midst of all this ice, so glad in the midst of all this gloom. i have my sights set on a much warmer place indeed, and soon, after less than a month’s worth of waiting now, for the first time in my life, I’ll be gone to live in the warmest place I’ll have ever been: Vietnam.

really a five-month-long visit more than any sort of immigration, I’ll be there from roughly the 1st of April ’til the 1st of September, visiting newfound friends and making more, seeing sights, experiencing the culture—and, perhaps above all, taking the opportunity to serve humanity in some of the small ways I’ve learned to serve. namely, I’ve been asked to help the Baha’is of Vietnam put together a website for their national community, a public face to help their country and the world to get to know them better. I’m looking forward to it—it’ll be an exciting project to be sure, one that’ll test my ability to manage projects and determine customer requirements, as well as my intercultural consultation skills. Baha’i consultation is the same wherever you go in the world, but communicating well across cultures is more than just your regular task, requiring a greater level of patience, sensitivity, wisdom and love. I only hope God will confirm my efforts.

i wonder about my readiness for this period of service, ever since i became burnt out after a two-year period of service in the province of Québec several years ago. Then, like now, I set out around Naw-Rúz, hoping that the budding springtime (still obscured by the usual remnants of a Canadian winter) would herald a spiritual springtime within me—a long-awaited rejuvenation that I hoped would take my frightened, self-absorbed consciousness and raise it to a level that God might deem acceptable. Seven years of lessons later, I feel as though much of the darkness that surrounded me has lifted—and a great deal of naiveté replaced with a deeper understanding of God and spiritual things—but still I feel fear, hesitation, trepidation. I wonder how my mood will fare, how my bruised—yet healing—psyche will hold up to the coming stress. I wonder how I will react to the challenge of service—with fear and doubt, or with courage and faith? I wonder how I will react to the people—will I choose to retreat into my shell and hide my heart from those I meet, or will I dare to open up my soul to them? will I be cold, like the ice that slowly coats the streets of Ottawa? or will the Vietnamese summer—and God’s love and blessing—warm my heart?

Seen lately on a Baha’i email list which shall remain nameless:

Let us move like the volkswagons of the sea purposefully with determination regardless of our limitations.

nothing to say about it really, except that it gives a wonderfully hilarious mental image. I wonder how these volkswagons are supposed to navigate the sea? oh, and I’m not hating, either, I really did laugh. there comes a time in everyone’s life when we just happen to run out of good metaphors ;)

today’s children’s class was postponed ’til next week to accommodate the holding of an Ayyám-i-Há gift fair at the Bahá’í Centre. I slept in a little late – good for my body, I suppose, because I haven’t had lots of good sleep lately; but not so good for the organizers who asked if I could come in early to help set up :/ Things seem to have gone alright, though, and the event itself was a success, with many families arriving over the lunch hour with their children to take part in not only the gift fair, but also to make Ayyám-i-Há cards and candles. the proceeds from the gift fair were slated to pay for its expenses, and the remainder went to the Baha’i Fund.

after the gift fair, people quickly cleared out to make room for the visit of Mr. Rowhani, a representative from the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada. I was asked to take cake of the bookstore during the talk he gave since there were no other volunteers present, so I ended up missing a great deal of it. I did manage to hear a few things, though; Mr. Rowhani gave the friends a detailed explanation of how the National Spiritual Assembly had been handling its recent financial crises. He also shared certain stories from the History of the Faith, especially relating to the trials ‘Abdu’l-Bahá went through as He was overseeing the construction of the Shrine of the Báb, all the while hiding the Blessed Báb’s remains until the hour finally came for them to be interred. the crowd emptied out by 5pm and another crowd moved in: youth this time, a whole mass of them from 15 years old and upwards, and again Mr. Rowhani addressed them. I peeked in on their session for a little while and it reminded me a lot of when I was a youth, and of how much love the Institutions and their members had (and have) for the youth. With them, Mr. Rowhani spent time listening to their questions and sharing his own experiences as a youth, dealing with things like peer pressure, finding confidence to teach, finding a Baha’i identity, and so on.

right now I’m going to close up the bookstore; hopefully I can catch the rest before it’s over.

Another track from the prayercast; like the last one, this melody is a well-known one accompanying a Hidden Word revealed by Bahá’u'lláh, sung in French this time.

O fils de l’existence! Aime-moi afin que je puisse t’aimer. Si tu ne m’aimes pas, mon amour ne pourra point t’atteindre. Sache le, ô serviteur.

Bahá’u’lláh, Paroles Cachées, No. 5, Arabe

want to hear more of these? leave me a comment on this post or via email, and subscribe to the prayercast in iTunes or your favourite podcast player.