 It is now my great pleasure to introduce our first plenary speaker of this year's conference, Dr. Robert Henderson, who is well known to many of us and who asked to be introduced simply as a Baha'i from Chicago. In order to give you just a brief introduction and sense of what Dr. Henderson will speak about, just a few words. We all sense that the world is at a turning point and that the forces released by Baha'u'llah are amplifying every opportunity, every conflict. Dr. Henderson in his address this evening will talk to us about those forces and those opportunities and how they inform our view of the challenge of uniting the races and of achieving social justice. Dr. Henderson. Well good evening friends. That's the part where you say well good evening. See that's how that works. There's a reciprocal aspect to this. Dan I want you to know that when I was a little boy in Baha'i school on Hampshire Street in Los Angeles, we didn't have you or your synthesizer. We had good morning sun. We had consultation means finding out. We had Johnny as a Christian, Jacob as a Jew, Ali as a Muhammad and here's what they can do. And we thought we were so cool. You know we were five six years old and and if you if no adults were around we'd sing it with a little beat and we just thought we were on the edge. But it is so beautiful to hear new melodies celebrating the verses of Baha'u'llah and particularly that prayer which is one of my favorites. Friends it has been too long for me to have the privilege of attending a an association from a high studies conference. I'm embarrassed to admit that I served on the Association for Baha'i Studies Board for ten years and I loved every moment of it and I have missed the time that I haven't been able to be with you. But I want to tell you that the last time I had the privilege of being at an association conference it was to introduce Feroz Kazemzadeh and I said at the time I suggested that Feroz was a historian so venerable in age and in honor that Nabil's narrative was actually based on his notes but that humility of course had prevented him from stepping forward so he left them to Nabil to chronicle and synthesize in what we celebrate as the dawnbreakers. Now you know that dear Feroz has gone on to the kingdom of glory and we think about him and we love him and we miss him every day but I wanted to say just a couple of words about him because Feroz was not only a global leader of thought having changed national policy, having educated generations of national and international leaders including presidents of the United States and senators and congressmen and policy leaders and the like. Having been the first to argue that the Soviet Union could not be understood as a new confederation of nations that it could only be understood as an empire and subsequently changing American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. His contributions in his thought leadership was that pivotal but I was very pleased to have read comments by one of his students Frederick Starr who is the chairman of the Central Asia Caucuses Institute at John Hopkins University and he wrote a beautiful and moving tribute to Feroz and I just wanted to make a couple of introductory comments about that tribute and commend them to your consideration as to what we can learn and embed in our hearts and conditioned in our ways of thinking about our role as students of the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh and its application to life because Dr. Starr said that he had been a student of Feroz's since 1958 and that he had celebrated the brilliance of his scholarship the scope of his learning and the refinement of his character. Oh that we should all be known by such wonderful attributes. He said that he wrote this tribute on the occasion of the republication of Feroz's classic study The Struggle for Transcaucasia 1917 to 1921 and he made these observations. He said that when the Soviet Union fell and the states of Armenia and Azerbaijan and Georgia the Republic of Georgia and so forth were reconvened as states there was no organized body of scholarship that would allow us to organize our thinking about these newly reestablished republics and the scholarship that did exist was either heavily flavored by the Marxist lens or it was it reflected a western liberal political view that and that neither one of those lenses did justice to the challenge of understanding the dynamics of those cultures and those peoples. He said there were a few a handful of scholars who were able to write with detachment and balance and objectivity and he said among those Feroz Kazimzadeh rose tall and stood far beyond all of the others and he explained that it was his objectivity his ability to empathize and at the same time subject persons of history and events to rigorous critical analysis it was his ability to do as Feroz used to call it the grunt work of scholarship carefully unpacking ideas and episodes to understand their real essence and their meaning and he said that that this was of course a tour de force for Feroz who by the way wrote it when he was 27 years old now when Azerbaijan was was reestablished as a nation it happened that Feroz and Wilma Kazimzadeh Feroz was invited to Azerbaijan to Baku to celebrate his contribution to the reestablishment of Azerbaijani culture and they said to him we had forgotten who we were as a people we had forgotten our culture our history our stories and we'll relay relearned ourselves regained ourselves from your book what a wonderful thing that a work of scholarship could allow a people to regain a sense of national identity and culture after decades of Soviet domination the very idea of which was to stamp out any identity that was not affiliated with the state and he went on to say that Feroz was the best of teachers he said that he never stood on formalities he always insisted on being called Feroz now I said the same thing to Julia before she introduced introduce me I said look I'm Bob I'm from Chicago that works for me anything else isn't going to make me sound any better or make the ideas any clearer she didn't buy it but I tell you Feroz insisted on it and and what Frederick Starr said about him was that while other professors might be hard to reach Feroz was very generous with his time that not only in his classes but in the mornings at George and Harry's he would hold forth with coffee and in the afternoons at the Elizabethan at high tea he would hold forth again and they would talk about politics and law and culture and art and everything because he was he was interested in how all things fit together and how they harmonized and how we might parse reality to gain a deeper understanding of what's happening in our world and I just wanted to mention his name because when he passed we felt a gaping hole in the space that we call our lives and as I visit my mother I always think that any moment Feroz is going to come out of his library and make some tea and we're going to have a delightful and educative conversation if I were to propose a patron saint for the association it would be my boy FK there's one more thing that I would say about Feroz and that is as you know he was also the pioneer of external affairs for the United States and had taken them to heights now internationally globally where the Baha'i community is recognized and considered a force in the area of human rights so as I thought about coming here today I just could not resist but to say a few words about this wonderful man who is a constant presence in my heart but I also wanted to take the opportunity to say a few words about a subject that is a deep concern of mine and I would wager a concern of yours as well and that is what's going on in our world and particularly what's going on in our world in the context of this movement or the oneness of humankind the unity of the races because we are truly at a turning point and as I began to think about it the phrase that kept coming to my mind were those stirring words from the Bible in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and recalling that Bahá'u'lláh teaches us that God so loved his creation that he could not conceal that love from himself he writes veil in my immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of my essence I knew my love for thee hence I created thee engraved on thee my image and revealed to thee my beauty he says thou art my lamp and my light is within thee he says I created thee noble I created thee rich turned thy sight unto thyself that thou mayest find me standing within thee mighty powerful self subsisting the Bible tells us that in the fullness of time God will send a world redeemer and that redeemer will unify the religions the Bible says that in that time that be that we know as the day of God thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven that time he says that I will give them one heart and I will put a new spirit within you that you may walk in my statutes and they will be my children and I will be their God the Bible tells us that every race and people will receive the blessings of God in that day it says I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh and it says that in that day the government shall be on his shoulders whose shoulders Bahá'u'lláh's shoulders and his name shall be called wonderful counselor the everlasting father the prince of peace and they say that in that day we will be transformed all people will be transformed they say that we'll be changed that the name of God will be stamped on our foreheads as a way of understanding that we will develop new habits of thought that are divine in their aspiration and new habits of the heart that will embrace all people in the spirit of oneness and new habits of behavior that will be driven by the urgency of service and that we ourselves will as the Bible says behold that the tabernacle of God is with men and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither shall there be any more pain for the former things are passed away. Abdu'l-Bahá is referenced in Shoghi Effendi's great book God Passes By commenting on that period and he's commenting specifically on the meaning of the oneness of humankind and he says that by that it is the intention of God to make all the nations one nation and all the races one race and all the peoples one people and all the bloods one blood and Shoghi Effendi tells us that the world that will be created by this process this vast historical process will be the envy of posterity that we will all delight he said there will come a time Abdu'l-Bahá said that there will come a time when people won't want to die because life here is so wonderful but Shoghi Effendi adds an element of reality he says that speaking specifically to you and me to American Baha'is he's talking about the glorious destiny of the American nation and the contribution we will make to the unity of the races and to international peace and to the unity of the nations and he says that the American Baha'is will be the envy of posterity but then he warns us he says that the path leading to our glorious destiny is thorny and torturous replete with setbacks and reverses so too is the path of humankind the path it has traveled over the millennia to achieve this day one of the characteristics of our current dilemma is that we see so many wonderful things happening so many obvious evidences of advancement and progress but at the same time we are beset with creed with crises of increasing complexity and I wanted to add the perspective of Shoghi Effendi the guardian of our faith the sign of God on earth because he helped us understand how we were true to traverse this thorny and torturous path which he says is replete with setbacks and reverses he is talking about a time when the Babis were under assault being hunted as a result of the attempt on the life of the Shah of Iran and he talks about this and he says that there are occasions when over and over again the forward march of God's cause seems to be halted the cause itself paralyzed and setback after setback seems to be our lot in life but he says viewed in their proper perspective these events however horrifying however much they tear our hearts into can only be understood as blessings in disguise and he goes on to set an expectation for us to condition and discipline our minds in response to these crises to toughen our hearts and to help us rally ourselves and carry on he says that these blessings in disguise deliver specific benefits that ultimately aid our refinement as souls and servants and propel the forward progress of the cause he says that they are a fresh outpouring of celestial grace he says they are a means for the achievement of age-old prophecies he says these crises galvanize the Bahá'í community and revitalize it and strengthen its unity and he said that often at the height of these crises the wisdom of what has occurred would be evident to both friend and foe and friends I'd like to commend to your consideration that he wasn't just talking about how we Bahá'ís should think about the crises that we confront in the cradle of the faith or the African nation or the American nation no I think that Shoghi Effendi was giving us a deep insight into the nature of reality itself and to the human experience over the vast expanse of history as we have evolved through test and trial traveling this thorny and torturous path replete with setbacks and reverses but nevertheless have reached the dawn of the day of God in which God's promise thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven will be fulfilled I want to talk a little bit about some of the forces that have been released by the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh and how those forces are propelling opportunities for the advancement of the unity of the of humankind and how they are creating conflicts that intensify our difficulty that's the thorny and torturous part there is a book that I read some time ago which was written by our own Rob Stockman it's called the early American Bahá'ís it's a charming volume and it tells the story of the first pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see Abdu'l-Bahá of American Bahá'ís and in that book there's a diary by Helen Hillier Brown and she records that one day in the presence of the master Abdu'l-Bahá was asked why was America discovered when it was and Abdu'l-Bahá according to these notes said that it was the will of God that at this time he would establish the greatest and most powerful nation the world had ever known but not for greatness and power in and of itself he said that it would be done so that those so that that nation could be the home of the spreaders of the truth now ordinarily we would simply set that aside and we would say well these are pilgrims notes and what can you do except that Shoghi Effendi himself picks up the same themes and he says that the American nation is significant because it is the shell that enshrines the priceless gem of the followers of Bahá'u'lláh and he says that the glory and the progress and the development of the nation itself will be propelled and sustained when the spreaders of the truth the Bahá'í friends leave American shores to spread the Bahá'í message all over the world now we look back to the founding of our country we see a vision that is wholly consistent with the vision of the Bible and the vision that the Bahá'í faith has for this country we look back and we hear the echoes of the founders and what were they saying at the moment of the conception of this nation they said we have it in our power to begin the world all over again the past is the textbook of tyranny but the future is the Bible of the free they said that if you spill one drop of American blood you have spilt the blood of the entire world because this is a nation composed of all people George Washington himself said that the bosom of America is open to all the people of all races all religions all nations that we may make of this nation one race one people and one unified nation that was the vision of the founders at the conception of this nation and so it is not terribly inconsistent that we would find in our own writings these prophetic statements of the continent of America is in the eyes of the one true God the land and wherein the splendors of his light will be revealed shall be revealed where the mysteries of his faith shall be unveiled where the righteous will abide and the free assemble it is in the DNA of this nation and yet we are also a nation that enshrined e pluribus unum as our motto that established ideals of freedom under law that inspired millions and nations around the world but also counted a slave as three fifths of a man and embedded inequality in the DNA and in our example is a playlet that describes the whole of human history and now we find ourselves at a moment where we simultaneously have a recently retired African-American president and black children women and men unarmed shot and nobody goes to jail children playing with toys in a empty park or shot women in a car go woman in a car going to a job interview is shot a man selling cigarettes in New York is shot a man buying a toy for his 12 year old son's birthday is shot and on the other side we invade the national forest in Oregon with guns and hostile intent declared and not a bullet is fired and it tears our hearts apart because we do not understand how this can be how can it be you know it it it would be easy to dismiss this as the lot in life of people of a certain class or neighborhood but I will tell you that my own son in Will Matt Illinois as a nine year old was riding his bicycle down the street when he was arrested by the police for stealing his own bicycle and when he was asked where he lived and he said 536 Sheridan Road the policeman said to him that's not possible and the nine-year-old then Evan's and intelligence that the officer was lacking he asked if he had known if the officer knew another officer Martin and he said yes how do you know him he said well I go to will met Central Street School and he comes and he tells the kids that they shouldn't smoke cigarettes or do drugs and that's why he was released in the single richest city in the country so I asked the chief of police had there been a bicycle stolen no well had there been a bicycle stolen in the last couple of weeks no had there been a bicycle stolen in the last five or six months no well when was the last bicycle stolen we don't have a record of stolen bikes here so Miles problem was that he was black and in will met and what it lets us know is that there is unfinished business when it comes to elevating and understanding embedding and understanding throughout all of our citizens about human equality we are making tremendous progress on every continent and here but we have great work to do our recent election told us that there was a segment of American society that was wholly unheard by us the white working class and that they felt disenfranchised that they felt betrayed by their government and by their elected representatives and they felt that we were fundamentally on the wrong path and that the values that had established our nation had been abandoned and we woke up like a thunderbolt the next morning to discover that they had asserted their right to vote and to elect a representative that would champion their values to elect a president that would champion their values and what it reminded us was that there was unfinished business among the white working class that we had not attended to and the election itself reminded us that there is unfinished business among women that we have yet to attend to and so I wanted to talk a little bit about these issues and I want to cover some things that have become important in my own mind and maybe they're just important to me perhaps you'll find some value in them as well I want to suggest to you that we are not the only ones who think that powerful forces have been released that are changing the structure and the function of the content and the focus of the world itself some 15 20 years ago Peter Drucker wrote a book called post capitalist society now you you may know that Peter Drucker is the the thought leader who really defined virtually everything we know about management and leadership the fundamental principles are defined by Drucker and he until recently was a professor at Claremont just a few miles from here and Drucker said that every 500 to 1000 years civilization is renewed that sounds familiar doesn't it and he says in the art in the architecture and and the literature and the law and the and the spirit of society goes through a transformational change and a great leap of progress is taken by all of humanity and he goes through the ages of history and he marks these periods of great advance and then he says that according to his analysis the last time this occurred was in the 1850s and he said that there was an explosion of knowledge and that the characteristic of this period was this this release of more knowledge than we had accumulated in the entire time before that combined now this might remind you of the reference made to the Bob his holiness the Bob and the release of the other 25 letters of knowledge but to put this in perspective in my mother's time knowledge doubled every 100 years in my grandson's time knowledge will double every other month and what will champion the day is purpose and principle because in a in an environment of constant turbulence if you're rigorous on a strategy you're going to get beaten down into Sam that's what happens to rocks on the beach they become Sam because they're unmoving but you know what has viability in an environment of turbulence a feather because it can bend and adjust and adapt without breaking its structural integrity well that's exactly the role of principles in our lives so when we think back of those biblical verses he will stamp our foreheads and write the law of God on the inner tablet of our hearts and will give us one heart we are thinking we've got to think in terms of a transformation of ourselves to think differently to feel differently and to engage one another and to engage our obligations and our services differently so that in this turbulent environment we can navigate that thorny and torturous path toward our glorious destiny knowing that this is the process and that we will ultimately be successful Marsha Pali a wonderful scholar has written a good bit about the forces that are driving that turbulence as she talks about global immigration which is leading to demographic diversity on a global scale but it's also leading to racial and cultural conflict on a global scale she talks about economic globalization which is creating wider opportunity for everyone everybody anywhere but it's also creating destabilization of jobs and industries and income streams and money flows she talks about the internet and the the proliferation of knowledge and here she bifurcates the problem on one hand knowledge is growing so fast we can hardly keep up with it on the other hand one of its primary tools the internet really focuses a great deal of our energy on what to buy and when to buy it and what to focus our attention on and she talks about the culture of autonomy which valorizes individual choice and self-determination and elevates the importance of me mine and more and what she says is that these forces are destabilizing our environment and that we're having two reactions to these forces on one hand we're trying to make contracts law and order obedience compliance and on the other hand she said millions of people in this country and around the world are establishing covenants and she differentiates these contracts from these covenants she says that the contracts protect interests we make a an agreement and we define a contract that protects your interests and my my interests she said but covenants protect relationships and she commends to our consideration the covenants of a soldier who because of his relationship to the idea of his country and to the love of his country and its people is willing to serve and possibly die that a covenant is what motivates a parent to work two and three jobs so that one of her or his children can go to college for the first time in their family's experience that a covenant is what a teacher does when she goes to Walmart to buy school supplies her district or school can't provide her because she wants her children to be adequately provisioned a covenant is my friend CC ice maids a black woman who at 50 went back to school and got a bachelor's degree and at 55 she got a master's degree and then she became a second grade teacher in a ghetto school in Chicago and she said that the problem was that the neurological damage these children had suffered was so great that a lot of their thought patterns were the neurological equivalent of white noise just static and confusion and no order and so on now we know that that many of these children from birth to five years old will hear three million fewer words than their more privileged cohorts and so we hatched a plan and the plan was that she would teach them some of the fundamentals of mindfulness meditation and she would begin to introduce calming influences in her class soft music even classical music and teach them something about it so that they would know exactly what this music is and where it came from and how it can help them and she went from a classroom of constant chaos and conflict to a classroom in which these same children would say miss ice maids it's time for us to breathe because we're getting too excited put on some of that classical music perhaps Mahler or Beethoven and in which her children are making progress as readers and writers and spellers and budding mathematicians these forces that I'm referring to are creating all kinds of of conflict in the United States and around the world but these covenants are creating opportunities for us to begin to bring people together and help them start again in a real sense she argues that covenants that are gifts of love we make to those we are in community with are to be our salvation and she argues that this is precisely what Abraham Lincoln did at Gettysburg when he drew on the mystic scripture at the moment of the founding of our nation and asked the question can a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all human beings are created equal long endure and she gives us encouragement to understand that these covenants are occurring all over the United States now I'd like to make a few suggestions for our discussion and consideration but before I do I want to mention a couple of these covenants because they're interesting and I think you'll find them interesting and perhaps even entertaining the first took place in Paris and Senegal I was in both places so I saw it for myself and I happen to be in negotiation with diplomatic representatives of 26 different African countries to build a fiber optic cable that would go from Pen March France to Cape Town South Africa and would bridge the digital divide and so on the problem was that from one country to another in Africa I wanted it for my country but I hate your country so I don't want you to get it but I would go to lunch with the African representatives every day we would meet for eight days and eight nights every month for about 16 months and so we were together a lot and even though they had political differences and cultural differences and ethnic and tribal differences you know when it was food time we'd all get together and many of them were Muslims in fact most of them were Muslims because this was West Africa and so they would talk about Islam a lot and from time to time I would just mention something about the Prophet Muhammad or Islam and of course they thought Americans didn't know anything about Islam until one person was delegated to ask me and he came up during a coffee break and he says Bob what is your book I knew exactly what he was talking about so I went back to the table and I said I'm a Baha'i and the moment I said I was a Baha'i was the highest point of unity we achieved in the entire negotiation because every single one of those representatives started telling stories about what the Baha'is had done in their country and their stories had a consistent theme the Baha'is were the ones who unified everyone it didn't matter your race your tribe or your your ethnic origin if the Baha'is were organizing it all were welcome he said they were always the first to come and the last to leave that the money was always safe with them and that the unity only grew and that we accomplished things be with the Baha'is I'll tell you I was in the White House and the president of the United States at that time Bill Clinton told me the very same thing about the Baha'is all over the world and we ourselves consider ourselves to be invisible and yet these covenants we live by which establish our relationship at once to Baha'u'llah at once to his institutions and his laws at once to his the cause itself also establish a covenantal relationship of us to all of God's children and we see this manifest in these services and these services are transformational so here we are building something that's going to revolutionize Africa and bring light to the quote dark continent and the point of unity isn't the fact that we're going to get this transformational technology it is our memory of all the wonderful things the Baha'is have done in every one of those 26 countries and how it is brought light and unity and progress and they spoke with endless excitement so let's go on I also wanted to mention another analysis because I thought it was it was a revolutionary insight to me and I think it is something that I would commend to your consideration to read and that is Stephen Pinker's book the better angels of our nature I'll warn you in advance it's 942 pages and it is a slog but here's what he says he says that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history and that violence while not wholly eliminated is virtually extinct by any historical comparison he says that every kind of violence violence against women violence against children murder war terrorism all of it is not just lower than it has ever been it is exponentially lower than it has ever been and he talks he chronicles and and details all of the civilizing forces that are contributing to this decline of violence and the implications for the transformation the way we think our habits of the heart and our behavior toward one another manifest not just in individual relationships but in relationships of individuals to the state and states to other states and those states to the world itself and in the codification of those new systems of belief in things like the introduction the international declaration of human rights and the African Union and the European Union and so on and so forth but what it lets you know is that there is a construct a progress a process of building and construction underway that we cannot ignore even as we are daily assaulted by all the evidences of our failings as human beings and of our inexplicable treatment one to the other so both things are true friends but what is significant about Pinkers book actually there are two things one is an observation and then one is a subjective interpretation that I'll offer what's significant about Pinkers book is that he details that this process that God prophesied in the Bible and has reiterated in every successive revelation is actually coming to pass and that the nations themselves are different now he also deals with the paradox that we all we see on the television is blood and gore according to yesterday's news tomorrow we may be nuked by the North Koreans all of that is true but it is simultaneously true that we are in a process of transformation so let's talk about a little bit about that process it is the development of the state and the confederation of states it is economic interdependence it is the feminization of society and the rise of women in their participation in society it is the development of moral reasoning as a default mode of cooperation for more and more people as a direct result of the building of schools and school systems on a global basis it is the consciousness of the oneness of humankind that is evident in documents like the universal declaration of human rights international unions and treaties and and religious cooperation such as the parliament for the world's religions so I'm going to conclude by making some specific suggestions about ways that we can think about how to apply some of these ideas to the particular problem of the unity of the races which is what Baha'is call the oneness of humankind and I want to take you back to 1927 when Shoghi Effendi Rabbani the guardian of the Baha'i faith and the sign of God on earth wrote a letter to the National Spiritual Assembly the Baha'is of the United States and it was in response to a proposal made by that assembly to have a race amity conference in the United States now to put you in the picture this was just a few years after what it was called historically the red summers where there was actual racial warfare on the streets of st. Louis since and Cincinnati Ohio and Chicago and other places and people were battling black and white for control of neighborhoods and streets literally killing each other and the response of the Baha'i friends at the time was to publish a document called reality magazine the central integrating theme of which was the unity of the races which they called interracial amity and the oneness of humankind so Shoghi Effendi took this up he took this theme up in this letter of 1927 up bear in mind that this is a young Shoghi Effendi who had only been the guardian of the Baha'i faith for a few years still in his 20s and at the same time masterful and commanding in shaping our understanding of how reality would evolve and how we would achieve that state in which God would invest us with one heart would stamp his name on our foreheads would write his law on the inner tablets of our hearts and with that we would be his children we would see his face and be his children and he would be our God how do we achieve that and make it possible Shoghi Effendi wrote that as the challenge of interracial amity in the inevitable course of events grows in acuteness and complexity and as the number of the faithful in both races multiplies it will become increasingly evident that the future growth and the prestige of the cause of God itself are bound to be influenced to a very considerable degree by the manner in which the adherents of the Baha'i faith carry out first among themselves and then among their fellow countrymen those high standards of interracial amity so widely proclaimed and so fearlessly exemplified to the American people by our master Abdul Baha and then he goes on and he raises the rhetorical question he says how can hearts that throb with the love of God fall fail to respond to all the implications that this supreme injunction of Baha'u'llah the unreserved acceptance of which is the hallmark of a true Baha'i character that's what Shoghi Effendi said about this issue and its importance to the growth and prestige of the cause and to the fulfillment of our mission to unite the world the supreme injunction of Baha'u'llah the hallmark of a true Baha'i character and then he gave us a plan that sounds very much in focus like the five-year plan of the Universal House of Justice the aim of which is to habituate habits of thought habits of the heart and habits of behavior which expand our capacity and discipline our understandings to do the very difficult work of building a system of life that is divine in inspiration and founded on the reality of bonds and ties that are stronger than blood Shoghi Effendi tells us how to achieve this he says in their homes in their hours of relaxation and leisure in their daily contact of business transactions in the association of their children whether in their study classes their playgrounds their club rooms in short under all possible circumstances now what he was he was juxtaposing two things he was saying that we can have conferences and banquets to celebrate interracial fellowship he said but that's not enough it has got to be thoroughly integrated in every aspect of our lives and that's where he says in our homes and our businesses in our hours of leisure in our playground integrate every single thing look we learned this lesson in civil rights we understood at the end of civil rights that you can desegregate the lunch counter and you can desegregate the playground and the school but if you don't desegregate the kitchen table you will not achieve racial equality we learned that lesson Shoghi Effendi was detailing exactly how far we should go and what he was aiming to convince us of was that we should penetrate every corner of our lives and animate that with this principle and he said that if we relax our purpose if we falter in our faith if we neglect the varied opportunities given to us from time to time by an all wise all gracious master we are not simply failing in what he described as our most vital and conspicuous obligation but are there far thereby insensitive insensibly retarding the flow of those quickening energies which alone can ignore the vigorous and speedy development of God's struggling faith so he's establishing a spiritual a relationship of spiritual dynamic between our pursuit of what he calls the supreme injunction of Baha'u'llah the hallmark of a true Baha'i character and our translation of that into a new system of thought a new system of relationships and a new system of interaction integrated into every aspect of our lives and he says that the degree to which we do this will not only assure the growth and prestige of the cause of God itself but will will trigger the release of spiritual energies that alone can ensure the triumph of our cause and so I wanted to give you some examples I wanted to tell you about what Dave Rue at once a member of the American Baha'i community at once the secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States and a member later of the Universal House of Justice it was 1948 and Dave was a young doctor medical doctor in Atlanta Georgia now this is far before civil rights and there were no guarantees of anything and Dave was having integrated firesides in his home when a ruckus began outside in his front yard and he went outside and he stood on the porch by himself and he saw men in Ku Klux Klan uniforms robes including the sitting governor of Georgia himself and they demanded that the black people be expelled from his house and never return and Dave Rue medical doctor 1948 on his porch said these are my guests and they are safe in my home and you are not welcome and he began to call names Herman Talmich and so on and so forth and he said you're not welcome in my home be gone and these men these men who came with sticks and rifles were turned away by a man whose faith and whose bond and tie to the black guests in his home attending his fireside was stronger than blood and stronger than his fear of his own life that's what we're talking about we're talking about that level of conviction we're talking about that kind of courage in their hours of relaxation and leisure let me tell you about 1953 when Dave and Margaret Rue had gone from Atlanta to Houston Texas and Dave was pioneering the practice of teaching surgical techniques with with film of which he was the pioneer and of course with his university appointment and his medical appointment he received a membership to the most prestigious and all white country club in Houston so when Margaret and Dave made their first visit to the club they brought a Nigerian doctor with them and as they approached the pool all of the club members got out of the pool and Dave said to his to his guests more room for us and they all got in all three of Dave Margaret and their guests not concerned about the talk not concerned about the repercussions but concerned about prosecuting this covenant of Baha'u'llah and applying its lessons to the decisions he made about how he would lead his life and what values would guide it let me tell you about study classes and playgrounds because you know this is exactly the battleground on which the Universal House of Justice is inviting us to knit souls together in children's classes in the neighborhoods among junior youth at a point where they're deciding what they believe is true about life and let me tell you just one of the differences it makes and in this case I'm going to use an example that I saw myself when I was on the board of visitors of a foundation which had made grants to schools and other organizations to do different things so I went to this school in Marin County in California and if you can believe it it was the name of the school was the Bahia Vista School you can't make this stuff up honestly and the school was distinguished because 90% about 95% actually of the children who attended the school were the daughters and sons of migrant laborers and they spoke 27 different languages so you can imagine five-year-olds six-year-olds seven-year-olds and you're trying to teach them and they speak 27 different languages and so the school had applied to become an English as a second language school for all the teachers and what this looked like was if you went to kindergarten or first grade the kids were kind of acting out and pantomimeing because nobody spoke a common language you could have 27 kids in a class and and no two kids spoke the same language but by the third and fourth and fifth grades you saw that the kids were mastering English and they were mastering other languages as well well what happened was testing helped us understand that by the sixth grade the average child of the Bahia Vista School was fluent in three languages at least three languages and they were at the top of the California reading assessment test writing assessment test and mathematics tests and these were the sons and daughters of migrant laborers who spoke 27 different languages in kindergarten but were fluent in three languages by the sixth grade and what was very interesting was that the second language acquired by almost all of the children wasn't necessarily English it was always the language of their best friend so Vietnamese child second language might be Spanish because his best friend was Pedro and they played soccer together and he learned Spanish but by the time that Vietnamese child was in the sixth grade she spoke Vietnamese Spanish and English at least the same kinds of transformation are available to us the opportunities in neighborhoods all across the United States and this is what the House of Justice is commending to our consideration let me tell you about neighborhoods and the green street gang there was a time when Rob Stockman and I worked on a project called models of unity and it was a time when hate crime was burgeoning in Chicago and every year i would be called to attend a meeting of the commissioner of human rights in Chicago to talk about the rise in hate crime and i said to him one day i said Clarence there's got to be another story somebody in Chicago is getting along and we ought to go find them and tell their story because they might have something to teach the rest of us about how to build unity and harmony in relationships and and Clarence who was a brilliant scholar and who was the author and publisher of the state of black America for the urban league for years and years was reluctant to do so because he feared that people would laugh at us because it didn't have a hard edge you see if it's conflict we can write about it but if it's harmony god forbid that we should treat that seriously i said well let's do it anyway and my reasoning was look we're black people talk about us already they say new things what what differences is it going to make so we did and what we found was that just as widespread as conflict was unity was even more broad but nobody ever talked about it we found black and white churches second baptist church in evanston illinois had been one church separated black and white 125 years ago three women a black baptist a white baptist and a behi lunch together every day at work and engineered the reunification of that baptist church i was there you should have seen it people walking in the streets and weeping having true fellowship in christ the way that it was intended we found a neighborhood which we came to call the green street gang where violence had overtaken the neighborhood gang violence had overtaken the neighborhood and people had been driven indoors hiding until one day the inevitable happened and a child was killed and in their grief the neighbors said we're not going to call 911 or the mayor's gang intervention task force because it's not going to do any good we're going to take our neighborhood back and the way they did it was they reconditioned the playgrounds and they repainted the lines and and repaired the carousel in the swings and they planted flower gardens in front of their row houses and they organized their work shifts so that parents could be there in the daytime whenever kids were present and within nine months crime went from a daily or weekly occurrence to zero the gang literally moved out of the neighborhood because there was no space for them anymore and as these parents who were black and working class white brown began to see the power of unity they turned their attention to the schools then they turned their the attention to the health care system then they turned their attention to community relations with the police and i can tell you hundreds of stories from all over the united states where those kinds of covenants centered around relationships where we're bringing the gifts of our service and the gifts of our open-heartedness and the disciplines of a mind that refuses to accept separation and insists on unity and cooperation and the development of understanding and love are transforming communities right under our noses i want to tell you about 1963 right in the peak of the civil rights movement where there was a great surge in our sense of urgency and rise in our consciousness about the need to act on the issues of civil rights and where we beheyes were pivotal and i remember my mother telling the story of the hand of the cause william sears coming back and standing at the podium in the hampshire street center hampshire avenue center in los angeles and looking at the friends with a terrible look on his face and pointing and saying where were you and nobody knowing what he was talking about and he said when the first man fell in selma alabama where were you and why wasn't it a behind it's leadership friends it's moral leadership it is encouragement to a sense of of urgency and at the same time there was a group a small group of white civil rights workers in mississippi who were shot and killed because they were residing in the home of black people and feroz kazemzadeh our own dear feroz wrote a letter asking for permission to go to mississippi and stay in the home of a black behind to be arrested and to face the music as he wrote in the letter assuring the nsa that the yale defense fund would bail him out but also saying that it would have to be a person of stature in order to arouse national curiosity and for the case to work itself through the successive courts but willing to put his life at risk for the principle of the unity of the races so friends i wanted to suggest i have one other example that i'm compelled to mention uh because it's important i think that one of the very poorly understood phenomena in the transformation of american society and in the area of race is the work that corporations are doing and i want to give you an example i'm going to give you an example of one of my clients um who wanted to be the best in the industry overall wanted to be on the fortune 100 list of best companies to work for and it wanted to be number one in customer satisfaction i am pleased to say that we achieved that about 18 years ago and we've maintained it all that time uh through today but i'm also going to tell you that at the time that i began to work with them they had five black managers out of 30 000 people today 29 percent of their leadership and they're what they call their high potential leadership people who are going to move on and and assume greater responsibility in the in the company 29 percent are women and people of color and the and the company took the extraordinary step and this this was amazing i i never thought they would go for this but i suggested to them that churches were in the same business black churches were in the same business what they want are solid citizens who are gainfully employed who learn and who develop skills to sustain and provide for their families and so they sent white managers to black churches on sunday morning to meet pastors and parishioners can you imagine that you was different eyes were opened and relationships were formed and pretty soon job fairs were happening in 39 churches throughout upstate new york and pennsylvania and massachusetts in their parking lots and hundreds and thousands of black folks got jobs as a direct result and got into training and and so on so i wanted to give you these examples i could tell you the story the long story of of pasadena when was it proposition 187 the california state proposition that called into question um legal immigration status in california it was 187 when that happened latinos in pasadena felt like they could not walk the streets and it was dorthy nelson who through the western justice center established a models of unity process in pasadena that included a television show a regular newspaper column and meetings in neighborhoods that didn't have meetings to bring everybody together to begin to talk about how we were engaging one another as a as a community and change the entire culture of leadership a process that was so successful that the mayor herself resigned her position did not run again so that she could take a lead role in this process it was that dynamic and that successful these processes are happening all over the world and the reason that i wanted to test your patience by telling you all of this is that you know we all say god works in mysterious ways and that we don't realize that when he does this work under mysterious circumstances often is right under our noses and so we look at a world and we think it's perceived by violence and what we may miss is that there is a transformational process of peace and harmony invading every aspect of life we look at a world that is bereft with conflict where conflict is ubiquitous and what we may miss is that our patterns of thought are changing and that new laws and new treaties and new national or uh understandings are beginning to bind us together in ways that will not allow separation any longer and then we ask ourselves what can we do against the mighty world and i wanted to give you these examples to say that we can provide transformational influences in every aspect of life that is exactly what the five-year plan is about that is exactly what the national spiritual assembly was writing about in its february 25th letter when it talks about america and the five-year plan and centers in on the the the decadent state of morality in the united states the inequality and conflict among the races and our need to do something about that we're talking about giving rise to a a system of life based on divine inspiration and founded on these bonds and ties that are stronger than blood and i just wanted to pull some of these ideas together so that they might spark some reflection and conversation among the friends and last you know we can't talk about these things without giving shogi effendi the last word one of the greatest gifts of my spiritual life is the privilege i have to read and reread the letters of shogi effendi i get goosebumps when i read it my heart swells with pride that he was our guardian and it feels as each day passes that his messages become more and more relevant to our lives but bearing in mind all that we've discussed today and bearing in mind everything that's going on in the united states and around the world and bearing in mind that we are only a small collection perhaps less visible than we want to be listen to what the guardian says about the impact we can have on the world he's talking about a period of unprecedented chaos and conflict and he asks us he says would it seem extravagant in the light of so sublime and utterance referring to the destiny of america to expect that in the midst of so enviable a region of the earth and out of the agony and wreckage of an unprecedented crisis there should burst forth a spiritual renaissance which as it propagates itself through the instrumentality of the american believers will rehabilitate the fortunes of a decadent age and friends with that thought i would just invite invite us all to a rise and struggle godspeed to everyone