In recent years, various members and ex-members of the Universal House of Justice have blessed the Bahá’í World with the fruit of their own personal experience and learning from serving in the inner core of the ring of fire in the form of books for us to ponder. One of these is Hooper Dunbar’s Forces of Our Time – The Dynamics of Light and Darkness, published by George Ronald in 2009. Bahá’ís have a view of this topic diametrically opposed to the view of the rest of humanity, and is the reason why in these days of unprecedented anxiety even worse than in the days of the Cold War when The Bomb hung over all our heads whether waking or sleeping that Bahá’ís remain cheerfully and unremittingly optimistic about the future. Are the Bahá’ís out of touch with reality or do they see what virtually all the scientists, economists, politicians, military leaders, NGOs, journalists, mavens and gurus, the Information Highway, and Hollywood to Bollywood have somehow missed? Is it yet another desperate utopian dream among the myriads that have been foisted upon an increasingly skeptical world that scornfully heaps each failed ideology into the same dustbin marked “forget these embarrassingly deluded fools”? Mr. Dunbar says: “We cannot help but perceive and be touched by the pain, sorrow, anxiety, and fear all about us but must strive to see the tumult of the world through God’s vision instead of our own. This will give us courage and power.” (pg. 51)
Certainly the part of the world that is aware of this still apparently insignificant and impotent yet ubiquitous and insistent community is watching – watching to see if the Bahá’ís are truly serious and can not only embody but foment these ideals the whole world wants yet is utterly incapable of realizing. Some may secretly be cheering them on, others ready to chortle with evil glee the moment they find a stray unraveling thread in its seamless royal robe; in the meantime, numbers in every clime, after considering the options, are signing on the dotted line and affirming their wish to become part of the solution Shoghi Effendi has enunciated:
Let there be no mistake. The principle of the Oneness of Mankind -- the pivot round which all the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh revolve -- is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. Its appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and nations. Its implications are deeper, its claims greater than any which the Prophets of old were allowed to advance. Its message is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family. It does not constitute merely the enunciation of an ideal, but stands inseparably associated with an institution adequate to embody its truth, demonstrate its validity, and perpetuate its influence. It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced. It constitutes a challenge, at once bold and universal, to outworn shibboleths of national creeds -- creeds that have had their day and which must, in the ordinary course of events as shaped and controlled by Providence, give way to a new gospel, fundamentally different from, and infinitely superior to, what the world has already conceived. It calls for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized world -- a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units. (The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, pg. 42-43)
Dunbar’s book was not written as such, nor is it a compendium of speeches, but is an arrangement of themes taken from recorded Monday night classes he gave on Mount Carmel in the 1980s. The style is appealing as it retains much of the conversational style in which he delivered them. For example:
Through divine revelation the forces of the higher world penetrate the realities of this world. There is a kind of pulsation, a moving from the spiritual plane to the physical and back again. Bahá’ulláh would receive a spiritual power from the higher invisible realm, which was His animating principle. It would stir His whole being. He would communicate that spiritual power in the form of divine verses, which He would recite or chant. Those verses would this become physical; through His chanting they would becoming sound that would reverberate out into space, influencing every atom of existence. They would also be noted down in a written form on a tangible, material page. They reach us in printed form a hundred or more years later. We read them and are able through their influence to connect with the impulses of the original spiritual Revelation of Bahá’ulláh. These energies compel us to act in conformity with the verses we read. Yet to outward seeming they are no more than black scratching on a sheet of paper. Spirit has become matter and yet somehow retains and conveys its original spiritual impact. This is indeed a mysterious process. (pg. 15)
One of Dunbar’s most obvious gifts in this book is his ability to delineate processes, satisfying those who want to know not only principles, but how things actually work. And this is done systematically throughout the book and is no doubt the work of the compilers, chiefly Holly Hanson, a student of the Mount Carmel Monday night sessions. Ergo the titles of the various sections:
1. The Nature of Spiritual Forces
2. The Outpouring of Creative Forces
3. The Crystallization of Divine Forces
4. The Progressive Release of Divine Forces
5. Universal Fermentation and the Impact of Creative Forces on Human Society
6. Understanding Forces of Darkness
7. Combatting the Forces of Darkness
8. Custodians of the Forces of Light
Yes, these talks were given from Mr. Dunbar’s most profound understanding, but in true Bahá’í style they are based on his study of the Bahá’í Writings and peppered with quotations; furthermore, the final forty-seven pages of the book consist of the passages from Shoghi Effendi which inspired his own thoughts (compiled by him before the efflorescence of the data bases which now let us find them – prophetically -- in a flash), and which are given to us, with the humility characteristic of the members of the most august Institution of the Faith, to meditate upon them ourselves in order to draw our own unique insights therefrom. How’s that for an “interactive” book?
One may be especially intrigued by the titles of Chapters 6 and 7. Lest one be tempted to immediately associate these themes with the endless cartoonish movies of the battle of good versus evil humanity gorges itself upon, the truth as expounded in these chapters is radically different than these escapist fantasies that our race can’t seem to graduate from, but if we remain in that quagmire, we cannot advance. Chapter Eight is for fully mature adults that wish to face the future armed with a real power of which superheroes are deprived.
These books are an essential companion to studying the documents and messages of the current Plans of the Faith; the latter give us the lines of action and unfold the dramatic surging of the Faith in the united worldwide community, while each of the former expand the scope and depth of our vision of the Faith we thought we already knew and loved so well.
