I was a callow 17-year-old when I first met the Bahá’ís. I’d been brought up and confirmed in the Church of England, but my faith had waned somewhat in my teens and I considered myself an atheist.
I left school in 1965 and went to live in Cambridge with my half-brother Peter. Peter was a Buddhist and was keen I should look into Buddhism. So he sent me to the university freshers’ fair – you didn’t have to be a student to go into the fair – to find the Buddhist Society stand. I wandered around the various religious and philosophical stalls, found the Buddhists, was accosted by the Christian Union, had a chat with a Humanist, and then came to a bare table adorned with the word ‘Bahá’í’.
‘What have you got that the humanists haven’t got?’ I asked the rather severe looking bloke who was standing at the Bahá’í table (I’d just come from the humanist table).
I have no idea what the he said, but he gave me a slip of paper with an invitation to a public meeting a few days hence.
Sheer curiosity got me to the public meeting. It wasn’t an exciting or inspiring meeting and I might have left the Bahá’í Faith in my museum of curiosities had I not been approached by one of the younger Bahá’ís and invited to go to a Bahá’í home. Straight away.
And that’s where my love affair with the Bahá’í Faith began, in the home of an Iranian Bahá’í family. I’d never knowingly met any Iranians, nor had I experienced the legendary Iranian hospitality. In that home I felt a warmth that I’d not associated with religion before, undemanding but palpable.
I started to attend weekly ‘fireside’ discussion meetings to learn more about the Bahá’í Faith and got to know more of the Bahá’ís in what was a vibrant and active community. And what a diversity of Bahá’ís I found: the older Scottish lady we all called ‘Lady Margaret’; the Southern African couple who came from a Jewish background – he was a photographer, she was a concert pianist; Derek, a Burnleyite who took the responsibility for teaching me about the Faith, and his beautiful Iranian girlfriend, who was the niece of the older Iranian lady the whole community called ‘Auntie’. It was in Auntie’s house that the fireside meetings took place.
I learned a great deal at those firesides about the history of the Bahá’í Faith and its teachings, about what made the community tick and what held it together. This was a whole new world for me. Religion as I had never experienced it before – informal, non-ritualistic, deeply spiritual.
It took me around five months to come to the conclusion that I wanted to be part of this faith. And it took Derek to push me. I say push, but neither he nor any of the other Bahá’ís ever put any pressure on me – and that’s a crucial element of the way the Bahá’í Faith is shared with others. Each of us has the right and the responsibility to explore truth and reality for ourselves, not depending on other people’s opinions, and to make up our own minds. But sometimes someone else can see more clearly what one’s mind is.
I became a Bahá’í in February 1966. I was 18 years old.
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