Baby Boomer Baha’is
recall joining the Faith in Summer of Love era
Posted : July 6, 2007 - 6:19pm http://www.bahai.us/node/234
For a number of Baby Boomers, the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love evokes more than hippies, Haight-Ashbury, Hare Krishnas and hairy kids: It recalls the period in which they joined the Baha'i Faith.
"We were looking for something to save the world, social reform, spirituality and Utopia," says Robert Stockman, a professor of history at DePaul University in Chicago.
Mr. Stockman became a Baha'i in 1973 at the tail end of the hippie generation. Many other Baha'is in his age cohort joined the Faith in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, causing a fourfold spike in membership.
One such Baby Boomer was Peggy Varner of Milledgeville, Ga., who grew up in the Bay Area close to the epicenter of the action. After falling in love with the ideals of the Faith and becoming a member in the summer of 1967, Ms. Varner participated at "love-ins'" by holding signs proclaiming "Baha'is for Peace."
"We were so obviously happy," she says, "that the police came to check us out, thinking we were high. We were spiritually high - no need for all the other stuff that people were doing those days."
Susan Lewis Wright of Highlands Ranch, Colo., took a more roundabout route. As a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 1968, she worked for two underground newspapers and led anti-Vietnam protest marches by singing and playing guitar.
But the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy made her question "whether politics was the answer to this country's problems, or the world's," she says. "We had honestly believed we could change the world."
And while "improvements were made in advancing equality for people of color, and the war in Vietnam eventually ended, the changes did not go deep or far enough." But the Baha'i Faith did, says Ms. Wright, who learned about it through a friend in 1969. After discovering that alcohol and illegal drugs are not allowed in the Faith, however, she took a pass and joined seven years later in 1976.
"Sometimes I tell those interested in the Faith about those years, about how easy it is to be against something and how difficult it is to build a new world from the ground up," Ms. Wright says. "I tell them that the Baha'i Revelation is the most revolutionary movement in the world, and that it alone provides the means for eliminating prejudice and establishing world peace."
Richard Stamats of Colorado Springs also came to the Baha'i Faith after the slayings of the Rev. King and Senator Kennedy.
"I felt empty inside; my purpose in life was unclear," says Mr. Stamats, who had heard the Rev. King speak in Washington, D.C., and at an anti-war rally in New York. His way became clear, he says, after hearing his college world-history teacher, a Baha'i, talk about the Faith.
"I was 20 and liked iconoclasts," Mr. Stamats says. So he attended "firesides" - informal gatherings to learn about the Faith - at his teacher's home.
"I would prepare questions of great depth, even knowing that I would soon be a ‘goner' -- that I would soon become a Baha'i -- because enlightenment was coming to me like nothing ever had."
Marv Peck of Atlanta also declared at age 20 because of a teacher - a high-school teacher, who "encouraged students to think for themselves, to question their beliefs," he says.
"My teacher was a Baha'i, but of course he couldn't tell his students that. It turned out many of his former students knew each other and the word spread rapidly. These students started going to firesides," Mr. Peck says, "and within 18 months approximately 50 of us had become Baha'is."
Charles Nightingale of Rowesville, S.C., first became aware of the Baha'i Faith in 1968 at an anti-war rally at MIT.
"An incredibly diverse table of Baha'is," he says, "was passing out copies of the first sentence of The Promised Day Is Come," written in 1941 by Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 until 1957:
"A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth."
"Since religion wasn't the answer for me at that time," Mr. Nightingale says, "I kept the paper and respected the Baha'is for not pressing it on me." He saw the sentence again two years later in a Boston underground paper and decided to investigate the Faith. He was 25 and a social worker doing Alternative Service rather than serve in the military.
"Finding the Faith made me so excited, yet I couldn't commit to it immediately because I felt I wasn't good enough," Mr. Nightingale says. "And becoming a Baha'i meant I would have to follow all the laws - no wine with dinner or overnight female companionship. But I did get through it."
David Rouleau of Evanston, Ill., spent much of the peace movement in Vietnam. When he got out in 1969 at age 21, "the world had changed," he says. "When I went in it was a crewcut world. When I came out, it was long hair and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.'
"Well-meaning people were protesting the war, but they didn't understand what was really going on. The bigger issue wasn't Vietnam," Mr. Rouleau says, "It was war. Period. The troops who were over there didn't want to be there either. We came home ashamed to wear our uniforms."
A perpetual seeker of the meaning of life, Mr. Rouleau read Maslow, Hesse and many others before coming upon Baha'u'llah .
"He not only talked about a new kind of world where everyone would get along," Mr. Rouleau says, "but He had a plan on how to get to that point."
After attending many firesides, Mr. Rouleau became a member of the Baha'i Faith. He says he's still enamored after 37 years, although the days of looking for "signs of the Faith" in songs by the Moody Blues, Donovan and Seals and Crofts (who were Baha'is and did mention their religion) are over.
Tim Moore of Wheeling, Ill., also was in the military (Marine Corps) during the peace movement, a sad irony that hit him hard after getting out in 1975. Frustrated with the government and corporations, he picketed and protested "all sorts of social wrongs" at events in his hometown of Rock Island, Ill.
Once a staunch Catholic, Mr. Moore began to question some of the church's teachings. After investigating the Faith and being drawn to its system of administration -- a unique form of democracy -- he asked local Baha'is if he could be a Baha'i and still be Catholic. Not really, they told him.
After digging deeper into the Faith, Mr. Moore says he knew becoming a Baha'i was the only way to go. His wife followed suit two months later.
Like Mr. Moore, Bob Siemiaszko of Scottville, Mich., was a Catholic outgrowing his faith. Known as Bobby Simms to the many fans of the Chicago psychedelic soul band Rotary Connection to which he belonged, he was turned off by religion and "thirsting for spiritual sustenance" at the same time.
"I began to recite Catholic prayers at a club on Rush Street where I was playing," Mr. Siemiaszko says. "The sound was piped out onto the street, and a Baha'i from Baltimore attending an IBM convention heard me. He came into the club and showed me three poems he had written about the Bab (Baha'u'llah's forerunner)."
"I started to shake," Siemiaszko says, "because everything the Baha'i said made such sense. One week later I became a Baha'i."
Sunny Scroggins of Oakhurst, Calif. had a similarly exhilarating experience when she joined the Baha'i Faith at age 23 in 1972. It happened after spending "glorious days barefootin' at Golden Gate Park" and praising "flowers instead of bullets in the barrels of guns, songs of peace, human unity, equality," but realizing "there was no plan, no follow-up strategy."
When she was handed a Baha'i prayer book, she found the plan her soul had sought: the plan of Baha'u'llah.
"Someone told me that whatever prayer came under my hand would be the prayer that was meant for me at that time," Ms. Scroggins says.
"And I read a prayer by Abdu'l-Baha ":
O Thou kind Lord! Thou hast created all humanity from the same stock. Thou hast decreed that all shall belong to the same household . . .
O God! Thou art kind to all, Thou hast provided for all, dost shelter all, conferrest life upon all . . .
O Thou kind Lord! Unite all. Let the religions agree and make the nations one, so that they may see each other as one family and the whole earth as one home. May they all live together in perfect harmony.
O God! Raise aloft the banner of the oneness of mankind.
O God! Establish the Most Great Peace.
"One prayer, and I had found the answer to my heart's lifelong search," Ms. Scroggins says. "I literally ran around, asking people if they knew what this said, what it meant. I was and still am so, so excited to be a Baha'i."
Copyright © 2007 The National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States. All Rights Reserved
recall joining the Faith in Summer of Love eraPosted : July 6, 2007 - 6:19pm http://www.bahai.us/node/234
For a number of Baby Boomers, the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love evokes more than hippies, Haight-Ashbury, Hare Krishnas and hairy kids: It recalls the period in which they joined the Baha'i Faith.
"We were looking for something to save the world, social reform, spirituality and Utopia," says Robert Stockman, a professor of history at DePaul University in Chicago.
Mr. Stockman became a Baha'i in 1973 at the tail end of the hippie generation. Many other Baha'is in his age cohort joined the Faith in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, causing a fourfold spike in membership.
One such Baby Boomer was Peggy Varner of Milledgeville, Ga., who grew up in the Bay Area close to the epicenter of the action. After falling in love with the ideals of the Faith and becoming a member in the summer of 1967, Ms. Varner participated at "love-ins'" by holding signs proclaiming "Baha'is for Peace."
"We were so obviously happy," she says, "that the police came to check us out, thinking we were high. We were spiritually high - no need for all the other stuff that people were doing those days."
Susan Lewis Wright of Highlands Ranch, Colo., took a more roundabout route. As a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 1968, she worked for two underground newspapers and led anti-Vietnam protest marches by singing and playing guitar.
But the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy made her question "whether politics was the answer to this country's problems, or the world's," she says. "We had honestly believed we could change the world."
And while "improvements were made in advancing equality for people of color, and the war in Vietnam eventually ended, the changes did not go deep or far enough." But the Baha'i Faith did, says Ms. Wright, who learned about it through a friend in 1969. After discovering that alcohol and illegal drugs are not allowed in the Faith, however, she took a pass and joined seven years later in 1976.
"Sometimes I tell those interested in the Faith about those years, about how easy it is to be against something and how difficult it is to build a new world from the ground up," Ms. Wright says. "I tell them that the Baha'i Revelation is the most revolutionary movement in the world, and that it alone provides the means for eliminating prejudice and establishing world peace."
Richard Stamats of Colorado Springs also came to the Baha'i Faith after the slayings of the Rev. King and Senator Kennedy.
"I felt empty inside; my purpose in life was unclear," says Mr. Stamats, who had heard the Rev. King speak in Washington, D.C., and at an anti-war rally in New York. His way became clear, he says, after hearing his college world-history teacher, a Baha'i, talk about the Faith.
"I was 20 and liked iconoclasts," Mr. Stamats says. So he attended "firesides" - informal gatherings to learn about the Faith - at his teacher's home.
"I would prepare questions of great depth, even knowing that I would soon be a ‘goner' -- that I would soon become a Baha'i -- because enlightenment was coming to me like nothing ever had."
Marv Peck of Atlanta also declared at age 20 because of a teacher - a high-school teacher, who "encouraged students to think for themselves, to question their beliefs," he says.
"My teacher was a Baha'i, but of course he couldn't tell his students that. It turned out many of his former students knew each other and the word spread rapidly. These students started going to firesides," Mr. Peck says, "and within 18 months approximately 50 of us had become Baha'is."
Charles Nightingale of Rowesville, S.C., first became aware of the Baha'i Faith in 1968 at an anti-war rally at MIT.
"An incredibly diverse table of Baha'is," he says, "was passing out copies of the first sentence of The Promised Day Is Come," written in 1941 by Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 until 1957:
"A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth."
"Since religion wasn't the answer for me at that time," Mr. Nightingale says, "I kept the paper and respected the Baha'is for not pressing it on me." He saw the sentence again two years later in a Boston underground paper and decided to investigate the Faith. He was 25 and a social worker doing Alternative Service rather than serve in the military.
"Finding the Faith made me so excited, yet I couldn't commit to it immediately because I felt I wasn't good enough," Mr. Nightingale says. "And becoming a Baha'i meant I would have to follow all the laws - no wine with dinner or overnight female companionship. But I did get through it."
David Rouleau of Evanston, Ill., spent much of the peace movement in Vietnam. When he got out in 1969 at age 21, "the world had changed," he says. "When I went in it was a crewcut world. When I came out, it was long hair and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.'
"Well-meaning people were protesting the war, but they didn't understand what was really going on. The bigger issue wasn't Vietnam," Mr. Rouleau says, "It was war. Period. The troops who were over there didn't want to be there either. We came home ashamed to wear our uniforms."
A perpetual seeker of the meaning of life, Mr. Rouleau read Maslow, Hesse and many others before coming upon Baha'u'llah .
"He not only talked about a new kind of world where everyone would get along," Mr. Rouleau says, "but He had a plan on how to get to that point."
After attending many firesides, Mr. Rouleau became a member of the Baha'i Faith. He says he's still enamored after 37 years, although the days of looking for "signs of the Faith" in songs by the Moody Blues, Donovan and Seals and Crofts (who were Baha'is and did mention their religion) are over.
Tim Moore of Wheeling, Ill., also was in the military (Marine Corps) during the peace movement, a sad irony that hit him hard after getting out in 1975. Frustrated with the government and corporations, he picketed and protested "all sorts of social wrongs" at events in his hometown of Rock Island, Ill.
Once a staunch Catholic, Mr. Moore began to question some of the church's teachings. After investigating the Faith and being drawn to its system of administration -- a unique form of democracy -- he asked local Baha'is if he could be a Baha'i and still be Catholic. Not really, they told him.
After digging deeper into the Faith, Mr. Moore says he knew becoming a Baha'i was the only way to go. His wife followed suit two months later.
Like Mr. Moore, Bob Siemiaszko of Scottville, Mich., was a Catholic outgrowing his faith. Known as Bobby Simms to the many fans of the Chicago psychedelic soul band Rotary Connection to which he belonged, he was turned off by religion and "thirsting for spiritual sustenance" at the same time.
"I began to recite Catholic prayers at a club on Rush Street where I was playing," Mr. Siemiaszko says. "The sound was piped out onto the street, and a Baha'i from Baltimore attending an IBM convention heard me. He came into the club and showed me three poems he had written about the Bab (Baha'u'llah's forerunner)."
"I started to shake," Siemiaszko says, "because everything the Baha'i said made such sense. One week later I became a Baha'i."
Sunny Scroggins of Oakhurst, Calif. had a similarly exhilarating experience when she joined the Baha'i Faith at age 23 in 1972. It happened after spending "glorious days barefootin' at Golden Gate Park" and praising "flowers instead of bullets in the barrels of guns, songs of peace, human unity, equality," but realizing "there was no plan, no follow-up strategy."
When she was handed a Baha'i prayer book, she found the plan her soul had sought: the plan of Baha'u'llah.
"Someone told me that whatever prayer came under my hand would be the prayer that was meant for me at that time," Ms. Scroggins says.
"And I read a prayer by Abdu'l-Baha ":
O Thou kind Lord! Thou hast created all humanity from the same stock. Thou hast decreed that all shall belong to the same household . . .
O God! Thou art kind to all, Thou hast provided for all, dost shelter all, conferrest life upon all . . .
O Thou kind Lord! Unite all. Let the religions agree and make the nations one, so that they may see each other as one family and the whole earth as one home. May they all live together in perfect harmony.
O God! Raise aloft the banner of the oneness of mankind.
O God! Establish the Most Great Peace.
"One prayer, and I had found the answer to my heart's lifelong search," Ms. Scroggins says. "I literally ran around, asking people if they knew what this said, what it meant. I was and still am so, so excited to be a Baha'i."
Copyright © 2007 The National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States. All Rights Reserved
