Welcoming ‘a new spring’
Members of worldwide faith embrace hope for holiday that last year preceded pandemic
On March 20, 2020, just after the spring equinox, Sienna Mae Heath scrounged up what spices, sprouts, vinegar and other symbolic items she had at home in south Bethlehem, put them on a table, and turned to a random page in the book of a Persian oracle for advice.
It was the Persian New Year, known as Naw-Ruz, or New
Day, for members of the Baha’i faith — a worldwide religious community of about 7 million with a small group in the Lehigh
Valley. Since she couldn’t go to her mother’s house, she improvised her own “haft-sin” table, a
Persian tradition for Naw-Ruz.
The holiday is a day for spiritual renewal, spring awakening, new life. But in 2020, it happened to mark the precipice of a dark period in history.
By March 20, 2020, a week had passed since the coronavirus landed in the Lehigh Valley, schools shuttered and “social distancing” became part of the lexicon. Two days before March 20, Pennsylvania recorded its first COVID-related death. One day before, Gov. Tom Wolf ordered non-life-sustaining businesses to close and began implementing stay-at-home orders.
“What was meant to be a
happy time of renewal was a challenging time,” said Heath, a writer, who is half Persian.
But, Skyping with her mother that night, she found a moment of brightness. She was proud of her first solo table.
“There was sort of an uneasy feeling last year, but also, we were able to find a bright spot of humor,” she said.
As her upbringing has taught her to do, Heath coped by leaning into Baha’i traditions, reading and rereading Baha’i writings about eternal spring, racial unity and the oneness of mankind. Some of these themes emerged very publicly in the past year, as a summer of social justice protests shed glaring light on divisions.
This March 20 marks another New Year for the Baha’is. Locally, several dozen of them will celebrate with food and entertainment on Zoom instead of gathering in person like they normally would. And in the surrounding world, as vaccines roll out and case numbers slowly decelerate, the circumstances are far brighter this time.
“Baha’is do believe humanity is entering a new spring — that the oneness of mankind will become more and more manifest over time,” said Jim West, a Baha’i and Moravian College economics professor.
That belief has held steady, even when facing the darkness of last year. West looks at the pandemic as a kind of test that spurred people to consider what matters most in life, beyond material goods. This, despite the tremendous loss, is at least a sign of positive movement toward that vision, he said.
The Baha’i faith, established in 19th century Iran by a man named Baha’u’llah, believes in one God that is referenced by the world’s other major religions, and recognizes the messengers of those religions — Jesus, Abraham, Krishna, the Buddha — as revealers of God’s truth over time, to the various generations of new millennia. The community has faced persecution in the Middle East since its inception, and is widespread throughout hundreds of the world’s countries and ethnicities.
Central to its teachings are the unity of all facets of mankind, and the belief that social hierarchies are often the source of society’s ills.
So the call for racial reckoning that gripped the nation over the summer, in light of the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of police, was not lost on Baha’is around the world.
“We ardently pray that the American people will grasp the possibilities of this moment to create a consequential reform of the social order that will free it from the pernicious effects of racial prejudice and will hasten the attainment of a just, diverse and united society that can increasingly manifest the oneness of the human family,” the Universal House of Justice, the nine-member ruling body of the Baha’i faith, wrote in a letter to the American spiritual assembly in July.
The letter encourages Baha’is around the world to emanate love and acceptance, in order to build capacity for moving the world toward unity.
So the stark divisions apparent during racial justice protests were cause for concern, mixed with relief that at least the issues were being discussed, Heath said.
“Finally, the time has come where we’re really going to talk about this. My whole life, that was very much ingrained: unity and diversity,” she said. “Then there was some hesitance: I felt there was this rigidity around the collective, mainstream story of what it means to be inclusive.
And that really shook me.”
Heath, raised in Pen Argyl by a Persian mother and American father, participated in a Black Lives Matter protest in the borough with her mother over the summer. As they hurried to catch up to the marchers, she heard other protesters with “All Lives Matter” signs chant, “U.S.A.” and “God Bless America.” Her instinct was to agree with the pure sentiment of those chants. And as Black Lives Matter protesters chanted “This is what America looks like,” she felt agreement there, too, and smiled.
She started to write more for her online platform about these conflicts and open up about her thoughts which, like her heritage, were mixed. She was nervous at first. But lately she sees more conversation about these concepts: that diversity is often discussed in rigid terms, putting people into distinct camps.
“There tends to be a fixation on diversity to a point where unity isn’t even in the picture,” she said, invoking the Baha’i metaphor of people being flowers in a garden: different colors, but one big picture.
The Lehigh Valley Baha’i community kept holding devotionals virtually throughout the year. It’s difficult to determine exact figures, but Randy Padfield, chairperson of the local spiritual assembly in Bethlehem Township, believes there’s been increased interest in the Baha’i teachings in the last six months, judging by the number of people joining the Zoom activities.
How and why those newcomers find the faith is tougher to pin down. The local community remains small — about 70 families in the Lehigh Valley, including Reading and Quakertown, Padfield said — and it doesn’t recruit. There are no priests or clergy, but democratically elected spiritual assemblies.
“We like to tell people about the religion when they ask, but we don’t proselytize,” said West, who was Christian — and still believes in the tenets of Christianity — before discovering the Baha’i faith in college. “We’re not at the airports.”
The national conversation on racial injustice has featured in these Zoom conversations, members said. There’s trepidation about the way this conversation has manifested at times — demonizing anyone is not a way forward, West believes — but there’s an understanding of the justification for society’s rifts.
“We want to be color blind in our acceptance of other people, but we have to recognize, they have a position, a starting point, a history,” West said, describing a topic discussed in a recent devotional. “The Black community in America really suffered pretty outrageous, horrible things in living memory, even in contemporary memory. [We should be] loving to all people, but not do something to create more animosity.”
Every New Year celebrates the slow evolution toward progress and the oneness taught in Baha’i writings, West said.
This Naw-Ruz, also March 20, feels lighter, Heath said. She’ll do the same things — place seven symbolic items beginning with the letter “s” in Farsi on her table, video call with her mother — and this time, have a little more certainty about where the world is heading.