On the Glockenspiel and the Temple: If there is a God, I think I want to become a Baha'i

This blogger has kindly given me permission to re-post but has asked that I not give his screen-name or link to his site. - gw

I just had the most interesting experience. So for those of you who don't know, the North American Baha'i temple (like the only one that exists in North America out of the 8 in the world) is about a 10 minute bike-ride north from where I live right now.

So I had gotten home from the beach with Monica and I wanted to take a bike ride. A month or so ago, when I was still really torn up over Maggie, I did this where I just chose a cardinal direction (that time Northwest) and biked. That day turned out to be cool - I found a cute little music shop and bought a glockenspiel and playing it gave me an odd sense of calmness. So today I chose to go North and just see what happened. I tried to go North on Maple but it ended really quick. Then I tried to go North on Sherman but it hit a T intersection too...so I was funnelled over to Sheridan. I just rode Sheridan up and up and suddenly I was in Wilmette and even more suddenly this HUGE temple thing was right in front of me. I knew the Baha'i temple was nearby but I never had gone to see it. I parked my bike, walked over to the garden and I swear it was like suddenly I was standing outside the Taj Mahal or something...it was ridiculously beautiful and Grand.

So I walk around it a bit and I see a little entrance down into the basement so I go down and check it out...and there's a woman in there talking to another woman and she's about to show her a video. She turns to me and is like "hello do you want to see the video too?" And I say yes. So we go into this theatre and I sit down and watch an introductory video on the Baha'i.

Uploaded on June 18, 2006by wallyg
I was amazed. I didn't know anything at all about the Baha'i religion...I figured it was just some totally cracked out Indian thing or something. But no...it turns out that Baha'i basically just takes all of the other prophets that have come, stirs them in a pot and out comes love, family, community, togetherness and faith. The Baha'i belief is that throughout time, the one true God that we all have sends his prophet who takes on different forms given the era they are sent in: Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mohammad are all actually the same being that God sends down from time to time to preach love and acceptance. Furthermore, there are two additional people, The Bab and Baha'u'llah. The Bab basically was a dude who was like "someone really freakin' awesome is gonna come and make everything amazing." And then Baha'u'llah was that guy who came and said what I just said in this paragraph and tried to make everything amazing.

And...I dunno it totally just sounds so right and awesome to me. And so here I was having set off to just bike North, and suddenly I was in this theatre/museum thing reading and learning all about the Baha'i religion and loving it. So I was wondering around reading all the things about the Baha'i faith and it sounded great so I asked the woman who showed me the video if there were any meetings I could go to if I wanted and she introduced me to this girl who looked like...just a totally normal girl about my age etc. Turns out she just graduated from Wesleyan and is here working as an assistant at the temple and is Baha'i. Furthermore, and this is when this day started to take on creepy levels of interestingness, she lives at xx17 Garnett (my address? xx16 Garnett), and she was leaving to bike back home. So I biked home with her and we talked a bit about the religion, how she got into it (her parents were Baha'i, and her dad's college roomate was Baha'i). And she said they have a gospel music director who's awesome, and that she'd let me know when they are doing any sort of group activities or when services were going on.

http://news.bahai.org/photo/1157
I actually will probably try to go, I think. I think that, if I do in fact believe in God, that I would be Baha'i, it really just felt like...SO right to me and made so much sense. My only issue is deciding whether or not I believe that there is that one God who really did send those prophets..because I'm torn between thinking that now or thinking that God is really still just a human construct that we created so we all had some common ground we could use to interact with each other, foster communities and friendships. (God = facebook.)

But if I do decide for certain at any point that God is in fact real, I will almost certainly become Baha'i. What an amazingly different day today was.