RECOVERY

[RonPrice]

In February-March 1937, the months immediately preceding the beginning of the first teaching Plan, there were 170 sit-down strikes in the United States and three GM plants were shut down. The workers simply seized the factories and ransomed them back to their owners. There were signs on the horizon of great changes in America as 'Abdu'l-Baha's teaching Plan was finally launched after a hiatus of nearly twenty years. As these were years of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal aimed at aiding and hastening the recovery of the USA from the depths of depression, so was it the time when the Baha'i Seven Year Plan, aimed at a spiritual recovery within the context of a world-redeeming order, was initiated. -Ron Price with thanks to James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution--How to Survive and Prosper in It, MacMillan, NY, 1997, p.147.

 

Was it the exploitation of the capitalists

by the workers

or some new form of solidarity

in embryo,

some new spirit

about to unleash itself

on the American world and beyond?

 

Was it the onset

of the spiritual conquest of the planet

under that Divine Commander?

Was it the beginning

of that heavenly illumination1

streaming around the world?

 

Was it the evolution

of Baha'i Administration

as the nucleus and pattern

of a future world order

sufficient to embark on

the first international

missionary campaign?2

 

1 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, p.121,

2 Loni Bramson-Lerche, "Development of Baha'i Administratrion," Studies in Babi & Baha'i History, Vol.1, Kalimat Press, 1982, p.295.

Ron Price

4 August 2002