Utuado teaching trip February 2-9 1983

“Un momento fugaz, en este Día, sobrepasa a siglos de una edad pasada. Ni el sol ni la luna han presenciado día como este Día.”     (Bahá’u’lláh, Pasajes Inmortales)

A member of the Regional Spiritual Assembly of Puerto Rico shared with me that when Hand of the Cause of God Raḥmatu'lláh Muhájir once visited Puerto Rico, he emphasized the importance of teaching the Faith. On a map of the island, Dr. Muhajir pointed to Utuado and said that was the place to begin the teaching campaign.  Apparently, no one acted. When I heard that story, I decided even no one else is interested, I should go alone and try something in Utuado, at least a few days of intensive prayer.

2 February: Plaza de Utuado

    The slow beginning.  Walking and watching with a body full of aches, but it feels good here.  

    Time to come to grips with a plan. What would Dr. Muhajir do? Solo?  Pass out pamphlets? Greet everyone? Go to groups of people wherever they gather? Love everyone with pure motives? The Message needs to be proclaimed: a team would be better, but, alas!

Reflections from the Writings:  

“¡OH HIJO DEL HOMBRE!

Medita y reflexiona: ¿Es tu deseo morir en tu lecho o derramar tu sangre en el polvo como mártir en mi sendero y así llegar a ser la manifestación de mi mandamiento, el revelador de mi luz en el más alto paraíso? Juzga como es debido, ¡oh siervo!”

                    (Bahá’u’lláh, Palabras Ocultas)

“¡OH HIJO DEL HOMBRE!

El verdadero amante ansía la tribulación como el rebelde anhela el perdón y el pecador, la misericordia.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Palabras Ocultas)

“¡OH HIJO DEL SER!

Tu corazón es mi morada, santifícalo para mi descenso. Tu espíritu es el lugar de mi revelación, purifícalo para mi manifestación.”  (Bahá’u’lláh, Palabras Ocultas)

“¡OH AMIGOS!

No abandonéis la belleza sempiterna a cambio de una belleza que ha de morir, ni depositéis vuestro afecto en este mundo mortal de polvo.”  (Bahá’u’lláh, Palabras Ocultas)

3 February 1983: Hotel Vivi, Utuado 11 a.m.

    I spent last night in Arecibo and returned today. Now to restart.  Momentums are fascinating processes…once stopped, they cease. Inertia sets in (like rigor mortis?) immediately and everything must be pushed again.  If we Baha’i’s ever understand the importance of maintaining momentums, world unity could be established quickly… but we are very distracted by the world of dust, swayed by it and often snared under it.

Tough Guy, Tough Day

    It was one of those days the you decided not to be pushed around. You signed the register “El Griego” and let the owner carry your bags to the room. You checked the shower for hot water, but there wasn’t any, and the bathroom was shared by guests from three rooms.

“Is this it?”  You demanded. “This is all that $71.41 gets you?” (that was the day rate with tax)

The owner was cleaning the room next to yours at the time.  You noticed a high-powered rifle on the bed, gleaming in the morning sun-beam streaming from the window.

“We don’t want any trouble here,” he informed you. “You are welcomed here, but no outside calls to Las Vegas, because this is a clean place for quiet folk.  Even Italians have stayed here before. They were no problem, no problem at all.”

“Hey,” you retorted, “Back off.  All I want to know is where a guy can buy a good cup of coffee?”

“In town,” he said, “a couple of miles down the road.”

“You don’t have limousine service?”

He replied, “I told you this isn’t Las Vegas, didn’t I?”

The above is a true distortion of what really never happened… there was no time to record facts.  And I did walk a mile for a good cup of Yaucono café con crema.

The afternoon drifted into mental diversions, like the illusion of hunger, which I fed.

4 February: Barrio Conchita.  Fear paralyses.

    After visiting a Bahá’í friend, Antonio, I went up a steep road to see a man I had me a year before.  The road was difficult to climb, and as I approached his house, I could see him watching me from behind some platanos, and as I came closer, he disappeared. Even when I called his name from his front yard he wouldn’t answer. Boy, was I tired from the climb, and what a reception!  What to do? I walked most of the way to Utuado. I met a young guy painting in his front room, so I talked with him. Edwin Maldonado. He gave me a beautiful painting, and I gave him some of Bahá’u’lláh’s Words and an invitation to the meeting tomorrow.  The climb was worth the pain!

6 February Hotel Vivi, Utuado

    From my window I see the barriada on the hillside where today we climbed the stairs to the top white house and the thin woman; two children at her side, their eyes probe the present moments, storing it subconsciously for the future.  A slender, pale woman named Daisy. What a name for a soul snug in a hillside of Puerto Rico’s campo.  A daisy waiting for the light and the water needed to bloom.  It is a tender task. Not much sun nor water can be poured for it would be a storm to contain all at once.  Just a brief shower of both is what we leave, a few of His penetrative Words for her to absorb. A flower responds to gentle things like this, and Daisy begins go blossom.

Later… A mysterious phone call from a woman who leaves no name. The hotel owner informs her mistakenly that I am in the shower and to call again in half an hour. Waiting for the woman to call back, my mind resorts to fantasy, wondering who the mystery caller might be and what the call might be about: an emergency at home? A call from a Bahá’í who wants to join the teaching team? Hardly anyone knows that I am in Utuado. What secret message awaits me?  I pray in the interim, then smoke a cigarette (yes, I used to smoke tobacco. Not proud of it, but it’s history) as anxiety settles in. Three hours later and no second call. The day’s plan, so certain four hours earlier, is upset by the wait and any plan to venture out is put on hold. As my mind jumps from possibility to possibility… from traumatic emergency to an invite to dinner to someone trying to locate me...the result is nervous flitters. In the end no second call comes in and I feel let down and ponder if maybe the caller will show up in person to deliver the missed messade.  

    I listen to cars passing…listening to hear one slow down and stop.  None do. I listen for a tap at the door, or at my window.

    There are roosters and the buzz of a refrigerator, nothing more. Maybe Edgar Allen Poe suffered from such intrigue.

    I need to use the restroom, but doesn’t it always happen that that is when the phone rings?  I wait a little longer.

7 February.  Lares

Lares is small.  People do not die everyday here, but they do eventually die in their turn, their special time.

    Today Lares observed two funerals; one for a man from above the town, and another from a man who lived below Lares.  Their time came on the same day, one from above, one from below. The limousine for the first waited in front of the church as the people left the service walking behind the casket.  Two daughters wept; one was faint. A grandson cried in the plaza. He was close to his grandfather.

    The second funeral appeared to have less emotion, but more people in attendance.
    Maybe the two men from Lares helped one another enter the next world. I don’t know their names. Perhaps some day I’ll meet them when my turn comes to leave this mud heap realm.

8 February Utuado         Crossing the River

    Not a clean stream; a dead rooster, dirty diapers and rusted car parts polluted it.  Yet, it looked clear as tiny fish scurried about quite alive.

    It had narrow places, but my shoes still got wet when I jumped across. Even with crutches, I couldn’t leap it in one try, which I discovered half way across.

    Once across a pile of bamboo a small dead fruit tree blocked the path. Stuck between returning to the river and heading forward through the pile of dead wood, I finally decided to take on the dead wood.

    Beyond the mound of broken limbs and trunks came a field of thick weeds, then wet sand that sunk down into puddles. Finally, I reached the paved road and walked back to town. I’m not sure what I learned from that disappointed excursion into the unseen.   

   

9 February   Hotel Vivi

    "Be unrestrained as the wind," is Bahá'u'lláh's counsel to every would-be teacher of His Cause, "while carrying the Message of Him Who hath caused the dawn of Divine Guidance to break. Consider how the wind, faithful to that which God hath ordained, bloweth upon all regions of the earth, be they inhabited or desolate. Neither the sight of desolation, nor the evidences of prosperity, can either pain or please it. It bloweth in every direction, as bidden by its Creator."  Bahá’u’lláh quoted in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 50

    Prosperity and desolation come and go; are often encountered within moments of each other like a close embrace.  

    One walks and walks and enters both worlds.  Both have their tests; prosperity often leads to complacency and lethargy, while desolation can result in a state of hopelessness and utter despair.  In the extremes both conditions are remote from the Friend, yet along the way in search of Him we pass both prosperity and desolation, as if they must be necessary stages to purify us before we reach His Presence.

Evening

    This evening I met some jewels, a family nestled on the mountainside.  We ate and conversed together. It was a Feast of the soul. Didn’t Bahá’u’lláh promise that the pure specks of one jewel, even if buried beneath mountains or seas, would be discovered in this Day?  I thought about that divine verse as I enjoyed the hospitality and love of this family of Felix Dias in Utuado; “pure and clean of mire.”

"By the righteousness of the one true God! If one speck of a jewel be lost and buried beneath a mountain of stones, and lie hidden beyond the seven seas, the Hand of Omnipotence would assuredly reveal it in this Day, pure and cleansed from dross.”

Bahá’u’lláh quoted in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 80

El Fin