Why Bahá'í

Why Bahá'í
June 19, 2008 - 4:44pm

Mary Jo Adams
Reno, Nevada
Bahá'í since 2007

I was raised Catholic, and for much of my youth dreamed of becoming a nun. But eventually I found I didn’t agree with much of the doctrine and felt unmoved by the services.

So as an adult, I became a spiritual seeker. I explored Buddhism and other Eastern traditions, and took "A Course in Miracles." I also studied energy healing and self actualization.

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Greg and Mary Jo Adams About four years ago, I went to see a physician friend with my daughter. I was moved by my friend’s attitude toward my daughter’s devastating eye condition, which left her blind in one eye.

My friend helped us see a deeper meaning in what seemed to us a horrific situation, and that good things like compassion and maturity could result. I felt a sense of peace and acceptance that had eluded me for some time, and I was grateful for that.

At the visit, I gave my friend my business card. I was selling fresh eggs from my pet hens and thought she might be interested. The card said “fresh eggs from happy hens” and had a nine-pointed star that I had chosen from hundreds of icons on a clip-art website.

“A nine-pointed star is the symbol of the Bahá'í Faith, my religion,” my friend explained. “Where did you get that symbol?” my friend asked. She gave me a small Bahá'í prayer book, as we both thought it was interesting I had chosen that star.

My heart exploded with the love in those prayers. I did some research on the Bahá'í Faith, which attracted me further to the religion. The social principles were extremely attractive, the writings of Bahá'u'lláh were godly and the writings of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá were so sweet and beautiful.

A member of the local Bahá'í community came to my home to share more information and food for thought about the Faith. I soon joined a study circle with my physician friend, and she became a regular and happy egg customer!

I continued to further my Bahá'í education by reading Bahai literature. I started with Gleanings, and then progressed to Some Answered Questions, The Challenge of Bahá'u'lláh and The Hidden Words. I also attended Bahá'í devotional meetings, and, after two years of participating in the Faith, I became a Bahá'í in March 2007.

My husband became a Bahá'í a few months after I did, and my extended family has been very interested and supportive. My niece has participated in Bahá'í children’s classes, and I have two friends who are finishing their second Bahá'í study circle.

I am humbly and deeply grateful to Bahá'u'lláh for calling me to His Cause, and to my Bahá'í friends for the nurturance and patience they’ve so generously given. And to Jesus Christ, who answered the prayer of the child who asked Him, “Please let me know You if You return while I’m alive on earth!”

BERLIN (Reuters) - More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week. From Thursday, sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete New Testament, will be available on the Internet, said the University of Leipzig, one of the four curators of the ancient text worldwide.

High resolution images of the Gospel of Mark, several Old Testament books, and notes on the work made over centuries will appear on www.codex-sinaiticus.net as a first step towards publishing the entire manuscript online by next July.

Ulrich Johannes Schneider, director of Leipzig University Library, which holds part of the manuscript, said the publication of the Codex online would allow anyone to study a work of "fundamental" importance to Christians.

"A manuscript is going onto the net which is like nothing else online to date," Schneider said. "It's also an enrichment of the virtual world -- and a bit of a change from YouTube."

Selected translations will be available in English and German for those not conversant in ancient Greek, he added.

Dating from around 350, the document is believed by experts to be the oldest known copy of the Bible, along with the Codex Vaticanus, another ancient version of the Bible, Schneider said.

The vellum manuscript came to Europe piece by piece from Saint Catherine's Monastery by Mount Sinai after German biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf found a number of folios there in 1844. He was allowed to take some to Leipzig.

Tischendorf returned to the monastery in 1859 with Russian backing and acquired the biggest section of the Bible for his imperial sponsors. It remained in St. Petersburg until the Soviet Union sold it to the British Museum in 1933.

"The first section was clearly a gift to Tischendorf, but that's not so clear in the case of the second portion. The monks all signed a contract at the time, but the rumor persists that they were given a raw deal," said Schneider.

"And there is probably some truth to this."

Subsequent discoveries meant that the original Codex, missing roughly half the Old Testament, is now housed at four locations in Europe and the Middle East.

The project, launched in cooperation with the Russian National Library, the British Library and Saint Catherine's Monastery, also details the condition of the Bible, believed to have been written by early Christians in Egypt.

"I think it's just fantastic that thanks to technology we can now make the oldest cultural artifacts -- ones that were once so precious you couldn't show them to anyone -- accessible to everyone, in really high quality," said Schneider.

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