[Please note: some headings were added to the transcript to
further encourage readership]
Friends, it's such a pleasure to be here with you this
evening, and especially at such an auspicious time.
You know from the two wonderful letters that the Universal
House of Justice sent out on the 26th of March that this is the occasion of the
centenary of the Tablets of the Divine Plan. In those letters, there's a
testimony to the tremendous sacrifices and efforts that Bahá’ís have made―both
the heroes of the Faith, but also the rank and file―over a century to try to
translate whatever ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said in the Tablets of the Divine Plan into
reality and action. Of course, those letters also capture the unique role that
your community [the Bahá’í community of the United States] and its spiritual
forebears have played in this process both directly and in the way that it
contributed to raising up [Bahá’í] communities in so many parts of the world.
This centenary is an occasion, I think, to pause and reflect
a little bit about who we are and what we're doing, so I wanted to share some
thoughts along those lines with you.
Condition of the world around us
As we look around the world and review the news, on almost a
daily basis we see a cacophony of problems that hit us in the face every
day―these problems and habits of humanity that reflect a breakdown of the world
around us, of the fabric of the society. I don't know about you, but I have to
confess to my own shortcoming here: Whenever I get up in the morning and start looking
at the news, my blood starts to boil! I can’t imagine how people can do this,
how this guy can say this, and so on. Then I have to pause and calm myself down
and remind myself, “Well, Paul, the old world order is winning all of its
goals!” It's disintegrating at quite a rapid pace, so I should take heart and
not be so upset.
When we look around us, we see, for example, the effects of
corruption ― especially political corruption; of moral laxity and an ingrained
prejudice. We see all of these things especially in the United States. These
are the things you [find] in the conversations that are really at the heart of
this disintegrative process. These were the evil tendencies that Shoghi Effendi
identified in The Advent of Divine Justice. He might as well have been reading
the headlines today. Now everywhere we look we see these [evils] in various
manifestations, these elements [that] are eating away at the fabric of our
society. This behavior is a reflection of the way human beings think. “The
reality of man is his thought,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said. The world we see around us
reflects the thought and actions of the peoples of the world. You think this
way, and then you behave this way, and this is the world you get. If you don't
like this world, if there's a problem with it, then you have to learn how to
think in a different way and act in a different way.
