WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

John SteinbeckÂs Leader of the People was published in 1936 as the American BahaÂi community was planning its first formal teaching plan to be launched in April 1937. It is a sentimental and symbolic story that expresses a longing for America's past when courage and adventure led a westward expansion that conquered the unknown. A central question in the book: "Now where do we go?" gave expression to an anxiety in American culture perhaps since the closure of the frontier in 1890 by the Census Bureau. This anxiety was echoed, for example, when an old homesteader in the story feared that the process of westward expansion in the USA was over now that the Pacific had been reached and there was "no place left to go." Moving, discovery and westering had been for the pioneers their ultimate purpose, but what would be their purpose now? Men had known something was there in the mountains to their west. there was something very wonderful because it wasn't known, something secret and mysterious. The pioneers travelling west could feel within themselves this wonderful sense of mystery.-Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites discussing SteinbeckÂs Leader of the People, ValentineÂs Day, 14 February 2010.

The pioneering story had really

just begun as a new census was

recording an expansion in that

Century of Light as He had called(1)

those first decades of a movement

that would, in time, take the world

by storm but sensibly and insensibly

by stages and so very unobtrusively.

It was, indeed, a holy, a sublime

enterprise.....an historic mission

with unimaginable blessings and

far-reaching consequences which(2)

would usher in the World Order of

Bahá'u'lláh in the fullness of time...

There would be thousands of

places to go for, perhaps, tens

of decades, even centuries to

come for generations of spiritual

heroes and descendants of the

Dawnbreakers of old with heavy

and formidable obstacles pressing

on them step by step until that full

realization of the greatest drams and

the most wondrous vision in the long

spiritual history of the planet earth....

(1) a term ÂAbduÂl-Bahá used to refer to the 20th century.

(2) expressions used in Messages to America(Wilmette, pp.8-10) by Shoghi Effendi for the implementation of ÂAbduÂl-BaháÂs Divine Plan in 1937

Ron Price

14 February 2010