Planet Bahá'í

O my servants! Ye are the trees of My garden; ye must give forth goodly and wondrous fruits, that ye yourselves and others may profit therefrom. Thus it is incumbent on every one to engage in crafts and professions, for therein lies the secret of wealth, O men of understanding! For results depend upon means, and the grace of God shall be all-sufficient unto you. Trees that yield no fruit have been and will ever be for the fire.

(Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, Persian 80)

Be useful as well as ornamental.

(Charles Kettler)

One of my most cherished possessions is a letter my grandmother wrote to my father during the Depression, when Dad had just finished a stint in a CCC camp in Montana and was looking for work. In the letter Grandma said, "You know Mom said things are tough everywhere." But while my dad was trying hard to find a job, my grandmother had that very morning put up several gallons of sauerkraut, helped pick several bushels of fruit, and done whatever else she needed to keep a farm household running. (My grandmother also ran a small restaurant, quilted, embroidered, and sang in the church choir, just for starters.)

I look at this letter and marvel. Sometimes I think Grandma could do more in a day than I can probably get done in a month. I grew up in the Sixties, when being a kid was easy. Chores? Nah. And for me ("the smart one"), going to school wasn't much of a challenge since I already knew a lot of what I was supposed to be learning from all the reading I loved to do on my own.

My mother, for some reason I still don't entirely understand, apparently thought I was destined to marry Prince Charles. I never had to wash dishes, clean bathrooms, sweep floors, tidy my room, or do any of those other things that some of my friends had to do. But by the same token, I never got to help with dinner and only learned to sew (even though I was fascinated by dressmaking and design and such) because my mother's mother took pity on me and taught me. To Mom, it seemed to be enough that I was a straight-A student, loved music and art, and was polite as all get-out. Being ornamental was my usefulness as far as she was concerned!

Sometime early in my marriage it finally hit me that I had no idea what I was doing. I had gotten to the point where I could boil water without burning it, but a lot of little things about running a household--like, how are you supposed to get the carrots out of the baby's clothes, and what's the best way to get rid of that column of marching ants, and just why am I doing this stuff in the first place--were complete mysteries. My dad's saying--about being useful as well as ornamental--really started to hit home. It slowly sank in that I--me, the smart one--was going to spend the rest of my life cooking and cleaning, whether I wanted to or not! Gee, why hadn't I been smart enough not to get myself in this situation?!

Give them the advantage of every useful kind of knowledge. Let them share in every new and rare and wondrous craft and art. Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship. Teach them to dedicate their lives to matters of great import, and inspire them to undertake studies that will benefit mankind.

('Abdu'l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, p. 129)

My friend Amy says that the purpose of mothers is to make themselves obsolete. That sounds funny, but it's true. The measure of our maternal ability (and paternal ability as well) lies in how well our children can get along without us. After all, we're not going to be here on earth forever. My mom had to leave prematurely. And while I eventually learned how to do all the things I needed to do, and cultivated in myself the willingness to do them, it would have been much simpler had I gotten some basic lessons in "every useful kind of knowledge", and been allowed to "work and strive".

Which brings us to the point of this article. Sometime back in the now-defunct Bahá'í Faith forum at About.com, there was a lengthy conversation about this passage from 'Abdu'l-Bahá, especially the sentence, "Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship." Some people had trouble with the concept of hardship, focusing on issues that, to me anyway, seem to be quite far from what 'Abdu'l-Bahá had in mind--abuse and the like. We've lost sight of what hardship is and are frequently vague on what hard work might be, even though my parents' generation understood both. How, then, can we teach our children these vital lessons?

As always, learning begins in the home. The easiest way to begin, I think, is to look at our children and ask ourselves if they are working with us. These days our culture seems to expect us to have a sort of techno-Dr. Spock racket going--the kids spend the day surfing the Internet, never mind homework or chores or an after-school job. Maybe Mom and Dad notice, maybe they don't. But we're not doing ourselves any favors by falling victim to this kind of life.

Are our kids working with us? And I don't mean just "working"--as in "here's a list of stuff to get done today after school"--but working with us, all of us together. Let's get the laundry folded (Mom and Dad fold, too), the dishes washed, dinner made, a room painted, a yard raked, the peaches picked, the roses pruned, the floors swept, the beds made. "Every useful kind of knowledge" includes all these activities and more. After all, unless we can afford servants, we're all going to spend a good amount of time cooking and cleaning. I've found that work is a lot easier for kids to swallow if Mom and Dad are busy, too. And it's amazing the kind of conversations you can have over dishwashing and green bean snapping--or any other kind of work that engages the hands and lets the mind wander. Want to talk to your kids? Work with them!

While you're at it, let your kids do something that really interests them. Maybe that net surfer would be interested in learning programming. Got a musician in the family? How about an artist? A photographer? A baker? It's easy to strive when you're doing something you really like. Don't forget to reward all that striving--go to the Christmas concert and applaud like mad, frame the painting, help set up the basement darkroom, eat the lopsided cookies. And encourage it! It's all too easy for kids to quit when we can't share their enthusiasm for something. Maybe your passion isn't for Greek folk dances, but you can always tap your feet!

"It can't beat us!" Pa said. "Can't it, Pa?" Laura asked stupidly. "No," said Pa. "It's got to quit sometime and we don't. It can't lick us. We won't give up." Then Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.

(Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter)

Then there's the hardship clause. Back in that About.com thread, I was taken completely by surprise by the number of people who interpreted "hardship" much more harshly than I do. What is hardship? Well, my parents were teenagers during the Depression, and my mom's family lost their house. Dale's dad lost his job when Dale was thirteen and things were pretty dicey for a time. My mom died when I was eleven. My daughter Andrea's friend's father, a building contractor, had a very lean winter once and kept his family in food by hunting (thank the Lord for deer!). We had a terrible, terrible year in 1986, and subsisted largely on beans and brown rice. What's good about hardship?

What's good about hardship is you learn you will overcome it. You know you will live through it if it happens again. You know how to survive it. You learn not to rely on the material world but to place your trust in God.

Each of us will get our share of difficulties as we journey through this earthly life. When times are tough, we owe it to our children to let them know what's happening, and to let them be part of the solution. It's easier to keep everybody going if everybody is focused. Hardship grants a kind of maturity that can't be gained any other way--just ask the kids from World War II Europe who kept their families together after both their parents were dead. And sticking together while Dad looks for a new job, difficult and scary as it is, doesn't even remotely compare with caring for younger brothers and sisters in the midst of a war zone.

We shouldn't go out of our way to make things difficult for our families, but we can easily avoid the kind of excess that makes a small setback seem like a catastrophe. Let's not spoil ourselves. The ad agencies insist we can't possibly be complete without (your favorite consumer product here), but it's patently untrue. Let's live simply. Do we really need an extra TV? A third TV? A fourth? Do we need a TV at all? How about a stereo? Cable? A computer? Second car? Designer clothes? Camcorder? Carpeting? The latest kitchen gadget? Pre-packed lunches? The decade-long spending spree of the Eighties is still reverberating somewhere in the cultural subconscious. But should we want these things?

O son of being! Busy not thyself with this world, for with fire We test the gold, and with gold We test Our servants.

(Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, Arabic 55)

So why should we work, if not to make money and get nice things for ourselves? Hey, the answer is right at the top of the page: "Ye are the trees of My garden; ye must give forth goodly and wondrous fruits, that ye yourselves and others may profit therefrom." We're not working for ourselves. We're working for others, and, ultimately, for God. That's why work is worship. It's easy once you get focused on the method.