There is more to Ruhi than just “doing the books”. And there is more to the core activities than study circles, devotional meetings, children’s classes, and junior youth groups. There is a wholeness, a special dimension of growth and development, that comes when we see them as more than “things to do”, “things on their own”.
For some time now the Universal House of Justice has been encouraging the integration of these activities, explaining how they support each other, that people being involved with one can and should lead to their participating in others, how they lead to growth. We here have not yet fully been able to do this – what progress the Faith will make when we do!
But very often we struggle, we are in the position of “we know what we have to do – but how do we do it?” For that reason the Bahá'í Council is happy to recommend the website www.ruhiresources.org to all the Friends. It brings together material and suggestions and all sorts of practical ideas, things we can try and see if they work for us, others we can move on to and try if we prefer them. And it is not just about study circles, though it does give a lot of practical help and encouragement here (e.g. how you might go about your acts of service). It gives similar help for all the core activities: indeed a lot of the material can be useful in developing and enhancing our wider community life.
One case in point is the arts. How do we accomplish their “graceful integration” into our activities? How can we do more than “leave it to those who are good at that sort of thing” and avoid an embarrassing enforced “universal participation” (“We must all sing!”) that is likely to put people off? There are a number of resources on the web that can help with this —as a few minutes with Google will show—but www.ruhiresources.org is a good place to start if you are not sure what you might do, looking for something more, and anxious not to reinvent the wheel.
The Bahá'í Council has access to templates that you can use to produce your own leaflets to invite people to your various activities. These are in MS Word which means they can be opened and edited in most word processors, letting you amend them as you like and put in your own contact details and local information. They are A4 sheets that trifold. Items available are: CA-1 and CA-2—about the various core activities SC-2—about study circles CC-2—about children’s classes DM-2—about devotional meetings TZ-2—about Tranquillity Zones. (The National Spiritual Assembly has indicated that these are a specialised form of devotional meetings with a lot to offer in certain circumstances.)
To obtain electronic copies please e-mail the Bahá'í Council for Northern Ireland.org.uk specifying which items you want.
If you are wondering, SC-1, DM-1, and CC-1 are also available, they require Microsoft Publisher to open and edit them. If you have Publisher and want them, please say.
For more about Tranquillity Zones go towww.tranquillity-zone.org.uk
And while thinking about leaflets and how we can produce our own literature, how often have we asked “Where can I get a good picture of the Shrine of the Báb, or a temple, or a Bahá'í youth project, or just a nice photo of Bahá'ís doing things?”. The answer is the Bahá'í Media website at http://media.bahai.org which is a large archive of pictures related to the Bahá'í Faith. (Hint: If you download the picture on your screen you will get a small to medium size file, suitable for electronic media or printing as a smaller picture. If you want a large file so that you have a high-resolution picture for a large or professional print you will have to Subscribe then use the Download File option to get the zipped file of the large version.)
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