Today’s the Bahá’í New Year—Naw Ruz. It’s a happy time. It’s a time for folks to suspend work and school activities and instead come together in fellowship, preferably over food after all that fasting, and savor the flavors of whatever the new year will bring.
Taking the day off from work and school is not always easily done. Our national Bahá’í administrative body provides American Bahá’ís with a pre-written letter that children can use to explain the situation to their teachers and administrators. Sometimes it feels a little flaky, I guess, to have these random days we’re just supposed to take off—for service, or joy, or family time. It’s not as though most people know the Bahá’í calendar, so we could just be making it all up from scratch.
But we’re not. Actually, Bahá’ís really are supposed to take these days off if at all possible. Far too many people in my life are not doing this, and it breaks my heart. No one wants to schedule Bahá’í gatherings during the day on holy days because people are at work or school. We anticipate them being at work or school, and we thus seal the deal, because we don’t schedule anything special to happen during those work hours when some people might (might?) be making an effort to suspend work and school.
Thus our situation over the last several years, especially in our current community, where we keep the children out of school, and with significant effort we suspend work, and then we have no activity to engage in with the community around us. We invent our own. And everyone we talk to is going to work or school.
Last night, at a holy day event, we met up with a couple we knew many years ago when they lived in Massachusetts and we lived in southern Maine. Like us, they have kids now. We didn’t get to talk much. They’ve just moved to the area after several years in Central America. The mother had to go to one of her two jobs today. I got their phone number. This morning River called the father to invite him and his sons to join us today, thinking they may not have plans but might like the outreach. Turns out, the father was going to take the boys to school, and he was going to try to buy a new car, and take care of other things (he’s job-hunting). He was on his way out the door.
They made tentative plans to get together after school instead. Sort of a bummer. That’s when I started to write this post. It occurred to me that partly, we don’t take our holy days off because we just don’t get invited to do things. When it comes to having kids in the house on a random weekday when the rest of the world is at school, and you’ve got a stressed parent trying to take care of tasks, it is kind of depressing. If only we had opportunities to get together. It’s especially hard if you’re new in an area.
Then the father called back. He’d sat down and talked with his boys. They decided that it would be much better to enjoy their holy day. They decided not to send the boys to school. Instead they are coming to our house for a visit, stay for lunch—that very joy and fellowship stuff I was lamenting the loss of. Happy day.