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LITTLE RED BOOKS
On 28 November 2008 in George Town Tasmania, on the commemoration of the anniversary of the Ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Baha eighty seven years before, I watched an SBS TV program entitled: The Book That Shook the World.1 When that book was first published in the months before and after I became an international pioneer to Australia from the Canadian Baha’i community, in 1971, it had remained unread on the periphery of my life as had Mao’s Little Red Book published five years before, the year I graduated from university in Canada.
Although I was a teacher in primary and secondary schools at the time and although the book’s subject matter was targeted to schoolchildren, my life was simply too busy moving half way round the world, adjusting on an emotional come-back trail from six months spent in four psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric sections of general hospitals, teaching curricula in Ontario and South Australian schools, trying to make a demanding marriage work and helping to form the first local spiritual assembly in Whyalla. For a different set of reasons Mao Zedong’s book of quotations also remained unread.-Ron Price, 28/11/’08, 10:00-11:00 p.m.
I had carried a little book with me
from the early sixties, too, but it
was a blue covered publication;
later in life it was a hard-covered
green edition that I still have with
me in the evening of my life here
in the Antipodes. It’s contents, too,
were revolutionary and connected
with what well may be the greatest
religious drama in history, a drama
that was slowly unfolding in an age,
travailing and tempestuous....whose
womb was incubating saviours in a
hurry and liberationists for whom the
very concept of authority had become
anathema, for whom freedom became
the ability to say a four letter word.....
The revolution, little did they know it,
then or now, was spiritual and was out
of man’s control. It was advancing so
quietly in the hearts of millions who
had dropped out of a world they had
found meaningless and in the context
of search for global unification and a
civilization of peace and security and
it was all happening in my lifetime....
Ron Price
29 November 2008
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