How We Became Baha’is by Diane Findlay
Submitted June 2022
Bob and I both grew up in active church families, his Lutheran and mine United Methodist. We went to church and Sunday School, went to church camp in the summers, were active in our youth groups. My dad directed the choir and I sang in it. But we both had questions, particularly about perceived hypocrisy (which I now understand better as the inevitable gap between espoused beliefs and perfect practice) and the exclusive tenet that only Christians were “saved.” Bob remembers the sense, growing up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that you had to be the “right kind of Christian,” expressed in competition and tension between the prevailing Lutheran and Catholic communities. When we met in college neither of us was participating in religious life and the more we met diverse people from different cultures and faith traditions, who were clearly just as “good people” as the Christians we knew, the more our questions deepened.
We married in the Lutheran church Bob grew up in. When our son was born, we both felt the weight of our responsibility as parents, not just for Nathan’s material wellbeing but for his spiritual education as well. We decided we wanted to find something we could embrace wholeheartedly, as a family. So we set about consciously religion shopping! We visited many churches, a synagogue or two. We read up on various faiths and went to meetings of religious groups that offered talks. When we moved to Cedar Rapids in 1975, we visited the Mother Mosque of the West. Nothing felt right.
It was then that I remembered something I’d heard about in a humanities seminar I was part of during my freshman and sophomore years at the University of North Dakota. It was a great mix of about a dozen students led by my favorite teacher of all time, Don Pearce, who was a librarian and a member of the British Buddhist Society. Occasionally, in our discussion, we’d hit upon a topic and he’d toss in his understanding of the teachings of the faith his daughter, Kristin, belonged to, the Baha’i Faith. I don’t remember details but I do remember that, when he did that, I always thought, “Well that makes sense!” I looked in the phone book and, sure enough, there was a listing. I called and we were referred to Claudia (then Ryan) Murphy who, with her husband Hank, hosted firesides on Wednesday evenings. We started going. Had we not been fresh out of college and coming from a rather intellectual perspective, we probably could have declared at our first fireside. It just immediately felt right. Instead we became Wednesday night regulars, bringing along our notebook of sometimes-belligerent questions—“OK, you answered that but what about THIS?” Claudia and other community members were so patient and welcoming. We became friends and attended community activities. I remember, a few months in, commenting in a discussion of Baha’i laws, “I get it but that doesn’t apply to me; I’m not a Baha’i.” To which a Baha’i we’d come to know replied, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”
I like to tell people that I declared after several months of investigating, on the first night of Ayyam-i-Ha, 1976, while Bob waited until after the Fast to declare. For his part, Bob was frank about his conviction that he needed a year of commitment under his belt before tackling the Fast. But the truth is that I was pregnant with our daughter so couldn’t fast that first year, anyway! But I think we both felt that, even after learning about the Faith together, it was important for each of us to declare separately, in the spirit of ultimately standing alone before God. Shortly after Bob’s enrollment I wrote to Kristin Pearce (now Majkrzak), through her dad, that she didn’t know she was teaching and we didn’t know we were seeking, but here we are! Over the years we got to know Kristin and she and her dad are good friends of ours to this day.