How I Became a Baha’i by Jo Dohoney

Submitted May 2024

                I was a graduate student at Michigan State University when I met a neighbor who said she was a Baha’i.  Soon there was another Baha’i family in my building, but I didn’t know that at the time. I befriended the first one, Lynne Scully, as we had kids who sometimes played together.  I was poor but she was poorer, as my daughter, who looked out for the other kids, had told me.  So I left bags of groceries at her door.  That was how we first met. 

                As time passed, she would try to teach me the faith, but I always waved her off.  There were lots of people pushing their different beliefs at the time so I tended to ignore them all.  I had left the Lutheran Church at age 18, because I had figured out that all world faiths were saying the same basic things.  I had checked out a few but joined none.  I didn’t think there was one that believed what I believed: that all people were the same regardless of race, that all the inequalities were unjust and immoral, and everyone was praying to the same God.

                Lynne persevered carefully but I resisted hearing about her faith.  One day, she got frustrated with me and said, “You ought to look at all the people you respect and admire the most because they are Baha’is.”  I said I didn’t know any other Baha’is.  She said, “Think again!”  I asked who she was talking about. It turned out that my boss as a research assistant, Joe Darden, was a Baha’i; and two favorite professors, June and Richard Thomas were Baha’is.  Lynne said I was surrounded. 

                So, I went to an Ayyam-i-Ha party and had a good time.  I saw a friend I had made on the buses, Hazel James, and assumed she was a guest like me.  Over some years, I went to a few other such parties and always was made welcome.  But I never asked about the tenets of the faith.  The Thomases began inviting me to their firesides once a month and I did go.  I enjoyed the fact that race was never an issue at Baha’i gatherings and there was always laughter and affection in the room.  And my friend Hazel was often there as well.  It was a long time before I realized she was also a Baha’i.  I hovered around the edges of the Baha’i community for years, and people stopped asking me if I wanted to join.  I found out from Hazel years later that people said I was a Baha’i and didn’t know it. 

                June Thomas, at one fireside had asked me what the sticking point was for me and I couldn’t tell her.  You see, as a child I was a victim of incest and used to pray so hard for my father to change, but he never did.  It eventually affected whether I even believed if there was a God.

                Have you ever heard the saying: there is never anything so bad that some good won’t come from it?  Well, one night, I was the victim of a rape attempt.  But unlike other times, I was able to deter the attack and have the guy arrested, convicted, jailed and eventually deported.  And as a result, I attended private and group counseling sessions at the MSU Counseling Center for free.   Soon I was shifted to incest counseling and it changed my life.  But it took a very long time before I could complete the process by confronting my abuser(s). 

                In the middle of the process of counseling, I was able to open my heart up to God again and imagined that if I did declare for the Faith, it would only be at the Thomas’s house, with Hazel, and especially Lynne, in attendance.  Lynne had since graduated and taken a job in Detroit so that was a tall order. 

                One night I went to the Thomas’s fireside, and everyone was there.  Their son-in-law read the closing prayer, a piece from the Last Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l Baha, that exhorts us to be many wonderful things and ends with the words, “be a Baha’i.” That struck me like lightening; I wanted to be all those things so I quietly asked June for a card.  She didn’t know what I was talking about at first, then she understood and asked if she could scream now.  I said, “no, give the card to Lynne and tell her someone needs it.”  She did and soon the whole room erupted while I signed the card.  I received a book and everyone wrote good things to me in it.  It was August 16, 1991, a mere eleven years after I first heard about the Faith.

                I have since never looked back.  I did face potentially faith-shaking struggles and challenges, but my dear Baha’i sister Hazel always had the very best advice for me.  And the community and its LSA always stood by me, something that became more important to me later on.

                I was thinking of getting married but understood that asking both my parents for permission would be anti-therapeutic.  My father had abused me and my mother knew without admitting she knew.  Her marriage was more important than protecting me.  I asked my LSA for advice. A small subcommittee met with me and listened to my story.  Then, they reported discretely their findings to the whole LSA and got their backing to ask for a dispensation from getting both parents’ assent to my marriage.  We discussed whether they should write the request or if I should.  I wrote the case myself and submitted it to the LSA, who, having approved it, sent it to the NSA, who then sent it to the UHJ,

                We waited; the entire LSA, of which I was a member, was on tenterhooks with me. Time went on with no reply.  Members comforted me and told me the Universal House of Justice would send me the most perfect response and to be patient.  Our LSA Chairperson discretely inquired of the NSA but they hadn’t heard anything either.  Then, an issue of the American Baha’i was published with an important teaching from the UHJ about what it means to be a Baha’i parent and what they should do to stop abuse of their children or otherwise lose their parental rights.  It was as if I wrote it!  Everyone called me and said, “See!  You should be hearing from them soon.”  But I didn’t. nor did the LSA.

                Time went on and I ended my engagement for other reasons, but I still wanted the Institution’s support.  That summer I quit smoking and it turns out smoking was how I had sucked down my anger all these years.  I had previously never dared express my anger to my parents and had not even imagined confronting them.  Well I was angry now and I had an epiphany of sorts.  I wrote letters to each parent confronting them with what they had done.  I gleefully danced to the mailbox and sent them.  I felt a great weight off my shoulders and told a friend on the LSA.  The next night we were meeting and when I came into the room everyone was smiling at me.  The Chairperson of the LSA announced that the positive reply from the UHJ had been mysteriously misplaced by National all that time and only rediscovered yesterday and transmitted to my LSA today!  What a blessing!  We all jumped and hollered, unseemly perhaps but appropriate, as they had all gone though this with me.  Then my friend asked me, in a leading way, if I had any idea why this had happened now.  So I told them what I had done to complete my healing process from childhood abuse yesterday by confronting my parents.  That, it would seem, was what I had to do before being given the official dispensation from asking my parents for permission to marry.  I have never felt so supported and surrounded by love in my life as I did that day.

                I am still a Baha’i and I still face tests from time to time but I have what I need to face them.