Mike Moum

by Mike Moum, submitted September, 2023

The title of this section, “How I Became a Baha’i,” is a bit misleading since becoming a Baha’i is a process rather than an event, beginning at birth, ending at death and continuing forward in a different environment, and marked by an exclamation point, which is conscious acceptance of Baha’u’llah as a Manifestation of God. For me there is a twofold process at work, the drawing towards Baha’u’llah on the one hand, and the rejection of the old on the other. I intend to address both because they are relevant to my story, at least as I understand it.

It began when I was born in North Dakota, which is a reality to a few and little more than a rumor to most.  My earliest years were characterized by a vague feeling that I had been plopped down in the wrong and unsatisfactory universe, until about the age of two or three (I can’t remember for sure), when the first significant event of the story occurred. The Universal House of Justice, in “The Promise of World Peace,” wrote about “…the human spirit, whose mysterious nature inclines it towards transcendence, a reaching towards an invisible realm, towards the ultimate reality, that unknowable essence of essences called God.” It was winter, we were visiting relatives in Bottineau, I believe, on one of those winter nights where the sky was perfectly clear and the temperature coldly bracing. One of the teens took me on a sled ride, and I had a transcendent experience, where the mundane vanished and the realization hit home that there was a beautiful and homelike reality hidden by the material world. My spirit awoke.

“Leaders of religion, in every age, have hindered their people from attaining the shores of eternal salvation… through want of knowledge and understanding, have been the cause of the deprivation of the people.”  (Baha’u’llah, The Kitáb-i-Íqán)

My next experiences, rather than attraction to the invisible realm, were worldly and severing. The first was attending Bible School in the Presbyterian Church. Winters in North Dakota back then were long and brutal. Spring was a season mostly known as a rumor rather than an actual event. We went from winter until usually around early to mid-May, followed by a direct transition to summer, warm and revitalizing. A week or two later school was out. The powers that be in the Church, realizing that we early elementary school children needed to be educated in the ways of the Church in order to be drawn to following the path of God, came up with the brilliant idea that the best way to do that was to confine us in Bible School for two weeks, starting immediately when school adjourned for the summer, from early morning to late afternoon, in a dreary basement room in the church building. We learned about Jesus feeding the multitudes on a couple of loaves of bread, walking on the water, Moses parting the Red Sea, and a host of other fairy tales whose spiritual meanings were missing, all the while our friends were out playing in the summer weather, as they should be. As you can imagine, we were not impressed, or at least I wasn’t. Being rather doubtful that such events were real, I embarked on my first experience of skepticism when I was walking home. I had a nickel in my pocket and decided that if God could feed thousands of people on two loaves of bread, it would not be all that difficult for Him to make my nickel ascend into the sky when I dropped it. As you can imagine, mundane physical law triumphed over transcendent power. Thus doubt bordering on contempt was born.

The next negative event happened around eighth or ninth grade. Having reached an age of some degree of maturity, it was time for confirmation class, which was held after supper for two weeks in an even drearier church room. The church pastor gave us lessons for two hours each night, of which I understood not a single word. I wasn’t sure whether my co-victims were understanding anything either, until on the last day the pastor and a couple of church council members approached me, and asked me to give a speech at the graduation ceremony because I understood what we were supposed to understand better than anyone else in the class. Suffice it to say I was dumbfounded; I couldn’t believe what they were saying. Anyway, my dad wrote a speech, which I dutifully delivered, and found myself an official member of an organization that I thought was completely ridiculous.

At around the same time, the most significant event in the process happened, although I did not recognize its importance until several years after I had declared in the Faith. I had gradually become very interested in science, mostly in astronomy and physics, and was devouring books by the popular authors of the time, notably Fred Hoyle in astronomy and George Gamow in physics. One day at the library I spotted a book called MUSIC OF THE SPHERES by Guy Murchie, a Baha’i who wrote the article on the Faith for the Encyclopedia Britannica, thought it looked interesting, and checked it out. That evening I opened it to read. I can hardly describe my feelings, because what I found were pages that shimmered with light and emanated a spirit that transcended the mundane. That spirit was absent in all the other books I’d read. I remember saying to myself, “This man knows something that no one else knows, and I’d give anything to know what that is.” Thus, unbeknownst to me, my Fate was launched. It never occurred to me to write that author to ask what he knew that no one else did, and the memory slowly faded.

A couple of years later, the final nail was driven in Christianity’s coffin for me when I bought a copy of Bertrand Russell’s book, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, much to the horror of my mother. That book delivered the fatal blow, and not knowing that there were other religions than Christianity, I decided that I was an atheist, and that that was the end of the matter. That marked the end of the “negative” events.

Although I did not believe, my spirit was still unsatisfied and restless. After graduation, I was off to college at the University of North Dakota. It was the late ‘60s and I was drawn to the burgeoning counter-culture movement with the expectation of finding community and meaning. Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, as the saying went. I will spare myself the embarrassment and you the gloominess of the sordid details. Suffice it to say that it was a mixed bag and leave it at that.

“At every step, aid from the invisible Realm will attend him and the fervour of his search will grow.” (Baha’u’llah, The Seven Valleys)

In my junior year, two friends and I decided to take an Easter vacation trip. One of them lived in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, which is on Lake Michigan tucked up against the Wisconsin-Illinois border. We had been down in Chicago one day, to the Museum of Science and Industry, I think. On the way back, Ken said he wanted to show us this new church, so we drove by the House of Worship. I wanted to go in, but the other two didn’t. I asked what the religion was about, but neither of them knew. I think the name “Baha’i” was mentioned, but don’t know for sure. On the way back we stopped at a large bookstore. I found myself drawn, almost pulled, to the religion section, which seemed odd for an atheist, but in retrospect I realized that there were other forces at work. I bought a book titled HONEST TO GOD, which was a study of the theology of Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I was immediately hooked, amazed that there could be Christians and a Jew who held a deep and intriguing theology so different from the foolishness I had been taught in the church. Although it did not banish my atheism, my spirit was definitely awakened. I became, as Leonard Bernstein remarked in his liner notes to Mahler’s ninth symphony, “…a religious man who could not believe.” Realizing that there was more to religion than superficial fantasy and still highly skeptical of Christianity, I turned my attention to the East, studying Buddhism, Hinduism, Tao, Zen, and a few other more obscure religions. I didn’t embrace any of them, but did try to incorporate some of their teachings into my life, somehow managing to adapt them to my current life-style, even though they were clearly contradictory. In retrospect, I can see that was part of the process.

A couple of years later I graduated from college, having no idea whatsoever what I wanted to do with my life, adrift and impractical. One of my friends from college had convinced the head of the alcohol division at the North Dakota State Hospital that they really needed a drug treatment program, and one was born. Several other friends were recruited for it and although I wasn’t one of them, I got a job there as a psychiatric aid. I found myself very attracted to two of the established alcohol counselors, Jim and Paul. The first couple of weeks there I found myself more alive and content than ever before. As you might have guessed, Jim and Paul were both Baha’is. Jim tried to teach me the Faith, much to his frustration, dismay, and dejection. He had probably never encountered such a resistant and stubborn soul before, and quite possibly never since. Intuitively I knew that it was the truth, and that if I were to embrace it I would have to renounce, in both word and deed, some behaviors that I had become quite attached to. Over the course of several months I found myself questioning everything I knew, in search of some fundamental truth that I could embrace free from doubt, but finding nothing. I grew increasingly depressed, possessed by a profound emotional, spiritual, and intellectual emptiness that would not go away and that I could not overcome. Internally, I was more dead than alive. Jim tried desperately to help, to no avail.

One Sunday one of the patients on the hospital ward that I was working on wanted to go to church. Hospital rules prevented him from going alone, so I said that I would accompany him. We got there. It was a Catholic communion service. I was again skeptical, but figured that I would be able to survive for an hour. The priest started in, and I was amazed to find the environment bathed in a warm, reddish glow that also permeated my entire being. Spontaneously I arose to take communion with everyone else, even though I wasn’t Catholic, which apparently was a bit of a no-no. God, however, didn’t seem to mind. I knew then and there that I had found what I was looking for, and also knew that it wasn’t Christianity, or Buddhism, or Hinduism, that it could only be Baha’i. Immediately after work I called Jim, went to his home, and signed my card. As an atheist declaring, my mind and soul were somewhat at odds, so life got really interesting after that, but that’s another story.