At The End of An Epoch
Those rooms swam in soft light, awash with holy and mysterious intimations. Looking back at those rooms it would appear that I was becoming, in the eyes of my family and friends, a deranged angel, a stable and sensible young man, slowly going off his rocker. And he did and he was. -Ron Price with thanks to Roger White, “Evangel”, Occasions of Grace: More Poems and Portrayals, George Ronald,1992, p.58.
By seventeen you’d felt His warm Word;
a shining knowledge slowly came in the
evenings as you read His books in bed,
incremental rises of brightness as the
paragraphs grew thickly read and read.
Something was acquired, then, in that
prosaic kitchen with the obtuse linoleum,
where your little family gathered in its homely
knot, dense with astigmatic virtue, blunted with
life, undefined, inarticulate, just stepped out on stage.
No transformation here, but something mysterious
happening in your head, taking you deeper and deeper,
insinuating itself into your heart, unobtrusively replacing
baseball and hockey, if not girls. And you woke up in that
new house in early autumn of 1962 pioneering as quietly as
the feathers of a bird floating on the air at the end of an epoch1
with its two wars, its depression and its eve of self-destruction.
1 the first epoch(1921-1963) of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan. The Guardian said in 1956 that the world was ‘hovering on the brink of self-destruction.’(Messages to the Baha’i World: 1950-1957, USA,1958, p.120.)
Ron Price
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