Why I Do This
Every story worth telling begins before the teller is even aware—the tale already in motion, the first words written generations before our birth. So it is with my life, and so it is with the question at the heart of this series. Why do I do this? Where does this urge—to seek, to bind, to remember—find its genesis?
To answer, we have to begin in an ancient place, hearing words that echo across centuries, preserved as the pulse of an entire people who once walked as slaves, then wandered as liberated souls, trembling on the cusp of promise.
Hear, O Israel...
The opening of Deuteronomy 6 reads like thunder beneath the desert sky. It is both a command and a reminder: you, who were brought out of bondage by a power greater than yourselves, do not forget. Do not slip again into the spiritual slavery that forgetfulness brings. Bind these teachings to your heart, your doorposts, your gates—let every moment be an act of remembrance for you and for your children after you.
The Shema, with its six carefully chosen words—Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad—resonates with a truth so simple, it risks being overlooked: The Lord is One. Yet this oneness is not mere arithmetic; it is unity in multiplicity, the promise that the scattered fragments of life—chaos, loss, exile—can be gathered and made whole, if only we remember.
Deuteronomy 6 stands as the pivot of Israel’s story. The text remembers a people shaped by slavery, led into a land of promise, yet warned: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land...houses filled with good things you did not fill, wells you did not dig—beware, lest you forget the Lord.” (Deut. 6:10-12) The threat is not just military defeat or deprivation, but spiritual amnesia—a forgetting of source, story, and self.
The antidote is remembrance, enacted in ritual: “You shall teach them diligently to your children...when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” (Deut. 6:7) Remembrance is not nostalgia; it is survival, generativity, fruitfulness.
That command—rooted in the Sabbath—became more than a ritual; it became the tie that binds. The Sabbath was not simply a day of rest, but a weekly re-enactment of becoming one—a people with their God, families with their ancestors, children with their future. It was, as Genesis describes Adam and Eve, to “know” in the deepest sense: “And Adam knew his wife, and she conceived...” Out of union came fruit—offspring, inheritance, story continuing.
In my own life, as I wrote in The People of the Sign, I glimpsed this pattern again and again. My parents, in many ways, were not destined for fruitfulness—two solitary souls, products of their own wounds and exiles. Yet out of their union, unlikely though it appeared, came children: my three sisters and myself. We were—perhaps improbably—the fruit of what might otherwise have been spiritual and existential barrenness. We were the living evidence that, even among fractured lives, remembrance and unity have the power to bear fruit.
Growing up, I found myself drawn to the sacred rhythm of ritual. The Sabbath was not only a family routine or a religious observance, but a weekly returning to that ancient story. In the Saturday hush, the ancient words swirled in my head. The story was never just about ancient Hebrews in a far-off land; it was an urgent instruction, a warning, a promise. Remember, so you will not be lost. Teach, so you will not be alone. Bind yourselves to one another, to God, to something broader than your own moment in history.
Yet, like all of us, I have known the deep ache of fragmentation—the chaos that seeps in when memory falters, when the lines between past and present, meaning and habit, begin to blur. My quest for God, for order out of chaos, for wholeness, purity, and love, was not a straight path but a wandering in the wilderness of doubt and longing.
It was during these wanderings—when my story felt most detached from meaning—that I first encountered the Baha’i vision, and the potent message of unity found within its teachings.The booklet One Common Faith became the oasis that drew me closer to the ever bubbling source of the Living Water of God’s Revelation. My wife and I, then not yet even engaged, studied it together with a circle of friends. For us, this was no mere academic exercise. It was, like the Shema for the Israelites, an act of remembrance and reorientation—a chance to recenter ourselves in a story that transcends boundaries. Only it had been made new again - for our day.
What I could not see then—but understand more fully now—is how all along I was being prepared, not only to remember but to invite others into remembrance. When I, a full decade later, stumbled across the letter from the Baha’i Universal House of Justice that preceded and announced the coming arrival of that booklet, addressed “To the World’s Religious Leaders,” its words felt both ancient and immediate: “There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly source, and are the subjects of one God... Cleave unto that which draweth you together and uniteth you.”
Reading those words, I recognized the culmination not merely of my own seeking, but the longing of generations—for oneness, for fruitfulness, for remembering who we are and where we are called to go. I had been a religious leader, ministering and speaking in multiple languages in dozens of countries, until, having been given responsibility for “Family Ministries” across churches in around 100 different countries from our headquarters in the US, I resigned in 1995 to separate my faith from my paycheck.
At that time I continued to serve God as a freelance and unpaid Minister, under the burden of having been ordained to do so. After a decade of global engagement, all the while searching for more complete answers, I had to admit I was in a spiritual dead end, and after one final sermon in Estonia I walked away from that old ordination entirely. And it was at that point that I encountered the Baha’i teachings, which opened everything back up, making all things new again.
But why do I do this? This writing, this reaching, this teaching? I answer because I must—because I’ve been called by a story older than myself, yet made new in my own bones and breath. I write because, in the act of remembrance, there is life—a life I hope to share, to teach, to invite you into. I do this because the alternative is forgetfulness, captivity, slow unraveling.
As I launch this series, I invite you: Enter the story. Remember what made you, and who you are called to become. Tell your children—literal or spiritual. Join in ritual, however humble or grand. Seek the oneness that binds chaos into cosmos, fragmentation into fruitfulness.
There’s work ahead. In future Saturdays, we will journey together—from Shema to One Common Faith, from my family story to the universal—and I hope you will walk with me, sharing your stories, your questions, your memory.
This is why I do this. To make the ancient words live again, so that we, too, may become one.
Feel free to share your reflections or family stories in the comments—let’s remember together.
