THE FIRST, TENDER, SLENDER FLIGHT
Until 1935.....some eleven people had become Baha’is for only brief periods in Toronto. -Will C. van den Hoonaard, The Origins of the Baha’i Community of Canada: 1898-1948, Wilfred Laurier UP, Waterloo, 1996, p.101.
Reading those Callaghan1 novels
reminded me of the days of walking
and street cars and the first poem2
by a Canadian about this new religion.
These were the first Laura Davis days
of horse-drawn milk carts,
walking by the lake,
taking a radial car to the edge of town
where the pavement ceased and
you seemed to enter a foreign country.
These days produced only six
active believers by 1937--
including the saintly Spendlove.
After more than twenty-five years
the show was just taking its first, slender,
tender, flight on the wings of a new Revelation.
1 Morley Callaghan, Canadian writer, whose first novels were written in the decade before the launching of the international teaching plan in 1937 and the formation of the LSA of the Baha’is of Toronto in 1938.
2 Albert Watson, 1922, in Will van den Hoonaard, p. 101.
Ron Price
18 February 1998