Day 42 - The Hard Awakening

Among the unsung artists of our very visual age are the anonymous designers of book covers. The troubling image on the cover of one book has stayed with me through the years and has hit home again as Holy Week approaches.

At college we had a buddy system. New students would be linked with others in the second or third year to provide some (hopefully) wise counsel. One of those I was buddied with was not in need of any counsel from me, wise or otherwise. He sailed through college. I have an abiding memory of him taking part in, or was it conducting, a concert version of The Pirates of Penzance.

Six years after I left, the news shocked all of us that Bahram Dehqani Tafti had been assassinated in the wake of the revolution in Iran.

Tragically, Bahram’s death has featured again in the news this Lent. Another acquaintance, I guess from those far-off college days, Lord Biggar, wrote in the Telegraph suggesting that his death justified the action taken by Trump and Netanyahu in waging war against Iran across the Middle East. This prompted a strident response from Bahram’s sister, herself Bishop of Chelmsford, Rt Rev Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani.

“But my brother would not have wanted his assassination to be appropriated for moral justification of the attack on Iran,” wrote Guli Francis-Dehqani. In forceful language she describes this as “a war of choice rather than necessity”. While condemning the Iranian regime as “odious and repugnant” she argues that diplomacy was working, albeit “frustratingly slowly” and “it certainly hadn't been exhausted”. She suggests “the lack of clarity as to the war’s aims, and the absence of any forethought about what comes next belie the notion that this is either a moral war or a just one”.

Bahram, she insists, “would be horrified at the terror that has been unleashed by this war. He would weep for the plight of the powerless caught up in the political machinations of the powerful. He would be saddened by the prospect of another Iraq or Libya. He would want to see the West supporting the Iranian people to find their own solution to their country's future, not leaving them as pawns in the games of others.”

That takes me back to artwork on the cover of the book I read not long after it was published in 1981. Bahram’s father, H. B. Dehqani-Tafti, was Bishop in Iran and President Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East. In The Hard Awakening he gives an account of all that had happened leading up to the assassination of his son. “It is because,” he explains in the preface, “I love my country and my people, and above all my small Church, that I am recording the things which happened to us.” The title of the book was taken from a 14th century poem, Love’s Awakening, by the Islamic Sufi mystic, Hafiz.

Love seemed at first an easy thing —

But ah! the hard awakening.

The inspiration for the book came from the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is the abject suffering of Jesus on the cross that enables us to live with the fact that there will be abject suffering in this world of ours. But through that suffering, Dehqani-Tafti asserts, “there will still be life, and where life is, there is hope”.

At the close of the book, in “A Father’s Prayer upon the Murder of his Son”, he remembers “not only Bahram but also his murderers”. Their savage act, their crime, the terrible fire of this calamity “makes obvious as never before our need to trust in God’s love as shown in the cross of Jesus and his resurrection;” This is the love we need to hold on to as we move towards Good Friday and the Day of Resurrection.

“Love which makes us free from hate towards our persecutors;

Love which brings patience, forbearance, courage, loyalty, humility, generosity, greatness of heart;

Love which more than ever deepens our trust in God’s final victory and his eternal designs for the Church and for the world;

Love which teaches us how to prepare ourselves to face our own day of death.”

Movingly, Dehqani-Tafti finishes with words of forgiveness.

“O God,

Bahram’s blood has multiplied the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls;

So when his murderers stand before thee on the day of judgement

Remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives,

And forgive.”

H. B. Dehqani-Tafti, The Hard Awakening: a courageous personal testament of love that outlives violence and death (Triangle, SPCK, 1981).

Richard Cleaves