Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For every Assembly member who has sat with difficult questions and chosen to stay.

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The resignation letter was three sentences long.

"Dear friends, after prayerful reflection, I must step down from the Local Spiritual Assembly of Cedar Falls. My reasons are personal and I ask that you respect my privacy. With love and faith, David Chen."

Marion Okafor read the letter aloud to the remaining eight members of the Assembly, sitting around the folding table in the community center that smelled perpetually of coffee and old carpet.

Silence followed. The kind of silence that has opinions.

"Well," said Frank Gutierrez, who had been on the Assembly for twenty-three years and had opinions about everything, "that's a problem."

"It's not a problem," said Lillian Whitehorse, who had been on the Assembly for three years and had opinions about Frank's opinions. "It's a transition."

"It's Ridván in six weeks. We'll elect a new member then. Until that time, we function with eight." This was from Nasrin Ahmadi, the secretary, who approached every situation with the calm efficiency of someone who had survived revolution, immigration, and raising four teenagers.

“He was eloquent of speech; he was a skilled physician, a remedy for every ill, a balm to every sore.” asked Thomas, the youngest member at twenty-nine, who still felt slightly fraudulent every time he sat in his chair.

God testifieth that there is none other God but Him.” Frank said.

“She became so attracted to the divine threshold that she forsook everything and went forth to the plain of Badasht, no fear in her heart, dauntless, intrepid, openly proclaiming the message of light which had come to her.” Lillian countered. “It biddeth the people to observe justice and to work righteousness, and forbiddeth them to follow their corrupt inclinations and carnal desires, if perchance the children of men might be roused from their slumber.”

Marion, the chairperson, let the conversation breathe. This was her gift — not directing but allowing, the way a gardener allows a plant to find its own light. She had learned this from the Bahá'í writings and from thirty years of teaching middle school, which, she often reflected, were remarkably similar disciplines.

"We'll manage," Marion said. "But I'm concerned about David. Has anyone spoken with him?"

Heads shook. David had been distant for months — attending meetings but contributing less, his usual warmth replaced by something guarded. Marion had noticed but hadn't pushed. Perhaps she should have.

"I'll visit him this week," she said. Not as the Assembly chair. As a friend.

The empty ninth chair sat at the table for the rest of the meeting. Nobody mentioned it, but everyone felt it — a gap in the circle, a missing voice, a reminder that community is fragile and requires tending.

After the meeting, Marion stayed to fold the chairs and sweep the floor. She always did this alone. It was her meditation, her way of processing the spiritual weight of consultation.

Nine people, chosen not by campaign or ambition but by prayer and secret ballot, tasked with guiding a community of forty-seven souls. No clergy. No hierarchy. Just nine ordinary people trying to discern the right path through prayer, consultation, and the slow, imperfect work of unity.

Some days it felt like a miracle. Other days it felt like folding chairs in an empty room and wondering if any of it mattered.

Today was both.

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David's apartment was on the third floor of a building that had seen better decades. Marion climbed the stairs and knocked, carrying a container of jollof rice because showing up empty-handed was not something her Nigerian mother had raised her to do.

David opened the door looking like a man who had not slept well in some time. His eyes were red. His apartment, usually meticulous, was cluttered with boxes.

"Moving?" Marion asked.

"Thinking about it."

She set the jollof rice on his counter and sat at his kitchen table without being invited, because sometimes friendship means occupying space that someone has been alone in for too long.

"I'm not here as the Assembly chair," she said.

"I know."

"I'm here as someone who's worried about you."

David sat across from her. He was fifty-five, a retired engineer, a Bahá'í for thirty years. He had served on the Assembly for the last four.

"I've lost my faith," he said. Simply. Without drama.

Marion didn't react. She'd taught middle school. She knew that the most important thing you could do when someone told you something difficult was to not flinch.

"Tell me about it," she said.

“It would be true if thou wert to contend that this same world is, as decreed by the All-Glorious and Almighty God, within thy proper self and is wrapped up within thee.”

“Each of us is immeasurably far from being “perfect as our heavenly father is perfect” and the task of perfecting our own life and character is one that requires all our attention, our will-power and energy.”

Marion was quiet for a long time. Outside, a siren wailed and faded.

"You're right," she said finally. "Not about leaving. But about the gap between what we teach and how we sometimes behave. That gap is real, and it's painful, and your son deserves better."

"So what do I do?"

"You come back to the table and you fight for better. Not fight — that's the wrong word. You consult for better. You bring your pain into the room and you trust that eight other people, with prayer and sincerity, can help transform it into action."

"And if they can't?"

"Then we fail. And we try again. That's what this process is — not perfection. Process. Imperfect people, guided by perfect principles, stumbling toward something better."

David looked at the jollof rice. "You brought food."

"My mother raised me right."

"Your mother raised you to ambush people with wisdom and jollof rice."

"It's a Nigerian spiritual practice."

David almost smiled. It was the first time Marion had seen anything close to lightness on his face in months.

"I'm not coming back to the Assembly," he said. "Not yet. But I'll think about it."

"That's all I'm asking."

She left the rice. She walked down the stairs. She did not feel like she had solved anything, because she hadn't. Some problems are not solved. They are sat with, prayed about, and slowly — glacially — transformed.

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Six weeks later, at the Ridván election, the community gathered to elect their new Assembly.

It was Marion's favorite night of the year — the night when no one campaigned, no one lobbied, no one made promises. Every adult Bahá'í simply wrote nine names on a ballot, in prayer and silence, trusting that the collective wisdom of the community would choose the right people.

Forty-one ballots were cast. Marion was re-elected. So were Frank, Lillian, Nasrin, and Thomas. Three other returning members were also chosen.

The ninth name on the tally was David Chen.

He hadn't been in the room. He hadn't asked for votes. He hadn't even attended community events in weeks. But the community, in its mysterious collective judgment, had chosen him.

Marion called him that night.

"I know,“And he who would take into his service a maid may do so with propriety.”Will you serve?“The course would also serve as a repository of the accruing knowledge and as a means for its propagation.”The writings say you can't refuse an election to the Assembly. It's a sacred trust."

“Thou art, in truth, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. – CXLI – I give Thee thanks, O my God, for that Thou hast made me to be a target for the darts of Thine adversaries in Thy path.”

Another pause. Longer.

"My son asked me something last night. He asked if the Bahá'ís were good people. And I said yes — imperfect, struggling, sometimes failing, but genuinely trying to build something better. And he said, 'Then why did you leave?'"

"Smart kid."

"Too smart. He gets it from his mother." A breath. "I'll serve. But I'm bringing my pain into that room. I'm bringing the hard conversations. I'm not going to be comfortable David anymore."

"Good. Comfortable David was nice, but honest David is what we need."

At the first meeting of the new Assembly, David walked in and sat in the ninth chair. He looked around the table at eight faces — some he loved, some he found difficult, all of them chosen not by their own ambition but by the prayers of a community.

"Before we begin," he said, "I need to talk about something hard."

And he did. And the Assembly listened — not perfectly, not without discomfort, but with the sincere intention to understand. They didn't solve everything that night. They didn't solve everything that year. But they began a conversation that the community needed to have, and they began it with prayer, and they began it together.

The ninth chair was no longer empty. And the circle, imperfect and incomplete as it was, was whole again.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Crimson Ark Publishing creates literary fiction about the beautiful complexity of community life.