More than two years and hundreds of Zoom calls later, a 300-page compilation of Four Corners stories is now published, and four friends worked together to make it happen.
It’s called Bahá’í Stories and Reflections Updated from the Center of the Four Corners: Shared Accounts of the Bahá’í Faith, and is available on Amazon.
It’s not a “polished history of Four Corners area,” said author Mark Reddy.
Instead, it’s an anthology of the region from the Baháʼí perspective, said author Chris Cholas, and “we included everyone’s story that we could.”
Baháʼí (ba-hi) is “a world religion that has no clergy,” Reddy said. “So every individual is both a student of the faith and a teacher.”
Its basic teaching is that all the great prophets – think Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad, Jesus – were sent from the same God. Followers of the Baháʼí faith believe that Bahá’u’lláh, the faith’s founder, is the most recent manifestation of God.
And as far as religions go, it’s quite new. It started in Persia, or present-day Iran, 200 years ago.
“The way we spread the faith is by traveling and settling in different places, and so on,” said Reddy.
Years ago, Carole Hitti, the author who really spearheaded the creation of this book, was visiting with a friend, Dianne Savage. They were sharing stories and decided they ought to start writing some of them down.
From there, Hitti reached out to Robin Richardson, an already published author, for help. Eventually, they asked Cholas and Reddy to join the effort.
“It’s grown into a big book,” said Hitti.
As far as finding the stories goes, Hitti said that she has “a long list of friends on my phone and computer,” so she went through and wrote to them, asking if they’d be willing to contribute.
“We tracked down people by friendship,” she said.
Friendship, and email.
The three other authors agreed that it was Hitti’s “stubborn” nature that made the book a reality.
“You normally think of stubborn as being a negative quality, but in her case it’s a good quality,” said Cholas.
“I think some of you guys called me a bulldog, didn’t you?” Hitti laughed.
“I think that was Mark (Reddy),” said Richardson.
“It’s true,” Mark conceded. “But it was your tenacity that got this thing off the ground and got it going. … I also think you’re part Sherlock Holmes.”
Hitti’s sleuthing and persistence were worthwhile: They received stories from Baháʼís in all corners of the globe, and from different time periods, too.
Despite differences in space and time, all the contributors found themselves in this region at one point or another.
“I thought we’d get a dozen stories or so and it’d be a nice little book,” Reddy said. “I was impressed by the depth and scope of how many people have actually moved through or have been in this area.”
Not only that, they all have ties to the Baháʼí faith.
Cholas said that he started collecting stories in the 1970s, and that those made up most of his contribution. He was in Durango at the time, in one of the area’s first Baháʼí clubs.
Concurrently, the Vietnam War was going on and the civil rights movement was “at a momentous peak,” he said.
“And the Baháʼí faith was spreading fast. It was reaching Western Colorado, of all places,” Cholas remembered.
He went on to say that the faith jibes with Indigenous values, and that there are many Native Americans who are also Baháʼí.
For Indigenous people coming into the faith, it’s “comfortable,” since it’s “not really a conversion, it’s a continuation of what their culture already is,” said Cholas.
Plus, the Baháʼí faith holds that “Indigenous people will illuminate the world.”
Hitti said that sharing these stories and the sheer variety of perspectives will “help people get a better idea of the people of the world,” which motivated her work.
All four authors agreed that another major motivation in gathering these stories concerned time, and telling them while they still could.
“There’s a period of time to capture the first stage of a new religion,” Cholas said. “Christianity has it, Buddhism has it. They all have the stories from around the time of the messenger, and there shortly after.”
And that period of time is limited.
“If you don’t catch those stories then, they might be lost forever. Part of capturing these early stories while Baháʼí faith is still relatively new in the world … (is so) in the future, people will have these stories.”
It was important to them, then, to leave the stories “in their original, unedited voices,” said Reddy.
“We read it for accuracy, yes,” Reddy said. “But we saw it more as source material for future historians or people wondering about the faith.”
Once they finished gathering the stories, their work was far from done . … But “the fun part started: How do you put it all together,” said Richardson.
It was Richardson’s role to compile the hundreds of stories into something of a story, something digestible.
The book is divided into 127 chapters, complete with a dedication, conclusion and an “about the authors” page.
“The book reflects the growth of the faith and the depths of what its reaching now,” Cholas said. “It’s getting into social action and the things that are really important if we’re going to have a better world.”
