non aveva mai sentito parlare della Fede Bahà'ì, ma lei è stata incuriosita!!

Jordan Dez loved worshipping at her big, white-steepled Connecticut church. She felt embraced by the liberal United Church of Christ congregation of her youth. It felt natural and right and fit in with her sense of God's love. She was baptized at 13 because, as she says, everyone around was a Christian.

That was her religious cocoon.

Yet, like many others of her generation, the 27-year-old Dez began in college to seek spirituality beyond the borders of traditional Christianity. While studying anthropology and Spanish at the University of Connecticut, she tried yoga, Buddhism and other Eastern faiths.

During graduate work at the School for International Training in Vermont, she met a handsome, brilliant Iranian

Jorden Dez, right, studies about teaching Bahai to children with Katie Danner, both of Salt Lake City, and other followers. (Jim Urquhart/The Salt Lake Tribune)student. He was a Bahai.

Jordan Dez had never heard of Bahais, but she was intrigued. There was no lightning moment when her husband-to-be described his faith, and he wasn't pushy about it. As they courted, though, she found herself increasingly attracted to the Persian-born faith that preaches love for all humanity and God's unfolding revelations down through the centuries.

"The guiding principle is unity and that was what I already believed. It spoke to me organically without any work," Dez says now. "It felt like home to me. It was natural to my personality."

She fell in love, she says, with the Bahai emphasis on gender equality as well as its preaching of harmony among various ethnic and religious groups. She appreciated its acceptance of prophets from different traditions, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Zoroaster, as well as two uniquely Bahai "messengers," known as the Bab and Baha'u'llah.

"God is God," Dez says. "And God will not leave us alone. More prophets are coming in the progression of humanity."

In November, after two years of study, Dez signed a "card," expressing her commitment to lead a Bahai life. That's all it took for her to be identified with the faith.



Now prayer and study are a daily part of her life, she says.

She finds answers and guidance to every possible human conflict in the "ocean of Bahai writings." She attends the local feast every 19 days, and works hard to implement its teachings about kindness, tolerance and love.

Yet Dez has made no big pronouncements about her newfound religion to her parents. When she visited at Christmas, she celebrated the birth of Jesus with them at their UCC church.

"I didn't have to give up anything to be a Bahai," she says. "I wasn't dissatisfied with Christianity. Everything I loved and believed, I still do."

She and her husband plan to raise their daughter, due to arrive around the first of August, in the faith. Dez will study Bahai teachings and Farsi, Iran's major language, along with her baby. But their religious experience will, no doubt, be different. Baby will be born in the faith, while Dez came to it as an adult.

And, if at 15 or so, Baby Dez chooses another path, that's fine with her mother. "My heart would be open to whatever she chooses."

pstack@sltrib.com