[RonPrice]

MYSTERIOUS DISPENSATIONS OF PROVIDENCE

On Tuesday April 29th 1980, three days before I went into the psychiatric clinic of the Launceston General Hospital, Alfred Hitchcock died.(1) He was 80 years old. I was about to experience, at least for about the next ten days, what was for me the last days of real terror in my life. Terror inflicted on the unknowing was one of the themes in Hitchcock movies. Fear was also part of his recipe for movie success. I would have fear many times in life again, but terror was part of my bi-polar illness and on that Tuesday 29 April 1980 I was on the edge of the throes of my last major hypomanic episode.

I had first come to hear of and to see Alfred Hitchcock in October 1955 on TV in my family’s lounge-room in Burlington Ontario, although I might have seen his classic movie Dial “M” for Murder in 1954. After more than fifty years I can’t recall with any exactitude. Hitchcock’s ten year long series of what are now ‘classic’ TV programs had just begun. Mystery, crime, horror and the supernatural, invariably with a twist in the tale came on week after week for a decade and the world has now had more than forty years of reruns.

In October 1955 a premeditated campaign of terror was in process in Iran against the Baha’i community. It was a campaign which the then leader of the Bahá'í community, Shoghi Effendi, characterized as an ordeal “in pursuance of the mysterious dispensations of Providence.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1 “Internet Site on Alfred Hitchcock,” and 2Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965, p.139.

While terror was entertaining
TV’s lounge-room troops and
thanks to the clever fantasizing
of the famous Alfred Hitchcock
then about to enter the last decade
of his meteroic career as a director,
before his slow and unhappy slide
to death in the first fifteen years of
my own adult life, 1965 to 1980....

.....the Iranian Baha’i community
was entertaining its own terror....
not a devastating flood, but a very
gentle rain on a green pasture; not
a calamity but God’s providence, a
wick and oil unto the lamp of Faith.

And, Alfred, as your years went on
and you garnered in all that success,
the ship of this Faith sailed safely in
to port well beyond the terrors of the
sea which could have taken the Cause
right off its course and any full-blown
understanding of the meaning of this is
beyond our generation.1 But with that
terror overcome, we can now not hold
anything back from contemporaries....

1 Century of Light, p. 92.

Ron Price
January 8th 2005.