Ross Woodman, Professor Emeritus at Western University in London, Ontario, passed away this week at the age of 91. He was a member of the first National Spiritual Assembly, the governing council of the Baha’i Community of Canada, elected in 1948.
On his passing, the Universal House of Justice, the international governing council of the Baha’i Community, wrote, “His many years of service to the Cause and humanity, including as a member of your first National Spiritual Assembly and a promoter of the arts within the community at large, are recalled with admiration.”
The National Spiritual Assembly, in a letter to his family and friends, noted that he was,“[o]ne of Canada’s leading authorities on Romantic literature… For him, the subject of his scholarship and the Faith that he had embraced were one and the same thing: his lifelong conviction was that the work of the Romantics was itself a reflection of the influence of the Baha’i Revelation on sensitive minds in the English-speaking world.”
As a youthful member of the community he travelled throughout North America speaking to audiences about the Baha’i Faith. In the latter part of his life, he gave a series of lectures in Toronto on several of the central books of the Faith and contributed articles to the scholarly Journal of Baha’i Studies.
With his final book, “Revelation and Knowledge, Romanticism and Religious Faith,” edited by Professor Joel Faflak, who contributed an introductory essay — “Beyond Belief/Having Faith,” Dr. Woodman explored religion, romanticism, modern psychoanalytical theory, and his Baha’i beliefs in an autobiographical reflection on his life-long engagement with the Revelation of Baha’u’llah, the Prophet-Founder of the Baha’i Faith. It was the culmination of an extraordinary outpouring of published works, academic and newspaper articles on literature and art, and two earlier books from the University of Toronto Press: “The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley,” and “Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism.” In 1992 McGill-Queen’s University Press published “The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman,” edited by J. Douglas Kneale.
Dr. Woodman was also an inspiring teacher to hundreds of English students over many years, and an enthusiastic supporter of the arts. On Dr. Woodman’s passing, the writer James Reaney wrote of him, “The great Londoner, one of Canada’s most eloquent champions of the arts and a former member of Western’s English department… Even as the sad news shakes me, I see Ross in witty, passionate and triumphant form addressing the crowd in the Woodman Room at the Michael Gibson Gallery in January… it called up memories of the Woodmans’ (Ross and his wife Marion’s) role in the 1960s and after as they helped London art and artists reach national and international prominence.”
Dr. Woodman was married to the internationally-known author and psychoanalyst Dr. Marion Woodman. He was born in Nova Scotia in 1922, served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, received an MA from the University of Winnipeg (then United College) and a PhD from the University of Toronto where he was in the first graduate seminar of Northrop Frye. He received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelly Association of America, and was an avid collector of Canadian and international art.
Before enrolling formally as a member of the Baha’i community in 1945, and while still a student in Manitoba, Dr. Woodman published in 1943 the first article on the Baha’i Faith in a student newspaper, “The Manitoban,” titled “Religion in the Modern World.” Elected to the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Canada at the Canadian National Baha’i Convention in 1948 in Montreal, though only in his mid-twenties, he was featured as one of two speakers at a public meeting during that Convention which attracted an audience of 500. The other speaker was Ms. Elsie Austin, the first African-American Assistant Attorney General in the United States.
In one of the many essays on Baha’i themes written after his retirement from teaching, “The Baha’i Concept of Freedom and Authority (including Some Personal Reflections),” Dr. Woodman wrote that “the authority of God upon which human freedom depends is an authority that, far from being imposed, is suffered and endured as the only means by which, apparently, it can make its way into human consciousness…” In that essay, he testified to a lifetime spent struggling with both his unshakeable belief in the reality of Baha’u’llah and His Revelation, and how to bring that belief into relationship with a successful academic career based on his passion for the Romantic poets.
However, he wrote that one can too easily confuse one’s recognition of the experience of the reality of God and religious faith with other passions. Though important as you work toward self-understanding, such passions in his academic career had become, he wrote, “a furnace of tribulation in which Baha’u’llah was testing me, forging in that testing ‘one single unit, solid and indivisible, able to execute His design.’” While once having felt that he had found freedom in material and temporal pursuits, he came to realize that such an experience had become “a fool’s paradise, the spiritual emptiness of which” had been difficult to grasp because of financial and other types of security that his career provided with its artificial sense of freedom.
When Dr. Woodman was asked near the end of his life about the theme of his final book, he replied that “to understand poetry, you have to suspend belief and enter into the world of the poem. However with religious faith, as distinguished from the world of literary imagination, you suspend belief in order to enter the world which God has purposed for your life, and then wake up to discover that the world of Divine Revelation is the reality which is truly genuine.”