The Bahai Faith
Pam, the Baha’i, and a Christmas in Salem
Coming to Salem new, I didn’t know a soul.
I was in a shelter last Christmas. Evicted in 2023. Kia Soul for a bedroom. PhD student but on paper I was homeless. New city. New season. Ash stage.
That’s when I met Pam with the Baha’i Faith group in Salem.
She saw me. Not the paperwork, not the shelter address, not the labels the mental health system gave me. She talked with me. Really talked. She didn’t scan the room like some people do. She looked at me.
And she opened her home to me.
It was Christmas last year. I had no family here. No tree. No dinner waiting. Pam prepared food for me when I was in a shelter. Hot food. A plate made with intention. She didn’t ask questions that would shame me. She just fed me.
Then she gave me the Baha’i prayer book.
That meant everything. Because my father was a Baha’i for many years. I grew up knowing the word, seeing the symbol, but never sitting with it. Not really. My mother converted to Islam. My father walked a different path. And I was somewhere in between — raised Christian, baptized 10 times, but always searching.
Pam accepted me when other people did not. Churches I’d walked into looked at my clothes, my story, my record, and found a reason to keep distance. Pam found a reason to pull a chair closer.
She introduced me to what my father believed. Not to convert me. Not to argue doctrine. But to connect me. To him. To a part of myself I’d left behind in Concord, in Oakland, in all the places I ran from.
The Baha’i Faith teaches that we are one human family. That the Creator is too big for one name, one book, one church. Pam lived that. She didn’t preach it — she practiced it.
In her living room, with that prayer book in my hands, I felt my father with me. I felt the Spirit. I felt peace that pills never gave me, that religion never gave me, that the system never gave me.
I was new in Salem. I was broken. And a Baha’i woman named Pam saw me, fed me, and handed me a piece of my father.
Some people talk about God. Pam showed me God.
And I’ll never forget it.
Cathryn M. Murray
From Ashes | Fed in Salem | Still Thankful
Salem, Oregon | August 4, 2026
