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Another podcast. This is a recent lecture I gave in Cambridge University, on the matter of life after death. While reviewing the well-known fundamentals of the Baha'i perspective on the after-life, it goes further, to approach matters that I have seldom if ever seen addressed in the literature, namely, once we grant that the Baha'i teachings posit the survival of the soul after death, how do we answer the question of where exactly is the after-life? And what connection, if any, does it have to this life, beyond bringing it to fruition. Can we reach that world, or those worlds, in this life? Are we already there? And what does all this have to do with traditional notions of union with God, of nirvanna, of enlightenment? And can we take our dog?
Read more!Sunday, 29 November 2009
Friday, 27 November 2009
Nightingales: A Musical Offering
This is a different kind of podcast, a song called Nightingales. It represents a preliminary version of a choral piece I composed many years ago around a beautiful, proclamatory poem of Baha'u'llah, which tells the nightingales that the season of roses, the blooming time is here, the seekers that what lay beyond their vision is now revealed to their sight, and the lovers that the adored one's face is in full view. The motifs, from Persian mysticism, are universal in their capacity to evoke. Like all else on this blog, this is not a finished thought, but a tentative beginning in a conversation, this time in musical form. Joining me in singing it are the extremely talented Smith family (Geoff, Michaela, Bonnie, and her cousin), and a friend called Paul. The provisional translation is by J. Cole. As soon as I get full names of everyone, I will give proper acknowledgement! It was a wonderful experience to record it at the Smith studio in beautiful Cornwall, after 12 years of holding it in my head, and I will always be grateful for the inspiration they imparted as an extraordinary, united, gifted family!
I share this song, not because it is finished, but because it is a beginning, in case anyone out there would like to collaborate in taking it to the next stage. I think it can do with cello, for instance, and twice as many voices, and removing some background sound, but it is enough to convey a sense of the musical vision that animates it, and I hope someone out there may like it. If you do, let me know, please.
You can find it in zipped format here
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Who could possibly believe in God? How? How could we possibly know whether an unknowable God exists or not?
Monday, 5 January 2009
Counter-Intuition: A Manifestation of God in a human body? Surely we know better...
The following musings consider how very difficult it is to believe, for any thoughtful, awake individual, that a fellow human could ever be a voice of the divine, more, in Baha'i parlance, a Manifestation of God, in a transcendent, numinous degree. With the accumulated dissappointments that human folly and human wisdom both have furnished us throughout our history, never more so than in the 20th century, with the betrayals of so many hopes by so many leaders, teachers, philosophers, gurus, caudillos, revolutionaries, both the nefarious and the well-meaning, to believe that from our familiar, imperfect human fabric could come a divinely perfect, absolutely flawless pattern, would seem to be to ask too much. And yet, as Baha'is, we recognise in a Persian nobleman of the 19th century, Mirza Husayn Ali, a perfection compelling enough to place capitals before His name, and see in His humanity, the Manifestation of God, Baha'u'llah, and in His teachings the remedy that a travailing world, mostly unawares, is seeking. What, subjectively, does such a leap against common sense, entail?
Many and high are the claims associated with the Founding Figure of a world religion. Their startling and frequently iconic elements come to dominate the image that we form of Him to the extent of overwhelming our earthly, but in truth no less startling, point of encounter with that same prophetic figure. In the case of Baha'u'llah, Prophet-Founder of the Baha'i Faith, this is so to a pronounced degree, the claims advanced being superlative to the point of astonishment.
"Verily I say, this is the Day in which mankind can behold the Face, and hear the Voice, of the Promised One. The Call of God hath been raised, and the light of His countenance hath been lifted up upon men. It behoveth every man to blot out the trace of every idle word from the tablet of his heart, and to gaze, with an open and unbiased mind, on the signs of His Revelation, the proofs of His Mission, and the tokens of His glory."
(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, section VII)
Our first instinct, upon being brought to an encounter with such remote, such far suspended words, is to reach out, to attempt immediately to fasten somehow upon their contents in full flight, without pausing to take in the unmeasured feat of their having reached our ears in the first place. It is to remain unapprehending of a compelling tale implicit - unsyllabled and untold - in the trajectory traversed by those actual words, not in claimed heavens beyond our reach and ken, but in the prosaic earth that bears alike, and bears in common, our feet of clay, and prophets' own.
It is in fact, counter-intuitively, our shared human condition with that putative prophetic figure that makes it possible for our sobered sight (for life takes care more soon than late to rein in our flights of fancy) to dare to see beyond the human: to yield perhaps uneasily to a sense of Divinity transcendent in the soul of an otherwise merely remarkable human being.
'Errare humanum est', the old wrinkled pirate in the adventures of Asterix was fond of repeating with each new sinking of his ship - to the perennial irritation of his captain. Any dimly honest introspection will touch without much seeking (more were too much) the tender spots where we find our own too personal confirmation of that melancholy, else compassionate and consoling maxim.
And if to be human is to err, we must know better than to seek redemption in however heavenly a human's voice. We should know, surely by now, that heaven is too large to fit into the upright frame of the unplumed, smooth-skinned biped that is man. We should know better, all the more with so much red and bloodied history behind us, than, as Marx might put it (Groucho, not Karl), join a club that would have one like us, a fellow human, for its prophet.
And yet, historically, something stops us again and again from resting in such good old common sense. Something pricks us in our complacent wisdom. Something inconveniently insists in our wistfulness and just won't let it lie. It is the indefatigable consciousness that, if to be human is to err, yet to err is to have dreamt, or sought or tried or dared to yearn or yet aspire unto something other than our error, something which in erring was intuited but mistook, misplaced, misdone, was misadventured. It is to affirm that before, and after, and above our error, was and is the faint, yet lingering trace of a pure, or at any rate purer intention, or conception, or reality, than its crude and at times devastatingly destructive trail of unintended consequence.
And here lies an asymetry that gives birth to human thirst and human tragedy, and to nobility, and genuine heroism, to compassion, and defiant joy of the impossible experienced, the redemptive surprise of grace. I refer to the uncomfortable realization that, notwithstanding our limited capacity, we come to the world equipped with an infinite thirst, and are fated to live in the paradox of our apprehension of immensity, and our experience of constraint, our indwelling yearning for transcendence, and the very limitations on which our experience of transcendence is, by definition, grounded. And this, said the Persian to the Theban at the banquet table, is the bitterest sorrow: 'to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action' (Herodotus 9:16).
For it is not capriciousness impels us to more, to all, in our loves and our desires, whether as children or grown adults (for though we learn in adulthood, as learn we must, to tame and domesticate our will to possess all that our irrepressibly unsated hunger desires, our insatisfaction still wags its tail with every morsel in anticipation of more, even in the foreknowledge that less is forthcoming).
It is rather that deep within, for some consciously, for others, just beyond the limen of awareness, stirs the intuition of totality, not as a thing external to ourselves which indifferently contains us as one more constituent atom, but rather as constituent of ourselves, totality as contained within us: not as an item is contained in a box, but as is a feeling in a melody, contained not so much inside, as through us, as if totality in some sense was us, yea, and more than us.
It is as if at the back of our minds we carried the feeling that it was so nearly within our gift - on the tip of our tongue - to join the letters kaf and nun, the cosmic B and E, and that, just beyond recall, but only just, awaited in readiness the words we at some indeterminate occasion ('when was it?') were the first in existence to ever pronounce: Fiat Lux!
And there was light.
What a contradiction! We go about in earnest or by default collecting evidence of our frailty, piling up conclusive proof of our fragility, disavowing whatever magic we may have invested in our innocence, and then knowingly embark on dreams and enterprises and loves and gambles beyond our capacity to realize. Sartre's vacillating Hugo in that relentless play, Les mains sales, on the verge of a terrible deed and a terrible error he's struggling to commit, gives a fellow youth, in passing, non-sequitur, the advice that life itself, and history, would give those who ponder on the lessons afforded by the pageant of youthful dreams with their stillborn issue:
‘Te charge pas de ce que tu ne peut pas faire. Apres ca, ca pese trop lourd... Je ne sais pas si vous avez remarquee: c'est pas commode d'etre jeune.’
'Take on nothing that you cannot do. After that, it weighs too heavily... I don't know if you have noticed: it's not comfortable being young.'
And so, reckless youth gives way to cautionary maturity. Santa takes visa. The grand Houdini drowns in the chains he himself selects to exhibit his ingenuity. They were too heavy.
We arrive at the 21st century with our innocence broken, no longer prey to the tragic, collective aspirations that inflamed our imaginations and convulsed our history in Hobsbawm.'s Age of Extremes. We now know better: it can't be done, and after that it is too heavy. So much hope betrayed, so many dreams discarded, cheapened or trademarked, mass produced and commercialized. Socialism, Democracy, Revolution, Empire, the American Dream, Woodstock, Esperanto, the United Nations, internationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, political activism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Union, country, planet and religion: gone are the dreams, only pragmatism remains.
We remain active, but compartmentalized. We work for the possible, not for the best. We'll work with many for a moment, only with a few for a long time. We'll join no communities, we'll follow no man, we'll think thrice before marrying, we'll embrace no flag. We'll not be labeled, will not be defined. And if we are called by a Dreamer, to dream the Dream of Humankind, we'll remember the betrayals of last century, and, leaving Virgil to Dante, taking Candide as our guide, we'll not hesitate to reply:
'C'est bien cela, mais allons cultiver notre jardin.'
'All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.'
Pero sa muove, as Galileo was said to have written in his prison, in the midst of his capitulation. And yet it moves. There are still, even now, after everything, after so much, many, me too, incorrigibly, who grant all this and simply dream again, and again, and then again, without reneging or detracting one jot or tittle from the peripateia, the dramatic fall from great heights, that has accompanied, in the long run, each and every one of our elaborate and millennial dreams, time after time, after time, after time.
And still and all, these many recalcitrant children of our century do affirm, do steadfastly maintain with Emerson, that, in the matter of human aspiration, 'the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and vain. We give the past to the objector, and yet we hope... We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? ...The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descended into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment.' ( The Oversoul)
And it is this capacity to be surprised by abundance that keeps us receptive, sometimes against our protestations and better judgment, to the irruption of unexpected magic into our lives, to taking on that which we cannot do, and perchance doing it beautifully: to falling in love; to baring our irredeemably solitary sorrow to a listening ear, and finding in it the capacity to hear; to finding in the glance of our child the confidence to believe in the embrace of life; to be capable of discerning, in a fellow human being, dazzling suns of interminable light.
And at such momentary instants of dramatic epochee, when we involuntarily, joyfully and astonishedly suspend our disbelief long enough to take in life emerging naked and enravishing like Venus from the deep, we find our voice once more in Sartre's desperate, if not despairing Hugo:
'Et ca aussi c'est de la comedie. Tout ca! Tout ce que je vous dis la. Vous croyez peut etre que je suis desespere? Pas du tout: je joue la comedie du desespoir. Est ce qu'on peut en sortir?'
'And that too is a play. All that! Everything I was saying to you. You believe perhaps that I am desperate? Not at all: I act the play of despair. Can one exit from it?'
This is, indeed, a pressing question, recurrent in the life of the individual who would approach with sincerity the hard business of living, and more urgent perhaps than ever for a global society whose will to act, whose will to consciously build a functional world order, seems paralyzed by a despairing poverty of aspiration.
'I act the play of despair. Can one exit from it?'
We know that, on a personal level, even at our most desperate, despondent periods of defeat, moments come intermittently that interrupt us with a smile. From a good comedy on television, to a newborn's random gurgle, from a sudden thing of beauty to a dish that was just right, from a book that reshapes our insights, to a chat that changes our life.
The answer, then, to our question, is that one can, in fact, authentically, and legitimately, transcend the narratives, the tedious or self-defeating enactments of past experience, by a moment that fills its gaps.
An instant, it will be objected, is an instant, and a life is a life. But - in this too Emerson had something to say - 'There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all experiences.' (The Oversoul)
So what does all this have to do with the figure of Baha'u'llah? It is that, before faith, our starting point is no more, but no less, than the fragile dignity of our common humanity. That everything in our experience should predispose us to reduce the Prophetic Figure that confronts us to the fallible clay out of which we ourselves are kneaded. And it is that same predisposition that equips us to distinguish in so familiar a play, a new Character. It is, if it be there, the capacity of this new Character to tap into and fulfill that part of our human paradox that aspires beyond our incapacity, that subjective sense of the totality within us, that is capable of engendering an Emersonian 'moment of faith', weighing more than all the years of life without it. It is a test, simultaneous and reciprocal, of the authenticity of the Prophet's claim to the Real, and of our openness to receive the Real into our ever approximate actuality, the duration and degree to which that moment of faith is capable of suspending our well grounded disbelief in the transcendent possibilities of our own nature, not in the abstract, but in the irreducibly personal, which alone can motivate the motion of our inner life.
There is more. Going about our business generations and societies distant from the person of Baha'u'llah, the degree to which His entry into history may be regarded as remarkable, may be judged by the chain of impacts and transmissions necessary for so improbable a scenario as is your reading, even now, these words about that Person, first written by a lonesome Mexican in a far-flung island on the outer edge of Africa, continuing to extend a multiplied 'moment of faith' carried from mouth to mouth, passed on from heart to heart, journeyed with, traveller by traveller, from shore to shore, country to country, city to city, hamlet to hamlet, home to scattered home, handed down and lived vicariously from year to year, and decade to decade, past a century and onto a second century, and still counting, memorialized and appropriated, identity by identity, race by race, nation by nation, tribe by tribe, from tens, to hundreds, to one thousand and more than one thousand fractious ethnicities with all their divergent prejudices and dreams, and arriving to me, for one, in the utterly inauspicious, suburban English neighbourhood of Beeston, Nottingham, no less than miraculously, from its genesis in that pestiferous and now inextant dungeon where the Qajar Emperor Nasiri'd- Din did gaol a cast-out, ragged and humiliated scion of the Persian nobility, before exiling Him to the far reaches of a moribund Ottoman empire.
How did notice of Baha'u'llah arrive to you from that black pit, by what tortuous trajectory, by what chain of events, as you might be able now to trace it with approximate exactitude? Attempt the exercise, and marvel at the result.
It is likewise as a human, indeed, with a personal history, a history dramatic but familiar also, that Baha'u'llah would have been encountered by His contemporaries, and it would have had to have been something exceptional in His very humanity that would alone have led those that came to believe to entertain the possibility of a higher reality in Him.
Some would have met, and others heard of the precocious Child of the talented and ill-starred minister, Mirza Abbas Buzurg, in the dangerous gossip of court circles, where reputations were made and unmade, and insinuation could be enough to lose a man his position, his freedom, and his head.
They might have sighed condescendingly, genuinely commiserated, or pompously moralised about the terrible misfortune that befell Baha'u'llah's father, beginning with a great flood that rose from the mountains of Mazindaran and swept up his splendorous house, as an omen and figure of the more terrible flood of calamity that would bring down his household, a flood long in rising, and unchained by one fugitive word critical of the prime minister's petty murder of his best friend, in a confidence betrayed by a disloyal correspondent, that made the young, uncannily perceptive Child, be witness to the decimation of His father's fortunes and his independence; the humiliating, excruciatingly public and vindictive dissolution of a truly catastrophic royal marriage; the painful, and for a child no doubt agonic spectacle of his father's bastinado by the prime minister's agents and collaborators; the fragmentation and dispersion of his household, and his father’s premature death in isolation and despair.
Or they might have nodded sagely at the undiminished brightness of that Youth's prospects,even in the wake of His father's reverses, noting admiringly the early signs of skill at the perilous game of navigating despotic favour and steering a path across the shallows of paranoid and ephemeral cabals of patronage, emerging unscathed, repeatedly, from frontal contests with the same prime minister who was the architect of His father's fall.
They might have marvelled at and celebrated the geniality of His intercourse, the vigour of His intellect, the liberality of His hospitality and the abundance of His charity. They might also have expressed astonishment or concern at His disregard for personal advancement, his aloofness from political intrigue, and his religious preoccupations. They would undoubtedly have been perplexed and troubled by His eventual advocacy of the religious conflagration which a young Shirazi Mercer had enkindled with His claim to be the Instrument for the advent of the promised Day of God. Many would have felt themselves compelled to join Him at all costs, or impede Him by any means, in His fearless and ensorcelling summons to the Cause of Siyyid Ali Muhammad, the Bab.
But nothing, nothing could have prepared them, or perhaps us, to see in Him the Manifestation of the Godhead, the Inaugurator of a five thousand century prophetic cycle, or, in purely worldly terms, the force capable of fulfilling, and recasting, the Message announced by the Bab, and imparting it to every single country of an as yet well nigh interminable world - against the combined efforts of two emperors and the categorical, mortal fatwas of the highest and most powerful guardians and regulators of Islamic doctrine, from the mujtahids of Persia to the Ulama of al-Azhar.
Once more, we, like they, are challenged to discern, in the familiarity of Mirza Husayn Ali's humanity, the unfamiliar element that produces in our hearts the subjective certitude in His reality as the Glory of God, as Baha'u'llah, a realization that, if it be true, must rank as the supreme fulfilment of our soul's inherent, inborn search for Truth.
To do so, to glimpse the subtle element, the elusive inner logic, to locate the unfolding, of divine manifestation in an otherwise recognizably human personality, we must venture into the objective facts of what must remain an inaccessible, and in the final analysis, if we have the intellectual humility to recognize it, an incomprehensible subjective experience of divine revelation.
This frank acknowledgement of limitation is an absolutely critical point of departure. For in seeking to understand the subjective experience of a fellow human being, in understanding their self-descriptions of inner states and transitions, we inevitably proceed by analogy. No man can know, nor is a man ever likely to do so, what it feels like to give birth to a child. One may, I speak here as a man, seek in women's descriptions handholds for one's own experience, analogies to one's own sensations, and perhaps one will find enough to evoke memories of pain, of wonder, of anxiety, of concentration, of exhaustion. One might even find that he is better able than less capable speakers, by dint of eloquence, to describe, transmit and integrate the descriptions received from various women, to convey in words the nature of the experience. But a man will still be none the wiser, not a hair's breadth closer to comprehending what it is like to have a new life beating within one's body and to perform the arduous miracle of ushering it into extra-uterine life.
Similarly, who can lay claim to be able to grasp, let alone interpret or explain the intensely private, incommunicable experience that gives birth in a single heart to a future world religion? Who would be so arrogant as to pronounce him or herself on the meaning of a Prophet's subjective experience of God, beyond possibly presenting, ever tentatively, His own statements on the subject? Even these statements must be understood not as explanations or straightforward descriptions of subjective experience, but as oblique analogies to a reality and experience deemed to be ineffable, and beyond language's capacity to apprehend or yet approximate. They must be understood, not as transparent, unambiguous expressions of spontaneous self-exposure, but as didactic compromises with our capacity of comprehension, designed, not to evoke in the reader familiarity with an experience that less than ten men in recorded history may be said with any plausibility to have experienced (engendering, each one, a whole civilization), but rather to affect our own sense of identity and our relationship and response to that Prophetic Figure.
To analyze human psychology and social organization with a theoretical and conceptual framework derived from the study and description of the most complex and sophisticated apes, would be to do violence to the infinitely richer complexities of human interaction, notwithstanding concrete points of close and even startling similarity that push back the boundaries of our distinctive natures. It is hard to see how one would describe in simian terms Milo's Venus, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Rumi's Mathnavi, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Dome of the Sistine Chapel. One would be hard put to place, even in the most exquisitely tender mating rituals of the gorilla or the chimpanzee, the odes of Pablo Neruda.
It would seem no less fatuous to attempt to reduce to conceptual models derived from the normal fabric of human consciousness the self-awareness of Souls Whose thoughts and ways tower so far above the commonality of mankind as to bring within their aggregated compass the vast majority of mankind, including its most distinguished and influential individuals. To say of such Souls that they felt this, or they thought that, beyond the apparently unambiguous self-descriptions in their writings, is to presume too much, as would any such statement with regards to human thoughts and feelings that started from the conceptual framework of zoology. At most we can say, such a Soul said this, or acted thus, which may raise the following questions, and evoke the following responses in the reader, or the beholder. When we understand that no statement from such a Educator is gratuitous, and that access to their inner experience is a foregone matter, we may more profitably ask ourselves, what response could this disclosure be sought to trigger in the reader, what notion, what aesthetic, what relationship to implant in the reader, rather than what does it tell us about what was going on in the depths of His mysterious heart.
With this in mind, we can venture, if curiosity, else devotion, spurs us, with stumbling feet into Baha'u'llah's descriptions of His encounter with the Divine from the perspective of the human in Him, and in His words find a bridge to our own deeply personal, truly human, ever approximate and potentially life-changing encounter with Him.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
How to read the Word of God? Reflections on the Book of Certitude
“In the name of God, the Exalted, the Most High. No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.”
With these words opens Baha’u’llah’s Book of Certitude. Without warning, without pause, perhaps even unawares we are transported to the edge of dilemma: do we identify ourselves with the type of reader which the book assumes is glancing at its pages - a reader devotedly seeking shores of oceanic understanding? Or do we resist the identification, proceeding as an audience other than the one presumed (intended) by Baha’u’llah? And if we do recognise in the quest for true understanding our own aspiration, do we accept the challenge of detachment as formulated in the text? More to the point, do we accept the book’s authority to prescribe at all? Or do we here part company with Baha’u’llah, choosing to measure the book by standards other than those laid out in its pages?
On our conscious or unconscious answer to these questions rests our subsequent experience of the text. These choices and decisions, not explicit in the text, lie implicit in the prescriptive authority assumed by Baha’u’llah throughout the work. The extent to which we either acquiesce to Baha’u’llah’s authorial voice, or distance ourselves therefrom, dictates a diversity of possible relationships between text and reader which in turn give rise to various ways of experiencing its meanings. It is this link between interpretation and experience, as conceived by Baha’u’llah, which we wish to explore in greater depth.
Let us return, then, to the beginning. “No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.” Implicit in this passage is, as we have said, an audience desirous to attain the wondrous vista, the “shores of the ocean of true understanding”.[1] The generic tone of the address, as of the work as a whole, further indicates that the book’s intended audience is not only one particular person seeking to attain unto these shores,[2] but rather a type or even archetype of reader, seeker-aspirant of this glorious destination.[3] Implicit in this aspiration, furthermore, is the fact of separation, of distance from one’s goal (true understanding), for one cannot aspire to attain a goal one has already reached. An unspoken recognition of the reader’s remoteness from true understanding thus provides or rather signals the point of departure. It evokes receptivity - a willingness to listen openly and sincerely to an authorial voice that speaks as if from deep within or far above in the preamble of the book.
But such desire to attain, such awareness of the distance, are deemed insufficient: “except” we be “detached from all that is in heaven and on earth”, we shall in no wise “attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding”. The use of the conditional (“except he be detached...”) implies that detachment is not inherent in the journeying. It is possible to travel towards true understanding without detachment, but though one may indeed thus travel, one will never thus attain.
Expatiating on the meaning of these initial words the next paragraph states:
“The essence of these words is this: they that tread the path of faith, they that thirst for the wine of certitude, must cleanse themselves of all that is earthly - their ears from idle talk, their minds from vain imaginings, their hearts from worldly affections, their eyes from that which perisheth.”
In what could almost be considered a paraphrase of the earlier passage, the book’s ideal reader is defined still more clearly. Not only must he desire to attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding; he must also “tread the path of faith” and “thirst for the wine of certitude.” Unlike detachment, which quality the conditional clause implies could be absent during the journey, the other three requisites are treated as a given, a sine qua non of the journey itself. An intention - to attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding; a designated and ongoing action - treading the path of faith; and an inner state - thirst for certitude’s mystic wine. Bereft of these three, not just the goal, the book advises, but the very journey, are beyond reach.
The Author thus seems to be emphatically inculcating certain attitudes in the audience. An ideal reader is being not merely hoped for or awaited – but rather actively cultivated. It becomes clear that there are preconditions imposed by the book upon its reader without which one may not fully participate in its paradigm. Unless these conditions apply to us as readers, while reading of the book will still be possible, our attempts at understanding it ‘from within’ will be in fact precluded. For unless we are in actual fact upon a quest for true understanding, treading the path of faith, and thirsting for the wine of certitude, we will fall outside the scope of the book’s intended, or at least implicit, audience.
This of course does not mean that only those who fulfil or desire to fulfil these requisites will be able to derive meaning from the Book of Certitude. The literary, philosophical, even aesthetic contents of the Book of Certitude may be equally accessible to readers who recognise and readers who reject the Author’s claim to prescriptive authority. Both audiences may well arrive at similar or identical conclusions as to the meaning of a text. But the psychological effect of arriving at those shared conclusions is likely to differ in relation to one’s attitudes to the Author’s claims to authority, implicit in his interpretive demands. Readings which do not accept the Book of Certitude’s underlying premises; readings which do not, for instance, involve the intense spiritual seeking so emphatically inculcated in its opening pages, will result in an experience of the text other than that expected by its Author.
One of the most significant then, if least obvious themes of the Book of Certitude, is what may be termed the psychological, or more precisely the mystical, dimension of hermeneutics. In linking true understanding – the quintessencial subject of hermeneutics – to spiritual states, Baha’u’llah aligns the hermeneutical process to what is best described as mystical experience. The exploration of a sacred text, when undertaken under the pale of Baha’u’llah’s exhortations, becomes a journey of the soul into the realm of the spirit: the mystical City of
From this perspective, Baha’u’llah’s Book of Certitude appears intended primarily, not to impart certain information or expound a given set of opinions (which any intelligent reader is likely to be able to grasp), but to have a specific existential/mystical effect which only a spiritually engaged reading can induce. The hermeneutical process is thus harnessed to the goal of spiritual education. Rather than focusing on dispelling the obscurities of a specific set of escathological traditions as voiced by Haji Mirza Siyyid Muhammad, for which a more traditional tafsir approach would have been perhaps more appropriate, Baha’u’llah uses the Haji’s questions as a means of directing him, and by extension the full compass of the intended audience, to the qualities of mind and heart that according to the Book of Certitude can alone enable a reader to truly understand, that is to say, truly experience, the allusions at hand and others akin to them.
The underlying method involves linking the text’s message to a series of interpretive obstacles which act as spiritual stimuli. These obstacles take the form of premises and attitudes which must be developed or overcome in order to attain the goal of “true understanding”. They function simultaneously as gates mediating entry into a privileged experience of the text, and as barriers defending or concealing the full meaning of the book from audiences regarded as unworthy to receive it or unready to accept it. Hence, the Book of Certitude may perhaps be said to have a less obvious intended audience than might at first be imagined: a reader who, though not yet fulfilling its criteria for true understanding, is yet desirous of fulfilling them, and willing to spend the necessary effort.
In reality, our approach to Scripture, to the practice of “sacred reading” more generally, and to our investigation of life itself, proceeds, if we are to follow Bahá’u’lláh’s injunctions and the vistas they unfold, in the reverse direction to that followed in this essay. It begins, in fact, in the striving for a spiritual condition which is the fundamental prerequisite of true understanding, and which the Book of Certitude explicitly, and the whole Bahá’í canon implicitly, seek to stimulate. It is out of this inner yearning, and sincere labour, that wells out the true intellectual humility and compassion that make possible an open-minded and loving eye. The receptivity, self-awareness, and independence of thought that such a spiritual condition and hermeneutical attitude engenders, empowers us to engage with the ambiguities, perplexities, contradictions and paradoxes of real life, in all its overwhelming immensity and plenitude, without yielding to either despair or dogmatism, and impels us, and makes us ever more capable, to achieve reconciliation in an increasingly fissiparous world.
[1] the word here translated as "true understanding" is irfan, a word rich in mystic resonances. The word is present in the short Baha'i obligatory prayer, as well as in the opening paragraph of Baha'u'llah's Most Holy Book, and in both texts it is held up as the purpose of existence. Irfan is further translated by Shoghi Effendi as "knowledge" and as "recognition" of God and His Manifestation. Islamicists usually translate the term as "gnosis". Its prominence in Islamic mysticism may be inferred from the fact that the word irfan, according to Siyyid Hussein Nasr, was used in post-Safavid Iran, especially in the nineteenth century, as a euphemistic way of referring to sufism when the latter was repressed and socially unacceptable. Irfan is sometimes described as "relational knowledge" as opposed to purely rational or analytical knowledge, and is said to involve spiritual communion, mystic insight and love.
[2] Such as Haji Mirza Siyyid Muhammad, the maternal uncle of the Bab in answer to whose questions the Book of Certitude was written.
Friday, 6 July 2007
Poems of the Journey: Absent Beloved
I cannot describe or present this latest poem of the journey, the sigh of a fractured, if loving soul, which only utter Beauty and utter helplessness might explain.
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Poems of the Journey: Absent Beloved
Absent Beloved
You see me immobile, straining to step into your court, unable even to fix my gaze upon your winged feet.
I fail utterly to rest upon invisibility, even when the visible has lost its power of conviction over my soul. Incapable to lure any longer my dreams, my hopes and expectations, it is still able to persuade, for moments upon accumulating moments, my full attention, the transient motions of my being, when all round me solidity presses its suit and promises in its all-surrounding embrace momentary escape from your absence's burning pain.
Desire overwhelms me, and all but undoes me. I can no longer tell what atom of this yearning is not you, for in your absence every shadow takes on your silhouette and torments my waking dreams. I call to you, with every tear and every smile (I can no longer tell them apart) while hope, exhausted, falters, and thirst images all round me a thousand empty mirages, which I readily discern as insubstantial, yet my unheeding, thirst-consumed limbs pursue in overwhelming need of respite, my will only at the very last imposing itself over this pointless career toward the emptiness of you, leaving my spirit not unscathed.
There is no part of me that has not sought you, no prayer left unsaid, no supplication unuttered, no tear unshed. There is no doctor, earthly or heavenly, to whom I have not turned to help me bear your absence, else draw it to a close. I have travelled the earth and joined every company, and also closed my eyes and sought you alone and quietly in the privacy of my habitation. I have sung to you songs of love where the wise gravely discourse; wept for you until more tears were impossible, yet keep on falling. I have kindled one hundred hearts in joy at your evocation - wounded hundreds more with the consequences of my majnun-like search of you.
I have sought you, beloved, from my youth, with all my innocence and vigour, and have aged prematurely upon reaching your door, and receiving your invitation, and hearing your most sweet voice, and smelling your exquisite perfume, and feeling your touch upon my skin - and discovering myself unable to respond, to step into your open chamber, cross your threshold, and join you, my love, my goal, my genesis, my all.
I know not what else to do, where else to go. You alone know the extent of my efforts. Only you can plumb the depths of my disappointment, the measure of my failure, the scale of my self-defeat, the accumulated grains of loneliness that add up to this desert of longing.
And yet, goal of my heart, perhaps your greatest miracle in me is that I am still far, very far from losing hope. Your tender, flashing eyes, even in the distance, even behind the luminous veil that hides your face, speak intimately to my heart such ravishing beauty and compassion, that I know, I know however far I seem destined to remain, yet you are nearer. I do not understand this statement of mine which my throbbing heart beats when I lift my gaze to yours. But what is the logic of words where beauty reigns?
Beloved one. You know my heart. You know my desperate, if not despairing need, and the exact limits of my strength.
Do not abandon me.
I know my undeserving. You know my sincerity, all there is of it.
I do not ask relief, best beloved - my tears and searing sighs are your kisses upon my neck - but only faithfulness. The strength to come to rest without distraction in your invisibility, rest fully, joyfully and undeviatingly, else be granted in my weakness a visible path to rest in you.
You know what is in me. I know only my desire to be yours without remnant or delay, and be granted the insight and ability to court you in deeds that destroy in triumphant celebration the lukewarm traces of mediocrity in love.
Whatever I am, I am yours. All else is my love for your mirrored image upon creation's troubled waters, and my unwise and self-destroying impatience with your absence. Even my failures in your path are signals of your conquest. Like Jami's Zuleika, if I slit my own hands while preparing the banquet, it is only because you just stepped into the room, and I lost my concentration.
Friday, 22 June 2007
Poems of the Journey: Preamble to a Wish
Here is another "poem of the journey", as I have chosen to refer to these burning sighs. This one is the fruit of my reflections on the preamble to the Long Obligatory Prayer, which in truth may be an entire journey, in itself, into the heart of obligatory prayer, and a gateway to sincerity. May we be confirmed in our quest for authenticity at the moment, that unique, atemporal moment, that kairos, of true prayer.
PREAMBLE TO A WISH
“Whoso wisheth...”
Whose own wishes
spread like canvas
for His hand to trace
its wishes on?
Who
so wishes
so longs
so yearns?
Who so wishes
“let him stand up”
above what
inclination
from what
reclining state
“and turn”
at last away from all
inertia?
“unto God”
advance
approach
the Wish of Him
Who wishes
we might wish so?
Who so wisheth
to recite this prayer
let him stand up
and turn
unto God.
Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Seeing the end in the beginning: the Birth of the Báb
Meditation on the Occasion of the Birth of the Báb
Continuing what might be called my meditations on the Bahá'í Holy Days I share here a meditation on the Birth of the Báb which I wrote for the 20th of October of 2001. It includes little known accounts of what He was like as a suckling, and His mother's memories of His infancy. It speaks not just of yesterday, but of today, and of tomorrow, and brings us sweet perfumes from the city of Shiraz.
On the night of October 20th 1819, on the first day of Muharram in the year 1235 A.H.,1 slumbering humanity slept on, and few were the souls that rose to greet the birth of Siyyid ‘Alí Muh?ammad, the Báb, in the home of Áqá Mírzá ‘Alí, His mother’s uncle, in the fabled city of Shíráz.
Shíráz, fortunate city! Well did the celebrated E.G. Browne speak of you as “the home of Persian culture, the mother of Persian genius, the sanctuary of poetry and philosophy, Shíráz.”2 A thousand times over was Háfiz's supplication granted, when he cried out in his love for you:
“Sweet is Shíráz and its incomparable site!
O God, preserve it from decline!”3
For on that sacred night, unbeknownst to your sleeping children, you attained to your greatest accolade, becoming the dayspring of revelation and birthplace of the One Whom the Tongue of Grandeur designated as King of the Messengers.4 Today you are honoured among His lovers, who long to kiss your blessed dust, set apart by the Most Great Name as a site of pilgrimage unto the people of Bahá.
And yet, Shíráz, notwithstanding such bestowals, incarceration and martyrdom were the only welcome forthcoming from the majority of your dwellers and their compatriots to One whose name they had for a thousand years invoked. On the anniversary of His own birth, ensconced within a fortress, buried like a seed fertile under the oppressive soil, the Primal Point recalled, in a supplication to the All-Merciful, the night Shíráz attained to its heart’s desire:
“Through the revelation of Thy grace, O Lord, Thou didst call Me into being on a night such as this, and lo, I am now lonely and forsaken in a mountain. Praise and thanksgiving be unto Thee for whatever conformeth to Thy pleasure within the empire of heaven and earth. And all sovereignty is Thine, extending beyond the uttermost range of the kingdoms of Revelation and Creation.
“Thou didst create Me, O Lord, through Thy gracious favour and didst protect Me through Thy bounty in the darkness of the womb and didst nourish Me, through Thy loving-kindness, with life-giving blood. After having fashioned Me in a most comely form, through Thy tender providence, and having perfected My creation through Thine excellent handiwork and breathed Thy Spirit into My body through Thine infinite mercy and by the revelation of Thy transcendent unity, Thou didst cause Me to issue forth from the world of concealment into the visible world, naked, ignorant of all things, and powerless to achieve aught. Thou didst then nourish Me with refreshing milk and didst rear Me in the arms of My parents with manifest compassion, until Thou didst graciously acquaint Me with the realities of Thy Revelation and apprised Me of the straight path of Thy Faith as set forth in Thy Book”5
And so in a Shírází merchant’s home the Báb was born “from the world of concealment into the visible world”, twenty-five years, four months, and four days before the birth of His Revelation, the promised Day of God yet unseen and pulsating within the soul of a newly born Child.
A touching evocation of His earliest days and months comes from the words of His fortunate mother, the noble Fátimih Bigum, who was frequently heard to recount:
“Often He was serene and made no noise. During the twenty-four hour period, He would desire milk only four times and while nursing would be most gentle and no movement was discerned from His mouth. Many a time I would be disturbed as to why this Child was not like others and thought that perhaps He suffered some internal ailment which made Him not desire milk. Then I would console myself that if indeed He experienced some unknown illness, He would manifest signs of agitation and restlessness. Unlike other children, during the weaning period, He did not complain nor behaved in any unseemly manner. I was most thankful that now that the Exalted Lord had granted me this one Child, He is gentle and agreeable.”6
How dimly the world suspected the significance of the birth of that Unique One, to outward seeming an ordinary Child, yet Bearer of an extraordinary destiny: an Infant “naked, ignorant and powerless” yet with all the mysteries of creation and revelation latent within His rarified Soul!
Indeed, far from celebrating, the chosen land of Persia was dressed in mourning. For the night of the Promised One’s birth coincided with the first of ten days of ritual lamentation for the third Imam’s martyrdom, the sublime Husayn, killed at the hands of the Umayyad armies of the caliph Yazíd on the plains of Karbilá, some eleven centuries earlier. This melancholy occasion undoubtedly constitutes the most important, and most tragic commemoration in the Shí’i sacred calendar, and so it was amidst the mourning and loud weeping of the masses that the very stones of Shíráz cried out in the sheer joy of reunion. Lost in their lamentation were the weeping crowds, “bereft of discernment to see God with their own eyes or hear His melodies with their own ears”.7 And thus bereft, those eyes shed a river of tears for the Imam Huseyn on the day when the he himself surely rejoiced at the birth of His glorious Kinsman. Those same weeping eyes that remained dry on the day 750 muskets pierced the breast of the true Joseph.8
As the earth rejoiced and the tears of the people rained down on the sacred night the Báb was born, pathos and joy embraced as long-parted lovers clinging the one to the other like candle and flame, reconciled henceforth.
One hundred and eighty two years later one wonders how often, for lack of discernment, we weep for yesteryear when jubilation beckons in seemingly ordinary births, if only we had eyes to see. How often do the revelations of His grace “issue forth from the world of concealment into the visible world” in modest garb, hidden in the mountain of material life and sight awaiting recognition in the realm of insight and discernment, and within that realm, awaiting celebration. The realm of insight where within the ordinary the extraordinary is grasped, and in the captive seed the luscious fruit is intuited and even tasted before the youngest shoot springs forth.
For the prayer revealed by the Báb on the anniversary of His birth, tracing His journey from conception to maturity, might speak also for every one of His lovers in our community of broken winged birds, and for the metaphorical children born of our servitude in His path. The prayer gives praise for each stage of development, from existence in the darkness of the womb, through birth into powerlessness and dependence, to ultimate arrival at the gate of God’s good pleasure. Might this trajectory not be observed, in its own way, in relation to the many instruments of our servitude and worship, be it study circles or Local Spiritual Assemblies; scholarship or the arts; devotional meetings or children’s classes; firesides and nineteen day feasts; or quiet acts of hospitality like those of Jináb-i-Mírzá Muhammad-Qulí, that faithful brother of the Blessed Beauty who would simply “pass around the tea”, “always silent”, holding fast to the Covenant of ‘Am I not your Lord?’9
It is the eye of discernment alone that makes it possible to look upon nascent institutions and infant instruments of service, “naked, ignorant of all things, and powerless to achieve aught”, and yield praise for the revelation of His transcendent unity in the simple fact of their existence; their having issued forth, powerless and fragile, “from the world of concealment into the visible world”. It is spiritual discernment, again, that gives us the joy and patience to nourish such infant creatures “with refreshing milk” and rear them in our arms “with manifest compassion”, till they become acquainted, in the fullness of time, “with the realities of Thy Revelation” and apprised “of the straight path of Thy Faith as set forth in Thy Book”
How great the temptation, as we nurture our communities and our own souls amidst the conspicuous signs of our relative immaturity, “to be disturbed”, like the mother of the Báb, “as to why this Child was not like others” and think that “perhaps He suffered some internal ailment which made Him not desire milk”. Whereas the eye of discernment might perceive, amidst the fissiparous forces of a distracted and distracting world, amidst the materialism and indifference and strife that tear apart the society to which we all belong, that which might, with Fatimih Bigum, make us “most thankful that now that the Exalted Lord had granted me this one Child, He is gentle and agreeable.”
The birth of the Báb is a call to celebration then, but also a call to spiritual discernment. So that, should a night arrive like unto the night in which we were born and find us prisoned in a forbidding mountain, be it built of heart’s fragments or of cold stone, we might with the Báb exclaim to God:
“Praise and thanksgiving be unto Thee for whatever conformeth to Thy pleasure within the empire of heaven and earth. And all sovereignty is Thine, extending beyond the uttermost range of the kingdoms of Revelation and Creation.”
Glad tidings!
1 See, Nabil-i Azam, The Dawnbreakers, (trans. Shoghi Effendi) p.73, BPT, Wilmette, 1970
2 EG Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (1893), p.283, Century Publishing edition, London, 1984
3 Cited in ibid. p.287
4 Bahá'u'lláh, Tablet of Ahmad, Arabic, Bahá'í Prayers, BPT, UK
5 Selections from the Writings of the Bab, p.173-74, Baha'i World Centre, 1982.
6 Cited in Mirza Habibu'llah Afnan’s account of the Bab in Shiraz, translated by Ahang Rabbani, Translations of Shaykhi, Babi and Bahá'í Texts, No. 11, Dec 1997, H-Bahá'í
7 Bahá'u'lláh, Tablet of Ahmad, Arabic.
8 Cf. The Qayyúmu’l-Asmá’, cited in SWB, p.4
9.Memorials of the Faithful pages 70-72
Monday, 18 June 2007
A tribute to ten Shirazi women
"Two days later, Mona and the other nine women were told that they would be given one more chance to recant their Faith or be sentenced to die. It was their last chance to remain alive. That night, Mona had another dream in which she was in prison saying the long obligatory prayer. Abdu'l-Baha came through the cell door and sat on the bed on which Mona's mother was sleeping. Tahirih Siyavushi was sleeping on the floor. He patted her mother's head and raised His other hand towards Mona, who thought to herself that He might leave if she continued saying her prayer. So she sat on her knees in front of Abdu'l-Baha and held her hands in His. 'Abdu'l-Baha asked Mona, "What do you want?" Mona replied, "Steadfastness." 'Abdu'l-Baha asked again, "What do you want from us?" Mona replied, "Steadfastness for all the friends." Abdu'l-Baha asked for a third time, "What do you want?" Mona again replied, "Steadfastness." Then Abdu'l-Baha said twice, "It is granted. It is granted." "
"Mona replied, 'Mother, If I knew that during each year I spend in prison only a few people become Baha'is, I would wish that I could spend a hundred thousand years in prison.'
'And if I knew that because of my execution, all the youth of the world would arise, join hands in service to humanity, become selfless, teach the world about Baha'i ideals and try to move the world, I would beg Baha'u'llah to give me 100,000 lives to sacrifice in his path.' "
* * * * *
It is with trepidation that I begin to write these words. My heart’s vocabulary of emotions seems unequal to the object of my contemplation, how much more the groaning structure of my words. I have prayed with all the fervour of my heart for the sincerity to feel, the eloquence to express. And yet, at the gateway, my knees weaken.
Tahirih Siyavushi, when she placed her neck upon the noose, was my age as I write these lines. Mona Mahmudnizhad, when she breathed her last, was my age when I became a Bahá’í. Mrs. Yalda’i was the same age as my mother is today, when they killed her after whipping her two hundred times, blending her clothes with her skin. Mrs Ishraqi was only four years younger. Her daughter Roya, Zarrin Muqimi, Shirin Dalvand, Akhtar Sabit, Simin Sabiri, and Mahsrid Nirumand, were all younger than I am.
This very night, perhaps this very hour at which I am now writing, twenty four years ago, they were killed for a Faith whose name I bear.When I think of them, I remember the living.
Not in the abstract.
I remember a young Shirazi woman in the lonely town of Felixtowe, England, who taught me to pray, not in words, but in the fervour of her supplications, and the burning fire in her gut at the perplexity of being alive, of being spared, when those ten women, when Mona, her own friend, were not. I think of her brother, and his dreams of Bahá’u’lláh, and his unassuming, yet unflagging and fruit-bearing dedication to servitude to His Cause. I think of the same outwardly disciplined, inwardly consuming flame in the serenely fervent eyes, brimming with unshed yet constantly flowing tears - of devotion and pain and longing - of a lone woman scholar of Shiraz, of the same generation, who now quietly but powerfully sheds her light in far distant Northern climes. And I think of those ten women’s fellow prisoner, who blessed my house with her stay, and befriended my three year old child, with whom I was united, for brief hours, in their remembrance, as I laboured to bring her voice, and their memory, to tens of thousands of readers of two publications in Scotland. And I remember a husband and wife I briefly met at the Guardian’s resting place in London, on a brief respite from some six years spent in different Iranian prisons, on their way back to Iran to likely future incarceration. They invited me to be their guest, should I ever visit the land of my heart’s desire. I felt they were my hosts already, as they shared of the abundance of their sorrow-seared, joy-irradiated, hearts.
That quiet intensity in the eyes of these cherished companions, or rather, to use a Persian idiom, that burning in their liver - something at once intensely spiritual, and visceral, instinct at once with light and only just contained emotion, like a voice that says, at every moment “Do not rest! Do not falter! Do not betray the trust!” - is to me pure evocation, lingering perfume of a moment, a moment that broke through the bars and walls of Adelabad and Seppah, and refused to become past, remaining instead present, ever ongoing, long after the fingers that type these fugitive words join the earth that entombs their precious if ephemeral bodies.
Perhaps my thoughts turn so immediately, so instinctively to these friends of mine, who belong, not by design or by appointment, to what the Bahá’í writings call “the remnant of the martyrs”, even as their forebears were the “remnants of the sword” (baqiyyatu’s sayf), because they seem to hear most immediately and pressingly, most continually and urgently, an admonishment that these ten women, and their fathers, and husbands and friends who shared their fate call out to us, in that silence that speaks when words avail not, call out insistently, in the manner of their death, to the manner of our lives.
I do not know by what means to fit my feet into their crimson footprints. My spirit breaks with love and inadequacy. Many are the things I hoped to say in this brief tribute. None have the strength to make it past my yearning. I can only hope the heat of their affliction is such as to burn at least some links in the long chain of self-defeat that holds me back from flying as my innermost spirit visions and desires, and that the selfsame heat does make me move, move an inch, a mile, a frasakh:
“While Persia remains heedless and unaware and its sorely-tried friends are beset by grievous repressions and cruelties, the hosts of life, the bearers of the divine Message of salvation are moving far and wide over the extensive territories of the free world, and bending their energies to capture the citadels of men's hearts. The motivating impulse, the driving power which is responsible for the successful achievements of these sanctified beings is derived from the heat and flame and the influence released through the relentless persecutions and ordeals which the pure-hearted friends in Persia are enduring. Wherefore has the Master said: When the light of God is ignited in the East it will shed illumination upon the West and its evidences will become visible both in the North and in the South.” (Shoghi Effendi, Fire and Light (Nar va Nur), section III)
How inert my motion feels in relation to the flame that burnt up those ten hearts this night in 1983 - and their pain was real, and trying, and their supplications for firmness constant (perhaps an indication of an equally constant awareness of a dangerous fragility under inconceivable mental, and emotional, and spiritual stress), however triumphant and spiritually jubilant the final outcome.
And yet, I look inside my heart, and I find the fragrance of their sacrifice in the very depths of my aspiration, I find a love for their spirits, for their humanity, and for the manner of their love. I find within myself a yearning for faithfulness to the trust of their sacrifice, for answer to their call, in Mona’s case explicit and unequivocally, for a reaction from us all, a reaction to their deaths in the form of genuine, burning servitude, and I cannot ignore that indeed, in their sacrifice is, even for such an indigent one as me, a “motivating impulse”, a “driving power”, that does “shed illumination” over the farthest reaches of my soul.
It is up to me, with God’s assistance, for the “evidences” of such a driving power as their martyrdom contains, so far invisible and folded in the recesses of unrealized aspiration and longing, to “become visible both in the North and in the South.” I feel unequal to the task, but cannot rest in such a feeling. I lack the language to address those 10 women, to lift my heart in prayer and give expression to my feelings. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s own voice gives vent to my humble request to Mona, Roya, Zarrin, Shirin, Akhtar, Simin, Mahsrid, Mrs Ishraqi and Mrs. Yalda’i:
“O ye who have suffered martyrdom! O trustees of His Revelation! …O illustrious and noble ones! May my inmost reality, my spirit, my entire being and whatsoever God hath bestowed upon me through His bounty and grace be laid down as a sacrifice for you.
I bear witness that ye are the radiant stars, the gleaming meteors, the resplendent full moons. the brilliant orbs in this wondrous Revelation. Well is it with you, O birds that warble in the gardens of divine unity; blessed are ye, O lions that roar in the forests of detachment; happy are ye. O leviathans that swim in the waters of His oneness. Verily ye are the signs of divine guidance. ye are the banners that flutter in the field of sacrifice.
I beseech God to bless me, through the breezes of holiness wafted from that glorious centre of sacrifice, and to quicken me with the reviving breath of heavenly communion blowing from that blessed region.
I beg you to intercede on my behalf in the presence of the ever-living, sovereign Lord that He may graciously suffer me to quaff my fill from the choice sealed wine, may grant me a portion from the unbounded felicity that ye enjoy and may exhilarate my heart by giving me to drink from your chalice which is tempered at the Camphor Fountain. Verily my Lord is merciful and forgiving. By bestowing the bounty of sacrifice in this realm of existence, He aideth whomsoever He willeth with whatsoever He pleaseth.”
((‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Fire and Light (Nar va Nur), section XX)
And so, as I remember these ten women, and the 200 believers who were executed in those years, and the afflictions that still rain down on the sweet and valiant friends of Iran, and as I approach the day in which the King of the Messengers was martyred, I cannot but evoke the glorious company which those ten women joined on this, their festal night:
“How well is it said:
'The worldly wise who garner the ears of grain
are unaware of Layla's secret, For unto none was accorded the great glory
but Majnun --
he who set the whole harvest afire.'
“... In this way most of the favoured ones of God offered up their lives as martyrs in the field of sacrifice. He Who is the resplendent Morn of divine guidance, the Exalted One [the Bab] sank below the horizon of sacrifice. Quddus sought companionship with the Beloved through glorious martyrdom. Mulla Husayn opened a new gate to the field of martyrdom. Vahid distinguished himself as a peerless figure in the arena of sacrifice. Zanjani [Hujjat] offered up his life as a martyr upon the plain of tribulation. The King of Martyrs hastened forth to the place of sacrifice. The Beloved of Martyrs was enraptured with ineffable gladness when he offered up his life for the sake of God. Ashraf attained the heights of honour as he unflinchingly set his face towards the arena of sacrifice. Badi', as he breathed his last, exclaimed: 'Magnified be my Lord, the Most Glorious!' The martyrs of the land of Ya [Yazd] drank their fill with relish from the draught of glorious martyrdom, and the martyrs of Shiraz laid down their lives in the arena of ardent love to the tune of sweet and wondrous melodies. Those massacred in the land of Nayriz were inebriated with the brimful cup of sacrifice, and the martyrs of Tabriz were seized with ecstatic joy and unleashed new energies in the field of sacrifice. Those who renounced their lives in Mazandaran exclaimed: 'O Lord! Destine for us this cup that brimmeth over with the choice wine'; while the martyrs of Isfahan laid down their lives with utmost joy and radiance.
“…In truth those that are guided solely by their reason would be unable to perceive the sweetness of this cup, but the ardent lovers will be overjoyed and enraptured by the holy ecstasy which this wondrous draught doth produce. Every discerning observer who hath gazed upon the countenance of that graceful Beloved was prompted to lay down his life as a martyr, and every receptive ear which had hearkened unto that celestial melody suffered its listener to become so enravished with joy as to offer up himself without hesitation as a sacrifice. The moth which is animated by love will burn its wings as it flitteth round the lamp of God and the phoenix of tender affection will be set ablaze by the fire of ardent desire. No unfamiliar bird can partake of the heat of this Fire, nor can the fowls that dwell upon the dust plunge forth into this heavenly Ocean. However, praise be unto God, ye are the leviathans of this ocean, the birds of this pasture, the moths of this lamp, the nightingales of this meadow.
And upon ye rest the glory of the Most Glorious!”
(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Fire and Light (Nar va Nur), section XIII)
Tuesday, 12 June 2007
Poems of the Journey: In Circumambulation
Given the rather dense nature of recent postings, I feel a need to look upwards, to the Beauty that, in the final analysis, is the single point of knowledge, which the ignorant have multiplied, the beginning and the end of the journey, the very thing that in the end, makes us recklessly throw caution into the air and, forgetting what we read in the books of the grammarians, the stronghold of our certainties, cast ourselves into His sea.
"The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric and grammar
Be then as nothing, and walk upon the waves".
In Circumambulation
I go around in circles seeking entrance to Your dwelling, and each time my very soul cries out - thus far, no further. The hair’s breadth that separates us stretches to infinity when I try to bridge the gap. Circling Your home, I return always to this spot. Circumambulating Your presence, I arrive once more to my starting point.
Cherished one! The love of You has filled me and exceeded me and therefore broken me. What is this union whose taste is separation? This caress that makes clear I cannot touch You? What is this water that makes athirst, this sobering wine, this food that sates with yet more hunger?
And yet though alone, disconsolate and helplessly enraptured, I remain intoxicated, drunk with Your majesty, sighing with relief amidst anxiety in the intuition of Your name, the Merciful. No voice is sweeter than Yours, no comfort real outside Your arms. All else but You in the end falters, and I cling to You, and am pacified. I place my trials at Your feet like petals, and inhale Your own fragrance, the perfume of Your grace. The consciousness of Your presence, beyond my separation, fills me with joy, and the colours of this world dissolve in the radiance of Your face, and the murmur of the world is stilled at the sound of Your footsteps, and I with all creation watch, breathless, the miracle that is Your gait.
Beloved! Watch me melting, dissolving like clay in the ocean of Your name, the All-Glorious. Be with me, my friend, my protector, for I fear oblivion, I fear perpetual, final separation. I fear to go down into Your waters as a little ball of clay, diminished but unvanished. Forgive me, precious one, my want of trust. Overlook my fears. Visit my soul.
Sunday, 27 May 2007
Daring to be Vulnerable
You write regarding the foundation of trust and communication in our communities: "My own observation is that the greatest healing moments come when an individual takes the risk to be vunerable and reach out to another individual. Those healed relationships ripple outwards."
How very true that seems to me too! It recalls to me 'Abdu'l-Baha's injunction to "expose your breasts for a target mirror bright". There is an immense strength in the act of vulnerability, and in fact it seems to me that it is precisely through the power of vulnerability that the Messengers and Chosen Ones of God have established their ascendency and effected change in society beyond their contemporaries' wildest dreams. It was not through the might of arms or wealth or dissimulation or guardedness that They conquered the hearts of humanity, but rather through Their willingness to trust in human beings when all around Them was betrayal and outward disappointment. It was Their willingness to offer love to those who would spurn Them, even unto torture and death. It was Their acts of self-disclosure when the mere thought of the risks entailed in Their unveiling would be enough to throw a lesser being into utter consternation - as Baha'u'llah Himself tells us in the Iqan referring to the Bab's divine mission:
"Another proof and evidence of the truth of this Revelation, which amongst all other proofs shineth as the sun, is the constancy of the eternal Beauty in proclaiming the Faith of God. Though young and tender of age, and though the Cause He revealed was contrary to the desire of all the peoples of earth, both high and low, rich and poor, exalted and abased, king and subject, yet He arose and steadfastly proclaimed it. All have known and heard this. He was afraid of no one; He was regardless of consequences. Could such a thing be made manifest except through the power of a divine Revelation, and the potency of God’s invincible Will? By the righteousness of God! Were any one to entertain so great a Revelation in his heart, the thought of such a declaration would alone confound him! Were the hearts of all men to be crowded into his heart, he would still hesitate to venture upon so awful an enterprise. He could achieve it only by the permission of God, only if the channel of his heart were to be linked with the Source of divine grace, and his soul be assured of the unfailing sustenance of the Almighty." (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 232)
This passage, at the same time, seems to me to give us the secret of this most healing of vulnerabilities: "He could achieve it only by the permission of God, only if the channel of his heart were to be linked with the Source of divine grace, and his soul be assured of the unfailing sustenance of the Almighty."
It seems to me that, to effect healing and build genuine spiritual intimacy within our communities, we need to achieve this spiritual vulnerability, this self exposure before one another that can deepen and refine love, but that to do so, this vulnerability should be "linked with the Source of divine grace" and sustained by the assurance of the "unfailing sustenance of the Almighty." In other words, in our vulnerability and powerlesness, in expressing our frailty or identifying our brokeness, whether as individuals or as communities, we should not do so expecting reddress or relief from one another, but rather depending on the bounty of the Lord God. For we are all ultimately a community of broken winged birds, and our flight is very slow. "We come with no provision but our sins, with no good deeds to tell of, only hopes" as 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote in the exquisite prayer that forms the second section of Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l Baha.
I have come to think that an inevitable effect of bringing diversity together, not only of ethnicity or culture but also of temperament, inclination, personality, emotional strength, etc., is the noticeable emergence of blindspots that keep us from appreciating or effectively honouring each other's distinctiveness. Our very diversity means that of necesity, as we get to know each other, we will tread on each other's sensibilities, display ignorance about each other's values and, generally inadvertently, act in ways that unconsciously exclude one another from full heartfelt participation in our emerging community. In this context, our readiness to be vulnerable can act both as healing water that gently fills the gaps in our understanding and our insight into each other, or as fuel to fan the flame of disharmony when tied to expectations of each other that are unrealistic, or when expressed in language that is immoderate, or when touched by bitterness or lingering resentment.
When the act of vulnerability is divorced from consciousness of the presence and almighty assistance of God, it generally comes to depend on human or material means for fulfilment, exposing one to disappointment in each other, to hoplesness, and disconnection. When, on the contrary, the act of vulnerability is "linked with the Source of divine grace", then spiritual abundance sustains the act of self exposure, confidence in ultimate fruition in God's will informs the manner and tone of our communication, and the possible outward disappointments and rejections we might suffer are powerless to disillusion or divide us. For such a link with the Source of grace implies a trust in Him above and beyond this world, which is the source of true inner peace and contentment. Indeed, it seems to me that this spiritual vulnerability is captured in the sublime words addressed by the Master to Hand of the Cause Tarazullah Samandari, whose bounty it was to have known Baha'u'llah:
"O thou who art turning thy face towards God! Close thine eyes to all things else, and open them to the realm of the All-Glorious. Ask whatsoever thou wishest of Him alone; seek whatsoever thou seekest from Him alone. With a look He granteth a hundred thousand hopes, with a glance He healeth a hundred thousand incurable ills, with a nod He layeth balm on every wound, with a glimpse He freeth the hearts from the shackles of grief. He doeth as He doeth, and what recourse have we? He carrieth out His Will, He ordaineth what He pleaseth. Then better for thee to bow down thy head in submission, and put thy trust in the All-Merciful Lord.
(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 52)
This means to me that, even as we turn to address the challenges and problems that affect or afflict our community or our relationships within it, in our hearts we seek the remedy from God "alone"; becoming independent and free from material causes and human capacities; depending in Him and trusting in His merciful Will. We supplicate to God, as in our Long Obligatory Prayer, even in the midst of our ardent yearnings and desires, "Look not upon my hopes and my doings, nay, rather look upon Thy Will that hath encompassed the heavens and the earth". Then, in the words of Baha'u'llah, will we feel "the winds of divine contentment blowing from the plane of the spirit." Then will we burn away "the veils of want, and with inward and outward eye, perceiveth within and without all things the day of: “God will compensate each one out of His abundance.” (Baha'u'llah, The Seven Valleys, p. 30)
Our vulnerability, then, begins in a consciousness of God's omniptence and mercy, and human beings' ineradicable imperfection and inadequacy of response (our own included):
"Look ye not upon the creatures, turn ye to their Creator. See ye not the never-yielding people, see but the Lord of Hosts. Gaze ye not down upon the dust, gaze upward at the shining sun, which hath caused every patch of darksome earth to glow with light. O army of God! When calamity striketh, be ye patient and composed. However afflictive your sufferings may be, stay ye undisturbed, and with perfect confidence in the abounding grace of God, brave ye the tempest of tribulations and fiery ordeals." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 75)
Only in such a plane will we attain the divine meekness to which Baha'u'llah called His own son when he counselled: "Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men." (Baha'u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 95)
For with the detachment implied in our absolute reliance "on Him alone" and not on each other, comes, inseparably, a meekness towards one another which Baha'u'llah Himself exemplified to us, and which is to me the very essence of the vulnerability the transforms and heals communities:
"Exalted, immeasurably exalted, is His detachment above the reach and ken of the entire creation! Glorified, glorified be His meekness—a meekness that hath melted the hearts of them that have been brought nigh unto God!" (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 244)
It is this divine meekness that holds the secret of unity, as explained by 'Abdu'l-Baha:
"His reason for putting on the heavy iron chains and for becoming the very embodiment of utter resignation and meekness, was to lead every soul on earth to concord, to fellow-feeling, to oneness; to make known amongst all peoples the sign of the singleness of God, so that at last the primal oneness deposited at the heart of all created things would bear its destined fruit, and the splendour of ‘No difference canst thou see in the creation of the God of Mercy,’[1] would cast abroad its rays." [1 Qur’án 67:3 ]
(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 264)
May we, through His unfailing bounty, attain to such meekness, and thereby taste of such concord, fellow-feeling, such primal oneness deposited, already, at the heart of all created things. Thank you, luminous Debra for your reflections, and accept these broken thoughts as a token of affection in this wonderful festival of Ridvan.
Your friend in Baha,
Ismael