Trust in the capacity of this generation to disentangle itself from the embroilments of a divided society. To discharge your responsibilities, you will have to show forth courage, the courage of those who cling to standards of rectitude, whose lives are characterized by purity of thought and action, and whose purpose is directed by love and indomitable faith. As you dedicate yourselves to healing the wounds with which your peoples have been afflicted, you will become invincible champions of justice.

(The Universal House of Justice, message to the Paraguay Youth Congress, 2000)

Dr. Susan Moody, with Baha'i women and girls in Iran.

When I was in high school, I read a book that left an indelible impression upon my heart.  It was The Diary of Juliet Thompson, an early American Baha’i living in New York City who had the good fortune to have spent time with ‘Abdu’l-Baha in the Holy Land, Europe, and New York.  Juliet was loved dearly by ‘Abdu’l-Baha — He said that she would become the envy of future queens — but she was by no means perfect, and I think that’s why she appealed so much to me.

I read the book again this year, as summer turned to autumn: before going to sleep, my eyelids growing heavy as I tried to catch another chapter; on the city bus, almost missing my stop; at lunch breaks from work, sitting in a garden tucked behind high-rises and not wanting my hour to be up.  One evening, lying on the couch with dinner in one hand and my book in the other, I gazed out the window at the sunset, watching a plane descend at the distance.  I had the great feeling of wanting to sacrifice very much to help bring about a new civilization that Baha’u'llah taught of, borne out of the great love for ‘Abdu’l-Baha that Juliet transmitted through these pages.

And it occurred to me that I had had that very same feeling when reading it as a high schooler.  I wondered what I had sacrificed — it didn’t feel like very much, and it always felt like I had some excuse; that “it’ll come later.”  But later was now, and what could I show of it?

Juliet’s diary did something to me, for as the autumn progressed, I picked books up and couldn’t put them down.  Books of great heroes, who sacrificed and had faith in a cause that would bring a new world long after they had passed away.  One book became two which became four, and before I knew it, I had devoured ten such books, as the fiery leaves that lined my street shriveled to dust, and D.C.’s first silent snow turned to blizzards.

These were stories of women and men in far-flung places (Persia, Bulgaria, Libya, Australia) and those closer to home (New York, Washington, D.C., Berkeley). They were stories of men who risked their very lives by, openly and stealthily, sharing with others Baha’u'llah’s message; and of women sacrificed material comforts to travel, alone, to distant lands, at advanced ages.

There are my favorites: the Western women who, although single — some never married, others widowed — traversed the globe and performed great acts of heroism.

There was Ella Bailey who, at eighty-eight years old, did not let a bad fall and a recent hospitalization prevent her from alighting upon her pioneering post in Tripoli, equipped with an oxygen mask, only to pass away a month after her arrival.  Martha Root, the “archetype of Bahá’í itinerant teachers,” who circled the world twice.  Keith Ransom-Kehler, twice widowed, with her endless trunks packed with couture, sludged through the mud of East Asia.  Susan Moody, who, at the age of fifty-eight, traveled alone to Iran at ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s request to provide healthcare for women, likewise starting the country’s first school for girls.  Marion Jack, sixty-five years old, moved from Canada to Bulgaria, living in a small hotel room through ill-health, freezing temperatures, and the Second World War.

These names — Ella, Keith, Marion, Susan, Martha — echoed in the memory of my formative years, and growing up, I associated those names with, “Well, I could never do what they did.”

But as I read on, what became increasingly apparent was their great heroism despite their human frailties: impatience, feelings of inadequacy, struggling to work in unity with others.  A line I read from the foreward of one of these books summed it up:

As we read about these early Baha’is, we realize that they were in many ways very much like ourselves, for they too had human weaknesses and shortcomings.  Their greatness lay in the quality of their faith in Baha’u'llah and His Message. This was the secret of their victory– despite their shortcomings.

(Gloria Faizi, Fire on the Mountain-top)

I realized any of us could be like them, and that there were a lot more of such people around me — whose lives are yet to be recorded in books — than I had imagined.

As I leave this city which I have occupied intermittently for the past five and half years, for warmer climes — leaving the comfort of plentiful friendships, organic markets, rapid public transportation, and clean sidewalks — off to an unknown destination to follow in their footsteps; in moments of fear of what may lie ahead, I remember these individuals who, ever human, were champions of justice:

Though they themselves would not live to see that day, they were prepared to sacrifice all they had if by doing so they could raise the call to unity, and prove to an unbelieving world that the wolf and the lamb could truly drink from the same stream….

(Gloria Faizi, Fire on the Mountain-top)

Prayer is communion with God.  Prayer is the channel through which we open our tender, fragile, delicate human hearts to our Lord.  Hearts which He has singled out as His throne — “All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee, except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory” (Bahá’u’lláh).  Hearts which in their delicateness and fragility often go astray.

We go through life hitching our wagons to stars that fall; whereupon we are miserable, and lasso the next ones.  Our leaves shrivel, our moons wane, the marbles we build our statues of are crumbled.  Only God is always strong, always there, always permanent.  Only God is worthy to be worked for.  And to achieve this detachment from everything except God we require prayer.

(Marzieh Gail, Dawn over Mount Hira)

We all struggle with our existence.  To understand ourselves and to understand one another.  Yet it seems that ‘finding ourselves’ is not something we can actually do on our own.  Shoghi Effendi explains that the more we search for ourselves the less likely we are to find ourselves; ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that the master key to self-discovery is self-forgetfulness.  But this task of forgetting ourselves is very difficult.  Especially living immersed in a social reality that begs to differ all the time.

We are exposed to music, television, films, books and popular thought that insist on the promotion of self as the key to happiness, that tell us “self-help” is “within our reach!” And then provide us with easy a+b=c formulas in self-help books and manuals to achieve just that.  But do they really work?  Probably not, or else why would keep buying the manuals?  We’re not satisfied yet.

Prayer and service, however…Prayer and service help us discover our true selves.  In prayer we ask God to help us be detached.  Not to fulfill our every whim and desire but to help us align our will to His.  His infinitely superior, infinitely wiser, infinitely more beneficial will.  And as we align our will to His, the mystery of “who am I?” and “why am I here?” begins to reveal itself.  The thing about this ‘mystery’ is that it does not ever seem to become permanently clear.

Many of us weave in and out of clarity, of acute awareness of who we are why we are here; or at the very least, of the discipline to fulfill our high purpose in this life.

Prayer, like any other habit, must be exercised daily or else it degenerates.  With increased use we become more adept at it, and with decreased use we become more likely to forget why we pray at all.  So we begin to lessen the habit and lessen the habit until it no longer forms part of our reality.  Then we begin to roam the self-help aisles in our mega-bookstores and indulge ourselves in thoughts and actions that centre around our own ‘happiness’ all the while neglecting the true fountain of joy in this life.  Nearness and servitude to God.  Nearness and servitude to His servants.

Each and every one of us, no matter how high or low our station in life, need to serve one another and care deeply about the welfare of each and all.  But maintaining this level of consciousness can be difficult without the assistance of prayer.   Additionally, prayer and meditation often make clear the ‘how’.  How do we assist one another?  How do we grow closer to God?

Then there is the sweetness of prayer.  The sweetness of surrender to One who is so far exalted above us and who loves us so truly, so completely—in a way that we can never really love ourselves or one another.  In His tablet to the Shah of Iran, Násiri’d-Din Sháh, Bahá’u’lláh explains to Him—a human being who caused so much pain and anguish, who was responsible for the torture and mass killings of thousands of early believers in Iran—to this person, Bahá’u’lláh says:

They that surround thee love thee for their own sakes, whereas this Youth loveth thee for thine own sake, and hath had no desire except to draw thee nigh unto the seat of grace, and to turn thee toward the right-hand of justice.

(Baha’u'llah)

But He also explains that in order for His love to reach us, we must love Him.  “Love me that I may love thee; if thou lovest Me not My love can in no wise reach thee.”

Prayer is an instrument we use to express our love for God and to deepen that love; to open ourselves to the grace and bounty that is continually flowing towards us.  Tyrant or saint; king or pauper.  One and all, He loves.

Marzieh Gail offers the following on the absurdity of asking why we must pray to God in order to grow near to Him:

And yet people inquire why they should pray, why God does not come to them — remarks as logical as sitting in a darkened room and wondering why all the sweep and glitter of the summer sunlight does not penetrate.

She also remarks that:

It is not surprising that a prayerless people are driven to drugs and stimulants and a hundred forms of useless activity. They have no antidote for life, and no effective means of achieving the ‘respite and nepenthe’ for which they long. It is not surprising that people cheat one another, desert one another, kill one another, because only universal prayer can make the world safe for us to live in.

Embedded in the act of prayer is also the feeling of ecstasy; the ecstasy of divine communion with the Source of our beings, with the Breath that animates our mortal frames.

Reveal then Thyself, O Lord, by Thy merciful utterance and the mystery of Thy divine being, that the holy ecstasy of prayer may fill our souls – a prayer that shall rise above words and letters and transcend the murmur of syllables and sounds – that all things may be merged into nothingness before the revelation of Thy splendor.

(Compilations, Baha’i Prayers)

Though there is much more that could be said on prayer, a final point that I feel must be included is that of cleansing our hearts.  Benjamin Franklin apparently kept a notebook with all his sins in it, but Confucius said, ‘I can do as my heart lusteth and never swerve from right’. The more we pray, the more we align our will to the Divine; the more we polish the rust from off our hearts and allow our desires to be such as will lead us to joy, to well-being — to God.

But if you think about it, all  religions have some version of a pilgrimage: a visit to a holy site which is usually linked to its Central Figure/s.  Aside from Baha’i holy sites, I have also visited Muslim, Christian and Jewish ones, and there is no question of the fervour and devotion of the devotees who have come (mostly from far distances) to pay their respects and to pray.

The main Baha’i Pilgrimage takes place in the Holy Land, spans nine days and consists of guided visits to the resting places (or Shrines) of the Central Figures of the Faith, various other sites in the Holy Land associated with them, and the Terraces and gardens on Mount Carmel.

But what is the purpose? For me, pilgrimage is similar to fasting, a time during which you focus your thoughts and energies on your spiritual life, a time to reflect and meditate.  Just the physical act of leaving your home and travelling to the Holy Land helps to divorce you from everyday concerns, the distance helping you to achieve a perspective which will allow you to properly evaluate your inner life. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has explained that:

Holy places are undoubtedly centres of the outpouring of Divine grace, because on entering the illumined sites associated with martyrs and holy souls, and by observing reverence, both physical and spiritual, one’s heart is moved with great tenderness.

Another aspect of the spiritual experience of pilgrimage is that you are one of a group of Baha’is from around the world.  Your pilgrim group (of a few hundred people per nine-day cycle) will have dozens of races, ethnicities and nationalities.  And for me, there are few things more uplifting than being part of a diverse but unified group of people.  Especially in the Holy Land, the nexsus of almost all the world’s religions.  As explained so eloquently in God Passes By:

…the Holy Land—the Land promised by God to Abraham, sanctified by the Revelation of Moses, honored by the lives and labors of the Hebrew patriarchs, judges, kings and prophets, revered as the cradle of Christianity, and as the place where Zoroaster, according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s testimony, had “held converse with some of the Prophets of Israel,” and associated by Islám with the Apostle’s night-journey, through the seven heavens, to the throne of the Almighty. Within the confines of this holy and enviable country, “the nest of all the Prophets of God,” “the Vale of God’s unsearchable Decree, the snow-white Spot, the Land of unfading splendor” …

 

Photo credit: Tom Dyson.

The older one gets, the more one’s own mortality becomes painfully evident.  I had a dream the other night that I was on a jet.  My sister was in the lavatory, and I was outside telling her a joke, wanting to make her laugh.

Suddenly, the plane began to plummet.  We both grew silent, on opposite sides of the door, and in my head, all I could think about was how much had been left undone.

Maybe I had that dream because recently, I’ve witnessed people around me, young and old, be afflicted with terminal illnesses.  I spent the weekend in Northern Virginia, at my pseudo-relatives’ home.  My father and another childhood friend of theirs were visiting D.C., and what was meant to be a jovial reunion weekend was tinged with a sense of how quickly life can change.

Mahin Khanum, my pseudo-uncle’s mother, had last week been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She had been a feisty woman with a sparkle in her eye who lost her husband at a young age and, at a not-so-young age, picked up and moved from Iran to Brazil when her two sons moved there. Whereas only weeks ago she was meddling in the kitchen, piling endless tea glasses into the dishwasher and effortlessly whipping up steaming pots of Basmati rice, Mahin Khanum could now hardly speak or react, let alone bathe herself.

In a rare moment of calm at the kitchen table, which was littered with crumbs and crammed with plates of fruit and half-empty glasses of tea, Mahsheed joon, my pseudo-aunt, leaned her elbow on the table and placed her head in her hand.  “Zendegi chegadr zood migzareh,” she sighed.  “How quickly life passes by.”  Switching to English, sweetly accented with Persian and Brazilian Portuguese tones, she waved her fork in the air and said, “You are young! Enjoy your youth and don’t take so heavily what might come in the future.”

A few weeks ago, I might have dismissed that advice as frivolous.  But in the midst of another hectic workday, her words rung through my mind, and I wondered whether I was wrongly associating living a purposeful life with gravity and heaviness.  I remembered a quotation from The Secret of Divine Civilization:

It is clear that life in this fast-fading world is as fleeting and inconstant as the morning wind, and this being so, how fortunate are the great who leave a good name behind them, and the memory of a lifetime spent in the pathway of the good pleasure of God.
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, page 70.

I can home tonight, and throwing myself on the couch, I picked up my weathered copy of The Secret of Divine Civilization, searching in vain for the passage.  And as I did, I flipped to the last page and stumbled upon this:

“Happy the soul that shall forget his own good, and like the chosen ones of God, vie with his fellows in service to the good of all…”
‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, page 116

It seems that in the end, what everyone is seeks is a kind of happiness.  The way they go about obtaining that happiness, however, runs the spectrum of being of benefit to being harmful to others.  Some find happiness in shopping (harmless); some, in volunteer work (beneficial); and some, in vandalism (harmful).  When I think about it, I can’t help but think that some of the pursuit of happiness is linked with that nagging feeling we’re going to get old and die.

Well, we are going to get old and die.  And like that moment in my dream, many of us are terrified– not so much that it may be painful, but that we might die and regret that we didn’t live a full life.

In this ever-fragmented, ever-frantic city, these thoughts sometimes elude us.  Or sometimes, we may mistake a “full life” as being those things that, while wonderful, bring us elusive happiness.  I love Washington, with all its quirks, but sometimes it seems as if someone hit a fast-forward button and forgot to hit “pause.”  Those of us in this city sometimes live as if we’re invincible– and that when we do die, all that really matters is how many times our name appeared in print.

But I have to wonder that, when this life ends– and if you don’t believe in an afterlife, when you lie down at night and honestly assess what you’ve done and who you are– what can we say about a life in service for the good of all?  In this ever-fragmented city, it’s easy to be worn out, run ragged, pulled in many directions, and anxious about career prospects.

It was dusk on Saturday evening, the setting sun peeking through the drawn curtains.  Mahin Khanum’s granddaughter, weary-eyed from a sleepless week, grasped her grandmother’s hands in her own, swinging them and singing old Brazilian carnaval songs to her.  There, amidst the pain and exhaustion, was a token of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s words– forgetting her own self, for the good of a loved one in the sunset of her life in this fast-fading world.

My personal take is that it is not that there is good aid or bad aid, but that the circumstances in each situation will determine if it is effective aid or not.  Throwing money at a problem will never completely solve it.  If the underlying issues are not addressed, it’s just good money and effort after bad.  And in particular so if aid agencies, humanitarian organizations and governments don’t recognize the power in grassroots communities and in each individual.  We need to harnass the potentialities latent in each member of the human race, empowering them to become a source of social good and development.

And you really don’t need to go further than the story of William Kamkwamba to see what I mean. At 14, the Malawian boy is forced to drop out of school for lack of fees.  Inspired by a book in the village library (donated by a development agency!), William decides to build a windmill in order to provide electricity for his family home.  He is undettered by the fact that he is not very educated, that he has no access to materials and parts for the windmill, or that no-one has ever done it before.  Relying mostly on the illustrations in the book, and scrounging for scrap metal and materials others have thrown away, and ignoring the ridicule aimed at him, William built a crude but effective windmill which powered four light bulbs, a radio and cellphone charger.

Since he built his first windmill, William has gone on to build five more, in and around his village.  He has been given a scholarship to the African Leadership Academy in South Africa.  He has given talks and speeches at international conferences and received worldwide acclaim.  He is working on projects dealing with HIV, malaria, solar power and clean water. And last month, at the age of 22, his autobiography “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” was released worldwide.

When  I read his story, and watched him speak, William humbled me, but most importantly, gave me hope.  And reminded me of the emphasis the Baha’i Faith places on the potentialities in each one of us, and of our duty to make the most of them:

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom…

Is any larger bounty conceivable than this, that an individual, looking within himself, should find that by the confirming grace of God he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men? No, by the one true God, there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight.

Person A walks around this maze with his eyes wide open. He sees the fire and knows to steer away from it. He sees the pot hole and knows to walk around it. He smells the roses but spots the thorns and knows not to lean in too closely. But the maze is also lined with gentle streams and giant waterfalls. Beautiful gardens and delectable delicacies. With all of his senses fully awakened, he partakes of its benefits as he makes his way through its many corridors. Making his way through it isn’t easy. Some bends are harder to come out of. Some elements are harder to easily identify as “splendor” or “horror. Yet, with eyes wide open, he is usually able to steer carefully away from the dangerous elements so often comingling with the beneficent ones.

Person B person walks around the maze with a giant blindfold over her eyes. Encouraged by the warmth she approaches the source; the flames spread too quickly for her to turn around unscathed. She didn’t realize it was fire. She manages to run away, skin raw and throbbing, only to fall directly into the pot hole. She breaks a leg but still manages to climb out. Her olfactory draws her near to the beautiful aroma emanating from the roses; she follows the scent, and before she knows it, her face is covered in thorns. In the meanwhile, the gentle streams and thornless flowers are all lost on her. She hears the roaring of the waterfall but is much too scared to approach it. She spends all her days wandering aimlessly through the maze, completely oblivious to all the beauty it has to offer, accruing little more than scars.

Bahá’u’lláh likens His laws to the lamps of His loving-providence. His laws guide us in this complex world so full of beauty and so follow of sorrow. We know that true freedom comes from submission to His will; obedience to His laws.  It sounds pretty counter-intuitive doesn’t it? That freedom comes from willful obedience. But then you think about life.  The fact that we’ve all been created for the same purpose. The fact that we all live in the same world and we all experience tests, often rather violent tests. Though the specific form of our tests may differ, the underlying purpose of them is the same. The main difference is that some of us live in this world with our eyes wide open. Certainly, we don’t always know which way to go, sometimes we just can’t seem to sidestep those pot holes, (though probably a lot of the time if we’ve landed in a pot hole it’s because we’ve willfully thrown ourselves in it), but still, we know the way out. We have the vision and the tools to navigate through life, able to discern danger from wonder, splendor from depravity, life from death. Others of us go through life approaching fires, falling into potholes, missing out on all the magnificence of the world, simply because we think following our own whims and fancies constitutes freedom, when in reality, it just makes us captives to our own blindness.

In considering the effect of obedience to the laws on individual lives, one must remember that the purpose of this life is to prepare the soul for the next. Here one must learn to control and direct one’s animal impulses, not to be a slave to them. Life in this world is a succession of tests and achievements, of falling short and of making new spiritual advances. Sometimes the course may seem very hard, but one can witness, again and again, that the soul who steadfastly obeys the Law of Bahá’u'lláh, however hard it may seem, grows spiritually, while the one who compromises with the law for the sake of his own apparent happiness is seen to have been following a chimera: he does not attain the happiness he sought, he retards his spiritual advance and often brings new problems upon himself.

(written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice)

On May 14, 2008, six of the seven members of the ad-hoc governing body of the Bahá’ís of Iran were arrested and taken to the notorious Evin Prison. Last week marked the one-year anniversary of their arrests (the seventh had been arrested on March 5, 2008). Since then, they have been held without access to their legal counsel, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi.

They have been charged on the baseless accusations of “espionage for Israel, insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the Islamic Republic” and, most recently, “spreading corruption on earth.”

They are men and women, mothers and fathers, some of whom have a history of persecution in their families. Among them are: a developmental psychologist, an agricultural engineer, an educator and school principal, a social worker, an optometrist, an industrialist, and a factory owner.

In a letter written on September 9, 2007 to Bahá’í students deprived of access to higher education in Iran, the Universal House of Justice wrote:

Service to others to others is the way. Let it be your watchword, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá being your exemplar. Like Him, you can find practical ways of serving your fellow citizens. Strive to work hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder, with your fellow citizens in your efforts to promote the common good.

As we keep them in our thoughts and prayers, and as we work, in whatever way we can, to speak out against this injustice, let us remember the poignant words of the Universal House of Justice to the Bahá’ís in Iran, in a letter written on November 26, 2003:

Your long night will end, and you will have the joy of witnessing with your own eyes the might structures your sacrifices have raised.

(For those in the U.S., find out how you can write to your representatives and senators regarding co-sponsoring House Res. 175 and Senate Res. 71: http://iran.bahai.us).

Then it is clear that the honor and exaltation of man must be something more than material riches. Material comforts are only a branch, but the root of the exaltation of man is the good attributes and virtues which are the adornments of his reality. These are

the divine appearances,
the heavenly bounties,
the sublime emotions,
the love and knowledge of God;
universal wisdom,
intellectual perception,
scientific discoveries,
justice,
equity,
truthfulness,
benevolence,
natural courage and innate fortitude;
the respect for rights and the keeping of agreements and covenants;
rectitude in all circumstances;
serving the truth under all conditions;
the sacrifice of one’s life for the good of all people;
kindness and esteem for all nations;
obedience to the teachings of God;
service in the Divine Kingdom;
the guidance of the people,
and the education of the nations and races.

This is the prosperity of the human world! This is the exaltation of man in the world! This is eternal life and heavenly honor!

These virtues do not appear from the reality of man except through the power of God and the divine teachings, for they need supernatural power for their manifestation. It may be that in the world of nature a trace of these perfections may appear, but they are unstable and ephemeral; they are like the rays of the sun upon the wall.

As the compassionate God has placed such a wonderful crown upon the head of man, man should strive that its brilliant jewels may become visible in the world.”

~ Abdu’l-Baha

We swim upstream and currents strong

Heighten struggles to move along

We paddle hard, yet go so slow

Why so painful, it’s hard to know

But hearts seek beauty, and so we go

The voyage long, the distance far

The path uneasy, the goal so hard

For growth we battle, for truth we yearn

With guidance we move, through failure we learn

For nearness we strive, with longing we burn

Scars we accrue, and strength we amass

Wisdom we glean, and tests we pass

We pray, we beg, we bow, we cry

We worship, we kneel, we love, we die–

To ourselves, to the world, but in Him, we abide

In heart’s beloved, at last, we’re alive

What would it look like if we lived our lives at every moment aware of the fact that this world and everything in it was merely a prelude to a world much greater than this.  Rather than allowing that knowledge to dull us into nonchalance or trick us into thinking the prelude was inconsequential, we would live knowing that the prelude was absolutely crucial in dictating what was to come.

The prelude would define the rest of the play- the body and the characters, the scene titles, and even the very last period on the very last page of the final act.

How might we live if we understood that the prelude was not more important than the rest of the play, but was absolutely essential to its unfolding.

And what if we knew that this play would tell the greatest love story of all time.  Greater than Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Bella and Edward, Leili and Majnun…greater than the love felt by the most adoring, devoted, sacrificial father for his favorite daughter…and that the prelude’s purpose was to set forces in motion which would allow for the lover and the beloved to meet in the chamber of eternity.

The meeting of the two was inevitable.  But the prelude would determine how quickly it would happen.  The prelude would determine how long the lover would sigh in longing for her beloved.  How long she would feel consumed by the flame of separation from the one for whom every cell in her body existed, every beat of her heart resounded, nay, the reason why every atom in the universe was. For these two to meet, to love, to be near.

What if you knew that you were the lover in the prelude.  And that every decision you made, every thought, every action or inaction, bore direct influence on how near you would be to the greatest, most radiant, most resplendent, kind, loving, wonderful, unimaginably glorious being.

That every kind act, every selfless thought, every step taken to help ease someone else’s burden, to help improve the quality of another’s life, to help those other lovers living the prelude with you would draw you nearer to this object of adoration — and what if you knew that your time in the prelude was very, very fleeting, especially as compared with the dominant note of eternity, which the rest of the play would unfold — would you waste a single moment on anger? On jealousy?  On lethargy or inactivity?

How much time would you devote to leisure?  To pleasure pursuits that distracted you, perhaps even moved your further away from, the path that led to this all-glorious one?

If we lived every moment of our lives consciously aware that we were created to know and to love God, to worship and adore Him in our actions towards His other creatures, that in serving our fellow man, we drew nearer unto Him, that whether or not we felt it now, when we exited the ante room and entered the chamber of eternity, we would be totally aware of and consumed by our love for Him and that if we were remote from Him we would feel sorrow and regret more intense than any hellish brimstone or scalding fire could impose on us …and that our nearness or remoteness from Him would be in direct proportion to how we had spent our time in the ante room, or how we had penned our story in the prelude — I wonder how differently we would behave.  How different our entire atmosphere would be.  One directly affects the other, after all, and both help shape the kind of eternity that awaits us.  An eternity which we are already a part of, which is always as near to us as the air we inhale and exhale at every moment.

It is the duty of every seeker to bestir himself and strive to attain the shores of this ocean, so that he may, in proportion to the eagerness of his search and the efforts he hath exerted, partake of such benefits as have been pre-ordained in God’s irrevocable and hidden Tablets. If no one be willing to direct his steps towards its shores, if every one should fail to arise and find Him, can such a failure be said to have robbed this ocean of its power or to have lessened, to any degree, its treasures? …This most great, this fathomless and surging Ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life-vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.

~ Baha’u'llah