of unity. Although to Baha'is the most obvious of truths, its implications
for the current crisis of civilization appear to escape most contemporary
discourse. Few will disagree that the universal disease sapping the health
of the body of humankind is that of disunity. Its manifestations
everywhere cripple political will, debilitate the collective urge to
change, and poison national and religious relationships. How strange,
then, that unity is regarded as a goal to be attained, if at all, in a
distant future, after a host of disorders in social, political, economic
and moral life have been addressed and somehow or other resolved. Yet the
latter are essentially symptoms and side effects of the problem, not its
root cause. Why has so fundamental an inversion of reality come to be
widely accepted? The answer is presumably because the achievement of
genuine unity of mind and heart among peoples whose experiences are deeply
at variance is thought to be entirely beyond the capacity of society's
existing institutions. While this tacit admission is a welcome advance
over the understanding of processes of social evolution that prevailed a
few decades ago, it is of limited practical assistance in responding to
the challenge.
Unity is a condition of the human spirit. Education can support and
enhance it, as can legislation, but they can do so only once it emerges
and has established itself as a compelling force in social life. A global
intelligentsia, its prescriptions largely shaped by materialistic
misconceptions of reality, clings tenaciously to the hope that imaginative
social engineering, supported by political compromise, may indefinitely
postpone the potential disasters that few deny loom over humanity's
future. "We can well perceive how the whole human race is encompassed with
great, with incalculable afflictions", Baha'u'llah states. "They that are
intoxicated by self-conceit have interposed themselves between it and the
Divine and infallible Physician. Witness how they have entangled all men,
themselves included, in the mesh of their devices. They can neither
discover the cause of the disease, nor have they any knowledge of the
remedy."(54) As unity is the remedy for the world's ills, its one certain
source lies in the restoration of religion's influence in human affairs.
The laws and principles revealed by God, in this day, Baha'u'llah
declares, "are the most potent instruments and the surest of all means for
the dawning of the light of unity amongst men."(55) "Whatsoever is raised
on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair
its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its
structure."(56)
Central to Baha'u'llah's mission, therefore, has been the creation of a
global community that would reflect the oneness of humankind. The ultimate
testimony that the Baha'i community can summon in vindication of His
mission is the example of unity that His teachings have produced. As it
enters the twenty-first century, the Baha'i Cause is a phenomenon unlike
anything else the world has seen. After decades of effort, in which surges
of growth alternated with long stretches of consolidation, often shadowed
by setbacks, the Baha'i community today comprises several million people
representative of virtually every ethnic, cultural, social and religious
background on earth, administering their collective affairs without the
intervention of a clergy, through democratically elected institutions. The
many thousands of localities in which it has put down its roots are to be
found in every country, territory and significant island group, from the
Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, from Africa to the Pacific. The assertion that
this community may already constitute the most diverse and geographically
widespread of any similarly organized body of people on the planet is
unlikely to be challenged by one familiar with the evidence.
The achievement calls out for understanding. Conventional
explanations--access to wealth, the patronage of powerful political
interests, invocations of the occult or aggressive programmes of
proselytism that instil fear of Divine wrath--none have played any role in
the events involved. Adherents of the Faith have achieved a sense of
identity as members of a single human race, an identity that shapes the
purpose of their lives and that, clearly, is not the expression of any
intrinsic moral superiority on their own part: "O people of Baha! That
there is none to rival you is a sign of mercy."(57) A fair-minded observer
is compelled to entertain at least the possibility that the phenomenon may
represent the operation of influences entirely different in nature from
the familiar ones--influences that can properly be described only as
spiritual--capable of eliciting extraordinary feats of sacrifice and
understanding from ordinary people of every background.
Particularly striking has been the fact that the Baha'i Cause has been
able to maintain the unity thus achieved, unbroken and unimpaired, through
the most vulnerable early stages of its existence. One will search in vain
for another association of human beings in history--political, religious,
or social--that has successfully survived the perennial blight of schism
and faction. The Baha'i community, in all its diversity, is a single body
of people, one in its understanding of the intent of the revelation of God
that gave it birth, one in its devotion to the Administrative Order that
its Author created for the governance of its collective affairs, one in
its commitment to the task of disseminating His message throughout the
planet. Over the decades of its rise, several individuals, some of them
highly placed and all of them driven by the spur of ambition, did their
utmost to create separate followings loyal to themselves or to the
personal interpretations they had imposed on Baha'u'llah's writings. At
earlier stages in the evolution of religion, similar attempts had proved
successful in splitting the newborn faiths into competing sects. In the
case of the Baha'i Cause, however, such intrigues have failed, without
exception, to produce more than transient outbursts of controversy whose
net effect has been to deepen the community's understanding of its
Founder's purpose and its commitment to it. "So powerful is the light of
unity", Baha'u'llah assures those who recognize Him, "that it can
illuminate the whole earth."(58) Human nature being what it is, one can
readily appreciate the Guardian's anticipation that this purifying process
will long continue--paradoxically but necessarily-- to be an integral
feature of the maturation of the Baha'i community.
"A corollary of the abandonment of faith in God has been a paralysis
of..."
A corollary of the abandonment of faith in God has been a paralysis of
ability to address effectively the problem of evil or, in many cases, even
to acknowledge it. While Baha'is do not attribute to the phenomenon the
objective existence it was assumed at earlier stages of religious history
to possess, the negation of the good that evil represents, as with
darkness, ignorance or disease, is severely crippling in its effect. Few
publishing seasons pass that do not offer the educated reader a range of
new and imaginative analyses of the character of some of the monstrous
figures who, during the twentieth century, systematically tortured,
degraded and exterminated millions of their fellow human beings. One is
invited by scholarly authority to ponder the weight that should be given,
variously, to paternal abuse, social rejection, professional
disappointments, poverty, injustice, war experiences, possible genetic
impairment, nihilistic literature--or various combinations of the
foregoing--in seeking to understand the obsessions fuelling an apparently
bottomless hatred of humankind. Conspicuously missing from such
contemporary speculation is what experienced commentators, even as
recently as a century ago, would have recognized as spiritual disease,
whatever its accompanying features.
If unity is indeed the litmus test of human progress, neither history nor
Heaven will readily forgive those who choose deliberately to raise their
hands against it. In trusting, people lower their defences and open
themselves to others. Without doing so, there is no way in which they can
commit themselves wholeheartedly to shared goals. Nothing is so
devastating as suddenly to discover that, for the other party, commitments
made in good faith have represented no more than an advantage gained, a
means of achieving concealed objectives different from, or even inimical
to, what had ostensibly been undertaken together. Such betrayal is a
persistent thread in human history that found one of its earliest recorded
expressions in the ancient tale of Cain's jealousy of the brother whose
faith God had chosen to confirm. If the appalling suffering endured by the
earth's peoples during the twentieth century has left a lesson, it lies in
the fact that the systemic disunity, inherited from a dark past and
poisoning relations in every sphere of life, could throw open the door in
this age to demonic behaviour more bestial than anything the mind had
dreamed possible.
If evil has a name, it is surely the deliberate violation of the hard-won
covenants of peace and reconciliation by which people of goodwill seek to
escape the past and to build together a new future. By its very nature,
unity requires self-sacrifice. "...self-love", the Master states, "is
kneaded into the very clay of man."(59) The ego, termed by Him the
"insistent self",(60) resists instinctively constraints imposed on what it
conceives to be its freedom. To willingly forgo the satisfactions that
licence affords, the individual must come to believe that fulfilment lies
elsewhere. Ultimately, it lies, as it has always done, in the soul's
submission to God.
Failure to meet the challenge of such submission has manifested itself
with especially devastating consequences throughout the centuries in
betrayal of the Messengers of God and of the ideals they taught. This
discussion is not the place for a review of the nature and provisions of
the specific Covenant by means of which Baha'u'llah has successfully
preserved the unity of those who recognize Him and serve His purpose. It
is sufficient to note the strength of the language He reserves for its
deliberate violation by those who simultaneously pretend allegiance to it:
"They that have turned away therefrom are reckoned among the inmates of
the nethermost fire in the sight of thy Lord, the Almighty, the
Unconstrained."(61) The reason for the severity of this condemnation is
obvious. Few people have difficulty in recognizing the danger to social
well-being of such familiar crimes as murder, rape or fraud, nor the need
for society to take effective measures of self-protection. But how are
Baha'is to think about a perversity which, if unchecked, would destroy the
very means essential to the creation of unity--would, in the uncompromising
words of the Master, "become even as an axe striking at the very root of
the Blessed Tree"?(62) The issue is not one of intellectual dissent, nor
even of moral weakness. Many people are resistant to accepting authority
of one kind or another, and eventually distance themselves from
circumstances that require it. Persons who have been attracted to the
Baha'i Faith but who decide, for whatever reason, to leave it are entirely
free to do so.
Covenant-breaking is a phenomenon fundamentally different in nature. The
impulse it arouses in those under its influence is not simply to pursue
freely whatever path they believe leads to personal fulfilment or
contribution to society. Rather, are such persons driven by an apparently
ungovernable determination to impose their personal will on the community
by any means available to them, without regard for the damage done and
without respect for the solemn undertakings they entered into on being
accepted as members of that community. Ultimately, the self becomes the
overriding authority, not only in the individual's own life, but in
whatever other lives can be successfully influenced. As long and tragic
experience has demonstrated all too certainly, endowments such as
distinguished lineage, intellect, education, piety or social leadership
can be harnessed, equally, to the service of humanity or to that of
personal ambition. In ages past, when spiritual priorities of a different
nature were the focus of the Divine purpose, the consequences of such
rebellion did not vitiate the central message of any of the successive
revelations of God. Today, with the immense opportunities and horrific
dangers that physical unification of the planet has brought with it,
commitment to the requirements of unity becomes the touchstone of all
professions of devotion to the will of God or, for that matter, to the
well-being of humankind.
"Everything in its history has equipped the Baha'i..."
Everything in its history has equipped the Baha'i Cause to address the
challenge facing it. Even at this relatively early stage of its
development--and relatively limited as its resources presently are--the
Baha'i enterprise is fully deserving of the respect it is winning. An
onlooker need not accept its claims to Divine origin in order to
appreciate what is being accomplished. Taken simply as this-worldly
phenomena, the nature and achievements of the Baha'i community are their
own justification for attention on the part of anyone seriously concerned
with the crisis of civilization, because they are evidence that the
world's peoples, in all their diversity, can learn to live and work and
find fulfilment as a single race, in a single global homeland.
This fact underlines, if further emphasis were needed, the urgency of the
successive Plans devised by the Universal House of Justice for the
expansion and consolidation of the Faith. The rest of humanity has every
right to expect that a body of people genuinely committed to the vision of
unity embodied in the writings of Baha'u'llah will be an increasingly
vigorous contributor to programmes of social betterment that depend for
their success precisely on the force of unity. Responding to the
expectation will require the Baha'i community to grow at an
ever-accelerating pace, greatly multiplying the human and material
resources invested in its work and diversifying still further the range of
talents that equip it to be a useful partner with like-minded
organizations. Along with the social objectives of the effort must go an
appreciation of the longing of millions of equally sincere people, as yet
unaware of Baha'u'llah's mission but inspired by many of its ideals, for
an opportunity to find lives of service that will have enduring meaning.
The culture of systematic growth taking root in the Baha'i community would
seem, therefore, by far the most effective response the friends can make
to the challenge discussed in these pages. The experience of an intense
and ongoing immersion in the Creative Word progressively frees one from
the grip of the materialistic assumptions--what Baha'u'llah terms "the
allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy"(63)--that pervade society
and paralyze impulses for change. It develops in one a capacity to assist
the yearning for unity on the part of friends and acquaintances to find
mature and intelligent expression. The nature of the core activities of
the current Plan--children's classes, devotional meetings and study
circles--permits growing numbers of persons who do not yet regard
themselves as Baha'is to feel free to participate in the process. The
result has been to bring into existence what has been aptly termed a
"community of interest". As others benefit from participation and come to
identify with the goals the Cause is pursuing, experience shows that they,
too, are inclined to commit themselves fully to Baha'u'llah as active
agents of His purpose. Apart from its associated objectives, therefore,
wholehearted prosecution of the Plan has the potentiality of amplifying
enormously the Baha'i community's contribution to public discourse on what
has become the most demanding issue facing humankind.
If Baha'is are to fulfil Baha'u'llah's mandate, however, it is obviously
vital that they come to appreciate that the parallel efforts of promoting
the betterment of society and of teaching the Baha'i Faith are not
activities competing for attention. Rather, are they reciprocal features
of one coherent global programme. Differences of approach are determined
chiefly by the differing needs and differing stages of inquiry that the
friends encounter. Because free will is an inherent endowment of the soul,
each person who is drawn to explore Baha'u'llah's teachings will need to
find his own place in the never-ending continuum of spiritual search. He
will need to determine, in the privacy of his own conscience and without
pressure, the spiritual responsibility this discovery entails. In order to
exercise this autonomy intelligently, however, he must gain both a
perspective on the processes of change in which he, like the rest of the
earth's population, is caught up and a clear understanding of the
implications for his own life. The obligation of the Baha'i community is
to do everything in its power to assist all stages of humanity's universal
movement towards reunion with God. The Divine Plan bequeathed it by the
Master is the means by which this work is carried out.
However central the ideal of the oneness of religion unquestionably is,
therefore, the task of sharing Baha'u'llah's message is obviously not an
interfaith project. While the mind seeks intellectual certainty, what the
soul longs for is the attainment of _certitude_. Such inner conviction is
the ultimate goal of all spiritual seeking, regardless of how rapid or
gradual the process may be. For the soul, the experience of conversion is
not an extraneous or incidental feature of the exploration of religious
truth, but the pivotal issue that must eventually be addressed. There is
no ambiguity about Baha'u'llah's words on the subject and there can be
none in the minds of those who seek to serve Him: "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."(64)
"One of the distinguishing features of modernity has been the
universal..."
One of the distinguishing features of modernity has been the universal
awakening of historical consciousness. An outcome of this revolutionary
change in perspective that greatly enhances the teaching of Baha'u'llah's
message is the ability of people, given the chance, to recognize that the
whole body of humanity's sacred texts places the drama of salvation itself
squarely in the context of history. Beneath the surface language of symbol
and metaphor, religion, as the scriptures reveal it, operates not through
the arbitrary dictates of magic but as a process of fulfilment unfolding
in a physical world created by God for that purpose.
In this respect, the texts speak with one voice: religion's goal is
humanity's attainment of the age of "in-gathering",(65) of "one fold, and
one shepherd";(66) the great age to come when "the Earth will shine with
the glory of its Lord"(67) and the will of God is carried out "in earth,
as it is in heaven";(68) "the promised Day"(69) when the "holy city"(70)
will descend "out of heaven, from ... God",(71) when "the mountain of the
Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall
be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it",(72) when
God will demand to know "what mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces,
and grind the faces of the poor";(73) the Day when scriptures that have
been "sealed till the time of the end"(74) would be opened and union with
God will find expression in "a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall
name";(75) an age utterly beyond anything humanity will have experienced,
the mind conceived or language as yet encompassed: "even as We produced
the first Creation, so shall We produce a new one: a promise We have
undertaken: truly shall We fulfil it."(76)
The declared purpose of history's series of prophetic revelations,
therefore, has been not only to guide the individual seeker on the path of
personal salvation, but to prepare the whole of the human family for the
great eschatological Event lying ahead, through which the life of the
world will itself be entirely transformed. The revelation of Baha'u'llah
is neither preparatory nor prophetic. It _is_ that Event. Through its
influence, the stupendous enterprise of laying the foundations of the
Kingdom of God has been set in motion, and the population of the earth has
been endowed with the powers and capacities equal to the task. That
Kingdom is a universal civilization shaped by principles of social justice
and enriched by achievements of the human mind and spirit beyond anything
the present age can conceive. "This is the Day", Baha'u'llah declares, "in
which God's most excellent favours have been poured out upon men, the Day
in which His most mighty grace hath been infused into all created
things.... Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one
spread out in its stead."(77)
Service to the goal calls for an understanding of the fundamental
difference distinguishing the mission of Baha'u'llah from political and
ideological projects of human design. The moral vacuum that produced the
horrors of the twentieth century exposed the outermost limits of the
mind's unaided capacity to devise and construct an ideal society, however
great the material resources harnessed to the effort. The suffering
entailed has engraved the lesson indelibly on the consciousness of the
earth's peoples. Religion's perspective on humanity's future, therefore,
has nothing in common with systems of the past--and only relatively little
relationship with those of today. Its appeal is to a reality in the
genetic code, if it can be so described, of the rational soul. The Kingdom
of Heaven, Jesus taught two thousand years ago, is "within".(78) His
organic analogies of a "vineyard",(79) of "seed [sown] into the good
ground",(80) of the "good tree [that] bringeth forth good fruit"(81) speak
of a potentiality of the human species that has been nurtured and trained
by God since the dawn of time as the purpose and leading edge of the
creative process. The ongoing work of patient cultivation is the task that
Baha'u'llah has entrusted to the company of those who recognize Him and
embrace His Cause. Little wonder, then, at the exalted language in which
He speaks of a privilege so great: "Ye are the stars of the heaven of
understanding, the breeze that stirreth at the break of day, the
soft-flowing waters upon which must depend the very life of all
men...."(82)
The process bears within itself the assurance of its fulfilment. For those
with eyes to see, the new creation is today everywhere emerging, in the
same way that a seedling becomes in time a fruit-bearing tree or a child
reaches adulthood. Successive dispensations of a loving and purposeful
Creator have brought the earth's inhabitants to the threshold of their
collective coming-of-age as a single people. Baha'u'llah is now summoning
humanity to enter on its inheritance: "That which the Lord hath ordained
as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all
the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one
common Faith."(83)
FOOTNOTES
1 Baha'u'llah refers to the ancient Persian and Arabian story of
Majnun and Layli, _The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys_
(Wilmette: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1991), page 6.
_ 2 Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah_ (Wilmette: Baha'i
Publishing Trust, 1983), section LXI.
_ 3 ibid.,_ section XVI.
_ 4 Tablets of Baha'u'llah revealed after the Kitab-i-Aqdas_ (Wilmette:
Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1988), page 27.
_ 5 Gleanings,_ section XVII.
6 Baha'u'llah, _Epistle to the Son of the Wolf_ (Wilmette: Baha'i
Publishing Trust, 1988), page 133.
7 Baha'u'llah, _The Kitab-i-Iqan_ (Wilmette: Baha'i Publishing Trust,
1993), paragraph 216.
_ 8 ibid._
_ 9 ibid.,_ paragraph 104.
_ 10 ibid.,_ paragraph 106.
_ 11 Gleanings,_ section XXII.
_ 12 Prayers and Meditations by Baha'u'llah_ (Wilmette: Baha'i
Publishing Trust, 1987), page 311.
_ 13 Gleanings,_ section XXVII.
_ 14 ibid.,_ section CIX.
_ 15 ibid.,_ section LXXXI.