5.
THE BELOVED RETURNS
BY HELEN BISHOP
Of Reluctance Becoming to an Amateur
For me there is something irrevocable about words in print and the sense of it halts my pen. A page should tell more about truth and lead to one of a thousand gates approaching the Prophet. He is the Beloved One Whom we can know, presented to us by God Whom we cannot know. Humanity is searching for Him, even while some humans unhappily defeat their own finding lest encounter with the Manifestation of Truth prove to be an end of opinions as well as the beginning of knowledge.
Our literature at its best is crying for the Prophet.
- “Sometimes I dream of one who neither rises nor falls, of one who walks the earth whole and unchangeable,
- unswerving and unadaptable. Perfectly unadaptable. It is of such an one that I dream,”
says a painter in a modern romance.1
Far more substantial persons and among them the mightiest and wisest in the land carry within their souls an unexamined awareness of the Prophet or His Message. As they have not yet identified Him they are unable to name Him; still they have passed laws and improved affairs after the pattern of His Creative Word.
Let us now praise famous men and women who have dedicated pages naming Bahá’u’lláh as the Prophet Who appeared in the nineteenth century and bespoke changes more advanced than our twentieth has foreseen (notwithstanding some of His Commands have been adopted and are now in the foreground of world plans). The conjunction of the Great Man and great events should be apparent to objective sight. Evaluation and pronouncements are the business of experts. It should be easy for them to testify that the Prophet came once again with the intuitive wisdom of the Holy Spirit anticipating humanity’s crisis and telling how it shall be met.
But it is not easy for me to write. Seldom am I singly conscious enough for composition. Things, creatures and persons invade my thought and win my attention or communication. Rarely do I see a ladder between the free working intellect and those subterranean regions where the roots of the mind draw up the sublime stuff of which art is made. Certainly in luminous moments there is no pencil in my hand.
What I do behold is the Prophet; not only imminent in all that men call fair, but sometimes even in what is taken for granted as unfairness or hardship. And if more of our experts literary and non-literary saw Him too, then easily would I renounce this strain of making sense in print. Yes, I could be content with the aesthetic of His proofs and leave it to authors to justify our mortal existence, its contingencies, quests and discoveries. As He says, “Man is my mystery, and I am his Mystery.”
——————-
1Jacob Wasserman, The World’s Illusion, Vol. I, p. 320, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York.
Alas! Most of the famous are not finding the Prophet Who has returned and is acting upon great events or shining within our souls as the manifest Source of our lights. And some of them even deny it! Still God is not mocked by any man’s negation. He is not even silenced: God still can speak! He is answered even if only nameless folk hear His voice and are glad to stand up and say so.
"The Kingdom of God is not necessarily confined to fools,” quoted the Master of Balliol in my hearing when he lectured in the Ætheneum at California’s Institute of Technology. "Though Heaven knows they come in quicker than the experts do.”
By grace abounding to a fool, I reached at the beginning of this decade the Mount of Carmel and the Sacred Shrines of the Founders of the Bahá’í Faith. There I was plunged into the realm of the wondrous and contemplated the active flame of love and wisdom which They left to be guarded as a lasting endowment for humanity.
There amid so much earthly beauty the Manifestation of the Blessed Beauty Bahá’u’lláh is remembered. The very threshold of His Shrine makes captives for Heaven:
- “It hath been known that God, glorious in His mention, is sanctified from the world and what is therein, and that the meaning of ‘victory’ is not this, that anyone should fight or strive with another . . . but, rather, what is well-pleasing is that the cities of men’s hearts, which are under the dominion of the hosts of selfishness and lust, should be subdued by the sword of the Word of Wisdom and of Exhortation. . . .” (Bahá’u’lláh, The Victory Tablet.)
After that Prophet of invisible Presence and His Interpreter ‘Abdu’l-Bahá there is today His visible heir, the Guardian, Shoghi Effendi. To meet Shoghi Effendi is to become convinced that his mind is designed to serve as the instrument of the Spirit, bearing the imprint of maturity upon all words and works. For me the lines of the Greek poet sprang into life:
"Foremost in might and in counsel,
Many a time did many a man pray
- That they might behold him;
For the flower of the heroes that dwelt
- around him,
Longed with gladness, to submit to his rule,—
- Of their own free will.”
From the Holy Land to Geneva. How very different it was where the nations fought verbally to put off the far more ferocious fighting of total war. There were rest periods in which some behaved as if they had averted the conflict. Magnanimity forbids my naming the optimists of Geneva’s palmy days; nonetheless, more than one statesman upon whom a people pinned its faith was convinced that any outbreak of war would be suppressed just as soon as the existing machinery for peace again had brought everything under control.
I was a young thing and didn’t know much; but I was never reassured by the confidence of such experts. I had to bear it that diplomatists assembled for peace generally overlooked the Bahá’í Secretariat from which for nine years the only all-embracing Plan for World Community and peace had been forthrightly spoken. The only Plan? Yes, I mean: the only Plan based upon the spiritual and organic relationships of nations, races and religions; the only Plan divinely—conceived, brought to earth by an Ambassador from Heaven.
We worked for the Cause while sensing Europe’s vast spiritual oppression and sometimes succumbing to it too. As an involuntary refrain it came to me that it was not rarities to eat, gayety, diplomacy, nor art, culture, Christianity or intellect—the last as first to expectations—that could save the world. I saw that mankind’s old-fashioned and tired social order would be folded up and laid away,—ultimately nobody would be the sorrier for it. Even then, in order to hang on to it all nations stumbled along a shadowy path headed straight for the Second World War.
This I knew aforetirne but not because I was sagacious whilst the diplomatists were naive or realistic and the people romantic. I knew only through the foreknowledge of the Prophet interpreted with the sequence of events first by the Center of His Covenant, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and after Him by the Guardian in his World Order Letters.
I tell of this episode in the year of decision 1944, also leaving to the chronicles of the first hundred years the following prodigy that has overtaken me. No doubt I would be living within the closed circle of small duties had not my life been seized and swung into the flow of the Cause. My first existence has vanished into a second in His Faith, which overrides my temperament and disinclinations: it makes me to do what I am not big enough to achieve. As an example, it brings an insistence that I—without literary pretensions—dare my pen on the theme which is the secret of all pertinent themes of our time, forasmuch as each universe of discourse has been conditioned today by the world-destroying consequence and rebirth that attends the Arrival of the Lord of Hosts.
Peace Without Religion or With It
Consistent with the modern temper that left religion out of the running, the only structural attempt to bring peace came through the League of Nations and was wholly secular. Nobody said it aloud but anybody could see in the nineteen thirties that—besides the popular “isms” which enflamed but did not enlighten—the practical religion of articulate Europeans was veneration of the intellect mingled with everyday dependence upon the gold standard and rate of exchange. (In parenthesis I admit that many Americans, my own people, did not adhere to the cult of intellect—they were contented with the gold standard.)
The delusion that human intellection is
an exercise adequate to cope with the
inevitable problems of international society
was the biggest of handicaps, so I submit.
Without benefit of Revelation, the League
failed to create a new sense of collective
consciousness binding a spiritual community
of faith and law. The League had
its esprit des corps, certainly, together with
the excitement and hard work of its supporters
throughout the world, but not a
world-wide community dedicated to justice
in the spiritual sense of Bahá’u’lláh’s supplication:
[Page 761]
”I beseech Thee by Thy Most
Great Name to assemble them that love
Thee around Thy Law. . . .”
Without such “unity of thought in world undertakings,” as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá interprets Bahá’u’lláh’s counsel, every threat to peace precipitated another unique situation for the League. These political quarrels were treated by the method of free discussion; afterwards the decision was handed down as nothing more potent than "an advisory opinion.” These, together with recommendations for economic and social reforms turned out to be the League’s foundations for an impermanent peace. Really, it was the application of man’s most civilized sciences—politics, economics, sociology—on a world scale. Almost that. For the United States of America did not give full-bodied participation to this experiment. We were not looking to divine Revelation either; our doctrine of "common sense” envisioned nothing beyond isolationism and shied away from the uncommon sense of idealism and world responsibility. Indeed, ”idealist” became an epithet used by opponents of Woodrow Wilson in the campaign that defeated the inspired founder of the League.
Quite secondary to the League’s notable work, there was a demonstration for peace from Christian forces. By no means was there unanimity among them. (Nor is there today.) Even though these crusaders revised the presentation of traditional doctrines, they were hard put to it to win peoples over to peace through religion because of the inner moral breakdown concealed behind the outward religious forms.
Institutionalized Christianity did not succeed in this enterprise because its dominion had passed. The past we know. The Bahá’í Faith did not succeed with its Plan for World Order either, but that was because its victory has not yet come. In the future we are free to believe.
Christian Pacifism as a New Phenomenon
Jesus said, ". . . in Me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” This adorable utterance and many others show that Christ meant for us to attain inner peace in the daily battle of living. So the early Christians understood the Gospel. They attained the Kingdom of God within the heart and renounced the world for the hope of the Kingdom to come on earth with "the Second Coming.” Modern Christians are groping for that peace in Christ; meanwhile, they want the Kingdom on earth, besides, through more organization or by new forms of Christianity.
The pacifist’s dilemma is a modern one. Saints whose names we know and devout Christians whose names we do not know have lived by pacific precepts, but the nations have not. Frequent religious strife and the institution of war as a means of settling disputes between peoples and nations are proof of the militant spirit of group Christianity. There have been no Christian nations in the pacifist sense.
When the primitive Church triumphed over the Roman state it brought no plan for the amicable settlement of disputes as a new policy for the Roman Empire. And the later Churches which also laid claim to a corporate Sonship of all the children of God in Christ did not advance a peace program until our own time and on the road to the Second Armageddon.
These demands for greater clarity on the moral questions of our time are with us now, in the twentieth century, because there is a new Prophetic expression at work in the world of mankind. Bahá’ís believe the Planetary Logos is recreating the minds and hearts of men.
- ”A new life is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth; and yet none hath discovered its cause or perceived its motive.” (Bahá’u’lláh.)
Yet towards that new expression of life men are groping each after his own style, secular or religious.
I view the rise of the collective phase of religious pacifism which has surged into international affairs as a phenomenon of the New Age and one of the peculiar dramatic proofs of Bahá’u’lláh’s Claim.
Moreover, not through a Christian revolution on behalf of an unpracticable pacifism shall the nations be launched into “the new Cycle of human power” and enjoy a planetary
Exhibition in the Bahá’í Temple, Wilmette, Ill., during the 1943 Convention, showing progress in various phases of Bahá’í activity.
culture. “This handful of dust, the earth, is one home. Let it be in unity.” Not by revolution but by Revelation!
The Letters of Negation
I quote from a capital work on the Jewish question. Its fifth edition of 1943 is in circulation from our public and university libraries and gaining popularization in the Women’s Clubs of America.
- "There are no more Prophets!”
- "I am non est Propheta!” There is not more any Prophet! By a prophet I mean a courageous speaker of the truth, a man who by virtue of a higher, divine authority dares to tell the mighty of the earth in concrete cases and in specific circumstances: ‘Thou Shalt!’ or ‘Non licet! . . .’ ”2
There it is again! Unfaith in Revelation for today. That God has spoken through His Prophets in past ages is implicit in the lament; so why the denial of the divine guidance for our time? Such insistence that
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2Pierre van Paassen, The Forgotten Ally, p. 37; Dial Press, New York, 1943.
God either cannot or will not speak leaves the thorough-going modern without resource beyond himself as the ultimate authority. If everybody goes that way there can be no unity for the Jews or mankind.
This famous man, Pierre van Paassen, has prodigious talent. He is not an unschooled reporter of limited journalese interests who might assume casually that Bahá’u’lláh’s stupendous Claim has raised up a cult of Islám or revived a vain attempt at a synthesis of religions. It is not for him to confuse the Bahá’í Faith with eclecticism or occultism. He is a sober man, this Hollander, and a pleader of great causes.
Our Forgotten Ally is an appeal to the English-speaking peoples to hasten the fulfillment of the long racial hope of the Jews for the restoration of Palestine. The author tells of hearing the despair of an aged Jew, Who renounces the hope for himself but not for his children.
To him Mr. van Paassen replied, ”God has promised it to them.” Whereupon everyone burst out in tears and with them he "wept for Zion.”3
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3Ibid., p. 21.
And so do I. And you, too, ought to weep,—even though our grief is only pathos.
However, it is not pathos when Bahá’u’lláh weeps and "by virtue of a higher, divine authority, dares to tell . . .” Israel that her unresolved plight is self-imposed inasmuch as it has been deviously wrought by her own rejection of four Prophets sent since Moses—Jesus, Muḥammad, the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. These manifestations renewed four Dispensations of spiritual power. But Israel deprived herself. Notwithstanding, her capacity for repentance and adoration can yet be proved by her acceptance of the new Mediator to the realm of values. For only the holy Prophet is the bearer of the Word that creates the new ethos. Today Bahá’u’lláh can bring Israel once again into touch with the Will of God.
Meanwhile the negation of God’s evident Word makes Bahá’u’lláh identify His suffering with the sorrow of Christ and Muḥammad. The parallel obtains in our time and He says:
- "‘The hand of God,’ say the Jews, 'is Chained up.’ Chained up by their own hands . . . Thou art surely aware of their idle contention, that all Revelation is ended, that the portals of Divine Mercy are closed, that from the day springs of eternal holiness no Sun shall rise again, that the Ocean of everlasting bounty is forever stilled, and that out of the Tabernacle of ancient glory the Messengers of God have ceased to be made manifest.”4
In fact, God gave the Jews what He had taken away and promised to return to them —the land of Israel! But how are they to keep it without keeping their promise to recognize Him by whom that Covenant was fulfilled? (Even the earth of Mount Carmel accepted the imprint of His Feet. . . .)
Furthermore, Bahá’u’lláh reprimanded the mighty of earth and commanded them to submit before the renewed Law of God. In His Letters to the Kings and to Queen Victoria, to the rulers temporal and spiritual
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4Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 23-4, Bahá’í Publishing Co.
including the Sulṭán-Caliph and the Pope, He condemned all institutions that perpetuated the disunity of mankind and counselled them to arise unitedly and build the New World Order.
Only the Queen heard Him graciously. To her He promised a long and happy reign. Nor did her prestige wane. But most of the others came to a bad end! Not only did their own affairs attest the want of right guidance, even historically they picked the losing side. Remember the fate of the Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, Napoleon III? What became of the Caliphate? And what befell the Czardom of the Romanovs, the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns, the empire of the Hapsburgs?
In these concrete cases and in specific circumstances the Prophetic warnings passed unheeded. As it had been foretold, these monarchs passed under the law of fatality, carrying their overweening pride, their dynasties and empires with them.
- ”And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: . . . but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall endure forever.” (Daniel 2:44.)
This gorgeous verse is a forecast of Bahá’u’lláh’s empire over the hearts. The prophecy was made by the Prophet Daniel while a captive of Persia’s ancient empire, where He was led from the Holy Land. So, too, Bahá’u’lláh by Whom the fulfillment is coming about was also a Captive—though led out of Persia to the Holy Land. Not only does the Prophet return! He returns to the same places of God’s preferment and withstands again the opposition from most of the kings and high priests!
What more can we ask of the first hundred years than the recurrence of the age-old drama of the Prophet opposed by priests and kings? This, only this: the Prophetic Message that found the kings unready found the common man of ready heart. (Today the seed of the Word fell into some fertile soil, too.) The common man who led the crusade of social causes can be found in the seat of the mighty as becomes the chosen heir of the, Father-King Who has taken
Temple model displayed at Keen’s Flower Shop, Phoenix, Arizona, 1942.
“ . . . the government upon His shoulder.” That common man may or may not be meek, but he has been made responsible to God before the nations and of him it yet may be said that he shall inherit the earth.
The Divine Jurisprudence for a Moral Commonwealth
Before the first century of the Bahal Cycle had elapsed, Ṭihrán, the city of Bahá’u’lláh’s birth—also of the dungeon where He received the first Visitation of the Holy Spirit bringing intimations of His world Mission—saw gathered together the planners of post-war reconstruction. During their consultation Ṭihrán enjoyed being for these hours the center of world gravity.
Funnily enough by way of contrast, at the turn of this century, the American Minister to Persia was perplexed over the route to his new post at Ṭihrán because
Cooke’s agent in New York declined to help, saying, uNobody goes to Persia.“5
The victory of the World Order revealed by Bahá’u’lláh is coming out of the concatenation of dramatic events. First, the divine Fiat proclaimed by the Messenger granted the long-awaited Kingdom of God as a gift from the Creator. Second, the continuing action of the Holy Spirit mediated by the Manifestation is gaining participation of wills and hastening ”the coming of age of the entire human race.”
There is nothing tame about this historical process. It only appears to be so to the literal mind which cannot recognize divinity at work through the generative forces of evolution. For blindness to the blazing Glory of God is failure to see spiritual
————————
5Lloyd C. Griscom, Diplomatically Speaking, p. 177, Literary Guild of America, Inc., New York, 1940.
truths through the eyes of the spirit. The literal mind gives a grossly material interpretation to the Scriptural symbols promising the return of the Prophet and becomes clouded by notions and fantasies. Just as clouds are interposed between sight and the sun so are these veils cast by the mind over the insight also clouds that conceal the risen Sun. Truly, Bahá’u’lláh’s coming is in the clouds—let us make no mistake on that—for never was the divine Sun of Truth clouded by more conjectures. For that matter, He came “as a thief in the night” too: the Lord was in the house but the owners did not know it. They were not watchful.
The same Spirit which used Jesus to manifest the Son used Bahá’u’lláh to manifest the Father of mankind. The same Spirit, for the Bahá’í Revelation does not admit more than One—the Holy Spirit. Indubitably, the renewed Word itself is the proof of the Manifestation. For Bahá’u’lláh has revealed what we need now: the divine jurisprudence for a moral commonwealth on this planet.
Its radical basis is the oneness of mankind and the oneness of religion. He raised the call for the abrogation of all forms of tribal consciousness: he proclaimed that superstitions of nationalism and racialism and the separations engendered by class struggle and religious rivalry shall die so that man may live. These are His words:
- "The Tabernacle of Unity has been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. . . . The world is but one country and mankind its citizens. . . . Let not a man glory in that, he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.” ”All men were created to carry forward an ever advancing civilization.”
To a Bahá’í world view the oneness of mankind is the fact of creation. No arguments against unity taken for granted by the unschooled or newly fashioned by the educated still in bondage to some party line can invade and split the consciousness born of the most recent Word from God.
Undisseverably linked to the oneness of mankind is the oneness of religion. And this is a fact of Revelation. For the Holy Prophets were the Founders of revealed religion; and the Scriptures they inspired are one essential testimony and one wisdom. Bahá’í Faith can be as simple as this: humanity is one organism and religion is one Truth because God is One. The unassailable Oneness and Unity of God is affirmed by the Bahá’ís in a daily prayer: ”His are the kingdoms of Revelation and of creation.”
Through Revelation the Law of God has been set forth progressively and now culminates in the Law for the whole planet. Therefore, Bahá’u’lláh the "Mighty Counsellor” wrote to the kings and rulers to “consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world’s Great Peace amongst men.” He commanded them to choose a universal auxiliary language, adopt a world-wide economic system, establish a World Court and World Parliament, and constitute a World Police Force together with other institutions necessary to an emergent planetary culture rooted in the new awareness of the unity of man and of faith.
It is because “all are from the Presence of God” that the new Law of Faith cannot allow the Bahá’ís to fight one another or name an enemy under the roof of the skies. They may not call the capitalists the bogeyman or identify the devil as the proletariat. Nor is it for them to assign guilt to the state and exalt the individual conscience as sovereign, as the uncompromising among Christian pacifists are wont to do. Neither can they volunteer to fight with nations against nations for that is civil war within the human race.
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Bahá’ís would fight for the Covenant and Law of God! After His Kingdom is won and the world institutions are rooted in justice, the very existence of the world-wide Kingdom should preclude the rise of any would-be aggressor forever. But if the serpent of the denial reappears within the new Eden from which the Angel with the flaming Sword of the Word drove him out —then shall the whole citizenry of Heaven unite to crush its lifted head.
Let us bear in mind that no individual conscience however differentiated will name the enemy, no city and no nation, no combine of nations will pronounce war against that enemy of man and God. Only the World Court of Justice representing the collective conscience of individuals, nations and races making up the divine Kingdom of the planet shall name that Lucifer who goes out from it and begins all over again the eternal battle against God.
His Estate and Titles
There is an ingredient missing from our flatly human selves, without which we are not fit for world unity and peace. Nor even good enough for science. For science has given humanity means with which to unite the globe and these we put to the uses of our own destruction. Because the natural man simply cannot by his unaided efforts accomplish any supernatural goal, the World Reformer has come to transmute our natures by conferring a new grace and thereby to change our natural stations.
”All the Bible was written for Bahá’u’lláh.” Throughout its pages moves the pre-existent and omnipresent yet invisible Personage of the Father-King. Frequently He is entitled “The Lord of Hosts.” To believe in Him before His Appearance became the supreme test of faith in the Covenant which was removed from age to age. For He was not to remain invisible forever. He was certain to appear when humanity became mature enough to accept Him. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives a commentary on this title:
- “The Blessed Person of the Promised One is interpreted in the Holy Book as the Lord of Hosts, i.e. the heavenly armies. By heavenly armies those souls are intended who are entirely freed from the human world, transformed into celestial spirits and have become angels. Such souls are the rays of the Sun of Reality who will illumine all the continents. Each one is holding in his hand a trumpet, blowing the breath of life over all regions.”
When Bahá’u’lláh came He found a small company of "waiting servants.” He summoned other bright spirits to join them. Still others who were not so bright He made over—and they all constituted a host. This we know because the Master gives praise in a solemn Document telling that Bahá’u’lláh reinforced His Cause” . . . through the aid of men whom the slander of the slanderer affects not, whom no earthly calling, glory and power can turn aside from the Covenant of God and His Testament. . . .”
From among our contemporaries Bahá’u’lláh is winning over even worldlings who respond to the love of God and take delight in living but are quite useless to the revealed Plan, besides others who are useful and proud in all manner of good works but have forgotten utterly the love of God.
In the Hidden Words Baha’u’llah says:
- "O Befriended Stranger! The candle of thine heart is lit with the hand of My power; quench it not with the adverse winds of self and passion. The healer of all thy ills is thy remembrance of Me, forget it not. Make My love thy all—precious treasure and cherish it even as thine own sight and life.”
Throughout the ages men have been seeking God after their own ways, but in this hour, God in His way is seeking man and leading him into the recognition of His New Name. Implicitly we believe this is the only sense to make out of the frustrations He allows, the bounties He bestows, the ordeals He sends, the intrigues He weaves.
The mutuality of the love of God is found again in the stir and energy of the Community of the Most Great Name. "Alláh-u—Abhá” (God Most Glorious) is the New and Greatest Name for this Greatest Age. Bahá’u’lláh means “The Glory of God” in the Persian tongue. The supereminence of His divine title is conceded not only by His friends and lovers but by His unrelenting enemies, who ceased long ago to use His human name—Mírzá Ḥusayn ‘Alí, suited to any nobleman of Persia—and refer to him always by'God’s splendid Attribute.
Under all His Names past and present
the Bahá’ís love Him: for He is the Mediator.
And He is the Mystery of the Many
[Page 767]
and the One. We love Him because He is
the Beloved. Whenever we are not with
Him we are engaged or even in conflict with
duty, obedience, self-discipline or sacrifice,
but when we are with Him then we are not
at all aware of meeting those claims He puts
upon us—we are aware only of Him. The
Manifestation of God the Beloved Who
woos His creatures from themselves and to
Himself. It is for this He returns.
