Nearness to an Unconditioned God

Here's passage ten. It is said standing. BTW this is gonna be another long one.


O Lord of all being and Possessor of all things visible and invisible! Thou dost perceive my tears and the sighs I utter, and hearest my groaning, and my wailing, and the lamentation of my heart. By Thy might! My trespasses have kept me back from drawing nigh unto Thee; and my sins have held me far from the court of Thy holiness. Thy love, O my Lord, hath enriched me, and separation from Thee hath destroyed me, and remoteness from Thee hath consumed me. I entreat Thee by Thy footsteps in this wilderness, and by the words “Here am I. Here am I” which Thy chosen Ones have uttered in this immensity, and by the breaths of Thy Revelation, and the gentle winds of the Dawn of Thy Manifestation, to ordain that I may gaze on Thy beauty and observe whatsoever is in Thy Book.



I think this is the first reference in this prayer to sin. That sure took a while. I feel like at some point I should give a fairly detailed explanation of what is meant by sin in the Baha'i faith. One thing I can say now is that there is no original sin, so human beings start off their life with a clean slate.



What can be gleaned from the Baha'i understanding of sin in this prayer is that it is configured around this idea of proximity/nearness to God. This is from passage 104 of the Kitab-i-Iqan. It's a good explanation of divine transcendence so I thought I'd throw in a little more.



No tie of direct intercourse can possibly bind Him to His creatures. He standeth exalted beyond and above all separation and union, all proximity and remoteness. No sign can indicate His presence or His absence; inasmuch as by a word of His command all that are in heaven and on earth have come to exist, and by His wish, which is the Primal Will itself, all have stepped out of utter nothingness into the realm of being, the world of the visible.



Because of this, any talk of proximity or nearness cannot be with regard to His Essence. This is because they are fundamentally heterogeneous. But humans are homogeneous with the divine attributes. One can become nearer to compassion. One can become nearer to wisdom. One can become nearer to patience. The development of these attributes is for one's own well-being. So when we are deprived of them it can be said that separation would destroy us, or remoteness from them consume us, to use the words of the prayer.



When the performer develops these divine attributes, especially wisdom, he or she begins to see that everything in this world is temporary, especially oneself. This is what it means to be a conditional being. For its existence is always conditional upon some other condition, which itself is conditional. To grow attached to these fleeting appearances is to make one's happiness dependent on things that are always in flux. So hence our happiness is in flux as well. As soon as they go one's happiness feels destroyed, consumed. But once a person understands deeply that all things are conditional by nature, then he or she is capable of living joyfully even amidst the storm of relentless flux. In short, I think this part of the prayer refers to the same ideas that are at the heart of Buddhism: desire, suffering, non-self, impermanence, etc.



On a related note, to attach oneself too feverishly to particular conditions is to be closed to the coming of new conditions whose form is not dictated by the former. This is one way that the will of God comes to us, as something foreign and unfamiliar to our expectations of it. Way back in the discussion of the second passage of the prayer, I referred to this revelation of God's will as unconditioned. In the sense employed in the above paragraph, nothing can come unconditioned. All created things are dependent on other conditions. But in another sense, we can narrow our scope and say that one particular thing was not conditioned by another particular thing. For example, I was expecting one thing and was attaching all of these conditions to it in my imagination. But instead, once it came it was something totally different. In this sense, the unconditioned arrival is something that is not constrained or dominated by something previous. It is the establishment of a new condition and new conditioning that breaks with the old. This is how the will of God is revealed when it is not already the will of humanity.



In this light I don't think it is a coincidence that the arrival of divine revelation receives special treatment in the petition that ends this passage.



I entreat Thee by Thy footsteps in this wilderness, and by the words “Here am I. Here am I” which Thy chosen Ones have uttered in this immensity, and by the breaths of Thy Revelation, and the gentle winds of the Dawn of Thy Manifestation, to ordain that I may gaze on Thy beauty and observe whatsoever is in Thy Book.



This petition is made by four things.


Firstly, it is made by Thy footsteps in this wilderness, a reference to God's manifest action in His creation. This may be a reference to the Genesis account of the creation. After Adam and Eve eat the apple they are said to have heard the footsteps of God moving through the garden. in this light it would be the foreshadowing for a coming revelation of divine judgment. In this sense judgment may not necessarily mean punishment, (though that certainly is the case in the Biblical story) but at the very least it is the revelation of a divine decision, the manifestation of His will.



Secondly, the petition is made by the words "Here am I. Here am I" which Thy chosen Ones have uttered in this immensity. The biblical passage that comes to mind is the third chapter of 1 Samuel. This is the story of how Samuel was called by God to prophethood. At the time he was only a child. As he was sleeping one night the Lord called out "Samuel, Samuel." The young boy then leapt up and ran to his father Eli thinking he had called him saying "He I am, as you called me." Eli then sent him back to bed. Then the same thing happened again, with the same result. When it happened a third time Eli figured out that it must have been the Lord who was calling his son. So he instructed his son that if he hears the voice again he should reply, "Speak Lord; for your servant is listening." In light of this story, "Here am I. Here am I" indicates the response of an eager servant to the first call of God.



Thirdly, the petition is made by the breaths of Thy Revelation. The first image that comes to my mind is one of the accounts in Genesis of the creation of Adam. I suppose I could interpret these lines outside of a biblical context. But I must say that I have grown up in a biblical context. So these are the references that come to mind. In that account God creates Adam by forming him out of clay. He brings him to life by breathing his own breath into him. Thus, there is an association here between God's breath and human life that comes from God, whether we want to think of this as either physical life or spiritual life. Though, for some reason I can't find this passage in Genesis. I know its there. So I'm really confused why I can't find it anywhere between the creation of the plants and animals and the account of the Fall. If somebody wants to find this passage for me that would be great. I have no idea why I can't find it, BECAUSE I'M SURE IT'S THERE.



Fourthly, the petition is made by the gentle winds of the Dawn of Thy Manifestation. I want to put the emphasis on that this is the Dawn, the first appearence, the moment of turning from darkness to light. In this way, the petition is made by the arrival of the will of God that disrupts the previous order to which humans have become accustomed.



Finally, it is time to look at the petition itself: to ordain that I may gaze on Thy beauty and observe whatsoever is in Thy Book. There are two concerns here, one of beauty, the other of obedience. Immediately this calls to mind an exhortation from passage 4 of the Kitab-i-Aqdas: Observe My commandments, for the love of My beauty. In this way mystical seeking and rule-keeping are held together as interdependent pursuits. This is a theme that is invoked elsewhere throughout the Baha'i writings, especially in the final section in the Seven Valleys, the Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness. For this Valley sheds light on what is meant by My beauty.

Now hast thou abandoned the drop of life and come to the sea of the Life-Bestower. This is the goal thou didst ask for; if it be God’s will, thou wilt gain it.
In this city, even the veils of light are split asunder and vanish away. “His beauty hath no veiling save light, His face no covering save revelation.” How strange that while the Beloved is visible as the sun, yet the heedless still hunt after tinsel and base metal. Yea, the intensity of His revelation hath covered Him, and the fullness of His shining forth hath hidden Him.

The central idea of this passage is contained in the hadith (reported saying of Muhammad), His beauty hath no veiling save light, His face no covering save revelation. A pervasive theme in Baha'i writings is the use of light to describe divine revelation. Any time somebody invokes light as a metaphor, they imply that something is made visible, understandable, and clear. In this case it would be by way of the divine attributes. But in the case of this hadith and this part of the Seven Valleys revelation itself is concealment. the fullness of His shining forth hath hidden Him. As argued before this is because the divine attributes are creation, and are thus heterogeneous to God's transcendent Essence. From this I think it can be said that this Valley is the awareness of the necessary gap between Essence and attributes, Creator and creation. God' beauty then would pertain to that unknowable essence, something that is concealed by the appearence of intelligibility.

It's a difficult passage so I get an uneasy feeling whenever I think I can explain it clearly and simply. After all, not long after this passage Baha'u'llah writes,

Ecstasy alone can encompass this theme, not utterance nor argument; and whosoever hath dwelt at this stage of the journey, or caught a breath from this garden land, knoweth whereof We speak.

Nonetheless, I believe this helps us understand the importance of gazing upon Thy beauty, even though it may be a beauty that eludes all gaze.

The divine attributes are not set entities. People can have different ideas about what it means to be merciful or what it means to be life-bestowing. So these are in no way safe approaches to Thy beauty. Furthermore people can become so blinded by their own conceptions of the divine attributes that they mistake what is human for what is God's and what is God's for what is human. Thus, we must develop a love for the unconditionality of God's essence and its manifestation in the oft repeated Baha'i principle God doeth whatsoever He willeth, and ordaineth whatsoever He pleaseth.

For these reasons, the performer must pursue the will of God however best it can be discerned. This can offer a safer pathway away from our own understandings and expectations and towards the will of God whatever that may be. The best repository for this is in sacred writings. This is why the performer hopes to observe whatsoever is in Thy book.