A couple posts back I began a commentary on the second passage of the Long Obligatory Prayer. In that post I interpeted up through the sentence beginning Behold me standing ready... In this post I will take on the rest of it, starting from I implore Thee by the Ocean of Thy mercy....The section as a whole reads as follows,
O Thou the Desire of the world and the Beloved of the nations! Thou seest me turning toward Thee and rid of all attachment to anyone save Thee and clinging to Thy cord, through whose movement the whole creation hath been stirred up. I am Thy servant and the son of Thy servant. Behold me standing ready to do Thy will and Thy desire, and wishing naught else except Thy good pleasure. I implore Thee by the Ocean of Thy mercy and the Day-Star of Thy grace to do with Thy servant as Thou willest and pleasest. By Thy might which is far above all mention and praise! Whatsoever is revealed by Thee is the desire of my heart and the beloved of my soul. O God, my God! Look not upon my hopes and my doings, nay rather look upon Thy will that hath encompassed the heavens and the earth. By Thy Most Great Name, O Thou the Lord of all nations! I have desired only what Thou didst desire, and love only what Thou dost love.
In part one we looked over the image of the supplicant who stands ready to do Thy will and Thy desire. Poised to perform the will of God, the servant does all that can be done to prepare for the performance, but does not in fact begin carrying out the will of God. This is because the decree has not yet come.
I implore thee by the Ocean of Thy mercy and the Daystar of Thy grace to do with Thy servant as Thou willest and pleasest.
The prayer is not for this or for that thing that the servant happens to want. Instead the prayer is for what God wants, whatever that may be. In this petition we see the most explicit presentation of the will of God as unconditioned and foreign to the self of the servant.
For something to be conditioned means quite simply that it must meet certain conditions. It must be constricted and bound within certain rules of engagement. A thing is acceptable if it conforms with my understanding of justice. A thing is acceptable if it confirms the legitimacy of such and such institution. A thing is acceptable if it doesn't interfere with my relationship with this person. Conditioning is the act of self-preservation. In fact it is the production of the self in the first place. It is the demarcation between the legitimate and illegitimate in such a way that secures the position that does so. The internalization of this conditioning process is desire. In this way desire isn't purely natural. It is produced and...yes...conditioned to support a particular arrangement.
Thus, the unconditioned coming of the will of God is something that breaks apart the unity and integrity of the self as desire. It is done on God's terms and God's conditions, which are foreign and exterior to that of the servant. In this way, there is an openness to the construction of a new self, a new standard for legitimacy. It is the production of new desires, and the discipline to follow them.
The tension between the old and the new is highlighted in the second-to-last line of the passage.
Look not upon my hopes and my doings, nay rather look upon Thy will that hath encompassed the heavens and the earth. Here, the servant puts not only my doings, a frequent subject of penance, but also my hopes in question. This is an extraordinary petition inasmuch as there is no greater illustration of self than in the content of one's hopes. Self is configured around how one imagines oneself to be and how things could be. To put one's hopes at a distance is to become alienated from one's own self. The great irony is that this is done in hope of a new self that one imagines as being yet to come.
Reasonable voices may look this over and see in it the enslavement of the human race. The images of subjection and pacification are obvious. So one wonders what this has to do with the upliftment of the human spirit, or emancipation from the rule of tyranny. The best response to this comes I think from a return to the image of turning presented earlier.
When one turns, and I'm imagining a 180 degree turn, there are three stages. At first one's feet are fixed. The gaze is in a single direction. At the end, one is in the same situation except what was once in front is now in back and what was in back is in front. In between is a time in which one moves from one position from the other. As the body moves so does the world. The faster one moves the harder it is for the eyes to focus. The stable frame of reference is lost. Eventually it is regained, but in the meantime a new and unclear world opens up. The loss of this stable frame of reference can be thought of as the loss of self and the certainty of one's own perspective.
The irony is that between selves is the ultimate testing grounds for the capacities of self. This is because the self-as-such is not dissolved, only its integrity, only its self-certainty. Its powers carry on, disconnected, liberated, betrayed: to make judgments when it is unclear by what criteria to make them, to endure the socio-political destabilization that comes with the transgressive act of turning one's feet, to keep one's life balanced when the balance of routine has been lost.
This turning requires a faith, not in the certainty of one's self, but in the turning itself, that when we turn by God, we turn round right.
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5 comments:
greg- your interpretation of the physical act of turning is awesome. as one turns, the world turns, and one's perspective is shifted. explaining liberation through obedience has always been a tough call for religious writers- but you are right. to turn and face God's will and law is to exactly turn away from those veils of distinction which make injustice and seperation possible. we are no longer opperating on the world's terms, but waiting upon His.
This entry has been the hardest for me to swallow. Granted, its the theological core of my project on the LOP, but I leave open a lot of questions.
The main thing I'm trying to work through is that the lack of foundation at the point of turning is not limited to periods "between selves." It's the inescapable inconsistency that haunts any claim to a unified self. To regain focus is in to carry on in spite of that inconsistency, or in more honest words, to embrace the lie of self-certainty.
Within the metaphor this might call for turning without end, the persistant demystification of any claims to self-certainty. There is evidence for this, especially in Baha'u'llah's Baghdad writings, such as the Kitab-i-Iqan. The problem though is that this is like fingernails on a chalkboard when trying to do religious law, or something like it, which is more along the lines of Baha'u'llah's later writings which are more aimed at practical concerns of community governance, like world order, or say...the Covenant. This approach privileges predictability, statecraft, clearly defined responsibilities These things that don't always sit well with esoteric mysticism, for reasons that I'm having trouble placing my finger on at the moment.
I'm not going to say that Baha'u'llah contradicts himself in between Baghdad and Akka. I'd laugh anybody out of the room who thinks they're capable of proving that. But nonetheless there are tensions there that are not easily resolved by just digging up more quotes.
Which is interesting because now we find ourselves back at some of the same sorts of issues that developed within Sufism back in the day. Maybe I should be paying more attention to Baha'u'llah's references to Rumi.
i remember your stories about Baha'u'llah as a Sufi. and i agree that alot of what one sees in the Baha'i faith as a non-Baha'i centers around order, administration, and clarity on key issues, less on mysticism and deeper readings of Baha'i writings. still, those Sufic writings and references are there all over to study and read in to. and that contrast is a difficult one to breach.
Well that tension between mysticism and order didn't just arise in 1863 with Baha'u'llah's Ridvan declaration. It goes back all the way through the Sufi tradition. In the early days following Ibn-al-Arabi a lot of Sufis went in the direction of antinomianism. They believed that mystical insight released them from the obligations of religious law. One of Rumi's most important contributions was to restore the importance of law-keeping while pursuing the mystical path. That was a tradition that carried on right through Baha'u'llah.
In between the execution of the Bab and the ascendency of Baha'u'llah as the community's leader there was a big wave of antinomianism. In response Baha'u'llah took up Rumi's position, that mysticism and law-keeping must go together. So even though the Baha'i community was far less structured and far more mystical back then, there was still that conjunction of law and spirit. Since then it has carried over, more or less to the current day. Though I must say, it takes a substantial outbreak of antinomianism to remind people of those roots and tease through their subtleties.
Tension occurs in Rumi as well but he unites the poles. For example, I think Baha'u'llah is alluding to a passage from Rumi when He writes of the conflicting advice of the mystics. Rumi had written of two laundrymen one washed while the other dried. Only one who doesn't understand the process (that they were cleaning) would say that they were working at cross purposes --that is one added water to the clothes while the other took the water away.
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