Spirituality

Spirituality

While Listening to “Diveniri” by Ludovico Einaudi (Audio link, in case WordPress refuses to include ithttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCGvZCbcE0Q

When my husband and I visited the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa Israel a long time ago we came home with a lot of fragrant dried rose petals from the Shrine of Baha’u’llah. Those treasures are in a glass bottle, to hold the fragrance, and these are some I dried from a gorgeous bouquet a friend brought from a rose garden in Fresno, California. The roses were fragrant, the size of diner plates.

Now that I am taking my place line with others recently diagnosed with metastatic cancer I am evaluating the role of. spirituality in life… Like what is it? How to find it when we need it?

Spirituality is where the circle of light that is one’s soul touches a great, glowing eternal force, and draws its strength to get through another day, another battle, another upest, even another great joy in a life that is too little understood in its inherent spiritual magnificence.  This is your life, as it has been mine.  We reach out to one another through some mysterious drive that tells us how life is better when there are hands to hold on to.

Spirituality is ignited by the smallest bits of one’s day.  The smile of a stranger on the street, the caress of sunlight on a tear stained cheek, listening to a special piece of music,  the cooing of a small baby, the warmth of a trusted dog or cat lying against you as you try to sort out of the confusion that has become your life.

In a word, it is the force that ignites the spirit within a human being.  

There is a prayer that I have known throughout my life.  Called the Tablet of Ahmad, it has helped many get through seemingly impossible circumstances.  Right up to the current state of division in our country and horrifying wars elsewhere.  This prayer was given to the world in the mid 1800s by Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith.  It is for people of all Faiths, and of none. It kept my late, good, ex husband alive under the most dire circumstances.

For long periods I have forgotten that this prayer exists.  Life then smites me  afresh and whammy, there I am, reading it again.  It has never failed to ignite the spirit within me with “I’ve got this!”

“He is the King, the All-Knowing, the Wise!  …. Lo, the Nightingale of Paradise singeth upon the twigs of the Tree of Eternity, with holy and sweet melodies, proclaiming to the sincere ones the glad tidings of the nearness of God, informing the severed ones of the message which hath been revealed by God, the King, The Glorious, the Peerless, guiding the lovers to the seat of sanctity and to this resplendent Beauty.”

If you would like to read the full prayer, the link is Tablet of Ahmad.

This long-ish prayer speaks to all sorts of things that might be going on in the life of an individual.  But today, so many of us are utterly confused — bamboozled, as my mother might have said — by the state of affairs.  My Boston University magazine, “Bostonia”, just found me again years after I failed to notify BU  — again!  about a change of address.  It is here, beside my notebook on my desk — buried beneath another magazine in order to hide the title story:  “How the AR-15 Divided a Nation.”

Man, confusion runs rife…. I had an AK-15 aimed straight at me by an unknown teenager one time and it was no fun.  Also not life changing.  My dogs got me out of harm’s way.

I do not believe that it is a gun model that has changed this country.  It’s way deeper than a tool such as that.  Nonetheless — every day I see my grandson off to pre-school and my son-in-law off to teach high school  I pray that nobody with an assault weapon, or any other gun, goes into their classrooms…. Or any other classroom, or shopping center, super market, concert, place of work or worship, whatever. 

There is a lot that must be left out for the sake of brevity and respect here.  This is not the place to try to explain the mysteries of the appearance of a new messenger from God, a person who came for the entire world, not just one or two sections of it.  Who brought the message that this is the time for all of us to come together in recognition that there is one God who created all of us and the universe beyond.  He brought new teachings, new laws, new explanations of the meaning of life and the role of religion as the driver of knowledge and wisdom throughout the world.*

And He said that the weight of His Message would upset the world’s equilibrium. He said:

“The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. Its perversity will long continue. And when the appointed hour is come, there shall suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake. Then, and only then, will the Divine Standard be unfurled, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble its melody.”

To me, this is spirituality as I have been learning It all through my life, the map for how I should be trying to shape my wee, tiny being on earth. Perhaps I will not be here much longer, but the above is the world my grandchildren and others are inheriting. There is nothing but spirituality that will enable us (you all, out there) to survive it.

“Be thou as a flame of fire to My enemies and a river of life eternal to My loved ones, and be not of those who doubt.

“And if thou art overtaken by affliction in My path, or degradation for My sake, be not thou troubled thereby.

“Rely upon God, thy God, and the Lord of thy fathers.  For the people are wandering tin the paths of delusion, bereft of discernment to see God with their own eyes, or hear His Melody with their own ears.  Thus have We found them, as thou also dost witness.

“Thus have their superstitions become veils between them and their own hearts and kept them from the path of God, the Exalted, the Great.”

So, to me, the path of spirituality means trying to free myself of any “veils of superstition” that may be clouding my vision.  I get help with this from fellow Baha’is, of course, but Baha’u’llah, like Jesus Christ and other prophets before Him, did not come and suffer so much while on this earth just for me, or America, or Africa, or future colonies on Mars.  He came for all of humanity.  And if you’re Wiccan, or Pagan… nature is there for all of us.  There is a great power which I have felt when sitting amongst the Giant Sequoias around here.  The world tears asunder as they burn in California’s mountain wildfires.

It is my job, the job of any believer in this newest of world religions, to try to follow it, try to live a more universal life with it — and to allow others to be, to believe. as they choose, for themselves.  No conflicts.  This is spirituality.  When we look with clear vision, it is there.  We do not even have to “find” it, so much as look to the universal spirit of this age we are heading into, kicking and screeching,  With many calling on old powers we are familiar with for help as humanity faces, collectively, problems so vast and universal that there is no way in which just a few elites or some lucky countries can make them go away.  

Today spirituality means we are all in this schemozzle** together, and like the Marines, we don’t, of our own intention, leave anybody behind.

*There is much more about the Baha’i Faith at bahai.org

**Yiddish for:

1. A state of chaos or confusion

2.    A quarrel or commotion.