“O my brother, a pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of ‘Neither doth My heaven nor My earth contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.’ ” Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, Unity
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. – Hebrews 13:2.
Verily, it is enjoined upon you to offer a feast, once in every month, though only water be served; for God hath purposed to bind hearts together, albeit through both earthly and heavenly means. – Baha’u’llah, The Most Holy Book, p. 40.
Hospitality gives us an opportunity to help people feel welcome in our homes. It spreads happiness when the host smiles, offers refreshments, and helps people feel comfortable. It makes neighbors feel neighborly. It creates friendships. It brings people together in unity.
But hospitality has an effect on the host as well. I notice my husband and I feel uplifted as we prepare our home to be clean and orderly. Towels and sheets are fresh. Food is abundant. The porch is swept. We feel closely connected to each other as we invite others into our space for a while. We also appreciate our own home better!
The people who come into our home vary from those we have never met to long-time friends and relatives. We all share stories of our lives that help us to build understanding and friendship. With new people, we look for points of connection. With people we already know, we fill in the gaps with news of what has happened since we were last together. Our world expands as we hear new viewpoints and learn about the choices others have made. We share ideas, feelings, thoughts, and prayers.
Make your home a haven of rest and peace. Be ye hospitable and let the doors of your home be open to the faces of friends and strangers. Welcome everyone with a smiling face… – Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West, Volume 6, p. 20.
Our hope is always that people leave better than when they arrive through the experiences they share with us. We want them to learn something new, heal from a past experience, have a new adventure, or lighten up with laughter. We notice that our lives are better from their visits too.
We also notice that the experience of being in our home becomes more enjoyable when we and our guests feel free to engage in service. As we prepare food together, set and clear the table, do the dishes, and more, we take part and become participants in a mutual experience. We try to make sure our guests are not passive recipients of us serving them. They benefit by being part of enhancing the overall quality of time we spend together. It’s also easier for us to relax when we are not trying to do everything, and conversation flows as we work and serve each other together.
My husband and I can also tell that it brings peace and happiness to our guests when they see positive interactions between us. As we demonstrate loving communication with each other, it inspires others to have loving relationships.
…like unto two sweet-singing birds, [you and your spouse] must be perched on the highest branches of the tree of life, filling the air with songs of love and happiness. – Ibid.
Sometimes it feels like it will be difficult to have guests, and we wonder if we can make time to offer them our hospitality. We think, “But we are so busy with work and other activities.” It can sometimes seem more like it will be a burden than a joy.
However, consistently, when we set aside these concerns and offer hospitality, we are happy we made that choice. Relationships and friendships with others are a vital part of living a full life, and a vital part of marriage. We also look upon our home as a gift from God, and opening it to others shares that gift.
O Son of Being! If thine heart be set upon this eternal, imperishable dominion, and this ancient, everlasting life, forsake this mortal and fleeting sovereignty. –Baha’u’llah, The Hidden Words, p. 16.
In college, I knew a guy everyone called a serial monogamist. Putting it kindly, he was aggressively single. Every time I saw him he was with a different date, and he rarely missed a party. We’ll call him Cliff.
I asked him about it once. He laughed and gave me some variant of the old “Variety is the spice of life, and I’m just playing the field” cliché. You know the one.
But Cliff, I learned after we wound up in two literature classes together, didn’t typically talk in clichés—he could actually think. The questions he asked our professors in class revealed a deeper and more thoughtful person than I would have guessed. I learned, as well, that Cliff didn’t seem very happy, despite all the partying.
After those classes a few years passed, and for a long time I didn’t see Cliff around, until one day I ran into him in a store.
“Cliff,” I said, “where’ve you been?” As I said it, I noticed he wore a wedding ring. Had he come into the store walking a lion on a leash, it might not have surprised me as much.
“I got married,” he said, with a big grin.
“Congratulations,” I said, shaking his hand. “Didn’t think you were marriage material.”
“You know,” he told me, “neither did I.”
“What changed?” I asked him.
“Well, I had an epiphany. I realized, with all that frenetic running around chasing women, I was only trying to deny my own mortality.”
Cliff’s philosophical and spiritual insight into himself struck me as pretty profound.
Later I gave Cliff this quote from the Baha’i writings:
Having, in this journey, immersed himself in the ocean of immortality, rid his heart from attachment to aught save Him, and attained unto the loftiest heights of everlasting life, the seeker will see no annihilation either for himself or for any other soul. He will quaff from the cup of immortality, tread in its land, soar in its atmosphere, consort with them that are its embodiments, partake of the imperishable and incorruptible fruits of the tree of eternity, and be forever accounted, in the lofty heights of immortality, amongst the denizens of the everlasting realm. – Baha’u’llah, Gems of Divine Mysteries, p. 72.
For me this short passage, and Baha’u’llah’s Hidden Word above, both exemplify the heart of true religion.
These two brief quotes express and examine the very root of the human condition: we live and breathe today, but tomorrow we die. The absolute certainty of our death forces all human beings to answer a fundamental question about our lives: What lasts?
If you believe–like Cliff did at one point in his player, party phase–that life comes to a halt when the body dies, then you might reach the conclusion that nothing has much lasting value. In other words, you could conclude that everything dies, and we are all just soulless mammals who face eternal oblivion at the end of our physical lives. Given that judgment, most people simply try to find as much pleasure, self-gratification and material comfort as they possibly can.
But if you sense the presence of something else in life, a mystical, deathless reality that extends beyond the grave, then you’ll want to plan for the long term, and not point your whole life toward the physical.
Those who believe our human consciousness goes on after biological death often call that next stage of existence the afterlife. But it’s a misleading word, which suggests that this physical world is where we have our actual, real life; and the spiritual world beyond it only contains a footnote.
The Baha’i teachings describe it differently.
This earthly phase of our existence, Baha’u’llah writes, is a “mortal and fleeting sovereignty.” Transcending that temporary sovereignty and ridding our hearts of attachment to it, he tells us, requires re-focusing our affections on the eternal. Rather than loving the physical, which will ultimately perish, we should extend our love to the spiritual aspects of life–the infinite and the imperishable. Rather than growing attached to this world, where we only stay for a short time, our gaze should take in the wider horizon and seek the longer view.
We are immortal souls, the Baha’i teachings say, each of us an indestructible essence. This physical existence, which lasts at most a hundred years or so, only serves as the first stage in our spiritual growth—but it serves as a very important stage. Here, in this material plane of reality, we decide to focus on what will pass or what will last. Choose well.
True religion is the source of love and agreement amongst men, the cause of the development of praiseworthy qualities, but the people are holding to the counterfeit and imitation, negligent of the reality which unifies, so they are bereft and deprived of the radiance of religion. . . That which was meant to be conducive to life has become the cause of death; that which should have been an evidence of knowledge is now a proof of ignorance; that which was a factor in the sublimity of human nature has proved to be its degradation. Therefore, the realm of the religionist has gradually narrowed and darkened, and the sphere of the materialist has widened and advanced; for the religionist has held to imitation and counterfeit, neglecting and discarding holiness and the sacred reality of religion. – Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 179.
In this profound passage, Abdu’l-Baha describes religion—even as he explains why it has not lived up to this definition in practice.
Now, I’m a wordsmith by trade, and rather partial to using words as accurately as possible. The very fact that religion (or any other important word) means so many different things to so many different people gives me great frustration. But I’m flexible, and while my preference would be to use the word “religion” to mean simply the binding together of the hearts of human beings around divine principles of conduct, and to use the terms “dogma” or even “religious dogma” to refer to the dogmatic belief in particular doctrines, I’m open to finding new words if my friends and correspondents can’t bend that far.
So, here’s the question: What words can we safely use?
Abdu’l-Baha suggests the idea of a Road or Path—a spiritual Path that he recommends we tread with practical feet. Buddha would call it a Dharma, a path to truth. Muhammad advanced the concept of the Din—a transaction or covenant with the Divine by which the believer committed to a journey of transformation and the daily effort to acquire divine qualities such as kindness, mercy, justice, and the like. We might also simply call it a Faith, which perhaps steps back a bit from the community aspect toward the individual relationship with God.
Many people have said (sometimes with an inexplicable air of superiority) “I’m not religious. I’m spiritual.” I find, as I write this, that my own definitions of “spirituality”, “faith” and “religion” revolve around individual and community relationships. My spirituality is what happens deep inside (whatever the very physical idea of “inside”ness means in this context); it is a quality or condition of my personal inner state. My faith is my relationship with God and His word. My efforts to cultivate transformative virtues bridges those two realities. My religion is my relationship with my fellow Baha’is and, beyond them, all other human beings. What connects the three is how my practice of those transformative virtues strengthens and deepens my relationships with other human beings.
In short, I could say that my religion centers on Baha’u’llah’s statement: “The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens”. That seemingly simple concept covers a world of complexity.
This definition of religion has implications for a relationship between religion and science (which my confrere Stephen Friberg writes much about on our Common Ground Group blog). First of all, there is nothing in the idea of the acquisition of virtues or their application to life and community that violates scientific principle, or eschews scientific process. In fact, scientific process is enshrined, if you will, in the Baha’i writings:
The third principle or teaching of Baha’u’llah is that religion and science are in complete agreement. Every religion which is not in accordance with established science is superstition. Religion must be reasonable. If it does not square with reason, it is superstition and without foundation. It is like a mirage, which deceives man by leading him to think it is a body of water. God has endowed man with reason that he may perceive what is true. If we insist that such and such a subject is not to be reasoned out and tested according to the established logical modes of the intellect, what is the use of the reason which God has given man? –Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace. p. 106.
Good question, don’t you think?
