19 Day Agape

The 19 Day Agape and the Principle of One God

By John Taylor; 2 February, 2006

These Friday nights Stu and I meet at the institution run collectively
by local churches called the "Youth Outreach Centre," at which he runs
a little chess club; since usually nobody turns up lately, we spend
this time playing chess and table tennis against one another. I have
come to look forward to this contest all week. Associated with this,
every second Friday night a crafts program for 10 to 14 year old girls
called GEMS is held in a local church. The church lady running the
Youth Centre, Liz, invited Silvie back in November to come along. Liz
drives Silvie to GEMS, along with several other girls from the
neighborhood; the ride leaves the youth centre 15 minutes earlier than
the Youth Center's normal opening time on Friday. So we were just on
the point of departure last Friday when Silvie remembered out of the
blue that she had been asked by the GEMS instructor to look up a quote
from the Apostle Paul and memorize it before the next meeting. Thanks
to the Baha'i database program, Ocean, I was able to find it in a
trice, though the given chapter and verse was minimal (they did not
say whether it was I or II Corinthians) and with her school sharpened
mind, Silvie memorized it in less than a trice. Here is the quote:

"Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and that God's Spirit
lives in you? If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy
him; for God's temple is holy, which you are." (1 Cor 3:16-7)

Yes, a good thing to teach to pre-pubescent girls, undoubtedly. Love,
nurture and value your blooming body before the predator plucks it
forever. Later, reading it over, I thought that Paul's wisdom surely
also applies to the topic of our upcoming Philosopher's Cafe meeting,
euthanasia and mercy killing. It also applies for suicide, for that
matter. Reverence for life means not ending it. The spirit in the
temple of the body is holy, untouchable, and it demands that one never
desecrate temples (or, perhaps more accurately, countenance their
direct destruction) lest one call forth retaliation from the original
Owner, God.

As we noted here yesterday, St. Paul was a moral genius. His use of
Agape created a new word, new wine out of old. The Greek word before
him just meant love, plain and simple. But Paul made Agape into love
as a political thing. As the quote from Paul above (written not to an
individual but to a group of glum, nitpicking early Christians who had
lost their grip on the spirit) says, love is a spirit, untouchable; it
dwells in our bodily temple. By extension, this spirit dwells in us
together, in the holy body politic, in our collective life as well as
our personal spiritual struggles. That spirit of love in groups is
one, holy, sacrosanct. Mess up a group, and you mess with God Himself.
You risk his retribution.

Thus Paul's Agape is not just love of God in isolation, dry and
unconnected. It is love of God as a love feast, as charity, as
communion. Agape is charity, pure love for God expressed in selfless
acts for one's fellow man. By transforming this word, Paul united the
sacrifice of Jesus with the deepest meaning of the lesson philosophy
had learned from the death of Socrates. I firmly believe and repeat
here perhaps too often that if it were not for Socrates and the
hemlock, Christians would never have had a fair shot at understanding
the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. `Abdu'l-Baha in a tablet
explicitly mentioned the early Christians' Agape, love feast, as the
predecessor of our 19 Day Feast:

"...make of the Feasts occasions of joy and fellowship reminiscent of
the feasts that our forebears used to hold in connection with their
commemoration of the Lord's Supper..." (Compilation of Compilations,
vol. I, p. 428)

According to my Encyclopedia Britannica, there is long standing
confusion among Christians as to how closely the Agape love feast is
identified with the rituals of Holy Communion, but in view of what the
Master says here, I do not think Baha'is need trouble themselves with
doubts. The essence is the spirit of love among us, Agape, and that is
all that matters. Jesus once offered a sad prophesy while standing at
a distance from Jerusalem,

"Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, 'Blessed is he
that cometh in the name of the lord.'" (Matt 23:39)

This, I believe, foreshadows the uber-principle that Baha'is call
"Oneness of God." This is a Baha'i principle, but it is also the heart
of all other religions, the choicest ground of every philosophy, for
it is oneness, Agape. Baha'u'llah laid out the principle in His
"Crimson Book," the Kitab-i-Ahd, His Will and Testament:

"We fain would hope that the people of Baha may be guided by the
blessed words: 'Say, all things are of God.' This exalted utterance is
like unto water for quenching the fire of hate and enmity which
smoldereth within the hearts and breasts of men." (Tablets, 222)

Jesus will dwell among us, Baha'u'llah's holy Covenant will dwell
among us, the Kingdom will dwell among us when we come together in a
feast of love, of Agape. For the understanding that "All is God's" is
the only ultimate cure for the selfishness of individuals, and hence
all of the world's ills.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com