Faith, Prayer and Oneness
By John Taylor; 2006 June 06
I had drifted far into the garden of repose but this morning was jerked back to the principle of One God. My morning reading was a cordial wake-up call from the Bab. In the opening to this passage He succinctly sums up in four sentences four qualities that Oneness entails, omnience, possession, inscrutability and peerlessness:
"God testifieth that there is none other God but Him. His are the kingdoms in the heavens and on the earth and all that is between them. He is exalted above the comprehension of all things, and is inscrutable to the mind of every created being; none shall be able to fathom the oneness of His Being or to unravel the nature of His Existence. No peer or likeness, no similitude or equal can ever be joined with Him." (Selections, 154)
The center of our knowledge, then, is from the point of view of the human mind eclipsed (omnience, material cause), made a vassal (possession, efficient cause), mentally outgunned (inscrutability, formal cause) and outshined (peerlessness, final cause). At heart every cause for every effect is a void, an unknown about which we can be certain of only one thing, that we will never be, own, grasp or attain to it. How do we know even that? As it says above, God Himself testifies to this. If you cannot trust God, who can you trust?
Nonetheless it is clear that we cannot know much since the best minds from Socrates forward have attested to their inadequacy. And as if that were not enough evidence, they inadvertently offered further proof by failing to agree at the most fundamental levels. The greater the thinker and the more profound the thought, the wider the understanding gap looms. All we can hope for is to accommodate inadequacy, as Kant strove for in his Critique of Pure Reason, and Verner Heisenberg discovered with his uncertainty principle. Heisenberg's principle is the reflection in tiny things of the broader phenomenon that the Bab describes above. Let us therefore call the original, divine principle the greater uncertainty principle and Heisenberg's the lesser uncertainty principle. Not everybody can study quantum physics, but everybody must come to terms with the greater uncertainty principle, for it is the heart of the principle of the oneness of God.
If it is true what Kant said, that understanding is knowledge adequate to our purpose, is recognizing the greater uncertainty principle adequate to our purpose as human beings? Is knowing that we do not know understanding enough? It certainly is universal, for though knowledge may be exclusive, all are born ignorant and what is universal is holy. Does that holy anointing in ignorance suffice? Again, we have to trust that it is.
We know from the Writings that our overall purposes are twofold, to know and to love God. Having covered the inadequacy of knowing, the Bab proceeds to the duty to love. Unlike knowledge, love stands not on presuppositions, or the lack thereof, it has, as the French saying goes, its reasons that reason knows not of. Nor does it stand on motives. As a character in Twelfth Night puts it: "Love sought is good, but given unsought better." Which is why a mother's love runs deeper than that of the child in return. The Bab says,
"Yield ye praise then unto Him and glorify Him and bear ye witness to the sanctity and oneness of His Being and magnify His might and majesty with wondrous glorification. This will enable you to gain admittance into all-highest Paradise. Would that ye had firm faith in the revelation of the signs of God." (Selections, 154)
Love comes when all the props of certainty have fallen away but still there is the universe unfolding before our eyes, teeming with life and beauty, the product of consummate knowledge and love. Is that not proper cause for wonder? Spontaneous love for God enables us to rise and enter heaven, the Bab tells us, but it is all too clear that our love is derived, second hand, it will never match God's love for us, just as our knowledge will never touch His Omniscience. Yet all that is good, beautiful and true in life comes of our love one for another, and ultimately for God. The Master says,
"Whatever produces any influence in this world of existence is on account of the love of God, which is the spirit of life and the cause of salvation." (Star of the West, Vol II, #15, p. 16)
In the last sentence above the Bab says, "would that ye had firm faith in the revelation of the signs of God." We do not have it. Yet. Yet He hopes it will happen. And here is the Bab's definition of faith. Faith is what happens when the knowledge and love of God are reciprocated. It is the slosh-over, the overlap of His true knowing and loving over ours; it is the moment when they become One. Oneness is concentrating upon the One, what we cannot know or appreciate. Yet. It is prayer, unity of attention, as the Master affirms. All else is a waste of time.
"The worshipper must pray with a detached spirit, unconditional surrender of the will, concentrated attention and spiritual fervour ... AUTOMATIC, FORMAL PRAYERS WHICH DO NOT TOUCH THE CORE OF THE HEART ARE OF NO AVAIL. When we turn to God with our whole heart and invoke His Name, a spiritual connection is established through which we become a channel of divine influence." (`Abdu'l-Baha, quoted in a letter dated 19 October 1925 written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual, cited in UHJ memorandum dated 15 September 2003)
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John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
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