Ignorance I

Ignorance as Bliss

By John Taylor; 2007 August 24

"... his ignorance were wise, where now his knowledge must prove ignorance." - Shakespeare

I have rounded life's summit of fifty years of age, and all is downhill from here. I find now that it is better to think about what I do not know, not what I do know. On the way uphill to this summit, in our youth, we were ignorant but it did not seem to do harm. Then, it was called innocence, not ignorance. Is the ignorance of a child a good thing? Is it any different from the ignorance of an elder?

Now I think I know why poets turn so often to their childhood for inspiration. Such was the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," where Thomas Gray looked back, downhill, over his former playground and muses on his salad days,

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade...
Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!

The young cavort and play with no idea that they are about to go through the grinder. The playground now hints at this strangeness of innocence, the only time in life when ignorance is without darkness, when the full light of morning shines on the heart.

Our Exemplar's childhood was not joy unalloyed as it seems for many of us. Although His family was wealthy, early on he experienced the contempt that the religious majority had for Babis. He knew well the face of prejudice, what a character in Shakespeare declared, "O thou monster Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look!" Abdu'l-Baha was regularly mocked and bullied in the street by mobs of larger children for being a Babi.

Then, when He was round about the age that my son Tomaso is right now, eight-years-old, everything changed for the worse. He met with extreme suffering and, soon after, homelessness when the attempt on the life of the Shah was seen as a declaration of open season on the Babis. The entire family was evacuated from Tehran when His Father, Baha'u'llah, was incarcerated. Only Abdu'l-Baha stayed, for He had fallen so ill that it was thought He might not survive. But the physical agony was nothing compared to the psychological pain of knowing --  and not knowing -- what was happening to His Father. As Lady Blomfield relates,

"'Abdu'l-Baha, then only eight years old, was broken-hearted at the ruthless treatment of His adored Father. The child suffered agonies, as a description of the tortures was related in His hearing -- the cruel scourging of the feet, the long miles Baha'u'llah had to walk afterwards, barefooted, heavy chains cutting into the delicate flesh, the loathsome prison; the excruciating anxiety lest His very life should be taken -- made a load of suffering, piteous for so young and sensitive a child to endure. All the former luxury of the family was at an end. deserted as they were by relations and friends. Homeless, utterly  impoverished, engulfed in trouble, and misery, suffering from sheer want and extraordinary privations -- such were the conditions under which His childhood's life was spent." (Chosen Highway, 80-81)

The fact that Abdu'l-Baha responded first and best of all to the Revelation that came down like a mighty torrent to Baha'u'llah in that dark and dank underground prison, that is a kind of consolation to us in our own hard times. For not only Baha'u'llah but our exemplar went through that and both wholeheartedly felt what the Elder expressed in a prayer,

"I am well pleased with that which Thou didst ordain for Me, and welcome, however calamitous, the pains and sorrows I am made to suffer." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 89-90)

It is one thing for a Holy One of God to undergo such an experience and quite another for an eight-year-old to witness the effects. We know that the boy was allowed to view His Father, bent over from bearing the heavy instrument of torture, walking in the prison yard, and that the sight so shocked Him that He fainted dead away. But the agony was wrapped in a Mystery, and His sensitive soul was so conditioned by this agony that later He discerned a change in His Father. This led to what can only be called the "Declaration of the Master," a religious experience of the greatest moment, though unmarked in our calendar.

"I am the servant of the Blessed Perfection. In Baghdad I was a child. Then and there He announced to me the Word, and I believed in Him. As soon as He proclaimed to me the Word, I threw myself at His Holy Feet and implored and supplicated Him to accept my blood as a sacrifice in His Pathway. Sacrifice! How sweet I find that word! There is no greater Bounty for me than this! What greater glory can I conceive than to see this neck chained for His sake, these feet fettered for His love, this body mutilated or thrown into the depths of the sea for His Cause! If in reality we are His sincere lovers -- if in reality I am His sincere servant, then I must sacrifice my life, my all at His Blessed Threshold." (Esslemont, Baha'u'llah and the New Era, 51)

This is how He bore under the burden of trials and tribulations for the rest of His life: His identity was wrapped up in sacrifice, He longed for it, and as to all great souls, life obliged and poured down oceans of it upon Him, to the very end.