THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MAN


*(Editor's Note: Dorothy Baker, Hand of the Cause of God, prepared this talk for a radio program in Lima, Ohio, United States. It is taken from "From Copper to Gold: The Life of Dorothy Baker, pp. 149 - 150 by Dorothy Freeman. Hands of the Cause of God of the Baha'i Faith are people who have been appointed by Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha, and Shoghi Effendi, to be the Chief Stewards of the Baha'i Faith)"

One day a businessman said to me, 'Secretly I wonder about myself. I arise in the morning, eat, keep shop, sleep and then do it all over again. I begin to feel like that person who said, "Man matters only to himself; he is fighting a lone fight against a vast indifference."'What a strange creature man is! He stands at the very apex of creation and forgets his own preciousness in the sight of God. Sometimes we go into dark closets of our own building and stuff up the keyhole and the cracks. Then we say, 'The sun is not shining for me.' We build the closets of our own odd variety of materials - envy, fear, selfishness, sadness and sometimes just a sense of frustration and futility. And there we stay, mainly because we have not thought out our position there and so we are not doing anything about it. Often we hear the sighs of others in nearby closets and we wish we could liberate them, but not having freed ourselves, we find it pretty hard to tell them what to do.Now the first thing that is probably needed is a larger perspective. I had the good fortune to have a remarkable grandmother. How well I remember hearing her say, 'If anything troubles you very much now, look at it in terms of five years from this time, or twenty-five, or fifty, and if it still looms pretty large, measure it in terms of eternity. Now that is my theme of eternity. Then look back, if you will, and wonder what became of your darkest closet.The great thing is to find for ourselves the purpose of being, and to hold to that through everything. Baha'u'llah said, 'O God, I testify that thou hast created me to know Thee and to adore Thee.' There is God at the far end and here are we are at the near end, on this lonely little island, the earth, needing to discover in that brief flash, an enormous purpose like that! And it is brief! He also said, 'Count all the days of thy life as less than a fleeting instant.'To know and adore God! Think of the things we deplore every day that all the while may be really speeding us on our way! Take the matter of trouble, for example. Baha'u'llah, in His Tablet to the Shah of Persia, wrote, 'I am not impatient of calamity in His way nor of affliction for His love. God hath made afflictions as a morning shower to His green pasture, and as a wick for His lamp, whereby earth and Heaven are illumined.'A morning shower! Often trouble opens the heart to God. And after that it becomes purified, little by little, so that the self or Satan of the heart dies out and makes room for the Divine Beloved. I came just this morning upon these words, 'Purify thy heart for My descent. The Friend and stanger cannot dwell there together.' Trouble is often just the testing ground of the soul. There is a real freedom in it. As a Kreisler after difficult years of drudgery is free in the world of music, as an athlete after long discipline of the body has supremacy in the world of sports, so does your soul win a sovereignty through a life that challenges it to be at grips with the world. Tests often come again and again to teach a single lesson, until at last there is a victory and a former weakness is replaced by strength. Every time this happens, it marks a milestone on the path to God."
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