What follows is an updated version of a piece written in November 2017 in commemoration of the bicentenary of the Gregorian date of the birth of the Prophet-Founder of my religion, the Bahá’í Faith. It is a reflection upon my personal spiritual journey as a Bahá’í. The most recent cosmetic edits to it were made in March 2021. I pray that some of those who read it may find it useful.
Let me tell you a story about one of the great loves of my life. The majority of those of you who know me personally, which I expect the entire readership of this newsletter does as of March 2021, will know that I have a relationship to God – I'm not always 100% convinced that He's there, but I do pray, and I do try to live my life as though it's informed by a consciousness of the spiritual dimension of reality. Virtually all of my time walking that path is spent stumbling and falling — I'm a flawed, broken man. But I do conceive of human beings as having souls – the essential part of us, the part that inclines us to strive for high and noble and beautiful things, that responds to the indwelling yearning to search after numinous things like “truth” and “beauty” and “the good”, the part “that shines and makes you feel warm”, in the words of a woman I met on a dating site once — and I take the cultivation of my soul very seriously. I wasn't raised to believe in God — the specific denomination of Judaism in which I was reared, which is called "Reconstructionist Judaism”, doesn't require it — and for many years I was content with that. But sometime around eighteen years ago, when I was a teenager exploring my nascent spirituality for the first time, compelled by religious soul and gospel and rap music by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield and Witchdoctor and Mos Def and Scarface, I started reaching out for a personal God. “What if He's there?”, I asked myself. “What would He or She or They be like, what would He teach, what would She ask of us?” And it just so happened that in the spring of my fifteenth year my father, who was the last in his family who had never been to Israel, took me on a Jewish pilgrimage, and we went to Haifa, and I found the Bahá'í Faith.
I was awestruck. Those of you who have seen photographs of the gardens and shrines that constitute the Bahá'í holy places in Haifa and Akka, and perhaps Bahá'í houses of worship elsewhere in places like Wilmette, just outside Chicago, or the heart of New Delhi, will know that they're magnificent and strikingly beautiful. And I asked some random person who was milling about the garden, “Hey, what's this?”, and they said, “Oh, we’re Bahá’ís”, and I went home and looked it up on Wikipedia, and my brain exploded in my skull. I started singing Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" to myself, believing the change was finally at hand. I had a mystical vision around the time I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and it corroborated many of the Faith's claims. I listened to Bahá'í music, especially the overpoweringly majestic and gorgeous "Garden of Ridván" by the pop-country legend Dan Seals of Seals & Crofts (yes, the "Summer Breeze" cats were Bahá'ís – Dizzy Gillespie and the actor Rainn Wilson too!), over and over and over and over and over again on an endless loop. The truth is, the Bahá'í Faith is so wondrous and glorious that my brain kinda hasn't stopped exploding in my skull for eighteen years.
The gist of the Bahá'í Faith is this: In mid-nineteenth-century Iran, a Person arose Who taught three elementary truths – the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humankind. He proclaimed that all humanity was one single family, and that all the major religions we know about are different versions of the same truth, arising at different times in different places and with differing secondary characteristics according to the particular needs of a given people or age. The major Prophets or Messengers of those traditions—Prophets Moses and Muhammad and Zarathustra, Lord Krishna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus the Christ of Nazareth, all of whom Bahá'ís refer to as "Manifestations of God"—are essentially held to be the same soul in different bodies, teaching the same message with specific variations in accord with the ordinance of God, Who sent them all, that they focus on a specific theme or motif. For Krishna, the main theme was just the concept of the spiritual life, and the recognition that all the many "gods" are just attributes of One Eternal God. For Zarathustra, it was the cultivation of virtue. For Jesus, the message was supreme, all-pervading, self-sacrificing love. For Buddha, it was detachment and renunciation, a turning away from oneself and one's petty worldly concerns. Each of the Manifestations is held to have had a special part to play in the history and evolution of religious civilization, progressively building on one another's messages and teachings—the principle is literally called “progressive revelation”—and showering upon us new knowledge from the heaven of God's Will, which will keep raining down upon us and allowing us to become ever more enlightened and build an ever more advanced civilization, forever. There will never be a last Manifestation of God, because there will always be new knowledge to reveal, but the claim the Bahá'ís make is that our Prophet-Founder, a man of noble lineage named Mirza Husayn Álí Núrí who was granted the title “the Glory of God”, Bahá'u'lláh – He’s allegedly the most recent Guy in that cycle, the fulfillment of the Messianic expectations of all the previous faiths – the return of Christ, the Maitreya Buddha, the Kalki Avatar, the Moshiach Ben-David, the whole thing – and the one whose teachings are best adapted and specifically designed for the age in which we find ourselves today, an age when, in Bahá'í parlance, humankind is finally ready to go from spiritual adolescence to the age of true maturity—to investigate the truth fully and independently, to set justice before our eyes, to disregard false idols and misbegotten prejudices and abolish hatred once and for all, to accept the full and unquestionable equality of women with men, to recognize science and religion as two equal paths to true knowledge that ought to work together in harmony, to transcend ancient rivalries and clashes based on race or class or tribe or clan or creed, to rise to the greatness and nobility for which we were created, and to step into the sunlight of a new day, as one race of people, living peaceably in a united world.
If it sounds too good to be true, my sad answer to you is that in some ways, I'm pretty sure I think it is. I feel honour-bound to explain some of that to y'all in due course. But I would certainly suggest that for anyone who has even the slightest inkling of spiritual faith, anything like a relationship to God, the life and teachings of Bahá'u'lláh deserve to be something you at least know about and familiarize yourself with. Because from the moment a kindly old man named Douglas McGrath stopped off at my father's house one day all those years ago and gave me a book called The Hidden Words, containing Bahá'u'lláh's teachings in their purest and most succinct form, my heart has been enraptured, like Majnún pining after Laylí in the ancient Persian folktale, just completely besotted and entirely taken with the life and teachings and especially the Writings and Utterances that issued forth from the pen of this beautiful Man, Who gave Himself up to imprisonment and exile at the hands of the wicked Ottoman and Persian rulers (“We have consented to be bound in chains that mankind may be freed from its bondage”), who freed His family's slaves and devoted His life to the care of the poor, and Whose beautiful Son—His heavenly Son, the Mystery of God, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, "Servant of the Glory"—built upon His legacy with an equally wondrous life of selfless service, teaching interfaith and interracial reconciliation and bending over backwards to help those in need and pouring out with lovingkindness for all who crossed his path; these two People will forever hold a claim to my heart.
And it gets even more intense, because the Bahá'í Faith, like Islam (out of which it grew in the same way that Christianity grew out of Judaism and Buddhism out of Hinduism – Bahá'u'lláh was born and raised a Shí'ah Muslim) is aniconistic — we don't display images of the Prophets or depict them as characters in art or whatnot —but I was looking the Faith up in the early days of Wikipedia, okay? I remember wiling away many an hour in my high school's learning disabilities support centre, googling the Bahá'í Faith and having my mind assassinated over and over again. And Wikipedia's editors hadn't realized that it wasn't licit to show the image of Bahá'u'lláh openly, right? So there He was, staring me in the face — this impossibly majestic visage with these unforgettably watchful, penetrating eyes. There's no way to say it except that to see His face up close, He is exactly as His second successor, Shoghi Effendi, described Him: "Transcendental in His majesty, serene, awe-inspiring, unapproachably glorious."
And then there were the words that streamed forth from His and His Son's pens! "My first counsel is this", He said: "possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting!" He and 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke about love in the most rapturous tones, describing it as "heaven's kindly light, the Holy Spirit's eternal breath, the cause of God's revelation unto man, the Most Great Law, which vivifieth the human soul." About love, 'Abdu'l-Bahá said this:
"Know, O thou who art inebriated with the wine of divine love and affection, that the station of these – love and affection – soars above the world of computation and description. Even those who understand the hidden secrets and those who know the symbols of primary oneness have not breathed nor drunk one particle from the reality of this divine subtlety, this eternal mystery. This love and affection are identical to the essence of the Absolute, and are not separate from or additional to it. And it is love and affection which, as a result of the effulgences of this hidden divine love, have been kindled in the hearts and souls of the lovers of the Glorious Perfection, and have burned away all veils and hindrances with their radiant heat, to the extent that nothing – nothing! – is left of the reality of the lovers except the remembrance of the Friend. And thusly the banner of power and might is elevated upon the hills of these evanescent shadows."
I mean, who the hell could fail to fall in love with that? And They made a direct claim upon my heart and soul: "Love Me", Bahá'u'lláh said, "that I may love thee; if thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee. Out of the essence of knowledge I gave thee being; why seekest thou enlightenment from anyone besides Me? Out of the clay of love I moulded thee, how dost thou busy thyself with another?" It got even crazier when I read His quasi-Sufi mystical treatise, The Seven Valleys, and 'Abdul-Bahá's two towering compilations of lectures given on His early journeys to the West around 1910, The Promulgation of Universal Peace and Paris Talks. I felt like I was being directly spoken to by God. Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá wanted to claim my heart as Their throne. And I believed Them, and wanted to love Them. And I still do. All of this was and is very real to me, and insofar as I have a spiritual life, it is essentially Bahá'í.
Which is weird, because over the years I have found it very, very difficult to be a Bahá'í. Now come the bad parts, or at least the difficult parts. For one, the Faith has an institution called "the Covenant" which involves pledging fealty to everyone in a certain accepted line of leadership succession – first Bahá'u'lláh (also called "the Blessed Beauty"), then 'Abdu'l-Bahá (also "the Mystery of God" or "the Master"), then 'Abdu'l-Bahá's grandson Shoghi Effendi ("the Guardian"), and then an elected, all-male, nine-member Bahá'í Pope (in effect), which has the grand title "the Universal House of Justice". All of these guys, in order, had or have the authorized right to interpret the Writings of the Faith, and if you dispute any of these people's claims to the leadership, and it gets serious enough, you'll be considered a breaker of the Covenant, which requires all Bahá'ís around the world to excommunicate and shun you except the deeply kooky and weird but mostly harmless few who have already broken it and are divided into various tiny sects. When you consider that the worldwide official Bahá'í community is only seven or eight million people tops, and the number of Covenant-Breakers is probably barely two thousand spread across multiple competing denominations, this probably doesn't count for much. But it does for me, for one simple reason: the Guardian, long secretly rumoured not to have had children because he was gay, interpreted a passage in Bahá'u'lláh's book of laws forbidding pedophilia to prohibit all homosexuality, including consensual adult homosexual relationships.
According to the Covenant, I am required to believe that he was guided by God in doing this, but I have never once in fifteen years been able to convince myself that this is true for even a moment. I know so many LGBTQ+ people, and believe so strongly in the worth and integrity and sanctity of their love, that I have resolved never to turn my back on them and never to compromise on this point, no matter how much I study the question, no matter how much it might break my heart to stay outside of the Bahá'í community because of it. I simply do not believe that this specific ordinance is of God. And if it is, I take the same attitude as the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said he would take if God came down from heaven and personally told him that He was against being a vegetarian: that he would shout back, "Well, I am for it!", and that would be that.
Now, the Covenant is supposed to be from God, straight up, so I'm openly disputing with God here, and it's a little strange, allegedly disputing with the very Being Who gave you a mind to think with like this. But I have no choice. And if I'm being honest, it's not the only aspect of the Faith where I run into trouble. The Faith requires total abstinence from alcohol and drugs and spotless sexual chastity; I hate alcohol, which helps, but my experiences with cannabis and premarital sex have been some of the most magnificent of my life, if I'm being honest, and it's a constant struggle to contend with that in light of the clear Bahá'í teachings on this, with which my rational mind basically agrees but with which my lower self has always struggled. I can't for the life of me understand why the Universal House of Justice has to be all-male, when the Faith is otherwise commendably feminist at all levels and in every way (no one knows; 'Abdu'l-Bahá said the reason would one day be "clear as the noonday sun", but it's not, and every Bahá'í has to take on faith the choice by Bahá'u'lláh to permanently taint the community with just the tiniest hint of patriarchy.) The Faith claims not to have any clergy, and to endorse, even to require, the independent investigation of truth by everyone for and by themselves; but once you become a Bahá'í it has a certain authoritarian element to it, with an Administration that's believed to be divinely ordained and is empowered to enforce dogma and discipline the way a priestly class would; when asked about the potential dangers in this, a prominent official and former Universal House of Justice member named Glenford Eckleton Mitchell essentially said, "We will be protected from totalitarianism by God", which is a lot to ask as leaps of faith go. Considering its alleged openness to science and its strident opposition to almost all forms of prejudice (especially racial prejudice, which it has always been at the forefront of opposition to, even to the point where 'Abdu'l-Bahá officiated at the first interracial marriage in the history of the United States of America, between Louis George Gregory and Louisa Mathew), its requirement of celibacy for gay believers (although not for transgender ones – like the enemies of the Faith in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Bahá'ís consider trans identity perfectly licit as long as the trans Bahá'í does not then try to marry someone of the same sex with which they identify) and treatment of homosexuality as a disease reads to me as being in contradiction of its stated principles as well as being flatly wrong on secular ones. My "John Stuart Mill-itant" Enlightenment mind has always struggled with 'Abdu'l-Bahá's heated contempt for Voltaire, with Bahá'u'lláh's dictum that "The symbol of liberty is the animal" and "True liberty consisteth in submission unto My commandments", and with the Administration's consequent approval of occasional restrictions on the freedom of speech and academic or artistic expression in the Faith. Nor have I ever been able to stop myself from worrying about the rights of dissidents who might for some reason stand against the decisions of the Bahá'í-led united world government the Faith envisions for the long term – the Faith is very much about a New World Order, which is all ostensibly for the sake of the permanent establishment of world peace ("the Most Great Peace", to be precise), but which takes some getting used to. The Faith has no room at all for my reluctant misgivings regarding Islam, the life of Prophet Muhammad, and the Qur'án; it disregards the ahadeeth, thank God, but it regards criticizing Prophet Muhammad as tantamount to blaspheming the Faith, and pretends that the unfortunately very well-documented early Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham seerah material portraying Him as an unsavoury character in many ways simply does not exist, and the Master also openly denies the depredations of the condition of dhimmitude suffered by non-Muslim kuffar (that is, unbelievers) living under Islam. The emphasis on family unity means I sometimes feel obliged by my faith to paper over disagreements with my father and sister, which can be hard, especially when I think about having to obtain my father's consent before marrying someone – what if he doesn't like her and keeps us apart? – and there are some laws about burial that I've always found weird (Bahá'ís have to be buried no more than two hours away from where we die, and we can't be cremated.) All this has vexed me for a full eighteen years, and continues to even now, as of 2021.
And I particularly urgently struggle with the Blessed Beauty's command that Bahá'ís always obey civil government and never speak of temporal rulers except to praise them; it has led to spectacularly noble and Christlike behaviour both on His and the Master's part and that of the persecuted Bahá'ís in places like Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Indonesia, which to my mind bolsters His Messianic claim (He was thrown into a dark dungeon in chains and imprisoned for much of His life, and even now Bahá'ís silently endure persecution and slaughter – may the Friends in Iran and Yemen be freed speedily in our own day), but the Faith has no concept of "disobeying an unjust law", and forbids civil disobedience, which has required that the Bahá'ís mostly stay out of freedom movements ranging from the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa and Dr. King's Civil Rights Movement to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the recent Green Movement to try to bring down the evil and contemptible theocracy that has been oppressing the Bahá'ís from the beginning, for daring to believe Bahá'u'lláh came after Muhammad, in Iran. (Bahá'í Administrative officials have also sometimes been uncomfortably close to such tyrannous regimes as that of Pinochet in Chile.) This particular detail is a bitter pill to swallow for me, as someone who feels the perpetual, virtually irresistible need to excoriate tyrannical temportal rulers – I'm always goin' off on malign political leaders, from Netanyahu and Trump to Hamas and Erdogan, from Kim Jong Un to the Saudi Wahhabis to the Khomeinists, from the Myanma junta to the various agents of the Islamic extremist jihad to Mugabe. Who would I be if I didn't raise my voice against such villains with their cruelties and atrocities? There is admittedly some ambiguity in Bahá'í thought on this point – there are places in Scripture where the Master says it's licit to raise our voices against tyrants and despots – but in practice, there's not nearly enough. Most of the time, Bahá'ís are instructed to stay mute as the criminals wreak their havoc, focusing instead on devotional gatherings (which I've always loved), children's classes, "Ruhi Institute" study circles, and junior youth groups, concentrating on building a "new race of men" whose vivified and spiritualized hearts will have the effect of transforming our world into God's heaven from the bottom up, solving economic and environmental problems in the bargain. It's a very, very compelling vision – one that just might, to my mind, be the one God Himself has in mind for humanity. And so I desperately wish that none of my caveats registered, and that I could unreservedly give myself over to the Blessed Beauty and the Master and live the rest of my days as a Bahá'í. But I can't. I'm caught, I'm stuck. Stuck in spiritual limbo. Maybe forever.
And it's not like the Faith is the only option life has ever given me. Even if I continue to resist the siren call of atheism and the part of my brain that tells me I'm a fool not to have just gone along with Corliss Lamont's lovely Humanist Manifesto when I found it ages ago, there are still plenty of other spiritual paths out there. My father thinks the Faith is bonkers (“We have enough of this shit in Kabbalah!", he said one day after glancing at the florid language in one of my prayerbooks), and would love nothing more than for me to return to Judaism, perhaps even to become a rabbi. My dear friend the Reverend Shawn Newton, whom I love so passionately I can hardly bear to express it here, has always been good to me every time I've ever been to his wonderful Unitarian Universalist congregation, with his soaring sermons (something I dearly miss about the Bahá'í Faith, which has no sermons unless you happen to live in Atlanta and go the the Bahá'í Unity Centre there) and the choir's beautiful music and sweet Brigit Swenson there to greet me at the door every time; the UU ideology is a creedless quasi-religion with a number of atheist and humanist adherents, so I would be on the theistic end of the spectrum there, but it's quite possible I could thrive there, and maybe even succeed as UU clergy. I've long been infatuated with the Chishtiyya Inayati, the Universal Sufi Order of Hazrat Inayat Khan; his The Unity of Religious Ideals is one of humankind's great spiritual masterpieces, and I could certainly do worse than follow in the footsteps of my "adopted spiritual grandma" Amina Janet Berketa and devote my life to him. I sometimes get curious about what life is like for my friends who are Hindus or Zoroastrians or Nizari Ismaili Khoja Muslims or Buddhists or Jains or Sikhs, or about Bahá'u'lláh's rival Messiah claimants, like Meher Baba or Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. And it just so happens that most of my close non-Bahá'í friends are Christians of various kinds, each living their truth and making their case: a Leftist postmodernist feminist Anglican, a Black Mennonite, a pair of Quakers, a Copt, a conservative Presbyterian, an Orthodox Armenian, and, notably, Alfred (not his real name), who was raised in the same progressive synagogue environment I was but became a conservative evangelical Protestant, affiliated with a church that belongs to a group
which broke away from the mainstream Anglican Communion because the votaries of the former understand the latter to have given way to liberalism and so departed from the true teachings of Christian Scripture. Alfred and I are very close, and we study the Bible together semiregularly; he believes all faith traditions other than Christianity are near-total bunk whose adherents and founders are bound for hell, and that the only way any person can be saved from the torment of eternal hellfire is for God to choose to save them by opening their eyes to the truth of the Gospel of the Triune Lord Jesus Christ and permit them to be washed in His precious blood. Now, it so happens that I believe his religion to be false, and find the Bahá'í account of Jesus as one among many Manifestations of God considerably more convincing; but fundamentalist Christianity is nonetheless there, a sometimes nasty but coherent and internally consistent worldview (buttressed in my case by Alfred’s penchant for watertight logic) that, among other things, provides a potent explanation for all the evil in the world, making reference to Satan and to the Fall, concepts that are absent from the Bahá'í Faith but that I sometimes wish weren't, given how difficult it is to trust in God's absolute sovereignty over all things. In short, there's a lot else out there, and yet I never seem to be able to resist conceiving of myself as a Bahá'í and considering the Blessed Beauty and the Master to be the Figures to whom I am accountable and Their teachings to be the foundation upon which I ought to build my life. I sometimes feel like a renegade child born into a Bahá'í family must – I cuss too much and argue about politics too much and joke about sex too much and so on and so forth, but however far I may roam, my bones are Bahá'í.
So given all this, why am I telling you all this now? And why can't I stop using "we" and "us" and "my religion" and "my community" in reference to the Bahá'ís, dreaming of going back to Haifa on pilgrimage (but as a Bahá'í this time!), tipping exactly 19% (the sacred Bahá'í numbers are 9, 19, 95 and their multiples, and we treat them the way Jews treat multiples of the number 18), praying to the same God I believe revealed the Bahá'í Writings, kneeling in adoration before the miniature portrait of 'Abdu'l-Bahá I keep on my night table, everything? Why do I wander around the sanctuary at First Unitarian singing Bahá'í songs after every service, as if to remind myself of where my heart is? Why can't I get the Blessed Beauty's eyes out of my head, ever, eighteen years later? In the words of Jake Gyllenhaal's character from Brokeback Mountain (ah, the irony), why can't I "quit" the Bahá'í Faith?
Well, because it's not as simple as just leaving the thing behind. To illustrate the point: I recently saw Light To The World, a film commissioned by the Universal House of Justice which was unveiled to celebrate the life and teachings of the Blessed Beauty in advance of the bicentenary of His birth, which was commemorated with fanfare and merriment by the global Bahá'í community in 2017. The movie depicts Bahá'í communities happily engaging in core activities all over the world – the Faith long ago spread to virtually every country, including all of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, not to mention many dozens of Indigenous tribes – and showcases people of all backgrounds and colours and walks of life who believe wholeheartedly in Bahá'u'lláh's world-embracing vision and ethic. It grabbed hold of my heart and stirred up the old longings in me, the ones that had so enraptured my heart when I first saw Bahá'u'lláh's eyes and listened to "Garden of Ridván" for hours on end all those years ago.
So now here I am. Standing before Bahá'u'lláh, begging Him to grant me the gift of faith that will at long last enable me to truly walk His path. I don't see myself ever being able to turn my back on my LGBTQ+ relatives and friends – I'll never believe that requiring celibacy of them in order for them to be allowed to participate fully in any religious community is a good or holy idea – but in virtually every other arena, I can compromise. After all, if Bahá'u'lláh really is the Messiah, that means He makes certain claims upon my mind, heart, and soul, doesn't it? You're supposed to bring your life into conformity with the Messiah's teachings, not the other way around. As Alfred says, those who would seek God should wait for Him to tell us what He's like instead of constructing a version of Him out of our own preferences. And Bahá'u'lláh Himself says: "If thou lovest Me, turn away from thyself; if thou seekest My pleasure, regard not thine own; that thou mayest die in Me, and I may eternally live in thee." There it is, plain as day. I need to regard my own pleasure a lot less, and focus my heart on what will draw me closer to the Will of the Blessed Perfection, the Fashioner, the Ancient of Days.
So I would ask all those reading these words who are praying people for their support in helping me to do that. I've broken down and wept over all this at least twice – once in the back of a friend's car, and once in a library at the Bahá'í Centre in Omaha, Nebraska on a tour of the USA – an' I have a feeling I ain't done weeping yet. But a moment's recollection of the names of all the wondrous souls I've met on this journey fills me with joy – more wonderful and beautiful people bear the name "Bahá'í" than any other I'm aware of, so many that I could probably fill up my 95 daily recitations of the word "Allah'u'abha!" ("Glory be to God!") by praying for Bahá'ís alone, and I long to join them and swim in the shoreless oceans of Bahá'u'lláh's matchless, priceless Revelation again.
So will I? I don't know. Maybe I'd have been better off if all these glorious souls had been Orthodox Jews or Sunni Muslims or Presbyterians and there was no compelling reason to get involved with their religion at all. But they're not, they're Bahá'ís, and now I can hardly imagine my life without Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Their Faith. It has become, in my best friend Nora’s (not her real name) enduringly terrific phrase, "the language of my spirit", the call to which my soul alone responds. Even on the days when I feel like I might make a great Unitarian or Sufi, I miss the Blessed Beauty and the Master terribly. And despite it all – despite all the tears and regrets and misgivings and doubt and uncertainty and heartbreak – I'm still glad I found Them (and them), and have been enabled to live out at least a portion of my days as "the Royal Falcon on the wrist of God". Only He knows the truth of what will come next. But I pray for the strength to walk in His beauteous way, to quaff my fill from the cup of His crystal waters. Ya Bahá ul'Abhá, hallelujah! May the tales of God's triumph be told far and wide, may we all rise at the sound of His trumpet and, even as a chorus of angels, may our hearts burst and our tongues stream forth with a flood of His praise. I'm struggling, and suffering, but I thank God for the struggle. It's not for nothing that practically the first thing I did when I was in recovery from my pulmonary embolism in the summer of 2016 was say Bahá'í prayers and sing Bahá'í songs. They are the home of my soul, and through it all, I'm awed and humbled, proud and grateful.