"I was walking
in the Land of Tá (Tihrán)—the dayspring of the signs of thy Lord—when lo, I
heard the lamentation of the pulpits and the voice of their supplication unto
God, blessed and glorified be He. They cried out and said: 'O God of the world
and Lord of the nations! Thou beholdest our state and the things which have
befallen us....'" (Baha’u’llah, ‘Epistle to the Son of Wolf’)
We, the two billion people currently on the planet, are
living at a time when not only the pulpits of all the religions, but all things
must be condemning us, each in that voice which, according to the Qur'án, God
has given to all things: "God, Who giveth a voice to all things, hath
given us a voice...." (41:20). We who have killed some forty-five million
human beings in the past thirty-five years, strangers whom we did not even know
by name. We who have denied our qualitative difference from the animals and
have tried to live in their world, an attempt which has proved as successful as
would be the animal's to turn into a tree or the tree's to be a stone. We who
spend our time devising elaborate excuses to justify our ways; who always blame
someone else, who always want someone else to save us.
It is not surprising that Bahá’u’lláh, the Persian nobleman
Who declared His spiritual mission in 1863, should also say: "... ye walk
on My earth complacent and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of
you and everything within it shunneth you."
Meanwhile we long for happiness, and then reject it when it
is brought to us. Because happiness for human beings means being raised out of
the blind physical world into the conscious life of the spirit, and this can
only be done by the Prophet of God. At His advent we fight Him and resist Him,
whether He is Moses or Buddha, Jesus or Muhammad, or Bahá’u’lláh.
