Photo © John Barnabas Leith

Erica and I have been running a weekly study circle on the theme of reflections on the life of the spirit since mid-September. We’ve been using the first book of the Ruhi Institute materials. For the past few sessions, we’ve been studying the third unit of Book 1, which is about life and death.

Last Wednesday, we got into some pretty deep stuff with Lindsey and Val, two of the ladies who’ve been regular participants in the study circle. Lindsey’s husband passed away about 15 years ago, when their daughter was 5, and she’s been searching for an answer to the question “Why?” ever since. She’s a strong person; she’s made her own life and brought her daughter up by herself, but she still wants to know why God deprived her daughter of a father.

The third unit of Book 1 takes us into a deep study of some of the most thought-provoking passages from Baha’u'llah’s Writings about life after death. At some point in the discussion I rushed to fetch my copy of Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah. Only that morning I had read a passage that seemed to me to express exactly what needed to be shared at this particular juncture in the study circle:

O My servants! Were ye to discover the hidden, the shoreless oceans of My incorruptible wealth, ye would, of a certainty, esteem as nothing the world, nay, the entire creation. Let the flame of search burn with such fierceness within your hearts as to enable you to attain your supreme and most exalted goal—the station at which ye can draw nigh unto, and be united with, your Best-Beloved….

That prompted me to think about this anyonmous quotation I picked up from Roger Prentice’s excellent website:

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

Perhaps you see the common theme. It is to do with the shorelessness, the unlimited nature of the Transcendent.

And then I found this poem by Mary Oliver (I read it in Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds, published in 2007 by Bloodaxe Books) to read to the group. The poem seems to me to ground us and, at the same time, offer us a glimpse of the life beyond. Mostly it expresses our need for meaning and to live a meaningful life:

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my lie something particular and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Did all of this prompt a moment of that heart-felt recognition that is known in Arabic as irfan? I got the feeling that it may have done.

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