(no subject)
Dear World,
I was feeling imposed-upon and tired today by the end of work today. Someone told someone else that the dorm-cleaning crew (Rob incl.) was cleaning a certain room, when a third someone told Rob that the counselors were doing it. Rob found out when the counselor living in the room complained that, with campers coming in tomorrow, none of the beds had any sheets. This was at the close of an already frustrating day of work, specifically just after fighting with Word for an hour. Grrrr. I was pretty cranky, and feeling a bit self-righteous to boot. I had been assigned to get a crease out of a large scuffle-mat (sits just inside a door, used for scuffling off feet; hence the name). When just picking the mat up and putting it down failed to be effective, I had the brilliant idea of trying out an iron.
OOPS.
Just for your future reference, those mats are like, 90% plastic. Probably cheap plastic, in point of fact. Cheap plastic not designed to withstand heat. Heat (such as an iron produces) causes the fibers to melt into a solid black mass, which shortly left me with a large melted spot on the carpet, looking a little like a small oil spill.
After a few mortified seconds, there was nothing to do but laugh, and my bad mood vanished, replaced by a feeling of some ratio of humility and embarrassment. The Lord works in mysterious ways; I'm not saying He caused me to melt the carpet or that He was coming out of the bottom of my iron in gouts of steam, but I definitely felt that God was telling me to get off my high horse and out of my funk. "God loves laughter" is the title of a book by Hand of the Cause Willam Sears, but it's essentially become a Bahá'í proverb. So often, I find myself laughing about God (or with God? Dare I say such a thing?) and the sorts of things that happen in the world. If you want to know what sort of laughter I am talking about, I am afraid you will have to start reading poetry, or have such an experience yourself. I recommend Rumi and Hafiz. They're good company. The sex and booze are all metaphors for God and Divine inspiration, anyway. Mind the pantheism, though:
Baha'u'llah writes,
No tie of direct intercourse can ever bind Him to the things He hath created, nor can the most abstruse and most remote allusions of His creatures do justice to His being.
(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 318)
Abdu'l Baha writes:
It is evident then that each elemental atom of the universe is possessed of a capacity to express all the virtues of the universe. This is a subtle and abstract realization. Meditate upon it, for within it lies the true explanation of pantheism.
(Abdu'l-Baha, Foundations of World Unity, p. 58)
So, as far as I can understand, it means that everything is possessed of the capacity to show forth the virtues and powers created by God, but that nothing but God is God. The metaphor of the mirror is a common one in the Baha'i writings.
When I hear people talking about why they don't believe in God or why they think religion is evil, I'm reminded of another thing that William Sears said. When he heard people say things like that, he said, "I don't believe in that God, either." It's really true: Everyone has their own reasons for believing or not believing in God, and the reasons for not believing in Him are, in my opinion, as subjective as the reasons for believing in Him. Even if God exists, we are still relative creatures, limited by our own perceptions. The reason I am not a materialist is simply that I contend that we have more perceptive faculties than we realize.
This is probably the first of a series of long letters on spirituality; that's just the way my mind is turning these days.
With warm regards,
Rob