A Hundred Thousand Ministers

*A retelling based on **Portals to Freedom** by Howard Colby Ives. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that account.*

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It was quite late when Howard Colby Ives saw 'Abdu'l-Baha slowly climbing the stairs to His room at the inn in Dublin, New Hampshire. Ives followed. The door had already closed by the time he reached it. He knocked, and 'Abdu'l-Baha opened it Himself.

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Ives had no idea what to say. 'Abdu'l-Baha beckoned him in and looked at him gravely, and Ives stammered: "Will you please pray with me?"

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Ives knelt. 'Abdu'l-Baha put His hands on his head and chanted a short prayer in Persian. "It was all over within three minutes. But those moments brought to me a peace I had never known."

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A few days after leaving Dublin, Ives wrote to thank Him for His courtesy and kindness. It was a letter which, as he put it, he "had not thought required an answer." Soon an answer came all the same. It was dated 26 August 1912, and he later copied it out in full:

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"O thou, my revered friend: Your letter imparted the utmost rejoicing, for its contents evidenced attraction to the Kingdom of God and enkindlement with the Fire of the Love of God!"

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It went on: "A hundred thousand ministers have come and gone: they left behind no trace nor fruit, nor were their lives productive."

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And at the end: "I have become hopeful, and prayed that thou mayest attain to another Bounty; seek another Life; ask for another World; draw nearer unto God; become informed of the Mysteries of the Kingdom; attain to Life Eternal and become encircled with the Glory Everlasting."

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Ives remembered clearly how he felt when he read it. "It was to me then simply a beautiful letter, couched in Oriental imagery." That those last lines were an actual summons, a call to enter another world and a higher life while still on this little planet, "did not dawn upon me for years."

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For the rest of that summer, travelling through the Eastern States, he carried a small satchel with nothing in it but the books and typewritten Tablets of Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha. He read nothing else, not even the newspapers. It seemed to him that the centre of his life had suddenly shifted, and that everything he cared about was now turning "around a new and most disturbing axis."

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In the autumn he went back to his work at the Brotherhood Church, and found he could not raise the money it needed to carry on. He wrote to 'Abdu'l-Baha about it, and about his deepening interest in the teachings of Baha'u'llah.

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Ives understood that the second Tablet had been written while 'Abdu'l-Baha was travelling from Washington to New York, and that His secretary translated it and sent it on from New York as soon as He arrived. The translation is dated 14 November 1912.

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"O thou spiritual friend! Thy letter was received. I was made very sad on account of the event of the closing of the Church of Brotherhood."

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Ives had evidently mentioned that his first assistant was a philosopher. 'Abdu'l-Baha took this up. Philosophy in this age, He wrote, means that a person is out of touch with God, with the Kingdom, with the Holy Spirit, and is a captive of the things the senses can touch. "In reality her highness the Cow enjoys this attribute and quality." The Cow denies God and the Kingdom and every spiritual truth, and has reached this station "without labor.

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Therefore she is the philosopher emeritus." Our philosophers, after twenty years of study in the universities, "attain to the station of the Cow."

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Then the letter turned. "In brief: be thou not unhappy. This event has happened so that thou mayest become freed from all other occupations, day and night thou mayest call the people to the Kingdom; spread the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh; inaugurate the Era of the New Life; promulgate the Reality, and be sanctified and purified from all save God."

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And then: "Crown thy head with this diadem of the Kingdom whose brilliant jewels have such illumining power that they shall shine upon centuries and cycles."

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Ives said the Tablet left him with two impressions that seemed oddly at odds. The first was its wit. It was his first personal meeting with 'Abdu'l-Baha's humour about the accidents of life. When they met again after the long summer apart, almost the first thing 'Abdu'l-Baha asked him was whether her highness the Cow was not a noble philosopher, and He laughed heartily as He asked it.

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The second impression came from the closing words, the ones that spoke of centuries and cycles. They gave him, he wrote, "the first glimmer of realization" of the kind of greatness 'Abdu'l-Baha had meant when He had told him, earlier, that "This is a Day for Very Great Things."

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Portals to Freedom** by Howard Colby Ives.*

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