A Minister's Doubts: Howard Colby Ives and the Questions That Burned

*A retelling drawn from **Portals to Freedom** by Howard Colby Ives — his own memoir of meeting 'Abdu'l-Bahá during the Master's journey through America in 1912. Phrases in quotation marks are words or titles preserved in that account.*

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Howard Colby Ives was a man who had made a profession of questions. He was a Unitarian minister, a thoughtful and sincere clergyman who had spent his life preaching, reasoning, and searching after the meaning of things. Of all the Christian ministries, the Unitarian was the one most given to free inquiry, least content with creeds simply handed down — and Ives suited it well, for he had a restless, honest mind that could not rest in easy answers.

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But beneath the busyness of his profession there was, by his own confession, a hunger he had never satisfied and a loneliness he had never named. He had preached about God for years; he was not at all sure he had ever met Him.

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It was in the spring of 1912, when 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to America, that Ives's careful, questioning world was disturbed. He had heard something of this visitor from the East — that He had spent forty years a prisoner and an exile for His faith, that He taught the oneness of humanity and the harmony of religions, that crowds and clergymen alike were going to see Him. Ives was curious, in the cautious way of a professional sceptic.

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He was also wary. He was a minister of one religion being invited, in effect, to consider another, and every instinct of his training and his pride rose up to keep him at a safe and critical distance.

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So he came as an observer, not a believer. And what is so valuable about the record he left — the memoir he later wrote, *Portals to Freedom* — is its scrupulous honesty about how slowly, and against how much inner resistance, his doubts were worn away. Ives did not undergo a sudden conversion in a flash of light. He struggled.

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For months he turned the matter over, argued with himself, advanced objections and met them only to raise new ones. He was, he admitted, a man defending a position — and the position he was defending was, in part, simply himself: his standing, his learning, his settled idea of who he was.

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In one of the most searching passages of his self-examination, Ives came to see something about his own questions that unsettled him more than any answer could have. He realized that not all of his doubts were the honest doubts of a seeker after truth. Some of them were something else — a kind of armour.

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They were questions he was raising not because he genuinely wanted them answered, but because so long as he kept asking them he need not surrender, need not change, need not let go of the comfortable man he had always been. The questions were a way of keeping the truth at arm's length while appearing, even to himself, to be earnestly pursuing it.

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This was a hard thing for an honest man to admit, and it is to his lasting credit that he admitted it. He had to learn to tell the difference between a question that opens the soul and a question that defends it.

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What broke through, in the end, was not a superior argument. Ives had heard arguments all his life; he could have parried theology with theology indefinitely. What he was not prepared for, and could not parry, was 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself. In the presence of the Master, Ives found himself met in a way he had never been met.

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He felt himself understood — not flattered, not lectured, but seen, down to the loneliness and the hunger he had hidden even from his own congregation. The love that came from 'Abdu'l-Bahá was not a debating tactic; it asked nothing and proved nothing in the ordinary sense.

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And yet it answered Ives more completely than any proof, because it reached beneath all his clever questions to the one question he had never managed to put into words: whether the God he had preached about was real, and whether that God could possibly know and love a man like him.

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There is a quietly famous moment in his memoir when the Master gave him a name — a tender phrase that fixed in a few syllables the very thing Ives most needed to hear about himself and his calling. Small as such a gesture might seem from the outside, to Ives it was as if a door he had been pushing against for months had been opened from the other side.

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The walls of his careful scepticism did not so much fall as become unnecessary. The questions were still there, some of them; but they no longer mattered in the old way, because the thing he had really been asking for — to be known, to be loved, to find that the spiritual world was true and near — had been given to him.

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There was, around this same time, an outward crisis that mirrored the inward one. The little congregation Ives had gathered — the Brotherhood church he had founded and poured himself into — fell into difficulty and finally had to be given up. To a minister, the loss of his church is the loss of his vocation, his security, and a good part of his identity all at once, and Ives felt it keenly.

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Yet when he turned to 'Abdu'l-Bahá in his distress, the Master did not commiserate over the failure. He turned it inside out, treating the collapse not as a calamity but as a release — as though Ives had been set free from lesser occupations so that he might give himself, day and night, to calling people to the Kingdom and spreading the teachings of a new Day.

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What looked to Ives like the end of his life's work was named, instead, the beginning of it. The very thing he had most feared losing turned out to be the door through which he walked into something larger.

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Howard Colby Ives became a Bahá'í. More than that, he gave the rest of his life to the Faith. He left his settled ministry behind and traveled, often in real hardship, teaching the Cause across America for the remainder of his days; his wife, Mabel, labored beside him. And he wrote the book that has helped countless other seekers — *Portals to Freedom* — precisely because it does not pretend the journey was easy. It is the record of a doubting man, told without vanity, and that is what makes it ring true.

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His story is a fitting one for the Feast of Masá'il, the Feast of Questions, because it refuses to flatter the act of questioning while still honouring it. The Bahá'í teachings call every soul to investigate reality independently, to use its own God-given mind, to believe nothing on mere hearsay or inherited prejudice. Ives did all of that; his long, stubborn inquiry was real, and he was right not to believe before he was convinced.

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But his memoir adds the harder, humbler half of the truth: that we can also hide behind our questions, using them to defend a self we are afraid to surrender. The honest seeker must be willing to question even his own questioning — to ask whether he truly wants the answer, or only wants to keep on asking.

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Ives found that the moment he stopped guarding himself, the answer he had been circling for months was already there, waiting, in the love of One who had known the question all along.

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

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