Portals to Freedom: The Slow Dawn of Howard Colby Ives

A retelling based on Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives, his own memoir of meeting 'Abdu'l-Bahá during the Master's 1912 journey to America. Words in quotation marks are preserved in that book or in the historical record.

Some souls come to the light in a single blinding moment. Others come the way the dawn actually comes — slowly, greyly, against a sky that resists it, with false starts and long stretches when nothing seems to be happening at all, until one looks up and finds that, somehow, it has become morning. Howard Colby Ives came to the light the second way, and because he wrote it all down with unusual honesty in a book he called Portals to Freedom, his slow dawn has helped many others trust their own.

A hunger his theology could not feed

Ives was, by 1912, a Unitarian minister — a thoughtful, sincere clergyman who had given his life to preaching the goodness of God and the moral law. Yet beneath the settled surface of his profession ran a restlessness he could not quiet. He had entered the ministry, he later confessed, in search of a Reality he had never actually found. He could speak with feeling about God; he was not at all sure he had ever met Him. He preached a light he had read about but had not, in his own heart, seen rise. It is one of the quiet ironies of his story that the man whose business was religion was himself spiritually hungry — and honest enough to know it.

So when word reached the liberal churches of New York that 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the Son of the Founder of the Bahá'í Faith, had come from the East and was speaking in the city, Ives's curiosity was the curiosity of a hungry man who has heard a rumour of bread. He went, at first, as a professional observer. He expected, perhaps, an interesting Oriental sage, a few wise sayings to carry back to his own pulpit. He did not expect what he found.

The first meeting

What he found, when he was at last brought into the Master's presence, undid his categories. He had braced himself to evaluate a teacher; instead he felt himself seen. There was in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's look and bearing, Ives records, a love so direct and so personal that it seemed to reach past everything he was pretending to be and address the lonely, searching self underneath. He had come to take the measure of a teacher. He came away unable to forget the way the Master had looked at him — as though, Ives felt, 'Abdu'l-Bahá had known him and loved him before they ever met.

But — and this is the crucial honesty of his account — that first encounter did not settle the matter. It unsettled it. It opened a door without yet drawing him through. He went home stirred, moved, troubled, and entirely unconvinced in the part of his mind that weighed claims and demanded proofs. The light had touched the eastern edge of his sky. The rest of him was still in the dark, and inclined to stay there.

Months in the grey

What followed was not a triumph but a struggle — and it is the struggle, more than any sudden glory, that makes Ives's witness so useful. He spent months, he tells us, wrestling with the reality of the Master's message. His trained, sceptical, ministerial mind threw up objection after objection. Was this feeling he could not shake merely the magnetism of an unusual personality? Was he, a grown man and a clergyman, about to be carried away by sentiment? He went back and forth. He sought the Master's company and then doubted what he had felt in it. He believed and then un-believed, sometimes in the space of a single day.

A modern reader is tempted to call such a season a failure of faith. Ives came to see it as the opposite — as the actual work of faith, the slow labour by which a real recognition is distinguished from a passing enthusiasm. The dawn that comes too fast can fade as fast. His came against resistance, and so it held. He did not leap into the light. He let it rise, and tested it, and let it rise some more.

Through that whole season the Master did not pressure him. There was no campaign to win him, no argument pressed to its conclusion. There was only an unfailing, patient love that left Ives free — free to come, free to doubt, free to take all the time his cautious soul required. It was, Ives came to feel, the very freedom of that love that finally proved its source. A merely human teacher, eager for a disciple, would have pushed. This love simply waited, the way the sun waits for no one and yet shines on everyone.

The closing of a door

Into the middle of his uncertainty came a blow that, to anyone else, would have looked like simple misfortune. Ives had organised a small congregation, and by late in 1912 it had fallen into financial trouble and had to be closed. The work of years was collapsing. He wrote to 'Abdu'l-Bahá about the failure of his church and about the faith that was, against his resistance, taking root in him.

The reply he received did not commiserate, and it did not advise him how to save his church. It re-read the whole catastrophe as a deliverance. "In brief," the Master wrote to him, "be thou not unhappy. This event has happened so that thou mayest become freed of all other occupations" — freed, that is, to call people "to the Kingdom" day and night, to "spread the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh," to "inaugurate the Era of the New Life," and to become "sanctified and purified from all save God." What Ives had experienced as a door slamming shut, the Master named as a door swung open. The closing of the small church was, in this reading, the removing of a weight that had bound him — so that he might be free for a far larger work.

It is a perfect Núr image: the same event seen in darkness is despair, and seen in the light is liberation. Nothing about the failed church changed. What changed was the light it was held up to.

Walking through the portals

The dawn, when it finally came, did not announce itself with thunder. Ives only gradually realised that he had crossed over — that the questions which had tortured him for months had not so much been answered as outgrown, the way a lamp is not argued out of a room but simply made unnecessary by the rising sun. He had come looking, as a professional, to assess a teaching. He found that he had been, as a man, found.

He left the Unitarian ministry. He gave the remainder of his life to the Cause that had reorganised his own from within — teaching, speaking, and at last writing the memoir whose very title names what the long ordeal had been for him. He did not call the book My Conversion or Why I Believe. He called it Portals to Freedom — because that, he had come to understand, is what the whole painful, patient, grey-then-golden process had been: not a cage of dogma closing around him, but a series of doors opening, one after another, into a freedom he had been hungry for all his life and had never been able to find.

The Feast of Núr remembers, among its many lights, this gentlest kind: the light that does not overwhelm but waits; that respects a doubter's freedom; that lets a cautious, honest soul take all the months it needs, and rises anyway. Ives's gift to those who come after him is the assurance that struggle is not the enemy of recognition. Sometimes the slowest dawns are the surest — and the doubter who keeps his face turned toward the east, even while he questions, will find in the end that it has quietly, mercifully, become morning.

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

Ives, H. C.. (1937). *Portals to Freedom*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom