Are You Interested in Renunciation?

A retelling based on Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937). The narrative is retold in our own words; the short phrases in quotation marks are verbatim from the book. Read the full text for Ives's own telling.

Howard Colby Ives had a question, and it would not let him rest.

He had come upon the word renunciation in a prayer, and something in it had seized him. What did it truly mean — to renounce, to give up, to let go? He wanted to understand it not as an idea but as a way of living. So one windy spring afternoon he crossed the whole of New York to put the question to 'Abdu'l-Bahá, carrying the passage with him like a man carrying a thirst.

The Master agreed to speak with him, and the two of them walked together back toward the house on Ninety-sixth Street. And here Ives's heart began to sink. For 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not answer his careful question. He spoke instead of the Sun of Reality, and of how it shines upon different horizons — beautiful words, but not, it seemed to Ives, the words he had travelled across the city to hear. He had come asking about renunciation, and he was getting, he thought, something else entirely.

Then, at the very steps of the house, 'Abdu'l-Bahá turned to him. And He said, three times, each time with greater intensity, that it was a day for very great things. The repetition struck Ives like a bell. Something in it caught him up and carried him along — so much so that when 'Abdu'l-Bahá went into the building and climbed to His room on the third floor, Ives simply followed, unbidden, up the stairs and through the door.

Inside, there was a silence. And then 'Abdu'l-Bahá looked at him, and asked, very simply, the very question Ives himself had carried across the city:

Are you interested in renunciation?

That was all. But in that moment Ives understood that the answer had been given to him all along — not in a definition, but in the entire encounter. He had come grasping for an explanation, clutching his passage, anxious to get something. And the Master had quietly led him to let all of that go: the disappointment, the agenda, the need to have his question answered on his own terms. By the time the question came back to him in that still room, Ives had, without quite noticing, already begun to practice the very thing he had come to learn. The lesson on renunciation had been the gentle renouncing of his own insistence — and the answer was the experience itself.

He left transformed, he tells us. He had wanted a teaching about letting go, and he had been given, instead, the thing itself: a small, real loosening of his grip, and the discovery that what waits on the other side of it is not loss at all, but a strange and quiet joy.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted phrases are verbatim from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937). See the source for Ives's complete telling.

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