Festival of Ridvan — April 21 – May 2, 2010 / 167 B.E.

Why Bahaullah’s Prophetic Claim Matters

Ridvan (which means “Paradise”) is the 12-day festival each year commemorating Bahaullah’s open declaration of his prophetic mission. This Ridvan season, let us reflect on the significance of the fact that Bahaullah chose to frame and promote his message to humanity as a message from God.

Many people throughout history have claimed to be prophets or channels for divine truth — not just human wisdom, but the teachings and commandments of a Higher Power. But most of these claimants have been forgotten, their message not surviving their own death. Why has Bahaullah been remembered, and why is his message the substance of a living and growing world religion?

Bahaullah knew that human civilization was entering a pivotal period of rapid progress and globalization. He instinctively understood that such dramatic changes would bring both great opportunities and great risks and challenges. The society in which he was raised was a fundamentalist religious culture unsuited to the rise of modernity — but it was a culture in which many people sincerely believed that God spoke through the religious leaders of the time and invested them with worldly authority. In the context of such a culture, perhaps the only way for people to come to accept new ideas and new ways of living and organizing their society was for a great religious leader to arise and boldly proclaim that God had a new message, a message emanating from the Kingdom of Heaven but fully compatible with the changing needs of the kingdoms of this world.

It is therefore no surprise that Bahaullah chose to interpret his visions, inspired ideas and words as divine revelation, and that he decided to make the claim that he was a human channel for the Manifestation of God. In his own cultural context of millennarian Shiite Islam, Sufism, and Babism, this was a rational thing to do for someone who had the intense mystical experiences he did and whose ideas were so far ahead of his time.

Is Bahaullah’s claim of a divine revelatory station still relevant today, beyond his own time and culture? Its relevance is not because of who Bahaullah may or may not have been, but because of the quality of what he taught and its continuing importance. Even the greatest ideas rarely gain significant power in people’s hearts and translate into bold actions that produce meaningful and lasting changes in the world, unless they are imbued with or perceived as having a divine character. People must believe that a Higher Power has inspired their cause — that it is in some sense “the Will of Heaven” — in order for it attain sufficient motivational energy, drive, passion, and therefore results.

Changing the world is not easy. It doesn’t happen because a bunch of people happen to have good ideas. It only happens because people who have those ideas are moved to promulgate them, suffer and sacrifice for them, fight for them or die for them. And this usually only occurs when people believe the cause is something beyond themselves, beyond the level of the human mind — something truly divine. History is replete with evidence of this. Examples from the recent past include the fight to abolish slavery in the American Civil War, the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, and the women’s suffrage movement. All of these causes were largely motivated by people’s belief that God was on the side of progressive change.

Today, there are many people in the world who believe fervently in the causes of fundamentalist religion: holy wars against other faiths and cultures, repression of gay people, restriction of the rights of women, the mixing of religion with secular government, and curtailments of freedom of speech to prevent what they regard as blasphemy. People who believe in such causes are not going to stop fighting for them — and they will fight hard, as always. This is because they believe God is on their side.

Progressive people also have a prophetic voice to inspire us and move us to fight just as hard for what the modern world really needs: interfaith reconciliation, racial and ethnic harmony, civil rights for all, limitation of the power and influence of clergy, equal rights for women, respect for science, international peacemaking institutions, and more. That voice is Bahaullah — a man who claimed that such teachings were not just his own good ideas, but were actually the will and command of God.

That’s powerful. For the next 12 days during the Festival of Ridvan, let us consider how faith that Bahaullah’s mission was truly a divine one can propel our spirits to new heights of inspired action, and how such action could be the very thing that the world so desperately needs in a time when it so often seems, in the words of poet William Butler Yeats, that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”