# The Sufferings of Baha'u'llah and Their Significance

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: George Townshend, The Sufferings of Baha'u'llah and Their Significance, Wilmette, IL: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1956, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> The sufferings of Bahá’u’lláh and their significance
> 
> By George Townshend, MA1
> 
> The Prayers and Meditations by Baha’u’llah which the beloved Guardian has given us is in large measure
> an intimate remembrance of the Redeemer’s sufferings. And Baha’u’llah wished us to meditate on these
> sufferings. In the Tablet of Ahmad He says: “Remember My days during thy days, and My distress and
> banishment in this remote prison.”
> In a great poem known as the Fire Tablet He records at length the tale of His calamities and writes at the
> close:
> “Thank the Lord for this Tablet whence thou canst breathe the fragrance of My meekness and know what
> hath beset Us in the path of God.” He adds: “Should all the servants read and ponder this, there shall be kindled
> in their veins a fire that shall set aflame the world.”
> True religion in all ages has called on the faithful to suffer. On the one hand it brings to mankind a
> happiness in the absolute and the everlasting which is found nowhere but in religion. No unbeliever knows
> any joy which in its preciousness can be compared to the joys of religion. “The true monk,” it has been said,
> “brings nothing with him but his lyre.”
> On the other hand Heaven is walled about with fire. This bliss must be bought at a great price. So it has
> ever been in all religions of mankind.
> An ancient hymn of India proclaims a truth as real now as it was in distant times:
> The way of the Lord is for heroes. It is not meant for cowards.
> Offer first your life and your all. Then take the name of the Lord.
> He only tastes of the Divine Cup who gives his son, his wife, his wealth and his own life.
> He verily who seeks for pearls must dive to the bottom of the sea, endangering his very existence.
> Death he regards as naught; he forgets all the miseries of mind and body.
> He who stands on the shore, fearing to take the plunge, attains naught.
> The path of love is the ordeal of fire. The shrinkers learn from it.
> Those who take the plunge into the fire attain eternal bliss.
> Those who stand afar off, looking on, are scorched by the flames.
> Love is a priceless thing only to be won at the cost of death.
> Those who live to die, those attain; for they have shed all thoughts of self.
> Those heroic souls who are rapt in the love of the Lord, they are the true lovers.
> 
> All the founders of religions have had to endure rejection and wrong, and as mankind grew more and
> more mature and the victory of God nearer, these wrongs, these sufferings have grown more and more
> severe continually.
> We read little if anything of martyrdom in the Old Testament. But the New opens with Herod’s slaughter
> of the innocents, his beheading of John the Baptist; its central figure is a Man of Sorrows acquainted with
> grief. The Gospels close with the agony in Gethsemane and with the Cross, the Nails, the Spear, and history
> follows with the martyrdom of all the eleven apostles. The Bab Himself was martyred and His followers gave
> up their lives for love of Him, not by dozens only but by hundreds and by thousands. In establishing the
> victory of God
> 
> 1   The Bahá’í World, vol. XII, 1950–1954, pp. 856–9; & vol. XVI, 1973–1976, pp. 635–37.
> 
> Baha’u’llah and Abdul-Baha drank the cup of suffering to the dregs.
> It is said there are three kinds of martyrdom: one is to stand bravely and meet death unflinchingly in the
> path of God without wavering or under torture denying for an instant their faith. The second is little by little
> to detach one’s heart entirely from the world, laying aside deliberately and voluntarily all vanities and
> worldly seductions, letting every act and word become a speaking monument and a fitting praise for the Holy
> Name of Baha’u’llah. The third is to do the most difficult things with such self-sacrifice that all behold it as
> your pleasure. To seek and to accept poverty with the same smile as you accept fortune. To make the sad,
> the sorrowful your associates instead of frequenting the society of the careless and gay. To yield to the
> decrees of God and to rejoice in the most violent calamities even when the suffering is beyond endurance. He
> who can fulfill these last conditions becomes a martyr indeed.
> None can attempt to delineate the variety or to analyze the nature of the afflictions which were poured
> upon Baha’u’llah. Repeatedly He has Himself summarized them in a few brief powerful sentences. In one
> place He calls our particular attention to the fact that it was not the Black Dungeon of Tihran, for all its
> horrors and chains, which He named the Most Great Prison. He gave that name to ‘Akka. We are left to
> surmise why, and we reflect that in the Black Pit His sufferings were chiefly personal and physical; His
> enemies were external foes, the hope of redeeming the Cause was still with Him. But when He went down to
> ‘Akka in 1868, the traitor Mírza Yahya had done his deadly work; the kings and leaders had definitely rejected
> the Message, He was definitely cast out and silenced. Not He Himself alone but the Cause of God was in
> prison.
> We can never imagine what numberless possibilities of immediate redemption the mad, sad, bad world
> had wantonly flung away; nor can our less sensitive natures know what the anguish of this frustration must
> have been to the eager longing of a heart as divinely centered, divinely loving as His.
> But this much is abundantly plain; that the pains, the griefs, the sorrows, the sufferings, the rejections, the
> betrayals, the frustrations which were the common lot of all the High Prophets reached their culmination in
> Him.
> Yet through all He remained calm, confident, his courage unshaken, his acquiescence forever radiant.
> No one is to imagine that the excess of His tribulations means that at any time the power of evil had
> prevailed against Him. Pondering as He would have us to do, over the significance of these afflictions, we are
> shown that the truth is quite otherwise. He reveals:
> “Had not every tribulation been made the bearer of Thy wisdom, and every ordeal the vehicle of Thy
> providence, no one would have dared oppose Us, though the powers of heaven and earth were to be leagued
> against Us.”2 He writes that God had sacrificed Him that men might be born anew and released from their
> bondage to sin. He praises God for His sufferings, He welcomes them, and even prays that for God’s sake the
> earth should be dyed with His blood and His head raised on a spearpoint. He continually protests that with
> every fresh tribulation heaped upon Him He manifests a fuller measure of God’s Cause and exalts more highly
> still God’s Word.
> How bitterly felt were His tribulations, how acute His anguish, how real His grief and pain is shown a
> hundred times in His laments. His high divinity did not protect Him from human sensibility, but never did He
> quail nor blanch, never did He show resentment.
> Many of His laments are not over His woes themselves but over the effect they produce on the faithful
> whose hearts they sorely shook or on the enemies of the Cause whom they fill with joy.
> Nothing could exhaust His patience nor dampen His spirit. “Though My body be pained by the trials that
> befall Me from Thee, though it be afflicted by the revelation of Thy Decree, yet My soul rejoiceth ….”3 He affirms
> that the tribulations that He and the faithful are made to endure are such as no pen in the entire creation can
> record, nor anyone describe. Yet “We swear by Thy Might …. Every trouble that toucheth us in our love for
> Thee is an evidence of Thy tender mercy, every fiery ordeal a sign of the brightness of Thy light, every woeful
> tribulation a cooling draught, every toil a blissful repose, every anguish a fountain of gladness.”4
> How then is it that “by Thy stripes we are healed?”
> 
> 2   Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, p. 14.
> 3   idem, p. 95.
> 4   idem, p. 135.
> 
> It is because the intensity, the magnitude, the volume of the sufferings of Baha ’u’llah called forth the
> fullest possible expression and outpouring of the infinite mercy and love of God.
> Wrongs done to the founder of a religion have two inevitable effects: one is that of retribution against the
> wrong done—the severity of which we may judge from the two thousand year exile of the Jewish people. The
> other is that of reward to the High Prophet whom they enable to release fresh powers of life that would have
> otherwise lain latent, to pour forth Divine energies which in their boundlessness will utterly overwhelm the
> forces of evil and empower Him to say: “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”
> The sufferings of Baha’u’llah enable us in some degree to measure the immensity of His love for mankind,
> to appreciate the sacrifice He made for love of us. The story of them enables us to keep in remembrance the
> heinous blackness and cruelty of the world of man from which He saved us; it enables us to realize the
> meaning and the need of Divine redemption, it proves to us the invincibility of God and the lone majesty of
> God’s victory over evil.
> It is for the sake of learning more fully the love and the glory and the might of God that we contemplate
> this story of Baha’u’llah’s tribulations.
> In that spirit we are to read it, and as a proof of His triumphant inviolable love He keeps the picture
> before us in many forms that we may be fortified and uplifted in our poor human struggle with the tests and
> afflictions of life.
> The Fire Tablet adds all the poignancy and impassioned power of divine poetry to the story of the
> boundless suffering He and His beloved followers had to endure. In language of torrential eloquence He tells
> of the longing, of the faithful for reunion with God being ungratified, He tells of the casting out of those most
> near to His heart, of dying bodies, of frustrated lovers left afar to perish in loneliness, of Satan’s whisperings
> in every human ear, of infernal delusions spreading everywhere, of the triumph of calamity, darkness, and
> coldness of heart. He tells of the sovereignty in every land of hate and unbelief while He Himself is forbidden
> to speak, left in the loneliness of His anguish, drowning in a sea of pain with no rescue ship to come and save
> Him. The light of honor and loyalty and truth are put out; slander prevails and no avenging wrath of an
> outraged God descends to destroy the wicked and vindicate God’s messenger.
> He calls to God for an answer. And the answer comes, showing the inner significance of God’s seeming to
> forsake His righteous ones.
> Man’s evil sets off God’s goodness. Man’s coldness of heart sets off the warmth of God’s love.
> Were it not for the night, how would the sun of the Prophet’s valor show forth the splendor of its
> radiance? Through His loneliness, the unity of God was revealed; through His banishment, the world of
> divine singleness grew fair.
> “We have made abasement,” said God to Him, “the garment of glory, and affliction the adornment of Thy
> temple. O Pride of the worlds. Thou seest the hearts are filled with hate, and to overlook is Thine, O Thou
> Concealer of the sins of the worlds. When the swords flash, go forward! When the shafts fly, press onward! O
> Thou Sacrifice of the worlds.”5
> In that battle which we all of us wage with pain and suffering and sorrow, those are God’s last words to
> us:
> Where the swords flash, go forward;
> Where the shafts fly, press onward.6
> 
> For love is a priceless thing, only to be won at the cost of death. Those who live to die, those attain; for
> they have lost all thoughts of self. Those heroic souls who are rapt in the love of the Lord, they are the true
> lovers.
> 
> 5     Baha’u’llah in Bahá’í Prayers, pp. 218–9.
> 6     Baha’u’llah, ‘Fire Tablet’, in Bahá’í Prayers, p. 218.
>
> — *The Sufferings of Baha'u'llah and Their Significance (Used by permission of the curator)*