Becoming a Baha'i

How does a man get to be spiritual? It certainly doesn’t seem to come naturally. I think one reason is that we (American society) accentuate and emphasize the material aspect of life. To succeed is to be rich and famous. Another reason is that we (men) are taught to value things like strength, intelligence, and athletic prowess. The idea of submitting your will to God, of admitting your weakness and His strength, is tantamount to admitting that you are not a successful man. It is also because we (scientific people) are supposed to see religion and science as mutually exclusive choices. Evolution or Creation. Pick one. I think the deck is stacked against men, even though men hold most positions of authority in churches.

I have meandered the spiritual path slowly, like a glacier advances during the ice age. I mentioned before that I am married, and in that I have had a lot of practice. This is my third marriage. While going through the process of the first divorce, I accepted God. The emotional trauma of my wife leaving me was so great that the only thing that worked was praying. I had eschewed God to that point, but when she was leaving I was desperate and tried to bargain with Him. “I’ll do anything if you’ll make her stay. I’ll go to church, read the Bible.” It didn’t work. Then I changed my approach. “Please help me have the strength to get through this and the ability to accept whatever happens.” Bingo!!

My counselor at the time said that whatever I was using to deal with this I should bottle it. I was so uplifted, I did the only thing I knew how to do when it comes to religion. I was, after all, raised in the United States. I accepted Christ. I called a friend who was a minister and asked him to come over. He explained the Bible to me, told me about the “Romans Road” and left me a bit more enlightened than I had been to begin with.

Then it hit me. How do I decide which church to go to? Do I go to every one and fill out a little scorecard, choosing the one with the highest score? Hey, wait! What if Christianity wasn’t even the right path? What is up with millions of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu’s, Jews? If Jews were the chosen ones, why wasn’t I becoming Jewish? I had to figure this out because it was my salvation I was talking about now and I was serious. If each religion believed it was right, how was I to figure this out?

A sixteen year old girl told me how.

During the course of our first conversation, she talked about the idea of “progressive revelation” and how each religion comes from the same God, and each one is a progressive lesson as mankind matures. Abraham taught about belief in one God. Moses taught about obedience to God. Jesus taught about love of God. Muhammad taught about submission to God. And that she was a Baha’i, which meant that she believed that Baha’u’llah, the newest messenger from God, taught about the oneness of humanity.

Not only that, she explained that science and religion should be in harmony, and that there had to be one ultimate Truth, and science and religion should agree about it. Evolution and Creation were not mutually exclusive, but that Creation was a symbolic, not literal, description of what happened. She also talked about “independent investigation of the truth” and the idea that we all had our own responsibility to find our path to God. We shouldn’t just choose our parent’s religion, or blindly accept what someone else, including her, said about a religion.

After six months of investigation, and lots of prayer to God to “guide me to this if it is right and away from this if it is wrong,” I became a Baha’i. Besides, I figured that if I became a Baha’i and found something that made more sense, I’d just become a member of whatever that religion was.

So that was the beginning of my spiritual path. It was like the process of choosing a college. Once I got in, the real work began.

But that is another story.