Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.
Psalm 119:11
This psalm was given to me by my father when I was an agnostic in college in the eighties. He had been a born again Christian all my life. I rejected my Roman Catholicism, his Southern Baptist evangelical Christianity, and I rejected all belief in God. Although this passage from the psalms did not mean a whole lot to me at the time, it stuck in my memory. It especially came forward when I learned about the Hidden Words from the founder of the Bahá’i faith, Bahá’u’lláh after I committed to the Bahá’i faith in 1998. I’d read the Psalms after committing to Jesus before my father and a couple of his fellow born again Christians during a mission in Moscow in 1991, but it still didn’t really register until much later.
The Hidden Words are a very short document. They consist of 71 short paragraphs in Arabic and 81 in Persian. They were written before Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed His station as a Manifestion of God – not as God himself, but as an individual that reflected the glory of the Word, similar to the station of Moses, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad.
Although the Bahá’i faith came first to Muslims in the Shi’áh tradition in Persia and Iraq, and although there is a strong story of what this alludes to – I don’t come from the Muslim tradition and it takes work for me to resonate with the story of words of comfort from the Holy Spirit to Muhammad’s daughter when the split between Shi’áh and Sunni Islam came so nearly immediately after the passing of the Prophet. What does resonate is Psalm 119:11, which my father emphasized as one of the most meaningful of the scriptures for him, at least at that time.
O SON OF DUST!
The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh from the Persian number 36
The wise are they that speak not unless they obtain a hearing, even as the cup-bearer, who proffereth not his cup till he findeth a seeker, and the lover who crieth not out from the depths of his heart until he gazeth upon the beauty of his beloved. Wherefore sow the seeds of wisdom and knowledge in the pure soil of the heart, and keep them hidden, till the hyacinths of divine wisdom spring from the heart and not from mire and clay.
One of the practical elements of wisdom from the Hidden Words as relates to the referenced Psalm relates to the thirty-sixth of the Hidden Words from the Persian. Bahá’i’s have a huge responsibility to teach our faith. Some have called it the Bahá’i yoga. Yet we’re also prohibited from proselytizing our faith. Perhaps such practices worked in the past, but they don’t work very well now. Instead of speaking when people aren’t interested in listening, the Hidden Words give me comfort in a concise set of meditations that support “sowing the seeds of wisdom and knowledge” in my heart, keeping them hidden until beautiful, fragrant and attractive flowers bloom.
May they bloom in your heart as well.