Where is God When We Need Him?

The majority of the world’s people believe in one God.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, many Hindus and Buddhists, and even those without any formal religion all see a single Supreme Being as the sole King of Creation. Every one of these belief systems say that from time immemorial, only one Creator, one Great Spirit, has ever existed.

Those who don’t accept the existence of a sole Creator generally believe only in the evidence provided by the senses:

…By materialists, whose belief with regard to Divinity hath been explained, is not meant philosophers in general, but rather that group of materialists of narrow vision that worship that which  337  is sensed, that depend upon the five senses only, and whose criterion of knowledge is limited to that which can be perceived by the senses. All that can be sensed is to them real, whilst whatever falleth not under the power of the senses is either unreal or doubtful. The existence of the Deity they regard as wholly doubtful. – Abdu’l-Baha, Baha’i World Faith, pp. 336-337.

Yet even Albert Einstein, the great scientist and renowned expert on the physical world, said:

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.

The Baha’i teachings agree that religion provides transcendence and order, and is indeed “cosmic” in that it permeates all creation. The natural world contains the signs, metaphors and symbols of a supernatural Being’s hand in everything. For a painting of the Mona Lisa to exist, for example, a Leonardo da Vinci must first exist. Baha’is also believe that the natural and the spiritual can come together, as Einstein suggests, in a meaningful unity.

As to a personal God, just as da Vinci painted tiny strokes in a multitude of colors, God is a very personal God. As He does His work, though, it usually takes a miracle, or at least a high level of spiritual awareness, for us to recognize those tiny strokes in our own lives. It’s easy for us humans to get caught up in a “me” thing to the exclusion of reality, which consists of “me” and everything around “me” at all times.

For Baha’is, the spiritual reality of Buddhism and Christianity, Islam, Judaism and all other great Faiths describe the same ethereal essence. They recognize that God does take part in human and natural affairs all the time, despite the fact that we neither see it nor always acknowledge it. How does that happen? Baha’is believe that the messengers and prophets who founded those great religions serve as the intermediaries between the Creator and His creation.

Baha’is believe that those messengers and prophets all form one continuous religion, exactly in the “cosmic” sense of “meaningful unity” Einstein predicted. In this passage from Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith, and the latest in that long series of divine messengers, he refers to all those prophets as the mirrors of God’s being:

Know thou that God – exalted and glorified be He – doth in no wise manifest His inmost Essence and Reality. From time immemorial He hath been veiled in the eternity of His Essence and concealed in the infinitude of His own Being. And when He purposed to manifest His beauty in the kingdom of names and to reveal His glory in the realm of attributes, He brought forth His Prophets from the invisible plane to the visible, that His name “the Manifest” might be distinguished from “the Hidden” and His name “the Last” might be discerned from “the First”, and that there may be fulfilled the words: “He is the First and the Last; the Seen and the Hidden; and He knoweth all things!” Thus hath He revealed these most excellent names and most exalted words in the Manifestations of His Self and the Mirrors of His Being. – Baha’u’llah, Gems of Divine Mysteries, p. 26.

So if you’ve ever wondered about God, and where God is when you need Him, look to those “Manifestations of His Self and the Mirrors of His Being” for guidance, assistance and connection to the Creator:

As to the Holy Manifestations of God, They are the focal points where the signs, tokens and perfections of that sacred, pre-existent Reality appear in all their splendour. They are an eternal grace, a heavenly glory, and on Them dependeth the everlasting life of humankind. To illustrate: the Sun of Truth dwelleth in a sky to which no soul hath any access, and which no mind can reach, and He is far beyond the comprehension of all creatures. Yet the Holy Manifestations of God are even as a looking-glass, burnished and without stain, which gathereth streams of light out of that Sun, and then scattereth the glory over the rest of creation. In that polished surface, the Sun with all Its majesty standeth clearly revealed. – Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 50.