By Bill Harley
There is a revealed prayer—beautiful and profound—that Jean and I have been reciting many years for our children, grandchildren and the children of the world. It goes like this:
O Thou kind Lord! These lovely children are the handiwork of the fingers of Thy might and the wondrous signs of Thy greatness. O God! Protect these children, graciously assist them to be educated and enable them to render service to the world of humanity. O God! These children are pearls, cause them to be nurtured within the shell of Thy loving-kindness. Thou art the Bountiful, the All-Loving. (From the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha)
Revealed prayers (like the Lord’s Prayer) represent the Creative Word of God and, consequently, have a creative, transformative effect on the human soul. Each time one reads a Scriptural passage, new meanings are showered upon one’s mind and heart. This happened to me several days ago when I read the prayer above for probably the ten thousandth time. It was the second to the last sentence that made my eyes open wide.
Revealed prayers teach us what to pray for. So, the following sentence is telling us what our children (and we) need:
These children are pearls, cause them to be nurtured within the shell of Thy loving kindness.
The oyster and pearl metaphor used suggests that when our soul enters this world we are in a pure state and surrounded by God’s tender care— “the shell of Thy loving kindness”. The interior of this shell is a wonderful place: it is lined with nacre—a pure, smooth, luminous, strong and beautiful pearlescent material that protects the being inside.
But the shell has the capacity to open to the world so that the being inside can find physical nourishment and learn about God’s material creation. In this process, worldly impurities can enter the interior of the shell and aggravate the being inside. Here, freewill comes into play. The being inside the shell can choose to welcome these worldly attributes, get accustomed to them and make the interior of the shell increasingly reflect the material world outside. In this case, the being inside the shell is in the world and of the world.
Alternatively, the being inside the shell can choose the challenging and time-consuming work of isolating these worldly impurities; and converting them into spiritual attributes by surrounding them with layer upon layer of nacre so that they become pearls. In so doing, these pearls make the being inside the shell increasingly reflect the pure, pearlescent, and luminous interior of the shell that the Creator provided for it in the first place. In this case, the being inside the shell is in the world, but of the spirit.
It is interesting that the sentence of the revealed prayer we are focusing on describes the difficult work of converting worldly impurities into spiritual pearls as being “nurtured” within the shell of God’s “loving kindness”. This seems to tell us that the process of choosing spiritual growth counter-intuitively involves the “nurture” of tests, challenges, struggles and adversities; but ends with something beautiful and priceless. In this sense, the metaphor of pearls developing inside the shell is an archetype of spiritual growth for all human beings. It is an archetype that especially addresses individual development in the context of metaphor.
In Jean’s and my first book, Now That I’m Here, What Should I Be Doing?, about the three ultimate purposes of life and the spiritual growth dynamics that need to be navigated to achieve these purposes, we introduce from the Creative Word the Watchman Parable, an even more comprehensive and informative archetype for human spiritual growth and “nurture”. It is an archetype that addresses individual, interpersonal and collective development in the context of a highly accessible story. If you are wanting to better understand how you are being counter-intuitively “nurtured within the shell” of God’s “loving kindness”, read this book.
