The life of Howard Colby Ives is a
saga of the spirit. It was not its events but his interpretation of them that
portrayed his genius. He had, it would seem, been born with a degree of
awareness that made, even of ordinary existence, a swing between ecstasy and
torture. God favored him in that He had bestowed upon him the grace of a
martyr's heart: a head willing to bow, a spirit straining to soar.Howard Ives in his spiritual autobiography "Portals to Freedom" divided his life sharply in two. The forty-six years before he met ‘Abdu'l-Baha he compares to the experience of a child of ten! He was horn in Brooklyn in 1867 and after the death of his father his family lived in Niagara Falls, N. Y., until Howard was seventeen and then returned again to Brooklyn. We hear of his spending many months on a ranch in Wyoming while overcoming a lung difficulty and are given a picture of a nineteen year old youth tending sheep on the mountain sides alone sometimes for weeks and writing poetry by the light of the moon. In 1902 he entered a Unitarian theological school at Meadville, Pennsylvania, and was graduated in 1905, 38 years of age. Of this period in his life his daughter Muriel Ives Barrow writes:
“His first parish was a small one with a beautiful New England church. Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was there only a year when he was called to New London, Connecticut. We lived in New London for five years, during which time father built a very nice, though modest, brick church for the people; then he was called to Summit, New Jersey.. . . In Summit, as he had in New London, he built a church . . . modelled after one of the early Christopher Wren's. . . . It was from Summit that he started additional work with his Brotherhood Church in Jersey City and also organized his Golden Rule Fraternity-a cooperative idea, as I remember . . . one of his many attempts to help humanity in some organized way. The fact that he made it while he was so active building the Summit Church besides starting the Brotherhood is characteristic of the restlessness that always drove him. One job was never enough. Two might do. Three was better. And four was what he'd like."
Read more…
