No. 26 of 124 · A Name of God · The Long Healing Prayer
The Enraptured One
A name that hints at the mystery of divine love so complete it transcends all ordinary measure.
I call on Thee O Beloved One, O Cherished One, O Enraptured One! Thou the Sufficing, Thou the Healing, Thou the Abiding, O Thou Abiding One! Bahá'u'lláh, The Long Healing Prayer · read the full prayer
Plain meaning · Enraptured
from “enrapture”: To transport with pleasure; to delight beyond measure; to enravish. Shenstone.
Definition from Webster's Dictionary, 1913 edition (public domain). When these Writings were translated into English, the translator relied on Webster's New International Dictionary, 1934 edition, of the same Webster's tradition. source
What “The Enraptured One” means
The meaning above is the plain dictionary definition of the word. What follows reflects on it as a name of God, offered for your own contemplation, and not as an authoritative interpretation of the Bahá'í Writings, which rests with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi alone.
The word 'enraptured' belongs to the language of intense, overflowing love, the kind that carries a person entirely beyond themselves. When this name is placed alongside 'Beloved' and 'Cherished' in a single breath of prayer, it suggests that the bond between God and creation is not cool or distant but luminous with something we can only call longing. To say that God is The Enraptured One is to turn upside down our usual sense of who yearns for whom. We think of ourselves as the seekers, the ones who reach toward the divine. Yet this name quietly proposes that the love moving through the universe has its origin in God, and that God's own being is, in some way we cannot fully grasp, alive with tender feeling toward what He has made.
Across many spiritual traditions, mystics have tried to describe the divine in terms of love that goes beyond duty or governance, love that is, in the most exact sense, enraptured. In the Bahá'í writings this is not treated as poetic fantasy but as a truth about the very nature of reality. The name The Enraptured One holds that truth in just a few syllables. It suggests that when we pray, we are not addressing a remote sovereign who must be convinced to pay attention; we are turning toward a presence already oriented, already inclined, already drawn toward us with something the human heart recognizes, even if the mind cannot contain it.
There is an intimacy embedded in this name that can be startling. Enrapturement is not polite or measured. It is total. To call God by this name in the middle of a healing prayer is to anchor that prayer in a vision of divine love that holds nothing back, that is not rationing its care. Whatever healing means in a given moment, physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, it arises from a source that, according to this name, is already wholly turned toward us.
Calling on The Enraptured One for healing
When illness or grief presses down and prayer feels like shouting into silence, the name The Enraptured One can shift something in the interior landscape. It invites us to remember that the one we are addressing is not indifferent to our condition. Calling on this name is less a technique than a reorientation, a small act of trust that the love at the heart of things is already aware, already moved. Many people find that simply sitting with this name, letting its meaning settle, loosens the knot of isolation that suffering so often tightens. This is not the same as expecting a particular outcome; it is more like opening a window and letting the air change.
Physical healing, as wise counsel consistently reminds us, belongs in the hands of qualified physicians as well as in the hands of God, and these are not opposites. If you are ill, please seek competent medical care; prayer and medicine are companions, not rivals. What calling on The Enraptured One can offer is a different kind of help: the assurance, held in trust and never taken for granted, that your suffering is not invisible to the source of your being. The outcome of healing belongs to a wisdom larger than ours. But the turning toward God that this name invites, that is always available, always worthwhile, and always met with something that deserves the word love.
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Living the Word
Applying The Enraptured One in your life
A name of God is a virtue to grow into. Where is The Enraptured One being asked of you right now, and how will you practice it? Keep a short note each time you return, and watch your own path with this name take shape over time. It stays on this device.
In the Bahá'í Writings
“God Is the Great Compassionate Physician Who Alone Gives True Healing October 19th All true healing comes from God! There are two causes for sickness, one is material, the other spiritual. If the sickness is of the body, a material remedy is needed, if of the soul, a spiritual remedy. If the heavenly benediction be upon us while we are being healed then only can we be made whole, for medicine is but the outward and visible means through which we obtain the heavenly healing. Unless the spirit be healed, the cure of the body is worth nothing. All is in the hands of God, and without Him there can be no health in us! There have been many men who have died at last of the very disease of which they have made a special study. Aristotle, for instance, who made a special study of the digestion, died of a gastric malady. Avicenna was a specialist of the heart, but he died of heart disease. God is the great compassionate Physician who alone has the power to give true healing. All creatures are dependent upon God, however great may seem their knowledge, power and independence.”
Read in full at bahai.org →“15.3O handmaid of God! The prayers which were revealed to ask for healing apply both to physical and spiritual healing. Recite them, then, to heal both the soul and the body. If healing is right for the patient, it will certainly be granted; but for some ailing persons, healing would only be the cause of other ills, and therefore wisdom doth not permit an affirmative answer to the prayer. 15.4O handmaid of God! The power of the Holy Spirit healeth both physical and spiritual ailments. Acquiring Divine Virtues”
Read in full at bahai.org →“‘Say, all is from God’ is a sound and sufficient argument, and ‘if God toucheth thee with a hurt there is no dispeller thereof save Him’ is a healing medicine.””
Read in full at bahai.org →Questions about The Enraptured One
- Why would God be called 'The Enraptured One'? Doesn't that make God sound dependent on us?
- It is a genuinely surprising name, and the question is a fair one. Rather than implying dependency, this name seems to point toward the inexhaustible generosity of divine love, a love so full it overflows, not a love that needs something from us to complete it. Mystics across many traditions have reached for similar language when ordinary words about duty or governance feel too thin to describe what they have experienced of the divine. As always with the names of God, we hold them humbly, knowing they are pointers toward a reality our language cannot fully contain.
- Can reciting this name in the Long Healing Prayer cure my illness?
- The Bahá'í teachings are honest and compassionate on this point: healing in all its forms is held in God's wisdom, not guaranteed by any formula. Bahá'í guidance consistently encourages people to seek skilled medical care alongside prayer, treating the two as partners rather than alternatives. Reciting the Long Healing Prayer and calling on names like The Enraptured One is a meaningful spiritual practice, and it may bring comfort, peace, and a renewed sense of connection, but the outcome of physical healing belongs to a wisdom greater than our own.
- What is the context of this name in the Long Healing Prayer?
- In the prayer, The Enraptured One appears alongside the names The Beloved One and The Cherished One in a single invocation, followed immediately by The Sufficing, The Healing, and The Abiding. This clustering is striking: the names of intimate, overflowing love flow directly into the names of sustaining, healing constancy. It suggests that the God who heals is the very same God whose nature is defined by love, and that healing itself is an expression of that love, not a separate transaction.
Listen to, recite, and reflect on the whole prayer, its more than one hundred names of God.
Hear the Long Healing Prayer