No. 16 of 124 · A Name of God · The Long Healing Prayer
The Holy One
To call on God as The Holy One is to turn toward a purity so complete it can cleanse whatever it touches.
I call on Thee O Most Praised One, O Holy One, O Helping 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 · Holy
1. Set apart to the service or worship of God; hallowed; sacred; reserved from profane or common use; holy vessels; a holy priesthood. "Holy rites and solemn feasts." Milton. 2. Spiritually whole or sound; of unimpaired innocence and virtue; free from sinful affections; pure in heart; godly; pious; irreproachable; guiltless; acceptable to God. Now through her round of holy thought The Church our annual steps has brought. Keble. …
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 Holy 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.
Holiness, at its root, points to something set apart, not in the sense of cold distance, but in the sense of an altogether different order of being. When Bahá'u'lláh invokes God as The Holy One, the name carries this quality of absolute unblemished purity. Nothing of shadow, corruption, or diminishment clings to it. It is as if the name itself were a clear sky with no horizon to interrupt it.
There is a long thread running through many spiritual traditions that associates holiness with wholeness. To be holy is, in some deep sense, to be undivided, uncorrupted, entirely what one is meant to be. When we apply that idea to God, we are gesturing toward a reality that is the very source and standard of integrity, the measure against which all partial, wounded, or fractured things are quietly judged and found to be incomplete, yet also quietly invited toward completion.
Calling God The Holy One is also, perhaps, a way of acknowledging our own condition honestly. We come to this name aware that we are not holy in that absolute sense, that our bodies suffer, our thoughts wander, our spirits sometimes grow dim. And yet the name does not rebuke us. It simply holds open a door, pointing to a presence that is everything we are not, and suggesting that such a presence might nonetheless draw near.
Calling on The Holy One for healing
When illness arrives, whether in the body, the mind, or the depths of the spirit, one of its cruelest effects is a sense of defilement or diminishment, the feeling that something has gone wrong in us at a fundamental level. Bringing the name The Holy One into that experience is an act of quiet courage. It is a way of saying: whatever has been disrupted in me, there exists a reality that cannot be disrupted. Whatever in me feels stained or broken, I am reaching toward something untouched by stain or breakage. This is not a claim that healing will follow in a specific form or on a specific timeline; healing, as the Writings remind us, rests entirely in God's wisdom and is never simply ours to command. It is rather an orientation, a turning of the face.
You might find it helpful, when reciting this portion of the Long Healing Prayer, to pause for a moment with the word holy itself, not rushing past it, but letting it settle. Consider what it would mean to be touched, even briefly, by something genuinely pure. Consider that such purity, in the Bahá'í understanding, is not an abstraction but a living reality. As always, prayer and spiritual practice belong alongside, not instead of, the care of competent physicians and other healers. The Holy One works through many means, and wisdom lies in drawing on all of them.
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Living the Word
Applying The Holy One in your life
A name of God is a virtue to grow into. Where is The Holy 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
“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 →“The source of perfect unity and love in the world of existence is the bond and oneness of reality. When the divine and fundamental reality enters human hearts and lives, it conserves and protects all states and conditions of mankind, establishing that intrinsic oneness of the world of humanity which can only come into being through the efficacy of the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is like unto the life in the human body, which blends all differences of parts and members in unity and agreement. Consider how numerous are these parts and members, but the oneness of the animating spirit of life unites them all in perfect combination. It establishes such a unity in the bodily organism that if any part is subjected to injury or becomes diseased, all the other parts and functions sympathetically respond and suffer, owing to the perfect oneness existing. Just as the human spirit of life is the cause of coordination among the various parts of the human organism, the Holy Spirit is the controlling cause of the unity and coordination of mankind.”
Read in full at bahai.org →“4.3Even the holy, divine Manifestations have had a nature in the utmost equilibrium, the health and wholesomeness of their bodies most perfect, their constitutions endowed with physical vigour, their powers functioning in perfect order, and the outward sensations linked with the inward perceptions, working together with extraordinary momentum and coordination. 4.4Therefore in these sixteen states, because they are contiguous to other states and their climate being in the utmost of moderation, unquestionably the divine teachings must reveal themselves with a brighter effulgence, the breaths of the Holy Spirit must display a penetrating intensity, the ocean of the love of God must be stirred with higher waves, the breezes of the rose garden of the divine love be wafted with higher velocity, and the fragrances of holiness be diffused with swiftness and rapidity.”
Read in full at bahai.org →Questions about The Holy One
- Does calling God 'The Holy One' in this prayer guarantee that I will be healed?
- No, and it would be a disservice to suggest otherwise. The Bahá'í Writings are clear that healing, when we pray for it, is granted according to divine wisdom, and that wisdom sometimes sees things our limited perspective cannot. Praying the Long Healing Prayer is an act of trust and surrender, not a transaction. It is always wise to seek the care of qualified medical professionals alongside any spiritual practice.
- Why are there so many names of God in this one prayer?
- Each name illuminates a different facet of a reality that no single word can contain. Together, they build a kind of mosaic portrait of the divine, sufficing, healing, abiding, holy, so that the one praying might approach God from many angles at once, finding the word or quality that meets them where they are in that moment. The richness of the names is itself a form of generosity.
- Is 'The Holy One' a name specific to the Bahá'í Faith, or does it appear in other traditions?
- The concept of divine holiness is among the most widely shared across the world's religions, it appears in Jewish scripture, Christian liturgy, Islamic theology, and many other traditions. Bahá'u'lláh's use of the name draws on this deep, shared human intuition about the nature of God, while situating it within the particular voice and revelation of the Bahá'í Faith. The resonance across traditions is something many Bahá'ís find meaningful.
Listen to, recite, and reflect on the whole prayer, its more than one hundred names of God.
Hear the Long Healing Prayer