Three Portions: The Heart of the Nineteen Day Feast

The Nineteen Day Feast falls on the first day of each Bahá’í month — nineteen times a year, every nineteen days. Esslemont, writing in 1923 just after Shoghi Effendi had begun the work of building the Bahá’í administrative order, gives this brief account of what the Feast had become:

With the development of the Bahá’í administrative order since the ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Nineteen Day Feast, observed on the first day of each Bahá’í month, has assumed a very special importance, providing as it does not only for community prayer and reading from the Holy Books, but also for general consultation on all current Bahá’í affairs and for the association of the friends together. This Feast is the occasion when the Spiritual Assembly makes its reports to the community and invites both discussion of plans and suggestions for new and better methods of service.

That is the Feast in three portions: a devotional opening, in which the friends listen to the Words of God; an administrative middle, in which the elected Spiritual Assembly consults openly with the community on its life and plans; and a social close, in which the friends share food, music, conversation, the small graces of being together.

Each of those portions has its own logic. The devotional portion gathers the heart to its true center. The administrative portion makes clear that the community’s decisions are not made over the heads of its members but in their hearing — and that the friends’ suggestions are sought, listened to, and acted upon. The social portion, in turn, simply lets the love that is the Cause’s real business flow into the hour and the room.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s great Naw-Rúz instruction — given in Alexandria in 1912 and recorded by Esslemont in the same volume — illuminates the spirit of every Feast as much as of every Holy Day:

All should rejoice together, hold general meetings, become as one assembly, so that the national oneness, unity and harmony may be demonstrated in the eyes of all.... Today there is no result or fruit greater than guiding the people. Undoubtedly the friends of God, upon such a day, must leave tangible philanthropic or ideal traces that should reach all mankind.

The Feast, then, is more than a meeting. It is a small monthly practice of the very community that the Bahá’ís are trying, slowly, in nineteen-day rhythms, to learn how to be.

Source: J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (1923), with quotation from a Naw-Rúz talk by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Alexandria, 1912. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19241.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19241/pg19241-images.html