Hidden Word, Persian 1: Temple of My Love
Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, (1858), Bahá'í Publishing Trust · Read original
Studio narration for this story is coming — it’ll be generated by the cloud-TTS pipeline (voice: auto-selected from the source author).
When in Bahá'í history
The Persian section of the Hidden Words opens with a different tone from the Arabic. Where the Arabic Hidden Words tend to be brief and aphoristic — sometimes only a single sentence — the Persian Hidden Words are often longer, more lyrical, and more inflected with the imagery of Persian mystical poetry.
The first Persian Hidden Word announces the entire register.
O YE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD! Know, verily, that an unforeseen calamity is following you, and that grievous retribution awaiteth you. Think not the deeds ye have committed have been blotted from My sight. By My beauty! All your doings hath My pen graven with open characters upon tablets of chrysolite.
The opening is a warning, but it is a warning issued in the most intimate possible vocabulary. Know, verily. By My beauty! The Hidden Word does not address an enemy. It addresses the human family with the alarmed concern of a parent who has seen what the child has not yet seen.
The image of the tablets of chrysolite is striking. The deeds of the human soul are not, in Bahá'u'lláh's image, forgotten by God. They are inscribed — in open characters — on imperishable green-gold stone. The accounting will be plain when the moment of accounting arrives.
The Persian Hidden Words proceed through a sequence of such images, drawing now from the language of love poetry, now from the language of the marketplace, now from the language of the royal court. Each is a small lamp lighting one corner of the spiritual landscape. Together they constitute the soul's training in the Bahá'í Dispensation's vocabulary of inwardness.
The opening warning is not the whole of the Persian collection. It is the threshold. The soul that crosses it — the soul that takes seriously the inscription of its deeds on the green-gold tablets — is then led, through eighty-two further Hidden Words, into the deeper chambers of the divine love.
Source: Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words (Bahá'í Publishing Trust). Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.
Discuss this story
Reflection
- The Persian Hidden Words begin with the same theme as the Arabic — the heart as residence. What in your life this week is being asked to make room?
- *Throne of My revelation* is a startling location for the soul to find itself. What weight does that title place on the way you treat your own inner life?
Cite this story
Bahá'u'lláh. (1858). *The Hidden Words*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/hidden-words/
Record yourself reading this story
Recording stays on this device only. Nothing is uploaded.
Related stories
Hidden Word, Arabic 5: My Mansion is the Heart
The fifth Hidden Word in Arabic — Bahá'u'lláh's image of the human heart as His own mansion, and His invitation to sanctify it for His descent.
Hidden Word, Arabic 1: A Pure, Kindly and Radiant Heart
The opening Hidden Word in Arabic — Bahá'u'lláh's first counsel in the mystical aphorisms revealed in Baghdád — names what He most desires of the human heart: that it be pure, kindly, and radiant, so that an everlasting sovereignty may be conferred upon it.
Hidden Word, Persian 3: O Friend, In the Garden of Thy Heart
The third Hidden Word in Persian — Bahá'u'lláh's tender injunction that the believer plant only the rose of love in the garden of the heart, and that the heart itself be the dwelling of the Beloved.
Hidden Word, Persian 4: The Best Beloved of Hearts
The fourth Hidden Word in Persian — Bahá'u'lláh's invitation to the believer to behold, with the eye of the heart, the manifestation of God's eternal beauty in His own being.