Hidden Word, Persian 1: Temple of My Love

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.

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The first Persian Hidden Word announces the entire register.

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> 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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