Hidden Word, Persian 32: O Children of Adam, Holy Words

The thirty-second Hidden Word in Persian addresses the most common spiritual disconnect of the religious life: the gap between the speaker's beautiful words and the speaker's ordinary conduct.

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> O CHILDREN OF ADAM! Holy words and pure and goodly deeds > ascend unto the heaven of celestial glory. Strive that your > deeds may be cleansed from the dust of self and hypocrisy and > find favour at the court of glory; for ere long the assayers > of mankind shall, in the holy presence of the Adored One, > accept naught but absolute virtue and deeds of stainless > purity.

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This is the day-star of wisdom and of divine mystery > that hath shone above the horizon of the divine will. Blessed > are they that turn thereunto.

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The first sentence sets the standard. Two things rise: *holy words* and *pure and goodly deeds.* Both are required. The soul whose words are holy but whose deeds are not is, in the ascent, weighted down. The soul whose deeds are good but whose words are coarse is, in the ascent, mismatched. The Hidden Word calls for the marriage of the two.

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The middle phrase contains the warning. *The dust of self and hypocrisy.* These are named together because they so often travel together. The deed done for the eye of others — the service performed for the praise it will earn, the piety displayed for the standing it will buy — is, by Bahá'u'lláh's plain language, dusted with hypocrisy. The remedy is the cleansing of the deed itself, that it may be done for the love of God alone.

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The closing image is judicial. The *assayers of mankind* — the weighers of human worth in *the holy presence of the Adored One* — *shall accept naught but absolute virtue and deeds of stainless purity.* The Hidden Word warns that the standard of acceptance is high. The world's lower standards of *good enough* will not transfer to the court of glory. What is asked, finally, is purity — purity of motive, purity of word, purity of deed.

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The Hidden Word is read often at occasions of spiritual self-examination: at the start of the Fast, at Naw-Rúz, at moments of personal recommitment to the Cause.

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