Hidden Word, Persian 66: With Joy and Fragrance

A Persian Hidden Word — among those quoted most often by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in His later years — gives one of the most sheltering images in the entire collection.

O SON OF BEING! My love is My stronghold; he that entereth therein is safe and secure, and he that turneth away shall surely stray and perish.

The image is military. A stronghold is a fortified place that holds against assault. Bahá'u'lláh names His love as such a place. Within it, the soul is safe and secure. Outside it, the soul is at the mercy of the open field of the world's ordinary pressures.

The Hidden Word issues a single binary. The soul either enters the stronghold or it does not. There is no third option of camping just outside the wall. The choice is daily.

The complement to this Hidden Word is the well-known Persian counsel — Walk in the way of holiness, walk in the way of chastity — that runs through many of the longer Persian Hidden Words. The believer who has entered the stronghold of the divine love is the believer who, then, walks out into the ordinary day carrying within him or her the fragrance of that shelter. The world's spaces are scented, where the believer passes, by the perfume the believer carries from within.

In this collection of small mystical aphorisms, the architectural image of the stronghold is paired with the natural image of the fragrance to make a single pastoral teaching. The interior life of the believer is not for the believer alone. It is for the world the believer moves through. A soul sheltered in the stronghold is a soul whose mere presence brings, into the rooms it enters, the freshness of the divine air.

The Hidden Word is read at the dedication of new institutions of the Faith, at the welcoming of new believers into the community, and in the quiet personal devotional life of those who have, in their own time, walked into the stronghold and found the shelter true.

Source: Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words (Bahá'í Publishing Trust). Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1858). *The Hidden Words*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/hidden-words/