Hidden Word, Persian 7: O Friend, Thou Art the Day-Star

The seventh Hidden Word in Persian is among the most exalted descriptions of the human soul in the Bahá'í Writings. It is a testimony — and a warning — addressed by Bahá'u'lláh to the believer.

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> O FRIEND! Thou art the day-star of the heavens of My > holiness, let not the defilement of the world eclipse thy > splendour. Rend asunder the veil of heedlessness, that from > behind the clouds thou mayest emerge resplendent and array > all things with the apparel of life.

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The first sentence is the diagnosis-by-celebration. The believer is named *the day-star of the heavens of My holiness.* The image is uncompromising. The day-star is the sun. The believer, in created reality, is meant to function in the heavens of holiness as the sun functions in the heavens of the sky: not one light among many, but the very light by which the others are seen.

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The verb *let not* names the believer's responsibility. *Let not the defilement of the world eclipse thy splendour.* The day-star is not, by nature, dimmable. The eclipse is the intrusion of an alien body in front of it. The defilement that dims the believer is, in this image, equally external — and equally something the believer is empowered to refuse.

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The Hidden Word ends with action. *Rend asunder the veil of heedlessness, that from behind the clouds thou mayest emerge resplendent and array all things with the apparel of life.* The believer who has refused the eclipse becomes, in the world's spaces, the one who *arrays all things with the apparel of life.* What was inert receives, through the believer's emerged splendour, the garment of liveliness it has lacked.

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The vision is high, almost vertiginous. The Persian Hidden Words are full of such elevations of the human soul. They are not flattery. They are testimony to the actual stature in which the human being was created and to which Bahá'u'lláh, by His Revelation, has called the human being to rise.

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