I Am Well Pleased With You All: The Last Audience at Bahjí

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which preserves the account of Bahá'u'lláh's last days at Bahjí. The words in quotation marks are Bahá'u'lláh's own, as recorded in that history.*

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By the spring of 1892 the long arc of Bahá'u'lláh's earthly life was drawing toward its close. The decades of banishment — from Ṭihrán to Baghdád, to Constantinople, to Adrianople, and at last to the prison-city of 'Akká — were behind Him. In His final years the walls of His confinement had eased, and He dwelt at the Mansion of Bahjí, north of 'Akká, amid gardens, sought out by a steady stream of pilgrims who had crossed deserts and seas for the bounty of attaining His presence.

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It was to that Mansion, in the closing days of May, that grief came quietly. Shoghi Effendi records that on the night before the eleventh of Shavvál — the eighth of May, 1892 — Bahá'u'lláh contracted a slight fever. It rose the next day and then subsided; but within days it returned in a more acute form, and His condition grew steadily worse. Those nearest Him understood, with mounting dread, what was approaching.

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And so, six days before He passed from this world, Bahá'u'lláh summoned the believers to Him one last time.

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The scene, as the history preserves it, is one of the most tender in all the annals of the Faith. He lay in bed, leaning against one of His sons. Into that room came the entire company of the believers who had gathered at the Mansion, including several of the pilgrims — men who had given their lives, their homes, and their safety to the Cause, and who now stood before its Author for what would prove to be their final audience with Him.

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To them He spoke words of gratitude and farewell. "I am well pleased with you all," He told them. "Ye have rendered many services, and been very assiduous in your labors. Ye have come here every morning and every evening." Then He left them with the charge that would matter most in the days and years to come: "May God assist you to remain united. May He aid you to exalt the Cause of the Lord of being."

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There is something quietly astonishing in that choice of words. Bahá'u'lláh did not, in this last meeting, unveil some new mystery or pronounce some new law. He thanked the friends for their faithfulness — and He pressed upon them, above all else, the preservation of their unity. The Author of a world Faith, at the very threshold of His departure, asked His followers to hold together. Everything He had revealed about the oneness of humanity was distilled, in that hour, into a blessing breathed over the heads of a few grieving believers in a room at Bahjí.

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To the women gathered at His bedside — among them the members of His own family — He addressed similar words of encouragement and reassurance. Shoghi Effendi records that He gave them a definite assurance: in a document He had entrusted to the Most Great Branch — His eldest Son, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — He had commended them, one and all, to His care.

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Even in this, His thought was turned outward, toward those He was leaving, and toward the Son into whose keeping He was placing them. That document, sealed and waiting, was the Kitáb-i-'Ahd, the Book of His Covenant; but its opening would belong to the days after His passing.

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For now there was only this: a Father's gratitude, a charge to remain united, and a blessing. Within six days the fever would complete its work, and in the small hours of the twenty-ninth of May the believers' worst fear would come to pass. But they would carry out of that last audience the memory of His own voice telling them that He was well pleased — and asking them, for the sake of the Lord of being, to stay as one.

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It is fitting that the community pauses, each year, over these final days. The Ascension of Bahá'u'lláh is a day of mourning. Yet at its heart lies not a scene of abandonment but a scene of blessing: the believers called in close, one last time, and sent forward with His pleasure upon them and His counsel of unity ringing in their ears.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi.*

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