The Charter That Moved a Continent: The Tablets of the Divine Plan

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which describes the revelation, unveiling, and effect of the Tablets of the Divine Plan. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.*

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During the years of the First World War, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was cut off in the Holy Land, encircled by the armies and dangers of a world at war and watched with hostility by the Ottoman authorities, who at one point threatened His very life.

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It was in the midst of this peril, with His own circumstances at their darkest, that He turned His gaze outward to the whole earth and set His pen to one of the most far-reaching documents of His ministry: a series of Tablets addressed to the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada, summoning them to arise and carry the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh to every land on the planet.

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Shoghi Effendi describes these **Tablets of the Divine Plan** — fourteen in all — as the charter for the propagation of the Faith across the globe. In them 'Abdu'l-Bahá did a remarkable thing: He named, one after another, the regions and territories of the world, and called upon the believers of North America to go to them.

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The republics of Latin America, the countries of Europe, the vast expanse of Asia, the continent of Africa, the scattered islands of the Pacific — 'Abdu'l-Bahá unrolled, in these Words, a map of the whole earth and laid upon a single small community the charge of reaching it.

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He assured them that hosts of divine confirmation would descend upon any soul who arose to teach, and He clothed the summons in language of soaring confidence, calling the friends to become as "waves of one sea," to "shine even as stars," and to spread the fragrances of God to the uttermost ends of the earth.

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The Tablets were revealed in 1916 and 1917, but the war held them back; in their fullness they could not be sent or shared while the fighting raged. Only when the war had ended could they be brought together and made known. Shoghi Effendi records that they were formally unveiled at a gathering of the believers in New York in the spring of 1919 — read out, all together, to the assembled friends of the western community for whom they had been written. It was, in effect, the moment the community heard its commission read aloud.

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And the Words went to work. Shoghi Effendi treats the Tablets of the Divine Plan as the very impulse that, in the decades to follow, sent the believers of North America out across the world — the document on which all the later systematic plans for the spread of the Faith would be built.

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A community that, at the moment the Tablets were penned, was modest in numbers and confined largely to its own continent became, under the influence of these utterances, a teaching force that would establish the Faith on every continent and in island after distant island. Men and women who had never imagined leaving their own country read 'Abdu'l-Bahá's naming of the nations, felt themselves addressed, and went — some for a season, some for the rest of their lives.

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What had moved them was not a campaign or an organization. It was a Word. The Tablets carried no compulsion and offered no inducement; they simply summoned, in language of love and certainty, and the summons proved able to lift ordinary people out of the lives they had planned and to set them on the roads of the earth. That is the very heart of what a Feast of Words celebrates: the power of the revealed utterance not merely to inform a mind but to redirect a life, and, through many lives, to alter the course of history.

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To read the Tablets of the Divine Plan even now is to feel something of what their first hearers felt in that New York gathering — the strange and bracing sensation of being personally addressed across the years, and called to a work larger than oneself. 'Abdu'l-Bahá wrote them in the shadow of war, for the sake of a peace that would have to be built one believer, one journey, one taught soul at a time. The Words remain; and they are still summoning.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi; the Tablets themselves are gathered in **Tablets of the Divine Plan** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.*

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