These Depths Are the Heights of the Lord: Jamshíd-i-Gurjí

*A retelling based on **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá — the Master's own reminiscences of the early believers. The narrative is retold in our own words; sentences in quotation marks are words preserved in that history, including a saying of Jamshíd's that 'Abdu'l-Bahá set down.*

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In *Memorials of the Faithful*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gathers the stories of the believers who lived and suffered and triumphed in the days of Bahá'u'lláh, and among them is a man whose joy could not be reached by his tormentors even when they had thrown him to the bottom of a well. His name was Jamshíd-i-Gurjí. He came, the Master tells us, from Georgia, but grew up in the city of Káshán — "a fine youth, faithful, trustworthy, with a high sense of honour."

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His awakening was sudden and total. When he heard that a new Faith was dawning, and "awoke to the tidings that on Persia's horizons the Sun of Truth had risen," he was "filled with holy ecstasy, and he longed and loved." The Master's images are of fire and light: the new flame burned away the veils of uncertainty and doubt that had closed him round; the light of Truth shed down its rays; "the lamp of guidance burned before him." Whatever Jamshíd had been before, he was now a man with a single fixed direction.

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He remained in Persia for a time, then made his way west into Ottoman territory, and at last, in the "Land of Mystery" — Adrianople — won the supreme honour of attaining the presence of Bahá'u'lláh. "His joy and fervour were boundless," the Master records. Soon afterward, at Bahá'u'lláh's command, he travelled on to Constantinople in the company of two other believers. And it was there, in that great city, that the world turned its full cruelty upon him: "the tyrannous imprisoned him and put him in chains."

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The accusation was a lie, and a calculated one. The Persian ambassador informed against Jamshíd and a companion as though they were dangerous ringleaders and fighters — describing Jamshíd, absurdly, as "a latter-day Rustam," a warrior out of the old epics, and his companion as "a ravening lion." These were peaceable, God-fearing men; the charge was slander dressed up to secure their deaths.

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They were first imprisoned and "caged," the Master says, and then sent out of Turkish territory under guard toward the Persian frontier, to be handed over to the Persian government "and crucified." The guards were threatened with terrible punishments should they ever relax their watch and let the prisoners slip away. And so, at every stopping place along that grim road, the two men were shut up in some almost inaccessible spot.

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Then comes the night that gives this story its meaning. "Once they were thrown into a pit, a kind of well, and suffered agonies all through the night." Imagine it: innocent men, slandered, chained, being marched toward a cross, flung down at nightfall into a dark hole in the ground and left there in pain until dawn.

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It is the kind of night that crushes the spirit — that turns a person bitter, or breaks his faith, or at the very least wrings from him a cry of despair. From the bottom of that well, what rose up out of Jamshíd was none of these things.

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The next morning he called out — and his words have been kept, exactly as he spoke them, by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. "O you who oppress us!" he cried to his captors. "Are we Joseph the Prophet that you have thrown us in this well? Remember how He rose out of the well as high as the full moon? We too walk the pathway of God, we too are down here for His sake, and we know that these depths are the heights of the Lord."

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There is the whole secret of submission to the will of God, spoken from the bottom of a pit. Jamshíd did not deny where he was; he was, plainly, in a well, in chains, bound for execution. But because he had accepted his whole situation as something endured "for His sake," on "the pathway of God," the meaning of the place was utterly transformed. To his enemies the well was a degradation, a step on the road to killing him.

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To Jamshíd, the very same well was a height — a station of nearness, a place of honour, because it was where the will of God had set him and where he was suffering for love of God. He reached back across the centuries to Joseph, thrown by jealous men into a pit and raised by God "as high as the full moon," and claimed that same arc for himself. The depths, he insisted, were the heights of the Lord.

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His tormentors held his body in a hole in the earth; they could not touch the place where he truly lived, which was already lifted up.

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And the deliverance, when it came, came as quietly and unexpectedly as such things do in these histories. At the Persian frontier the two prisoners were handed over to Kurdish chiefs, who were to send them on to Ṭihrán.

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But the chiefs looked at the men before them and saw the truth at once — that these were "innocent men, kindly and well-disposed, who had fallen a prey to their enemies." Instead of dispatching them to the capital and their deaths, the Kurdish chiefs simply set them free. And what did Jamshíd do with that sudden freedom? He did not run for safety or seek out a quiet life far from danger.

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"Joyfully," the Master tells us, the two men "hastened away on foot, went back to Bahá'u'lláh and found a home close by Him in the Most Great Prison." Freed from one captivity, they hurried straight back into another — the prison-city of 'Akká — because that was where their Lord was, and nearness to Him was the only freedom they wanted.

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The man who had called a well the heights of the Lord now chose a prison over the open road, for the same reason: it was where the will of God, and the Beloved of his heart, had placed him.

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The end of his life is described in words of perfect peace. Jamshíd "spent some time in utter bliss," the Master writes, receiving the grace and favour of Bahá'u'lláh and again and again being admitted to His presence. "He was tranquil and at peace. The believers were well-pleased with him, and he was well-pleased with God." That phrase — *well-pleased with God* — is the very heart of the attribute of Mashíyyat, of glad acquiescence to the divine Will.

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It is not merely that Jamshíd submitted to God; it is that he was content, satisfied, glad, in the will of God for him.

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And it was in that very condition, the Master says, that he heard the celestial summons addressed to the soul at peace: "O thou soul who art well-assured, return unto thy Lord, well-pleased with Him, and well-pleasing unto Him." To God's cry of "Return!" Jamshíd answered, "Yea, verily!" — and "rose out of the Most Great Prison to the highest Heaven."

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So Jamshíd-i-Gurjí met every station of his life with the same surrendered, shining heart: the ecstasy of belief, the chains of slander, the agony of the pit, the joy of return, and at last the call of death itself, which he greeted not with dread but with a glad assent.

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From the bottom of a well he had taught the lesson, and at the gate of death he proved it once more — that for a soul well-pleased with God, there is no depth that is not, in truth, a height of the Lord. His grave, "sweet as musk," lies in 'Akká.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.*

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