'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Spiritual Springtime

A retelling based on the Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas, the early collection of His letters to the believers. Passages in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own words as preserved in that volume.

When 'Abdu'l-Bahá took up the leadership of the Faith after the passing of His Father in 1892, He carried on a tender practice that bound Him to the believers across the whole world: He wrote to them. Thousands of Tablets flowed from His pen — to gatherings in Persia where the friends still met under the shadow of persecution, and to the new and eager communities springing up in Europe and North America. Many of these letters were occasioned by the turning of the Bahá'í year. The believers would write to Him at Naw-Rúz, the new year of the spring equinox, and He would answer with words of blessing, encouragement, and exhortation.

Through these new-year Tablets there runs one great image, returned to again and again: the image of springtime. 'Abdu'l-Bahá saw in the yearly renewal of the natural world a perfect mirror of the deepest truth of religion. Just as the earth lies seemingly dead through the winter — the trees bare, the fields brown, the life of the world withdrawn — and then at the spring equinox is suddenly quickened, so that a "wonderful, vibrant energy" rushes through every living thing and the whole creation puts on green and blossom; so too, He taught, the inner world of humanity passes through its own long winters and its own springtimes. And the springtime of the soul comes when a Manifestation of God appears.

"The new year hath appeared," He wrote to the friends in one of these Tablets, "and the spiritual springtime is at hand." It is a sentence of great simplicity and great depth. On the surface it speaks of Naw-Rúz, the literal new year that arrives with the warming of the earth. Beneath the surface it speaks of the new Day that Bahá'u'lláh had brought into the world — the descent of a fresh outpouring of divine grace after the long winter of the spirit, the season in which, as 'Abdu'l-Bahá so often said, the dead are raised, the cold hearts warmed, and the barren souls made fruitful once more.

For 'Abdu'l-Bahá, this was never a merely poetic comparison. He drew from it a direct and personal summons. If the springtime of God had truly come, then the believers were not to remain as they had been; they were to be transformed by it, as a tree is transformed by the spring. The whole purpose of the new outpouring was that human beings should themselves be made new. In these new-year writings He expressed His longing that the bounty of the Naw-Rúz season should "appear and become manifest" in the very faces and characters of the friends — that they should so absorb the spirit of renewal as to become, in His phrase, a new people: people whose conduct, whose love, whose unity would themselves be the visible proof that a new Day had dawned upon the world.

There is a striking gentleness in the way 'Abdu'l-Bahá joined the cosmic and the intimate. In the same breath He could speak of the rising of the "Sun of Reality" over the whole arc of human history, and of the small, daily warming of a single heart. The new year that quickens the violets in the field is the same new year, He taught, that is meant to quicken kindness in a person who had grown cold, or courage in one who had grown afraid, or faith in one who had begun to doubt. The festival is not only something that happens to the calendar; it is something meant to happen to us.

This is why, in the Bahá'í understanding, Naw-Rúz is far more than the start of a new twelve months. It is a yearly reminder of the central fact of the Faith: that God renews His guidance to humanity in age after age, sending a divine springtime to a wintered world. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's new-year Tablets take that vast truth and lay it, like a gift, in the hands of each believer. The spring has come, they say. Now let it come into you.

For all who keep the festival, His words endure as both promise and invitation. The promise is that the springtime of God is real, and that no winter of the spirit is final. The invitation is to open to it — to let the new year find us not unchanged, but greening, like the earth itself, with new life.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1909). *Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas*. Bahai Publishing Society. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19312