The Roses Carried Across the River: The Garden and Those Beyond It

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers (Nabíl's Narrative), the eyewitness chronicle of the early days of the Faith. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Of all the images that the histories have preserved from the twelve days of Riḍván, none is more often retold than the roses. Nabíl, whose narrative gathers the recollections of those who were there, sets the scene in the garden of Najíb Páshá, on the bank of the river Tigris outside Baghdád, in the spring of 1863. There Bahá'u'lláh had withdrawn on the eve of a fresh banishment, and there He declared to His companions the long-hidden secret of His station. And there, each morning, the roses came.

The account relates that every morning, the gardener would gather the roses that bloomed along the riverbanks and carry them to Bahá'u'lláh's tent. They were heaped in the centre of the tent in such abundance that the companions seated on one side could not see those sitting on the other across the great mound of blossoms. The fragrance lay heavy and sweet over the whole garden. And through the warm nights, the nightingales sang in the trees without ceasing, so that the believers, hardly sleeping for joy and wonder, passed those days in something very close to the Paradise whose name the Garden bore.

But the roses were not left to heap and fade in the tent. Here is the detail that opens the meaning of the Ninth Day. Bahá'u'lláh would take the blossoms up in His own hands and give them to those who came into His presence, charging them to carry the roses to the friends on the far side of the river. From the heaped roses of His tent He sent blossoms across the river, so that those who could not enter the Garden might still receive its fragrance. The Garden's gladness was not to be hoarded by those near enough to sit within it; it was to be borne outward, across the water, to everyone the love of God embraced.

This gesture lies very close to the heart of what the Ninth Day commemorates. For the Ninth Day is, above all, the day a river was crossed. On the first afternoon, when Bahá'u'lláh entered the Garden, the Tigris ran so high with the waters of spring that His own wife and household could not follow Him over. For nine days the swollen river divided them — His family on the near bank, He in the Garden on the far one. We are not told whether roses were among the things carried back across that water in those days; but the image is irresistible all the same. Even as the river kept His dearest ones at a distance, the Garden was already reaching across it — its blossoms passing from His hand, over the water, to those beyond. And then, on the ninth day, the river itself was crossed: the household was ferried over at last and gathered to Him among the very roses He had been sending out. The fragrance that had travelled to them across the water now surrounded them in person.

There is a parable in this for anyone who keeps the festival. The joy that Bahá'u'lláh inaugurated in that Garden was, from its very first morning, a joy that travelled. It did not stay within the canvas walls of a tent, nor even within the banks of a single river. It was meant to be carried — out to the friends across the water, out to the city of Baghdád, and, in time, out to the whole of a waiting world. The Declaration of Riḍván was the unveiling of the Glory of God; and the roses passing from His hand across the river were a small, fragrant sign of how that glory was to move — outward, always outward, toward everyone separated from Him by any flood.

And on the Ninth Day, the separation that mattered most to the household was healed. The river that had divided the family from Bahá'u'lláh was crossed, and those who had received the fragrance from afar were brought into the Garden itself. The roses had gone out across the water; now the family came in over it. The Garden of Paradise, which had been reaching toward them all along, opened at last to receive them.

That is why the simple image of roses carried across a river belongs to the Ninth Day of Riḍván. It is the picture of a love that will not be confined — that sends its sweetness across every divide, and then, in its own time, crosses the divide entirely and gathers the beloved home.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/