After Each Prayer: The Báb on Remembering Parents
the Báb, Selections from the Writings of the Báb, Bahá'í World Centre · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
Shíráz (today: Shíráz, Iran)
In the Bayán the Báb gave the believer a great many small instructions, each of which was meant to weave devotion into the ordinary fabric of the day. One of them, preserved in the Selections from the Writings of the Báb, concerns the moments that immediately follow obligatory prayer.
It is seemly that the servant should, after each prayer, supplicate God to bestow mercy and forgiveness upon his parents.
The instruction is gentle in tone. It is not one of the great proclamations to the kings; it is not a sentence of judgment on the world. It is a quiet word about what to do in the breath after one has stood up from prayer.
But its placement is significant. The Báb does not assign the remembrance of parents to a separate occasion or a separate ritual. He places it at the very edge of the most central act of worship — after each prayer. The breath that has just risen to God is asked, before it disperses, to carry up the names of the two human beings without whom the worshipper would not exist.
The Báb continues, in the same passage, with the assurance that such remembrance brings a real spiritual reward. To pray for one's parents is not a gesture of sentimentality; it is a small act of genuine intercession, and a small act of genuine acknowledgement that the believer did not begin himself.
For the Bahá’í who has lost a parent, the instruction continues to apply. Mercy and forgiveness are the two words the Báb chose, and they reach beyond the grave. The prayer becomes, then, a continuing act of love between the worlds.
The teaching is small. It does not occupy whole pages of the Bayán. Yet it has shaped the daily devotion of generations of Bábís and, after them, Bahá’ís — for in joining family to prayer, the Báb joined what had often been left apart, and made even the private domestic affections part of the structure of worship.
Source: Selections from the Writings of the Báb, "Prayers and Meditations" section. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library / Project Gutenberg eBook #18828.
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the Báb. *Selections from the Writings of the Báb*. Bahá'í World Centre. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18828
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