After Each Prayer: The Báb on Remembering Parents

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.

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> It is seemly that the servant should, after each prayer, > supplicate God to bestow mercy and forgiveness upon his parents.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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