A Naw-Rúz Message from 'Abdu'l-Bahá

The Naw-Rúz issue of the *Star of the West* for the year 1916 — dated the twenty-first of March, the spring equinox, the Bahá'í New Year — opened with a Tablet from 'Abdu'l-Bahá that the editors had received during the previous winter. The Master had addressed it to the American friends. The editors gave it pride of place at the front of the issue.

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The world, in March of 1916, was in a darker condition than the world had been in for many generations. The Great War had been in progress for nineteen months. Europe was being consumed in trenches and casualty lists and the slow grinding down of a generation of young men. The mails between Palestine and the United States were intermittent and uncertain. Cables were censored. The American Bahá'ís had been receiving fewer Tablets from 'Abdu'l-Bahá than they had been used to receiving in the years before the war.

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The Tablet that opened the Naw-Rúz issue was therefore precious twice over: once for being from the Master, and once for having made the journey at all. Its tone was bright. Its keynote was the simple injunction:

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> Be ye filled with the joy and gladness of the Lord.

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The Master wrote that the year just beginning would bring trials and tests, but that the spirit of Naw-Rúz — the spirit of the new beginning, of the day when the long winter ends and the earth turns again toward the light — would carry the friends through them. He asked for steadfastness. He asked for prayer. He asked that the friends remember the suffering humanity around them, especially those caught in the war, and that they make of their own gatherings instruments of healing for the world.

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The editors of the *Star* printed the Tablet without commentary. They knew their readers would not need them to explain it. The American friends opened their March issue to find the Master's own words, sent across the ocean and through the censors and the war zones, and addressed to them at the turn of their spiritual year. It was the kind of small thing that, in the recollection afterwards, made the long years of war bearable for the friends.

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The Tablet's closing image — the friends *filled with joy and gladness* even in a darkening world — would be quoted back in many later issues of the *Star,* as the editors and the contributors returned to it for a benediction whenever the news of the world had grown especially dark. Naw-Rúz, in the Bahá'í calendar, is the festival of return. The Tablet of 1916 made it, that year, also a festival of endurance.

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