After This Storm, the Divine Spring

In *Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas* — the 1909 American compilation of early Tablets of the Master — a short letter to a community of Bahá'ís then under pressure of opposition takes up the characteristic Bahá'í teaching about the fruitfulness of trial. The recipients are not named; from internal evidence they appear to have been one of the small American or European groups that had begun, in those years, to face local hostility — derisive articles in the local press, social ostracism by clergy, the unkindness of former friends.

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The Master's reply opens with the reassurance the friends were needing.

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> When the winds blow severely, rains fall fiercely … grieve > not; for after this storm, verily, the divine spring will > arrive, the hills and fields will become verdant … These > favors are results of those storms.

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The image is one any farmer of the Persian uplands or the American Midwest would recognise. The hardest months of the year — the storms of late winter, the icy rain that beats down on bare ground, the wind that strips the last leaves from any remaining branch — are not, in the cycle of the seasons, an interruption of the year's fruitfulness. They are part of it.

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The same rains that punish the bare fields in February soak the ground for the green of April. The bitter cold breaks the ground that the spring sun will then warm. The fruit of the year, when it eventually comes, has come *because* of the storms, not in spite of them.

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So with the spiritual life of a community. The opposition that was at present making the friends miserable was — in the Master's longer view — preparing the spring that was coming. The communities that had endured persecution would be the communities that had been winnowed and made ready. The believers who had stood firm through derision and ostracism would be the believers whose roots were deep enough to receive the eventual flowering.

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The Tablet does not minimize the difficulty. *When the winds blow severely.* The Master grants that what the friends were enduring was hard. He does not pretend otherwise. What He refuses to grant is that the hardship is meaningless. It is, in His reading, the necessary first half of a process whose second half is the green field, the orchard in fruit, the harvest.

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The instruction is patient. Endure. Continue. Do not measure the year by its hardest week. The spring will come. And the spring will be — as every spring eventually is — recognised as having been worth the storm.

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The brief Tablet was printed in the 1909 collection so that the American friends could carry it as a small pocket-companion through their own difficulties. The image of the *divine spring after the storm* has, ever since, been one of the consolations the believers most often turn to in the harder seasons.

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