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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
15 stories on this theme.
A short story for children, paraphrased from the Baha'i Stories for Children blog: a small family preparing for Naw-Rúz by counting up the good deeds of the year, and the small new resolution each child makes for the year ahead.
In 1912, on the Feast of Naw-Rúz in Alexandria, Egypt, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the meaning of the blessed days appointed in every dispensation — days for rejoicing together, for unity, and for leaving "tangible philanthropic or ideal traces" reaching all mankind.
On the first day of spring in a city by the sea, 'Abdu'l-Bahá told His friends that the best way to celebrate a special day is to do something kind that helps the whole world.
On Naw-Rúz 1909, after the sacred remains of the Báb had been hidden and moved for sixty years, 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid them with His own hands in the Shrine He had built on Mount Carmel — and, overcome, wept so that all who were present wept with Him. The greatest victory, He called it, of a long-deferred hope.
In the prison-city of 'Akká and later in Haifa, 'Abdu'l-Bahá kept the festivals of the Bahá'í year — and Naw-Rúz above all — in a way that turned joy outward: toward the hungry, the sick, the widow and the stranger. The Greatest Holy Leaf and the ladies of the household, whose memories Lady Blomfield gathered, remembered a home where the new year was a season of open doors and open hands.
Among the laws the Báb set down in His Bayán was a wholly new way of measuring time: the Badíʿ calendar, a year of nineteen months of nineteen days, each month bearing the name of an attribute of God, and nineteen years gathered into a cycle called a Váḥid. At the head of it all He placed Naw-Rúz — so that the Bahá'í year begins, every spring, upon the name of God's own splendour.
In the spring of 1912, only weeks after the Bahá'í new year, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke in a New York home of the deepest meaning of the season. The coming of each Manifestation of God, He taught, is a divine springtime that quickens a wintered world; Christ's advent was such a spring, and the long winter that followed had now given way again, for "Bahá'u'lláh has come into this world. He has renewed that springtime."
In His writings Bahá'u'lláh gave Naw-Rúz a meaning far deeper than the turning of a season. In a prayer revealed for the festival, He blessed the day He had ordained for those who had kept the Fast for love of Him; and through His larger teaching, traced by Adib Taherzadeh, the spring equinox becomes a sign of the spiritual resurrection that the coming of a Manifestation works upon a dead world.
Esslemont, gathering the ordinances of the Bahá'í year, shows how Bahá'u'lláh framed Naw-Rúz with exquisite care: a handful of intercalary days given to hospitality and the poor, then the nineteen-day Fast of inward devotion, and then, at the spring equinox, the new year breaking in joy. The festival is the bright morning that the whole shape of the year is built to reach.
From the mountain prison of Chihríq, in the last spring of His earthly life, the Báb sent a beloved attendant on a long and perilous errand — bearing Tablets to the shrine of the Tabarsí martyrs and a message to Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán — with a single tender instruction: to hurry back in time to keep Naw-Rúz at His side, "that festival, the only one I probably shall ever see again."
In the spring of 1863, in the last weeks of His decade in Baghdád and only days before He would declare His mission in the Garden of Riḍván, Bahá'u'lláh kept the two-week festival of Naw-Rúz with His companions at the Mazraʻiy-i-Vashshásh, a farm in the countryside outside the city — a final, joyous new year on the eve of the greatest of all proclamations.
Across the years of His ministry, 'Abdu'l-Bahá wrote to the believers of East and West at the turning of each Bahá'í year, drawing again and again on a single great image: that as the material world is renewed at the spring equinox, so the coming of a Manifestation of God renews the whole inner world of humanity. "The new year hath appeared," He wrote, "and the spiritual springtime is at hand."
Within the laws of His Bayán, the Báb swept away the old calendar and brought into being an entirely new one — nineteen months of nineteen days, each named for an attribute of God, the first month bearing the name of splendour itself. At its head He set Naw-Rúz, the day the sun returns to its springtime power, naming it the Day of God and crowning with it the month of the Fast.
In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book of His Revelation, Bahá'u'lláh confirmed the calendar the Báb had ordained and set His own seal upon Naw-Rúz — joining it forever to the close of the Fast, fixing it to the moment the sun enters the sign of Aries, and designating the new year of the spring equinox as a festival for all the people of the world.
In the Naw-Rúz issue of the Star of the West for 1916, the editors printed a Tablet from 'Abdu'l-Bahá received during the year — a brief message of cheer and exhortation to the American believers, written during the war years when communication between Haifa and the West had become difficult.