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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."
84 stories where reverence appears.
In London in September 1911, a painter came to ask 'Abdu'l-Bahá whether art was a worthy vocation. The Master answered in three words. Then an actor asked about drama, and the conversation widened into a memory of a Mystery Play that, as a child, had kept Him sleepless for nights.
On September 13, 1911, in His first weeks in London, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed a small gathering at the home of Mrs. Thornburgh-Cropper. He spoke of the meeting itself as a mirror reflecting the Concourse on High — a quiet declaration that what mattered there was not earthly but heavenly.
In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont describes the proximity of the Persian believers in 'Akká to the great Mansion of Bahjí — the pilgrim who, after the long road, would silently ascend the path each morning to be near the windows of the Master, then sit beneath the trees, then descend at dusk having barely spoken.
In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont preserves the famous 1890 account by the Cambridge orientalist Edward Granville Browne — the only Westerner ever to record his impressions of meeting Bahá'u'lláh. The short paragraph was written in plain academic English. It has never been surpassed.
A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on 'Abdu'l-Bahá's particular love for the flowers that pilgrims brought Him in 'Akká, His unhurried inspection of each, and His habit of asking the giver to name the flower in their own language.
A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's particular love for children, His habit of stopping in the street to greet them, and His insistence that the youngest of His visitors be received with the same gravity He gave to ambassadors.
A short story for children, paraphrased from the Baha'i Stories for Children blog: a small girl who learns the difference between a prayer she says fast and a prayer she says slowly, and the way the whole room changes when she lets the words breathe.
A short story for children, paraphrased from the Baha'i Stories for Children blog: a small yellow flower in the cracked sidewalk, the child who decided not to pick it, and the bee that came to visit it later that day.
In Bahá'í World Faith, a short passage of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's writings sets out one of His characteristic teachings: the same sun shines on every object, but the mirror that has been polished receives the light, and the mirror that is dusty does not. Spiritual receptivity, the Master insists, is a matter of the inward instrument we have made ourselves.
In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield records the days in September 1911 when 'Abdu'l-Bahá lodged in her own house at 97 Cadogan Gardens — and one September evening when the Master, hearing the bells of Westminster across the city, stepped out onto the balcony to listen.
In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield records the Sunday evening, 17 September 1911, when 'Abdu'l-Bahá ascended for the first time the pulpit of an English church — St. John's Westminster, at the invitation of the Reverend Archdeacon Wilberforce — and addressed the great congregation that had filled the building to hear Him.
In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield describes a pilgrim's stay in the small house in 'Akká where Bahá'u'lláh and His family had lived for twelve years — thirteen people sometimes sleeping in a single room — and a Western visitor's testimony that the chamber once occupied by Ásíyih Khánum was filled, even decades later, with a benign atmosphere that could be felt at night.
Sent as a small boy to school in Shíráz, the Báb asked His teacher one simple question — and the teacher carried Him home, saying he had nothing to teach this child.
Shoghi Effendi's account, in *God Passes By*, of how 'Alí Khán — the warden ordered to keep the Báb in strictest confinement at the fortress of Máh-Kú — was so moved by a strange vision that he relaxed his discipline, and how the people of the village then began to come every morning hoping for a glimpse of the Prisoner's face.
In *A Heavenly Vista* Louis G. Gregory describes the afternoon in April 1911 when, having travelled from Egypt, he was rowed across the bay to 'Akká for the first time — and the small wooden landing-stair at the foot of the prison walls that received the first African American Bahá'í pilgrim.
On April 10, 1911, in Alexandria, Egypt, Louis G. Gregory — the African American lawyer from Washington who would later be named a Hand of the Cause — entered 'Abdu'l-Bahá's reception room for the first time. His pilgrimage notes preserve the kiss on the head, the question about his health, and the silence into which a long journey suddenly settled.
In *A Heavenly Vista* Louis Gregory describes the morning he ascended the slope of Mount Carmel with a small party of believers to the Shrine of the Báb — the small low building the Master had completed only two years before — and the silence in which he stood, an African American lawyer from Washington, in the presence of the remains of the Persian Herald of the Bahá'í Cause.
In *The Diary of Juliet Thompson* the painter records an evening in New York in the summer of 1912 when, after one of the great public meetings, she found herself walking beside 'Abdu'l-Bahá through the dark streets — and the silence in which the most carrying conversations sometimes pass.
In June 1912 in New York, the painter Juliet Thompson was given an unprecedented privilege: 'Abdu'l-Bahá agreed to sit for her. The Diary preserves the moment He stopped her on the street, took her hand, and said *come tomorrow and paint;* and the cramped basement studio where He asked her to paint not the man but the *Servitude.*
In *The Diary of Juliet Thompson* the young American painter records her first encounter with 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Paris in 1901 — a small upstairs room, a single Persian voice, and a recognition that would, in time, organise the rest of her life.
One quiet evening in London, 'Abdu'l-Bahá stepped out onto a balcony to listen to the church bells ringing across the city.
One Sunday evening in London, a great church filled to its doors, and the people waited to hear 'Abdu'l-Bahá speak from a pulpit where only English clergy had ever stood before.
A visitor slept one night in a tiny old room in 'Akká, and woke up sure that the love of the family who once lived there was still in the air.
A teacher sent a small boy off to school to learn his lessons — but the boy asked one question that the teacher could not answer.
A stern guard was ordered to keep the Báb a prisoner high in the mountains — until something he saw changed his heart, and soon a whole village climbed up just to glimpse the Prisoner's face.
'Abdu'l-Bahá sailed down a river to an old farmhouse, stood quietly at a great man's grave, and taught His friends the hardest, bravest thing a powerful person can do.
'Abdu'l-Bahá stood quietly at a great roaring waterfall and heard, inside all that noise, something wonderful — a kind of prayer.
On a sunny Sunday in a little garden, 'Abdu'l-Bahá bent low over the lilies and laughed with the children — and a man named Howard never forgot how that afternoon smelled.
A man climbed the stairs of a tall hotel with a long list of hard questions in his pocket — and discovered that the answer he truly needed was waiting for him in a single, warm hello.
A small barefoot boy stood in a doorway watching his grandfather, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and the gentle nod he was given held a secret no one could quite put into words.
Mahmúd's Diary records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's visit to Mount Vernon — the Virginia plantation home of George Washington — on April 25, 1912. The Master walked through the house and grounds, paid respects at Washington's tomb, and remarked on the meaning of the place for the American Republic.
Mahmúd's Diary records that on September 9, 1912, after the intensity of His talks at Buffalo, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was driven to Niagara Falls. He stood for a long time at the lookout, said little, and afterward observed that the roar of the falling water was a kind of prayer.
At three in the morning on the anniversary of His ascension, and whenever a pilgrim enters the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh, Bahá'ís chant the Tablet of Visitation. Adib Taherzadeh recounts how this most beloved of devotional texts came to be — gathered, in the days of mourning, by the grief-stricken chronicler Nabíl from Bahá'u'lláh's own revealed words, and given authority by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.
Bahá'ís do not call the twenty-ninth of May the day of Bahá'u'lláh's death. They call it His Ascension. Drawing on Esslemont's Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, this retelling reflects on the serene close of His earthly life, on the Tomb at Bahjí that became the Qiblih of a world religion, and on why the language of a rising Sun and a homeward journey, rather than of ending, is the truer way to speak of His passing.
In the small hours of the twenty-ninth of May, 1892, Bahá'u'lláh ascended at Bahjí in the seventy-fifth year of His age. A telegram bearing the words "the Sun of Bahá has set" carried the news to the Sultan; and for a full week, mourners of every faith and station — Muslim and Christian, Jew and Druze, rich and poor — gathered at the Mansion to grieve and to pay tribute.
Long before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh had begun to unveil the station of His eldest Son. In the Tablet of the Branch — the Súriy-i-Ghuṣn, revealed years earlier in Adrianople — He called 'Abdu'l-Bahá "the Limb of the Law of God" and "the Trust of God." When the Book of the Covenant was opened after His passing, it brought to fruition what this Tablet had quietly sown.
The Báb was born in Shíráz, Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán, two years and two cities apart — yet on the old lunar calendar Their birthdays fell on consecutive days, and Bahá'ís keep them together as a single festival of light. A reflection, drawn from Esslemont, on why the Faith remembers its two Founders as twin luminaries of one and the same Dawn.
When Bahá'u'lláh was born in Tihrán in 1817, He entered the world through a family line that reached back, in Shoghi Effendi's account, to Abraham, to Zoroaster, and to the royal house of ancient Persia. The Holy Day of His birth is also the remembrance of the long preparation, across millennia, for His coming.
Before the world knew Him, the young Báb married Khadíjih Bagum, a kinswoman of His own family, and made with her a quiet home in Shíráz. In her own remembrances she tells of the dreams that prepared her heart, of His long hours of prayer, and of the strange "account books" that were not a merchant's ledgers at all.
Within two years of one another, two Manifestations of God were born — the Báb in Shíráz and Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán. On the lunar calendar Their birthdays fall on consecutive days, and Bahá'ís keep them together as a single radiant feast: the Twin Holy Birthdays, two dawns of one and the same Light.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes the Báb's youth in the plainest terms: a young Merchant of holy descent who traded in the Gulf port of Búshihr and was known among all who dealt with Him for godliness, devoutness, virtue, and piety — the quiet signs of a station the world had not yet guessed.
Among the recollections Lady Blomfield gathered for *The Chosen Highway* is the testimony of the Báb's own family — that the relatives who lived closest to Him, His uncles and aunts, were conscious of His exalted nature and revered Him long before He made any claim. His greatness was felt in His own home before it was ever proclaimed to the world.
On the first day of Muḥarram in the year 1235 of the Muslim calendar — the twentieth of October 1819 — a Son was born in a modest house in Shíráz to a family of merchants who traced their descent from the Prophet Muḥammad. The child was named Siyyid 'Alí-Muḥammad. The world would come to know Him as the Báb, the Gate of a new Day of God.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá records what all Shíráz knew of the Báb's early years: that He had sat in no scholar's circle and studied under no master, and yet, when He came forth, His knowledge confounded the most learned divines of Persia. The wisdom He carried had been His own from childhood.
Years before His Declaration, the young Báb came as a pilgrim to Karbilá and sat quietly among the students of Siyyid Káẓim. When His eyes fell upon that Youth, the great teacher fell silent — and pointed to a ray of sunlight resting on the Báb's lap, saying the Truth was now more manifest than that light, though he dared not speak the Promised One's name aloud.
In the years before His Declaration, the young Báb was known in Shíráz not for any claim or office but for the depth of His devotion — a Youth of great personal beauty and gentle manner, unfailing in His prayers and fasts, who obeyed not merely the outward forms of His religion but lived, even then, in the very spirit of its teachings.
About a year before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh set down in His own hand the Kitáb-i-'Ahd — His Book of the Covenant, His Will and Testament. During His final illness He placed it in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's keeping, and nine days after His passing it was read aloud to the gathered believers. In it, in words beyond all dispute, Bahá'u'lláh bade His family and His kindred turn their faces toward the Most Mighty Branch.
Years before He named 'Abdu'l-Bahá the Centre of His Covenant, Bahá'u'lláh revealed in Adrianople the Súriy-i-Ghuṣn — the Tablet of the Branch — in which His eldest Son is extolled as the "Branch of Holiness," the "Limb of the Law of God," and the "Trust of God," a Tablet that foreshadowed the rank later to be conferred upon Him.
In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book, Bahá'u'lláh wrote a single luminous verse pointing the believers, after His passing, toward "Him Whom God hath purposed, Who hath branched from this Ancient Root." In His Book of the Covenant He made the meaning unmistakable: the object of that verse was none other than 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the Most Mighty Branch.
On the evening of 22 May 1844, outside the gate of Shíráz, the Báb invited a travel-worn seeker named Mullá Ḥusayn into His home. There, two hours and eleven minutes after sunset, He declared Himself to be the Promised One — and, taking up His pen, began to reveal the first verses of a new Book with a speed and majesty that left His guest overwhelmed.
As Bahá'u'lláh prepared to leave for the Garden of Riḍván, the great and the powerful of Baghdád came to do Him honour. Officials, men of rank, even the governor of the city paid their respects to the departing exile — and, in Nabíl's words, heads on every side bowed to the dust at the feet of His horse.
It is to Nabíl, the chronicler of the early days, that we owe the most beloved picture of the Garden of Riḍván — roses heaped so high in Bahá'u'lláh's tent that the companions could not see one another across it, and a saying about the nightingales that He uttered in the warm Baghdád nights of April 1863.
Bahá'ís did not invent the supreme rank of Riḍván — Bahá'u'lláh Himself conferred it. In His Most Holy Book He named those days the first of the "two Most Great Festivals," and tradition has hailed Riḍván as the "King of Festivals," the days whereon, in His own words, "all created things were immersed in the sea of purification."
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 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.
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.
The festival of Riḍván lasts twelve days, and of these the first, the ninth, and the twelfth are kept as holy days on which work is set aside. Drawing on the early Bahá'í periodical Star of the West, this retelling looks at how the ninth day — the day the Holy Family crossed to join Bahá'u'lláh in the Garden — came to be hallowed, and how the friends keep it.
The Báb was sent to a bleak mountain prison on the frontier of Persia, chosen for its remoteness and the supposed hostility of its people, so that His influence might be extinguished. Instead the light could not be walled out: the hostile warden himself was transformed, the discipline relaxed, and the Kurdish villagers below began to climb the mountain each dawn for a single glimpse of His face.
For nearly sixty years the remains of the martyred Báb were carried in secret from hiding place to hiding place, guarded through every danger. On the morning of Naw-Rúz 1909, after a labour of ten years to build the tomb, 'Abdu'l-Bahá with His own hands laid them to rest in the spot on Mount Carmel that Bahá'u'lláh Himself had chosen — and wept upon the sarcophagus.
In *Portals to Freedom* Howard Colby Ives describes a Sunday afternoon in 1912 when 'Abdu'l-Bahá received the believers in a small New Jersey garden — and the way the smell of lilies, the ordinary furniture of the house, and the laughter of children combined into what Ives later called the *fragrance* of the Cause.
In *Portals to Freedom* Howard Colby Ives describes the first morning in April 1912 when, summoned to the Ansonia Hotel in New York, he climbed the stair and entered the room where 'Abdu'l-Bahá was receiving — and found that all the arguments of his Unitarian ministry suddenly fell silent.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum's *The Priceless Pearl* preserves a moment from Shoghi Effendi's boyhood in 'Akká: a small barefoot figure in a doorway, eyes on his grandfather, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá's slow nod of recognition that the bond between them was not only physical, but something else.
On the second of June, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá entered the Church of the Ascension at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street in Manhattan, and addressed an Episcopal congregation on the *Collective Center* — the Manifestation of God around whom every people, of every race and belief, can become a single melody.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the students and faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C. — the historically Black institution at the heart of African American higher education. His subject was the station of the human being: created in the image of God, possessed of a divine spark beyond every material limitation.
On September 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed a gathering of the Twin Cities Bahá'ís and inquirers in the parlour of the Leland Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. He spoke on the Holy Spirit as the living, active, present-tense bond between the human soul and the Divine reality.
Adib Taherzadeh's account, in the closing chapters of *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh*, of the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh on 29 May 1892 in the mansion of Bahjí — the closing of the prophetic ministry of which the rest of Bahá'í history would become the unfolding.
In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the Tablet of Carmel — the Tablet revealed by Bahá'u'lláh on one of His four visits to Mount Carmel in the closing years of His life. The Tablet is read as the charter of the future Bahá'í World Centre.
Adib Taherzadeh's account, in *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh*, of the revelation of the *Tablet of the Holy Mariner* in Baghdád shortly before the Riḍván declaration of 1863 — and of the dread the Tablet's imagery cast over the believers who heard it chanted in their gathering.
From Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, a Tablet on the spiritual practice of detachment — not the rejection of the world but the freedom of the soul from the bondage of its desires, so that the heart may be ready for the indwelling of the Beloved.
From Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, a Tablet on the proper character of the spiritual meeting — the gathering of believers in private homes for prayer and consultation, which the Master holds out as the true seedbed of the Bahá'í community life.
In the opening chapter of *Some Answered Questions*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá takes up Laura Clifford Barney's question about nature itself — and gives, in one sentence, a sweeping definition: nature is the appearance of composition and decomposition, the meeting and parting of life and death, governed by a single universal law.
In *Some Answered Questions*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá takes up the question of miracles with characteristic clarity: extraordinary events may have occurred and may yet occur, but they are not the proofs by which a Manifestation of God is finally known. *Miracles are proofs for the eyewitness only*.
A passage from Selections from the Writings of the Báb drawn from the Qayyúm al-Asmá' — the great commentary on the Surah of Joseph that the Báb began to reveal on the night of His Declaration in May 1844 and that constitutes His first major work.
From Selections from the Writings of the Báb, a prayer revealed during the Báb's confinement in the mountain fortress of Máh-Kú in northwest Persia from 1847 to 1848 — a period of severe isolation during which the Báb composed many of His major works.
In *Selections from the Writings of the Báb*, a brief instruction from the Bayán: after every obligatory prayer, the believer should ask God's mercy and forgiveness for his parents. A single sentence that joins devotion to family duty.
Among the recollections of Bahá'u'lláh's boyhood Mr. Furutan preserves in *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh* is the dream the child once had of a great moving spectacle in the sky — birds, fish, a green sea — that He told to His father the next morning, and whose meaning the household began only later to suspect.
In 1920 the Star of the West printed Genevieve Coy's pilgrimage notes from her stay with 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Haifa — one of the small group of Western believers who reached the Master in the months after the war ended and found Him still in His house on the slope of Mount Carmel.
In an early issue of the Star of the West, Helen Goodall — the matriarch of the Oakland Bahá'í community — published her pilgrimage notes from her visit to 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká in 1908, preserving the Master's words on the equality of women and men in His own household.
In the December 1921 and January 1922 issues of the Star of the West, the editors gave their readers the bare cable that had reached Chicago on the 29th of November and then, in the issues that followed, the fuller accounts of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's last days written by the household in Haifa.
In 1922 the Star of the West printed Mountfort Mills' account of his visit to Haifa in the months following 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing — the first encounter of a Western pilgrim with the new Guardian of the Cause, Shoghi Effendi, then only twenty-five years old and already, in Mills' words, *the center of the world today.*
Among the Quranic images 'Abdu'l-Bahá would unfold to inquirers was the Verse of Light — the lamp in the glass in the niche — and the careful explanation He would give of how the human heart is at once the niche, the glass, and the lamp's keeper.
Julia Grundy's pilgrim notes preserve the small ceremonial details of a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh at Bahjí — the shoes left at the door, the long Persian rugs underfoot, the kneeling at the marble threshold, and the tea served afterward by the women of the household.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá relates the encounter between Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known as Vaḥíd, the most learned cleric of his generation in Persia — and the Báb. Three audiences. In the third, a request for a commentary on the Súrih of Kawthar; and the Báb's spontaneous, written reply that emptied the room of every doubt.