Baha’i Perspectives

leila June 1st, 2009

“Bahá’u'lláh found the world in a ’strange sleep’. But what a disturbance His coming has unloosed!”

Like Washington, it was sticky this time last year in northern Israel.

I had awoken with a start to the chirp of my mobile phone at 2:00 a.m., the fluorescent light glaring “Nasim“.  My alarm had failed to go off, and I had sixty seconds to re-orient, get dressed, and splash some cold water onto my face

Bahji, aerial view at night.

Harrison drove us to Bahji that night — one part chilly and two parts humid — in a decades-old hand-me-down Benz whose rear window was jammed halfway.  It was the evening commemorating the passing of Bahá’u'lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, and over a thousand of us– staff, pilgrim, and visitors– shivered in the Haram-i-Aqdas. The warm glow of the lamps that dotted the precincts of surrounding the Shrine of Bahá’u'lláh, adjacent to the mansion in which He passed away (in which He resided in the last years of His life, still a prisoner), gleamed through the wet air.  I struggled to stay awake halfway through the program.  But as the nocturnal birds chirped at the cusp of dawn, Bahá’u'lláh’s words on the eve of His declaration in the Garden of Ridván came to mind:

Consider these nightingales. So great is their love for these roses, that sleepless from dusk till dawn, they warble their melodies and commune with burning passion with the object of their adoration. How then can those who claim to be afire with the rose-like beauty of the Beloved choose to sleep? (God Passes By, Chapter IX, page 153)

***

The stickiness of the evening loomed as I rushed home at half past eight. Though it had ceased raining an hour ago, the neighborhood park, my shortcut home from the metro, was devoid of the life that had occupied it only yesterday: the wet benches where I had lazily lounged last night, reading a book; the dripping basketball hoop that had swooshed against the backdrop of middle-aged chocolate-skinned men disputing a call; the dampened and chewed-up soccer field where Central American jugadores breathlessly raced. I quickened my pace, mindful that I had to crawl into bed early for a nap.

Shastri’s call awoke me at 2:00 a.m.  His ambiguously accented voice — the kind I grew accustomed to last year (if not unknowingly adopting myself) amongst fellow staff members from across the globe — let me know that he was on his way. The air was warm and humid, and I absentmindedly pulled my unruly hair into a braid as I stumbled out of bed to throw some cold water onto my face.

Kathleen and I crawled out of his car parked near the Best Buy in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the streets nearly deserted, and I remarked, “The humidity– it’s as if we were in Bahji tonight.”

“Right, and we’ll circumambulate America’s Qiblih of choice,” Shastri joked, gesturing toward the yellow sign screaming “Best Buy!”

There were just seven of us at the Rassekhs’ home that evening, and the peculiarity of being so awake and alive at 3:00 a.m. hardly registered as the flickering candles reflected in the coffee table’s glass pane.  We arose reverently in their cozy living room to read the Tablet of Visitation (read on Holy Days associated with Bahá’u'lláh) and, like the nightingales in the Ridván Garden, I had the feeling of not wanting to sleep for a very long time.

We feasted on watermelon and pound cake and flatbread with hummus afterward, and washed it down with tea.  And we told stories, animated and forgetting that it was 4:00 a.m. and we had hardly slept.  Mrs. Rassekh recalled the candle-lined pathways of Bahji in the early, darkened hours of May 29, 1992– the centennial of Bahá’u'lláh’s passing– as one of the many guests invited from every country around the world (they were living in Mali then); Shastri, Kat, and I laughed as we recounted stories from our time working at the Bahá’í World Centre; and we all wistfully remembered the lamps that illuminated that evening in Bahji, and the inevitable rising of the sun on the drive back toward Haifa.

We certainly weren’t at the nerve-center of the Bahá’í world anymore (at the nerve-center of the so-called “free world,” maybe).  But as I arose to face eastward for the Tablet of Visitation, I remembered something that my friend had said earlier that evening that tempered my nostalgia, in a phone call prior to my nap.

We had been discussing plans for our Saturday afternoon children’s class in a mostly Salvadoran neighborhood.  Our class was composed of beaming children filled with the capacity for excellence, whose attention would drift as police sirens cackled by at intervals, who were unruffled by the drunken, muttering loiterers who occupied the urban playground where we lay our picnic blanket and discussed the light of unity being so powerful as to illuminate the whole earth.

As the conversation hovered to a close, it drifted to the topic of waking up in the middle of the night for this holy evening.  He recounted how, growing up, his family would go to the Bahá’í House of Worship in Chicago on that night.  His grandfather, among the last living Hands of the Cause and in the twilight of his years, never failed to remind him to say a special prayer on those evenings filled with spiritual potency.

And so we agreed to remember in our prayers those children that had come into our lives so fortuitously. The spirit of the teachings of this Manifestation, whose passing we were commemorating, were, sometimes gradually, touching their tender lives, and certainly infusing the world with a power, the source of which many are as yet unaware.

Bahá’u'lláh found the world in a ’strange sleep’. But what a disturbance His coming has unloosed! The peoples of the earth had been separated, many parts of the human race socially and spiritually isolated. But the world of humanity today bears little resemblance to that which Bahá’u'lláh left a century ago. Unbeknownst to the great majority, His influence permeates all living beings. Indeed, no domain of life remains unaffected. In the burgeoning energy, the magnified perspectives, the heightened global consciousness; in the social and political turbulence, the fall of kingdoms, the emancipation of nations, the intermixture of cultures, the clamour for development; in the agitation over the extremes of wealth and poverty, the acute concern over the abuse of the environment, the leap of consciousness regarding the rights of women; in the growing tendency towards ecumenism, the increasing call for a new world order; in the astounding advances in the realms of science, technology, literature and the arts — in all this tumult, with its paradoxical manifestations of chaos and order, integration and disintegration, are the signs of His power as World Reformer, the proof of His claim as Divine Physician, the truth of His Word as the All-Knowing Counsellor.

Tribute by the Universal House of Justice to Bahá’u'lláh on the Centenary of His Passing, http://info.bahai.org/article-1-3-6-2.html

Tags: Baha'u'llah

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