|
The tasks ahead, calling for the expenditure of every ounce of energy on the part of the members of the indefatigable irresistibly advancing, majestically unfolding American Baha'i community and for the unrelaxing vigilance of its national elected representatives, are immense, highly diversified, truly challenging, sacred in character, undreamt of in their potentialities, urgent by their very nature, and inescapable in the responsibilities they involve. At the World Center of the Faith, where, at long last the machinery of its highest institutions has been erected, and around whose most holy shrines the supreme organs of its unfolding Order, are, in their embryonic form, unfolding; amidst the diversified tribes and races, peopling the Dependencies and Principalities of the Dark Continent of Africa; in the far-flung territories of Central and South America so alien in culture, temperament, habits, language and outlook; in the capital cities and traditional strongholds of a materially highly advanced yet spiritually famished, much tormented, fear-ridden, hopelessly-sundered, heterogeneous conglomeration of races, nations, sects and classes overspreading the continent of Europe; in the heart of the African continent, in the capital city of the Indian sub-continent; in one of the leading capitals of the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe; in the very heart of the leading Republic of the Western Hemisphere, the standard-bearers of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, the champion-builders of the Administrative Order, the vanguard of the Heralds of His World Order, and the Chief and appointed executors of the Master Plan of the Center of His Covenant, have, in the course of the few, fast-fleeting months ahead, separating them from the grandest crusade thus far launched in Baha'i history, been assigned tasks, obligations and responsibilities that they can afford to neither minimize, neglect or shirk for a moment. (33:1) Within only a few weeks the Baha'i World will enter upon the centenary of that fateful day of August the fifteenth, when a dastardly act, fraught with such terrible consequences, unleashed a series of tragic events that stained the annals of the Faith, that precipitated calamities on a scale unprecedented since its inception and unsurpassed in their tragic character by any event except the martyrdom of its Herald, which culminated in an holocaust reminiscent of the direst tribulations undergone by the persecuted followers of any previous religion, and which, in turn, paved the way, even as the darkest hour of the night precedes the dawn, for the first glimmerings that were to proclaim, to an unsuspecting world, and amidst the gloom and stench of the Siyah-Chal of Tihran, the birth of the Mission of the Founder of our Faith. Less than four months separate us from the centenary celebrations designed to befittingly commemorate that glorious event in Baha'i history, an event even more potent in its implications than the birth of the Babi Dispensation, and yielding in sacredness to none other except the memorable occasion when the Founder of the Faith Himself ascended the throne of His spiritual sovereignty and formally assumed in the City of Baghdad, His Prophetic Office. The radiance of God's infant light shining within the walls of that pestilential Pit - a radiance, an infinitesimal glimmer of which, as the Founder of the Faith, Himself, later testified, caused the dwellers of Sinai to swoon away - seemed, as it were, to be intermingled, whilst Baha'u'llah lay in chains and fetters in that subterranean dungeon, and, for many months after, with the somberness of the tragedy which enveloped the members of a persecuted community in almost every province of that hapless land. The dawning-light of the Revelation promised and lauded by the Bab marks the termination of the second and darker crisis in the annals of the Babi Dispensation, and signalizes the commencement of a ten-year long crisis, the first of the three successive ones that left their lasting imprint on His Ministry.
(33:2)
|