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Thank you Larry,
Your letter of response was most welcome. I am glad that the article containing the warning met your approval. Glad because I have been afraid I might be misunderstood after all. Also in a previous article I have shown parts the stern and cathegorical kind of language that the Manifestation of God is using, afterwards hoping that you do not misunderstand.
I am here to inform about this Faith. It is revealed in various kinds of languages and contains many kinds of admonishments , prescrptions and laws.I must present as many levels as possible I think.
Today I will tell you somewhat about Abdu'l-Baha. From the book I have mentioned:" Bahaullah and the New Era"
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Birth and childhood
Abbas Effendi, who afterwards assumed the title of Abdu'l-Baha (i.e. Servant of Baha), was the eldest son of Bahaullah. He was born in Teheran before ...the 23rd of May 1844, the very same night in which the Bab declared His mission.
He was nine years of age when His Father, to Whom even then He was devotedly attached, was thrown into the dungeon in Teheran. A mob sacked their house, and the family were stripped of their possessions and left in destitution. Abdu'l-Baha tells how one day He was allowed to enter the prison yard to see His beloved Father when He came out for His daily exercise. Bahaullah was terribly altered, so ill He could hardly walk, His hair and beard unkept, His neck galled and swollen from the pressure of a heavy steel collar, His body bent by the weight of His chains, and the sight made a never-to-be-forgotten impression on the mind of the sensitive boy.
During the first year of their residence in Baghdad, ten years before the open Declaration by Bahaullah of His Mission, the keen insight of Abdu'l-Baha Who was then but nine years of age, already led Him to the momentous discovery that His Father was indeed the Promised One Whose Manifestation all the Babis were awaiting. Some sixty years afterwards He thus described the moment in which this conviction suddenly overwhelmed His whole nature:-
'I am the servant of the Blessed Perfection. In Baghdad I was a child. Then and there He announced to me the Word, and I believed in Him. As soon as He proclaimed to me the Word, I threw myself at His Holy Feet and implored and supplicated Him to accept my blood as a sacrifice in His Pathway. Sacrifice! How sweet I find this word! There is no greater Bounty for me than this! What greater glory can I conceive than to see this neck chained for His sake, these feet fettered for His love, this body mutilated or thrown into the depths of the sea for His Cause! If in reality we are His sincere lovers - if in reality I am His sincere servant, then I must sacrifice my life, my all at His Blessed Threshold.'
About this time He began to be called by His friends, 'The Mystery of God', a title given to Him by Bahaullah, by which Hee was commonly known during the period of residence in Baghdad.
When His Father went away for two years in the wilderness, Abbas was heartbroken. His chief consolation consisted in copying and committing to memory the Tablets of the Bab, and much of His time was spent in solitary meditation. When at last His Father returned, the boy was overwhelmed with joy.
YOUTH
From that time onwards, He became His Father's closest companion and, as it were, protector. Although a mere youth, He already showed astonishing sagacity and discrimination, and undertook the task of interviewing all the numerous visitors who came to see His Father. If He found they were genuine true seekers, He admitted them to His Father's presence, but otherwise He did not permit them to trouble Bahaullah. On many occasions He helped His Father in answering the questions and solving the difficulties of these visitors. For exemple, when one of the Sufi-leaders....asked for an explanation of the phrase: 'I was a Hidden Mystery,' which occurs in a well-known Muhammedan tradition, Bahaullah turned to the 'Mystery of God', Abbas, and asked Him to write the explanation. The boy who was then about fifteen or sixteen years of age, at once wrote an important epistle giving an exposition so illuminating as to astonish' (the Sufi leader'). This epistle is now widely spread among the Bahais, and is well known to many outside the Bahai Faith.
I hope that you will find it comforting to know about Abdu'l-Baha, I'll write more about this remarkable persdonage later.
I have to leave you now, I got a phone call making me have to go to the village nearby.
Bye for now
Laila
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