Naw Ruz

Today is the Baha’i new year, Naw Ruz.  It has been one hundred years since the remains of The Bab were laid to rest in the Shrine on Mount Carmel.  For one and a half years, I could see the Shrine from my apartment.  Such a blessing!

“…’Abdu’l-Bahá had the marble sarcophagus transported with great labor to the vault prepared for it, and in the evening, by the light of a single lamp, He laid within it, with His own hands — in the presence of believers from the East and from the West and in circumstances at once solemn and moving — the wooden casket containing the sacred remains of the Bab…”

‘The most joyful tidings is this,’ He wrote later in a Tablet announcing to His followers the news of this glorious victory, ‘that the holy, the luminous body of the Bab … after having for sixty years been transferred from place to place, by reason of the ascendancy of the enemy, and from fear of the malevolent, and having known neither rest nor tranquillity has, through the mercy of the Abha Beauty, been ceremoniously deposited, on the day of Naw-Ruz, within the sacred casket, in the exalted Shrine on Mt. Carmel… By a strange coincidence, on that same day of Naw-Ruz, a cablegram was received from Chicago, announcing that the believers in each of the American centers had elected a delegate and sent to that city … and definitely decided on the site and construction of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkar.'”

(Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p. 276)

I remember how often he [Shoghi Effendi] would tell the visiting pilgrims that because a simple candle was denied the beloved Bab during His imprisonment in Mah-Ku, His resting-place was to be eternally a temple of light. This was also true inside His tomb, where there is a magnificent chandelier, with almost a hundred electric bulbs that, when lighted, turn the sombre dim light of the inner chamber into the full glory of brilliant sunshine.

(Ugo Giachery, Shoghi Effendi – Recollections)