Morning
O kings of the earth! He Who is the sovereign Lord of all is
come. The Kingdom is God’s, the omnipotent Protector, the Self-Subsisting.
Worship none but God, and, with radiant hearts, lift up your faces unto your
Lord, the Lord of all names. This is a Revelation to which whatever ye possess
can never be compared, could ye but know it.
We see you rejoicing in that which ye have amassed for others and shutting out yourselves from the worlds which naught except My guarded Tablet can reckon. The treasures ye have laid up have drawn you far away from your ultimate objective. This ill beseemeth you, could ye but understand it. Wash from your hearts all earthly defilements, and hasten to enter the Kingdom of your Lord, the Creator of earth and heaven, Who caused the world to tremble and all its peoples to wail, except them that have renounced all things and clung to that which the Hidden Tablet hath ordained.
- Baha’u’llah (‘The Kitab-i-Aqdas’)
Evening
They who soar in the heaven of Divine Unity and attain the depths of the sea of detachment reckon this city—which is the station of life in God—as the loftiest state of the mystic knowers and the furthermost homeland of the faithful lovers. But to this evanescent One of the mystic ocean, this station is the first gate of the heart’s citadel, that is, man’s first entrance to the city of the heart; and the heart is endowed with four stages, which would be recounted should a kindred soul be found.
Shattered was the pen at once,
Rent and torn in twain the page,
When the pen did reach the point
Of depicting such a stage. [Rúmi]
- Baha’u’llah (‘The Seven Valleys’, revised translation by
the Baha’i World Center included in ‘The Call of the Divine Beloved’)
