Sublime observations on the life of the most prominent woman of the Bahá'í Dispensation, Bahíyyih Khánum (also known as the Greatest Holy Leaf), daughter of the Blessed Beauty, Bahá'u'lláh.
"If she found you troubled she would not discuss your difficulties and try to solve your problems. You forgot them. Confusion and complexity were dissolved in her warm clarity."
"When we begged her to tell us of the scenes of tumult and outrage that crowded her childhood or of the long hardship in exile and imprisonment, she would not try to recreate in part that drama too great for any telling, or even to bring to the surface an episode out of the troubled past. She would simply allow to emerge from her still depths some living impression, some poignant detail, and so move you with this glimpse that you felt all the seasons of her grief and the full measure of her pain..."
(From A Tribute to Bahíyyih Khánum by Marjorie Morten)
Source: http://is.gd/h4PFT
PDF-version: http://www.claricomm.com/Bahiyyih_Khanum_Tribute.pdf
Hat tip to Brent Poirier at http://bahai-storytelling.blogspot.com/2010/10/magnificent-character-greatest-holy.html
Photo accessed here.
Share
"[S]he showed no urge to small activity. When there was something to be done she did it straightway, giving it her full attention. When she sat with folded hands she was wholly there; no part of her mind seemed to be busy with the next step, the duty to come. It was in keeping with her harmony with life that she gave herself in her entirety to her hours of companionship and so made them complete. Islands in time.
ReplyDelete"You knew that her openhandedness was the evidence of an unbroken stream of impelling kindness that flowed through her, that never failed.
"She was channel rather than cup; open treasury, not locked casket."
"She would not weigh your worth and reward you according to your deserts; nor would she consider whether your pain were inflicted or self-provoked, as if she knew that suffering has a sanctity of its own."
(Read the full essay here: http://is.gd/h4PFT)