Reflections on a Baha'i Pilgrimage

Here we are in front of the Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, lit like a beacon above the port city of Haifa, Israel, three believers and two loved ones coming along for company. Our vegetarian daughter is delighted to discover that meat/milk restaurants are split in Israel, so that the salads and cheeses in milk restaurants provide wonderful food: she eats Hallumi cheese salads often, in between all our stops at felafel stands. She and her sister go another day to the beach, despite jellyfish warnings, and have a delightful time. A small fish stings her below the knee but she has too much fun to really feel the pain.

All of us feel the heat: Haifa has a heat-wave which our server on Ben Gurion Avenue tells us is breaking records, even for Israel. I believe it, and toil up the hills of Mount Carmel with a willing spirit but knees and ankles which remind me that I'm a swimmer, not a runner. I am slow but steady, which has its advantages and disadvantages: it takes me longer to climb the mountain, and I need to drink more water than ever before in my life, but I have time to stop and literally smell the roses, and more importantly for me, the frangipani.

I am, as you know, a lover of gardens, and here it would be impossible to be anything but heaven-bound in the gardens of the Baha'i Holy Places. The terraces of the Shrine of the Bab are not simply places of Baha'i pilgrimage: they are also visited by tourists who revel in the green spaces, the beauteous spills of bougainvillea, the astonishing trees of bright red flame, the stone pathways, and the memorials to a figure they, and we, only dimly comprehend. The bright dome shines above the Divine gravesites in the light of hope.

I am astonished by the numbers of people who visit this site: I hear, from time to time, the numbers of you who drop in to read a line or two, to share in pictures. At this time, I am afraid that no expression is available to me but rhapsody. Despite the difficulty of heat, despite the almost 300 pilgrims, despite the hills, despite the sometimes-disinterest of my two youngest children, the opportunity to be Baha'i pilgrims is an event of magnitude in my life, and I find myself searching for superlatives. I do not believe it is possible to communicate belief, in any real way, and I do not know if it is possible to share the essentially private nature of a pilgrimage: why do we go as pilgrims, anyway?

Part of the reason, for me, stems from the words of 'Abdu'l-Baha, before Whose grave I kneel, on the Persian carpet, and in Whose spiritual presence I recite the words of the Tablet of Visitation, which He has written and which I know by memory so can close my eyes, not distracted by a text or any others in the small space. In my mind, I recite the words, "He is the All-Glorious! O God, lowly and tearful, I raise my suppliant hands to Thee..." and I think of how difficult it is for me to cry, yet I have done so at the grave of Shoghi Effendi in London, and I am able to weep beside the grave of Navvab, 'Abdu'l-Baha's saintly mother, and I am able to cry on the steps of the International Teaching Centre one morning, looking out over the magnificent Arc. It is good to be able to be tearful, to feel the emotions of these moments, to rekindle the passion of belief in the words of Baha'u'llah, Who said, in the 19th Century, to the historian E.G. Browne, that He had come for the good of mankind. It is good to be reminded, as I visit with Baha'is from all over the world, from Malaysia, the Phillipines, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Togo, Honduras, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Russia...that I am here in this spot because of the Divine hope for unity. I find myself humbled, wishing to listen, hoping for the gift of response to prayer.

In the deep mystery of Akka, the prison city, the old stones, the site of the incarceration of the Holy Family, there is something profound in being in a place so old, in touching the rock, in feeling the water's shimmer and counting the waves rolling in, in viewing the Land Gate where resides the needle's eye of Christian prophecy. The sound of a living city is all around, interspersed with the ultimate modernisms, Coke signs and advertisements, in Hebrew, for the latest Harry Potter movie. I smile at the sights and sounds of the city of Akka, old and new, imbibe history and the lap of water. The Mediterranean is beautiful, covered in a heat haze, and I watch through a room where 'Abdu'l-Baha lived and welcome Western pilgrims a century ago, and think, they are the same waves, and "We are the waves of one sea."

The joy is also alive as I share moments with my husband that we could not otherwise have known; he is full of laughter, an enthusiasm that sends him to seek the beauty of the terraces below and above the Shrine of the Bab, a joy of discovery which has him enjoying felafel and salads. He tells me, in some reflective times, of how he feels, coming into the Shrine of the Bab for the first time, that he has arrived home. Bernie became a Baha'i in Saskatoon in the early '80s, after reading the book, Release the Sun, by William Sears. He told Gordon Epp that he wanted to be a Babi, and accepted instantly that the Babis had become Baha'is, at the advent of "He Whom God shall make manifest." He fell in love with faith through the Bab, and now he falls in love with this land which holds the Bab's remains. Yet it is I, when we visit the Archives as a family, who find myself drawn to the Beauty of the Bab as conveyed in his portrait. He was so young, so pure, and so loved: a Christ-like figure in the middle of Persia, and His declaration that He is but a ring on the finger of Baha'u'llah strikes me with force. There is so much Grandeur here, and we human beings are no longer accustomed to such overwhelming Grandeur.

'Abdu'l-Baha tells us, “There can be conceived no greater manifestation of love and kindness in the existent world today than this, that one should call to mind a loved one at the Sacred Threshold of Bahá’u’lláh, occupy oneself with his remembrance, and offer prayers for his well-being. This is the greatest blessing and favour, the most perfect bounty and bestowal.”
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, excerpt from a tablet Jináb-i-Muhammad Ali. (provisional translation).

Here, I offer prayers for a litany of loved ones, and feel the blessings of doing this in the beauty and heat of Haifa in summertime. I leave my cynical self at the gate of this garden, and return to a sense of all that is holy.