Not the least of the treasures which Baha'u'llah has given
to the world is the wealth of His prayers and meditations. He not only revealed
them for specific purposes, such as the Daily Prayers, the prayers for Healing,
for the Fast, for the Dead, and so on, but in them He revealed a great deal of
Himself to us. At moments it is as if, in some verse or line, we are admitted
into His Own heart, with all its turbulent emotions, or catch a glimpse of the
workings of a mind as great and deep as an ocean, which we can never fathom,
but which never ceases to enrapture and astonish us.
If one could
be so presumptuous as to try and comment on a subject so vast and which,
ultimately, is far beyond the capacity of any merely mortal mind to analyse or
classify, one might say that one of His masterpieces is the long prayer for the
Nineteen Day Fast. I do not know if He revealed it at dawn, but He had,
evidently, a deep association with that hour of the day when the life of the
world is re-poured into it. How could He not have? Was He not the Hermit of
Sar-Galú, where He spent many months in a lonely stone hut perched on a
hilltop; the sunrise must have often found Him waiting and watching for its
coming, His voice rising and falling in the melodious chants of His
supplications and compositions. At how many dawns He must have heard the birds
of the wilderness wake and cry out when the first rays of the
sun flowed over the horizon and witnessed in all its splendor the coming alive
of creation after the night.
In this prayer it is as if the worshipper approaches the sun
while the sun is approaching its daybreak. When one remembers that the sun, the
life giver of the earth, has ever been associated with the God-Power, and that
Baha'u'llah has always used it in His metaphors to symbolize the Prophet, the
prayer takes on a mystical significance that delights and inspires the soul.
Turning to the budding day He opens His supplication:
