Let your vision be world embracing
Bahá'u'lláh

The Archives Building is built to resemble the Parthenon. It is filled with the 'things' of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and His son Abdu'l Baha. There are also pictures of them there. Real photographs. Imagine having a picture of Christ or Moses or Mohammed or Buddha.

After we got into the building the first things we were shown were the pictures. Getting in however, involved our Persian guide setting off the alarm three times. Some poor security guard had to come running up to check it out. And the building is quite a ways up Mt. Carmel. He was pretty winded when he got there. We were trapped between the outer doors and the inner doors while the alarm went off in our ears. Finally we got in. The central room is filled with cases and tables which are, in turn, filled with artifacts.

The pictures were amazing and almost impossible to talk about. The Bab was 30 when he was martyred. He was a beautiful young man, a long oval face, sloe eyes, a lovely mouth. Baha'u'llah's picture was taken shortly after he had been poisoned by his half-brother and my first reaction was "So this is what suffering looks like." He too was remarkably handsome, but it is a face ravaged by illness, exile, and the sorrow of being
betrayed by almost all of his family.

Of the rest of the things kept in the Archives, I was most struck by the Bab's clothes. He was quite a stylish dresser and some of his lovely things are kept there, as are the shirt he wore when he was killed. Actually it is bits of the shirt since his body was so riddled by bullets that it was fused with the body of the young man who chose to be killed with Him.

Most interesting and beautiful to me, were the tablets. Both of them had exquisite calligraphy and their letters and tablets have been illuminated in the Persian and Arabic style with much gold and red and blue ink. The script is gorgeous, the illuminations surrounding it are joined flawlessly to the pages of writing so that they look as if they were done as one piece. The illuminations lack the wonderful gargoyles and fantastic animals of the Medieval mss, but they do have an abstract design element that echoes the writing. I suspect if I could read the writing, the decorations would be even more beautiful or meaningful to me, but they do represent that urge to decorate the sacred word that drives both the eastern and western tradition of illumination. We have no prohibition against representational art, so there are leaves and birds in the designs, refined and elegant as the gold ink from which they are drawn.

To my Methodist upbringing, artifacts and relics smacked of Papism. It was a bit of a shock to me when I became a Baha'i to discover pilgrimage. And it took years for me to even think about wanting to go. As a medievalist, I was curious about the sort of pilgrimage we would have, as opposed to the great journeys of the middle ages. I also knew a bit about the Muslim haj, and various pilgrimages one can make in India. But I really didn't know what to expect and I was apprehensive, especially about the Archives.

What I found there was the human factor, the pieces of the Manifestations' lives that made them human. I will never think of the Bab again without thinking of his lovely, silk beige coat with the peach colored lining or his dark turquoise coat with the gorgeous silk buttons on the sleeves.

Their pen cases and pens are there, the instruments of their revelations. The actual writings exist for us to go and look at, to read if you have the language. Of all the things I saw there I think the writings themselves were the most impressive and astonishing. I have read them in English and found them beautiful. To see that beauty reflected in the script itself was to experience a kind of reality on two planes. Without the illuminations the texts would be exquisite, the penmanship regal, as if reflecting the content itself. And I stood there thinking that these were the texts from their own hands.

Imagine if we had the Writings of Jesus or any of the other Manifestations in His own handwriting. Beyond that, the writings were the thing that brought me to the Baha'i Faith, the word was all I had to go on, and it worked. It reached my heart. It also challenged and rewarded my intellect. It provided a balance for my life, in a way I could understand and accept and appreciate. And the writings and prayers continue to challenge and comfort. They never become tiresome or boring and they are always beautiful. Now I have seen their beauty with my outer eye as well as having seen it with my inner eye.