23 May ~ Declaration of the Bab

Today we celebrate the Declaration of the Bab. The Bab (Whose title means The Door or The Gate) declared in 1844 that he was the Promised One that many people were expecting to appear at that time. His Mission was to prepare the way for Him Whom God Will Make Manifest, Baha'u'llah. The Bab and Baha'u'llah are known sometimes as The Twin Messengers.

We read the story of "Mulla Husayn and the Bab" from Children's Stories from the Dawn-Breakers. Mulla Husayn was a man who had been studying the propheses and preparing himself to find the Promised One, the Bab. He found the Bab in the Persian city of Shiraz.

"It was about two hours after sunset when the Bab, with great love and joy, told Mulla Husayn Who He was. Mulla Husayn was so astonished that at first he could not belive the good news. But as the Bab went on talking, Mulla Husayn knew that no one else could be so wise."

"This night," the Bab said, "this very hour, will, in the days to come, be celebrated as one of the greatest and most significant of all festivals."

Mulla Husayn was the first to believe in the Bab. "Later eighteen souls would find the Bab, just as Mulla Husayn had done. But Mulla Husayn was to tell no one about the Bab, for each person had to find Him without any help. When all eighteen had learned the great Secret, the Bab would send them out to tell the whole world that a new Teacher had come."

Before reading the story we talked about one of the prayers revealed by the Bab. I was surprised to find out that my 3-year-old son had it memorized! So we talked about the meaning of it.

Is there any remover of difficulties save God? Say: praised be God, He is God. All are His servants and all abide by His bidding.

After reading the story we made some pretty nine-pointed star "stained-glass windows." The night before I used the 9-point star cookie cutters from Special Ideas as a pattern to cut out the frames from construction paper, and I cut up a bunch of little pieces of colored tissue paper. (From gift bags!)

To make them, I glued a star to one side of a piece of waxed paper and then turned the paper over. I covered the space inside the frame with glue and the kids stuck the bits of tissue paper to that. When they were done, I put some more glue on and covered it with another piece of waxed paper. Then I cut the waxed paper away from the frames and wrote Declaration of the Bab in the middle with a Sharpie pen.

9 May ~ God Sends Messengers

In The Light of a Good Character, Lesson 5 is called God Sends Messengers.
We started with the songs and reciting prayers.

The lesson is about how God lets us know what He wants us to do through Messengers. The book, which is published in India, says, "Messengers of God or Avatars." American (and perhaps other) Baha'is usually say "Messengers" or "Manifestations of God," so I used those terms for the lesson.

"The names of some of the Messengers are:
Krishna
Moses
Zoroaster
Buddha
Jesus Christ
Muhammad
The Bab
Baha'u'llah

Can you remember these names?"

We sang the song that goes:
Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster,
Abraham, Moses, Christ,
Muhammad, the Bab, Baha'u'llah,
The Spirit's the same.

Then we did a craft out of Baha'i Crafts for Children. The book has a page with the names and symbols of the Manifestations that I scanned and printed on card stock. In the book, it says to hang each cut-out symbol on yarn and tie them together at the top to make a mobile. That probably would have been too difficult with a 3yo & 5yo, so it's probably for the best that I forgot the yarn at home! The friends' house where we meet is loaded up with craft supplies, and we used a couple pieces of ribbon and glued the symbols on there.

25 April 2010

Lesson 4 in the Light of a Good Character is called the Worship of God. It talks about God as Creator and that we pray to God because we love Him. And we can show our love for God by helping others. (And by being obedient to our parents. This is a great book!)

There has been emphasis in all the prior chapters about cleanliness that I skipped because, I don't know, I guess I just expect my children to be clean. And at the ages the little guys are, cleanliness for them is still mostly my job. But this lesson, after saying we can show our love for God by being clean, went on to say, "when we clean this place where we have our classes we are helping other people. We are all happy when we see a clean place. God wants us to help other people, to be clean, and to be happy."

I thought this whole lesson tied in nicely to our Baha'i community's plan to adopt a park, so I took the little guys (3yo and 5yo), my big kid (13yo), and a trio of brother and sisters (ages 9-12) to clean up Waterfall Park. And play. Helping. Cleaning. Happy. We got it!

I also read a version of the Lion and the Mouse for the little guys before we left for the park.

I was concerned that the amount of litter at this rather large park might be too much for such a small group to handle, but I went back today and it wasn't too bad. whew! We'll see about formally adopting it during the week.

Tomorrow is the Twelveth Day of Ridvan. Ya Baha'ul-Abha!