Sacred days and nights imbue everything and everyone with their own color, their own distinctive taste, and their own accent; they soften everything within their embrace, add to them a dream-like quality, and enable them to attain an unfathomable profundity. In those times, there is a deep charm sensed almost everywhere, from the streets and marketplaces, homes and places of worship, schools and barracks—a celestial gleaming on the countenances of the believers, and a holiness trickling from their gaze. The multicolored lights beaming into our eyes during the hours of the night, in particular, ceaselessly whisper to us the songs of residence in another dimension. Every countenance we encounter in homes, places of work, places of worship, sometimes ripple with sorrow, but they also occasionally surge with hope and expectation, as though perpetually experiencing a journey to union and becoming a cascade of emotion. Then we flow forth to eternity.

As the fervor for worship and devotion increases in our hearts, our ability to sense and experience everything in a different way bubbles over, so to speak, and draws us into its own ocean. At such times, our material connections weaken, our spirits are freed from mundane attachments, and we suppose ourselves to have ascended to a point from which we can wholly observe all creation. From now on, we embrace and love the plains and prairies, mountains and foothills, the houses in which we were raised, the places of worship in whose climate we prepared for the life Hereafter – in short, we love everything animate and inanimate as favors which have come forth from His hand. We breathe them into our lungs like oxygen and release a sigh of relief.

During these luminous days and nights, which rise forever like a flood of light, an enchanting belief, an intimate knowledge of the divine, love, and otherworldliness glisten in the comportment and general manner of believers. These spiritual delights surpass all material delights and pleasures, and everybody sets out towards the sacred horizon of their own unique axis. On this path, every believer attains a small union as they pass one more level each day, and thus crown, as it were, their blessed journey. As they experience reunion on a daily basis, they are reminded of the “great reunion” the dreams of which they nourish their souls with. They beam with the beauties filling their emotions, with the hopes burgeoning in the bosom of worship, and the meanings cascading in the eyes and hearts of all believers. Then, they descend into an otherworldly silence as if swimming in a magical stream which channels out to timelessness.

These fortunate ones have now reached the sea of pleasure sought by their spirits. Now, the eye of their hearts witnesses eternal beauties in the form of flowers blossoming in the gaze of the Beloved, or beams of light projecting from His beauty. They find themselves in a garden abounding with diverse fruits, roses, and flowers, entranced with the warmth of the welcome and reception of the One to Whom they devoted themselves for a lifetime. In their inner world they even sense the winds of promise in another dimension, of some of the bounties they are unable to reach in this realm, the flowing forth of reward. They sense being embraced by the profound and eternal mercy of the Owner of Infinite Mercy. With this state of mind, they experience life anew; they love everything more deeply, embrace others with tenderness, and they smell everything that reminds God like a rose.

During sacred days and nights, everyone—women and men, young and old, those who know and those who do not know, common people and the learned—takes on the spiritual beauties of this blessed time with their utmost elegance and refined manner in a more resplendent way than those existing in fables. They drape upon their faces, like a veil, the awe and splendor of having believed. They open and shut their eyes with the lights of the realms beyond, imbue their own scent and color to everyplace they visit. They become celestial, so to speak, in the depths of their feelings, and each believer becomes angelic. One cannot help but imagine the lamps of the minarets and in the streets to be emanating from their refined looks, pearls and feelings scattered all around – they are nothing but angelic beings in the eyes of others.

Indeed, these pure countenances ripple with belief, love, yearning, dreams, hope, pleasure, and reunion. Robust, enamored, blissful, and silent. The attitudes, behaviors, and looks which express the meaning in their spirits forever become manifest in their surroundings like the unreachable dimension of otherworldliness within the human being, and this enthralls all those who sense and perceive it.

During sacred days, some of us release ourselves by shedding our usual restrictive logic, and we give in to joy, elation, thrill, and tears, as though we have been invited to a heavenly realm. Some of us imagine ourselves to have embarked on a journey among the stars and come head to head with the sun and moon, and are overtaken by the impression that our breaths have blended into the breaths of the angels. Our hearts soften, our eyes water, the knots we have frequently felt within us loosen, and the nodes of the self are untied to be freed from carnality. Thus, our tears sweep before them all the problems pervading our spirits, and our consciences breathe a great sigh of relief, exclaiming, “All praise be to God.”

Everyone begins to sense, to the extent of the meaning filling their own heart, certain profundities they were hitherto unable to see, due to the carnal constraints: the young awaken with a sense of doing justice to their strength, power, and vitality; the middle-aged strive to be more productive in accordance with the self-possession procured by their experience and knowledge; and the elderly overflow with the joy of preparation for eternal bliss and the realms to which their spirits flutter. Everyone opens the eye of their heart, as though feeling their own destiny, which they were unable to sense completely before this time. They are exuberant or sorrowful with their own lot and turn to their own future; their eyes smile with the promises of their time, and their countenance deepens with meaning.

The sounds of public proclamations rising from mosques and minarets add a unique flavor and richness to this general state, such that everything—from the blowing wind to the pouring rain—brushes past our faces with His perfume and permeates our hearts with the elixir of immortality. The morning breeze makes itself felt like a breath from eternity and thrills our hearts like tidings and favors coming from Him. These enchanting minutes in which we thus turn to Him appear, by virtue of our belief, love, and hopes, as drops of the truth of eternity. They pour forth into our souls, stimulate the seeds of the tree of paradise in the depths of our spirit to yield fruit, and allow us to travel incessantly on the heavenly slopes in our hearts.

God is always beautiful and gracious, but we feel this meaning more deeply during particular periods of time. During such periods, which are considered to be the springtime of our spirits, He draws the entire rhapsody of our heart to Himself, makes His beauty and attraction felt to an irresistible degree, and revitalizes us each moment with a separate bounty and new favor. I do not think these blessed hearts have another pleasure greater than this one, for this spiritual pleasure springs from the Divine love innately found in humans and the Infinitely Merciful’s honoring them with His grace. His regard and favors are infinite and endless to the degree of the person's love and connection being both from the heart and eternal.