He will be very happy to receive reports of the measures you are taking to carry out your important Five Year Plan. You have the unique distinction of being the first National Body, yet formed, to be born with a Plan in its mouth! and you may be sure your fellow Bahá’ís, East and West, are watching your progress with keen interest, not unmixed with curiosity, to see how well you fare in your historic work and your newly created independence.
The Guardian has high hopes for the achievements of the Canadian Bahá’ís. Their national character, which so fortuitously combines the progressiveness and initiative of the Americans, and the stability and tenacity of the British, fits them to make great contributions to the progress of the Faith, both in Canada and throughout the world.
He urges you to keep in close touch with him, and assures you that you, and your labours, are very dear to his heart, and he is ardently praying for your success in every field of your manifold activities.
With warm Bahá’í love,
R. RABBANI.
Dear and Valued Co-workers:
I hail with a joyous heart and confident spirit the truly compelling and almost simultaneous evidences of the creative, the irresistible power of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh as witnessed by the formation of the first Canadian National Bahá’í Assembly and the inauguration of the Five Year Plan, designed to orient its members toward and canalize the energies of the entire Canadian Bahá’í Community in support of the immediate tasks lying before them. So auspicious a beginning, in the life of a community attaining adulthood under the influence of the processes set in motion as the result of the progressive unfoldment of the Divine Plan, in a territory of such vast dimensions, blessed through both the mighty utterances, and the personal visit of the One Who fostered it from the hour of its birth, and Whose Plan enabled it to reach maturity, may well be regarded as one of the most momentous happenings immortalizing the opening years of the second Bahá’í century.
IMPLICATIONS OF PLAN TREMENDOUSLY VAST
The responsibility shouldered by an institution ranking as one of the sustaining pillars of the future Universal House of Justice is indeed staggering. The Plan entrusted to its infant hands is, in both its magnitude and implications tremendously vast. The anxieties, the strenuous exertions attendant upon the proper guidance, the effectual development and the sound consolidation of a community emerging into independent national existence, are inevitably trying. The numerical strength of that community, the immensity of the area serving as the field for the operation of its Plan, the meagerness of the resources now at its disposal, the relative inexperience of its newly-recruited members, the perils overhanging the territory in which they reside in the event of a future global conflict, the intensity of opposition which the unfoldment of its mission may provoke in the strongholds of religious orthodoxy inimical to the liberalizing influences of the Faith it represents—all these offer a challenge at once severe, inescapable and soul uplifting.