I was praying one morning last month, as I do every morning, and I couldn’t find my prayer book. We had had guests over the previous evening and had cleaned so well that my prayer book was in a different location. Instead, I picked up another book and opened to a random page hoping for inspiration. In a quick moment, my fingers flipped to a page called the Fifth Ornament. I read it and scanned other pages looking for a sequence. I soon learned that Bahá’u’lláh wrote a tablet called the “Six Ornaments.”
This discovery led me to study the ornaments through the whole month of January. My first thought at the word “ornament” was of a decorative object that is placed on a Christmas tree. My trusty dictionary proved that initial thought wasn’t far off. An ornament is something that lends grace or beauty to something, is a manner or quality that adorns, is a person whose virtues or graces add luster to a place or society, and is the act of adorning or being adorned. The word ornament has a deeper meaning than I imagined. In fact, I started imagining how to adorn my soul with values, behaviors, and character that will make me a better human being.
Educator and writer Nanette Missaghi shares this space with Dr. Bernard E. Johnson, Beryl Schewe and the Revs. Rod Anderson, Timothy A. Johnson and Trish Sullivan Vanni. “Spiritually Speaking” appears weekly.
