West Bloomfield Residents Celebrate Naw-Ruz

Although small in number, the passionate group of West Bloomfield residents adhering to the Bahá'í Faith joined with about 300 other community members of varying religious and racial backgrounds to celebrate Naw-Ruz on Friday night.

Roxana Panah, 48, of West Bloomfield, joined with her two daughters Olivia Baylerian, 16, and Adriana Baylerian, 14, in a celebration at in Farmington Hills, where musical performances by jazz pianists, flutists, and drummers were marked by speeches describing the faith and prayer chants in English, Farsi and Spanish.

“It’s so inspiring, it always is. Especially in a bigger setting, it’s interesting, because we don’t have congregational prayer in our faith, so it’s nice to share prayers in a bigger group because it’s rare for us,” said Panah, a lawyer working in Bingham Farms.

Naw-Ruz (“New Light” in Persian) is the name of the New Year in Iranian calendars and Bahá'í calendars, as well as one of nine holy days for adherents of the Bahá'í Faith worldwide. Naw-Ruz, which was officially celebrated March 21, marks the end of the Nineteen Day Fast, a period in March during which observers adhere to a sunrise-to-sunset fast, which is one of the greatest obligations of the Bahá'í Faith, Panah said. Work is suspended for a day to ring in Naw-Ruz, which marks the beginning of the month of Bahá.

Panah pointed out that the celebration Friday brought together Bahá'ís from all over Metro Detroit and Ontario, in addition to many who were neither of Iranian descent nor believers in the faith.

Celebration offers rewards relevant to community life

“You start over. That really speaks to me. A new beginning is just like every year, developing and maturing even more beyond our years," said Olivia Baylerian, a sophomore at Detroit Country Day School. "The Bahá'í goal is to bring unity to everyone. Especially at school, you don’t really see unity,” 

Panah said that unlike the American holiday of New Year’s Day, typically marked with new year’s resolutions of individual change, adherents to the Bahá'í Faith  celebrating Naw-Ruz are guided by the Seat of the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel, to make change with goals of community peace in mind.

“We get letters from the Universal House of Justice and they address, specifically, Naw-Ruz, its meaning, and what kinds of things we can do in our individual faith in the upcoming year, strengthen our communities, within the Bahá'í basis, and within each other, and how we can make each other better in our communities,” she said. “It’s about being active and spreading a message of tolerance.”

According to Panah, the West Bloomfield representation of the Bahá'í Faith is too small to allow for a required, nine-person spiritual assembly, making for the necessity of celebrating en masse or visiting friends’ houses outside of the area. Homayoon Missaghi, a West Bloomfield resident who originally immigrated from Iran 20 years ago, pointed out that visiting other Bahá'í at their homes plays right into the tenets of Naw-Ruz.

“It’s the start of the new year at the start of spring, so we clean the house, then we ask people to come visit us and return the visit,” said Missaghi, a lifelong observer of the Bahá'í Faith. “It’s new life. It’s rejuvenating. If I feel depressed, I come here and I see all these small kids who I’ve known since they were very small. I see them running around and having a good time and that makes me happy.”

Diverse groups celebrate new year

In addition to live musical performances, the country club also hosted a DJ who spun pop music well into the night. People representing different age groups from infants to the elderly danced, in addition to people of different homelands, ethnicities and religions. Panah said offering a wide range of diverse adherents to the Bahá'í Faith is actually a core tenet of the faith, pointing to Bahá'í prayers, which mention core tenets of Christianity, Islam and Judaism as examples.

“We believe in all of the religions and that the essence of all religions is one in the same,” she said. “The prayers can be said in any language, but personally, coming from a Persian background, the Naw-Ruz chant in Farsi took me to a higher level. It was uplifting, about love, newness, faithfulness, and kindness. That’s what I needed.”

Missaghi said that although in the Bahá'í Faith, religious history is understood to have unfolded through a series of divine messengers, including most recently the founder Bahá'u'lláh, the lack of a clergy figure makes community especially important. Bahá'í law outlawing the consumption of alcohol made for a child-friendly atmosphere at any Bahá'í event, Missaghi said.

“We believe that everyone is the same here, whether you’re young or old or believe in Bahá'í or not,” he said. “To be able to celebrate with everyone in my faith is so uplifting for me, and alcohol and drugs are just not good for you anyway. It’s easy to stay away when you have your family all around you.”