With warm Baha'i love,
R. Rabbani.

[From the Guardian:]

Dear and valued co-workers:

The progress achieved in recent years, rapid and extraordinary as it has
been, by the Baha'i Communities labouring so patiently, so methodically,
and so faithfully, for the consolidation and expansion of the institutions
of the embryonic World Order of Baha'u'llah in the Antipodes, has been
highly gratifying and has served to deepen my confidence in their ability
to achieve their high destiny, and to evoke sentiments of ever-increasing
admiration for the manner in which they have acquitted themselves of their
task in the face of varied and almost insurmountable obstacles.

Particularly commendable, and indeed exemplary, has been the share of the
Australian believers in enabling the New-Zealand Baha'i Community to make
such rapid strides, in recent years, strides that have prepared it for the
assumption of its sacred and vital function as an independent community,
and which culminated in the formation of a body qualified to take its
place, and assume the weighty responsibilities incumbent on it, as a
distinct and separate member of the world-wide family of Baha'i national
and regional Spiritual Assemblies. The great and signal honour, conferred
upon their homeland through the selection of one of the most highly
advanced, the most populous, and one of the most progressive of its
cities--enjoying already the distinction of being the first among them to
be opened to the Message of Baha'u'llah and to be warmed by the rising Sun
of His Revelation--as the site of the Mother Temple of the Antipodes, and
indeed of the whole Pacific area, moreover, proclaims their right to be
considered the vanguard of His hosts, and the defenders of the stronghold
of the Administrative Order of His Faith, in that vast area of the globe,
an area endowed with unimaginable potentialities, and which, owing to its
strategic position, is bound to feel the impact of world shaking forces,
and to shape to a marked degree through the experience gained by its
peoples in the school of adversity, the destinies of mankind.

The emergence of a new Regional Spiritual Assembly in the North Pacific
Area, with its seat fixed in the capital city of a country which by reason
of its innate capacity and the spiritual receptivity it has acquired, in
consequence of the severe and prolonged ordeal its entire population has
providentially experienced, is destined to have a prepon