You may want to read about the details of each Baháʼí Holy Day here, as well as some personal experiences and viewpoints here. This is a growing series exploring Pride and Baháʼí Holy Days. What follows is an introduction, with the PDF of the main article at the bottom of the page.
Summary
This series of articles aims primarily to educate members of the Baháʼí Faith on the history of Pride, the worldwide annual Queer celebration and festival, and its place in Queer societies around the world. Many Queer people feel a disconnect between their spiritual life and their identify as a Queer person. These articles are also written with the intention to provide a perspective to bridge these two aspects of their lives. In this series, a connection will be drawn between Pride and the different categories of Baháʼí Holy Days: Memorial, Commemoration, and Celebration.
Introduction
Regardless of culture, days of remembrance tend to center around three particular themes - memorial, commemoration, and celebration. No different are the Baháʼí Holy Days. Before exploring that claim more deeply, for the purposes of discussion, the following definitions were provided by Oxford Languages (June, 2022 / Raḥmat 179 BE):
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Memorial - something, especially a structure, established to remind people of a person or event.
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Intended to commemorate someone or something.
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Commemoration - remembrance, typically expressed in a ceremony.
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A ceremony or celebration in which a person or event is remembered.
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Celebration - the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion by engaging in enjoyable, typically social, activity.
These definitions do contain references to each other, as they are interrelated concepts and should be viewed that way. While the connotations of each word differ, it would be intellectually dishonest to think of them as completely separate concepts.
The Baháʼí Holy Days tend to follow this same pattern:
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Riḍván - Commemoration and Celebration
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Naw-Rúz - Celebration
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Declaration of the Báb - Commemoration and Celebration
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Martyrdom of the Báb - Memorial and Commemoration
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Ascension of Baháʼu'lláh - Memorial and Commemoration
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Birth of the Báb - Commemoration and Celebration
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Birth of Baháʼu'lláh - Commemoration and Celebration
And while work is not suspended on these Holy Days, their observances still follow the same pattern:
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Ayyám-i-Há - Celebration
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Day of the Covenant - Commemoration and Celebration
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Ascension of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá - Memorial and Commemoration