My Dear and Loyal Brothers!

Before dawn today I felt real pity for all of you. Then I remembered the Treatise For The Sick (Hastalar Risalesi ), and it consoled me.

Yes, this calamity is a sort of social sickness. Most of the remedies connected with belief in that treatise are in this too. As I told that blessed sick person in Erzurum, the pain of all past tribulations has passed; what remains of it is its good, and its benefits that look to this world, the hereafter, belief, and the Qur’an. That means the single transitory tribulation has been transformed into numerous permanent bounties. As for the future, since it is non-existent at the present, the tribulations that will continue in it give no pain now. To suffer pain due to delusions is to lack confidence in Divine mercy and Determining.

Secondly: Most of mankind on the earth now are afflicted with calamities, physical and non-physical, and in their hearts, spirits, and minds. Compared with theirs, our calamity is both extremely light, and profitable. There are pleasures for the heart and spirit, springing from belief, good health, and well-being.

Thirdly: If we had not entered here amid these storms, due to our contact with suspicious officials, this slight calamity would have been even severer, and there would have been the calamity of having to toady to them and flatter them.

Fourthly: Seeing with very little expense true friends more compassionate than brothers, and brothers of the hereafter like spiritual guides, here in the workless, compounded physical and spiritual winter of this School of Joseph, which is a department of the Medresetü’-Zehra; and visiting them, profiting from their personal qualities, and receiving strength from their fine characteristics, which like light are diffused through transparent objects, and from their spiritual assistance, joy, and consolation; all changes the form of this calamity, making it a sort of veil to Divine grace. Yes, a subtle facet of this hidden grace is that all the Risale-i Nur students here are called “Hoja;” they are spoken of respectfully as “the hojas... the hojas.” There is a further subtle allusion in this, that just as this