My Name is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. My Reality is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: and Service to all the human race is my perpetual Religion….
(From a letter sent to the friends in New York, January 1st, 1907.)
I learned a huge amount both from preparing these materials and from walking with others in a 2015 workshop along a path of intense exploration over a period of days. I last published this sequence in 2017. It seems worth republishing it now, not only because of my current sequence on The Matter with Things but also given the current situation in Europe. The first six posts will appear daily. The final posts will appear next Tuesday and Wednesday.
Century of Light is a key text published by the Bahá’í World Centre designed to help us understand the challenges we face in the world today.
If you prefer you can download this in PDF version (6 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Vision & Station).
My Name is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. My Reality is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: and Service to all the human race is my perpetual Religion….
(From a letter sent to the friends in New York, January 1st, 1907.)
Groupwork
For each group discussion the group should choose a facilitator. It would be best to change the facilitator for each piece of group work over the series of workshops but the group will remain the same. During the consultation, the facilitator’s role is to keep track of the time, to ensure that:
- everyone contributes something,
- no one keeps repeating the same point, and
- no one makes excessively long contributions.
All group members need to keep their own record of the main points for using in the role play at the end of the group consultation. The notes should be easy to use in a conversation. Both groups will use the same material.
The Guardian’s Explanation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Station
In God Passes By Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, explains exactly what the station of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is for Bahá’ís. It is a long passage so I have decided to focus on what is most relevant to our current purposes. It is perhaps necessary to explain that the Manifestation of God, in a way that underpins part of the imagery used here, is seen as a Lote[1] (or boundary) Tree marking a line ‘beyond which there is no passing.’ The offshoots of this Tree, in this case the descendants of Bahá’u’lláh, are described as Branches. Shoghi Effendi writes:
He [Bahá’u’lláh] bids them, moreover, together with the Afnán (the Báb’s kindred) and His own relatives, to “turn, one and all, unto the Most Great Branch (‘Abdu’l-Bahá )”; identifies Him with “the One Whom God hath purposed,” “Who hath branched from this pre-existent Root,” referred to in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas; . . . . and concludes with an exhortation calling upon the faithful to “serve all nations,” and to strive for the “betterment of the world.”
. . . . His had been the unique distinction of recognizing, while still in His childhood, the full glory of His Father’s as yet unrevealed station, a recognition which had impelled Him to throw Himself at His feet and to spontaneously implore the privilege of laying down His life for His sake. . . . .
On Him Bahá’u’lláh, as the scope and influence of His Mission extended, had been led to place an ever greater degree of reliance, by appointing Him, on numerous occasions, as His deputy, by enabling Him to plead His Cause before the public, by assigning Him the task of transcribing His Tablets, by allowing Him to assume the responsibility of shielding Him from His enemies, and by investing Him with the function of watching over and promoting the interests of His fellow-exiles and companions. He it was Who had been commissioned to undertake, as soon as circumstances might permit, the delicate and all-important task of purchasing the site that was to serve as the permanent resting-place of the Báb, of insuring the safe transfer of His remains to the Holy Land, and of erecting for Him a befitting sepulchre on Mt. Carmel. He it was Who had been chiefly instrumental in providing the necessary means for Bahá’u’lláh’s release from His nine-year confinement within the city walls of ‘Akká, and in enabling Him to enjoy, in the evening of His life, a measure of that peace and security from which He had so long been debarred. . . . .
He alone had been accorded the privilege of being called “the Master,” an honour from which His Father had strictly excluded all His other sons. Upon Him that loving and unerring Father had chosen to confer the unique title of “Sirru’lláh” (the Mystery of God), a designation so appropriate to One Who, though essentially human and holding a station radically and fundamentally different from that occupied by Bahá’u’lláh and His Forerunner, could still claim to be the perfect Exemplar of His Faith, to be endowed with super-human knowledge, and to be regarded as the stainless mirror reflecting His light. . . . . To Him He . . . . had alluded (in a Tablet addressed to Hájí Muhammad Ibráhím-i-Khalíl) as the one amongst His sons “from Whose tongue God will cause the signs of His power to stream forth,” and as the one Whom “God hath specially chosen for His Cause.” On Him, at a later period, the Author of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, in a celebrated passage, subsequently elucidated in the “Book of My Covenant,” had bestowed the function of interpreting His Holy Writ, proclaiming Him, at the same time, to be the One “Whom God hath purposed, Who hath branched from this Ancient Root.” . . . . . To Him, on the occasion of His visit to Beirut, His Father had, furthermore, in a communication which He dictated to His amanuensis, paid a glowing tribute, glorifying Him as the One “round Whom all names revolve,” as “the Most Mighty Branch of God,” and as “His ancient and immutable Mystery.” . . . . . And finally in yet another Tablet these weighty words had been recorded: “The glory of God rest upon Thee, and upon whosoever serveth Thee and circleth around Thee. Woe, great woe, betide him that opposeth and injureth Thee. Well is it with him that sweareth fealty to Thee; the fire of hell torment him who is Thy enemy.”
And now to crown the inestimable honors, privileges and benefits showered upon Him, in ever increasing abundance, throughout the forty years of His Father’s ministry in Baghdád, in Adrianople and in ‘Akká, He had been elevated to the high office of Centre of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant[2], and been made the successor of the Manifestation of God Himself—a position that was to empower Him to impart an extraordinary impetus to the international expansion of His Father’s Faith, to amplify its doctrine, to beat down every barrier that would obstruct its march, and to call into being, and delineate the features of, its Administrative Order, the Child of the Covenant, and the Harbinger of that World Order whose establishment must needs signalize the advent of the Golden Age of the Bahá’í Dispensation.
Question: While recognising that we are only really able to grasp a small part of what this all means, it will be useful to explore what we understand by three key expressions: (a) the Mystery of God, (b) the Perfect Exemplar, and (c) the Centre of the Covenant. As a group pause to share your understandings of the possible meanings of those terms.
It is also important to remind ourselves that whenever ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was asked about Himself He replied along these lines:
My Name is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. My Reality is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: and Service to all the human race is my perpetual Religion…. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is the Banner of the Most Great Peace …The Herald of the Kingdom is he, so that he may awaken the people of the East and the West. The Voice of Friendship, of Truth, and of Reconciliation is he, quickening all regions. No name, no title will he ever have, except ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. This is my longing. This is my Supreme height. O ye friends of God! ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is the manifestation of Service, and not Christ. The Servant of humanity is he, and not a chief. Summon ye the people to the station of Service of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and not his Christhood.”
(From a letter sent to the friends in New York, January 1st, 1907.)
Thornton Chase (for source of image see link)
Examples of His Powers
Page 19: [Quoting Thornton Chase] “His [the Master’s] own writings, spreading like white-winged doves from the Centre of His Presence to the ends of the earth, are so many (hundreds pouring forth daily) that it is an impossibility for him to have given time to them for searching thought or to have applied the mental processes of the scholar to them. They flow like streams from a gushing fountain….”
Page 22-23: Invariably, the Master’s actions were as eloquent as the words He used. In the United States, for example, nothing could have more clearly communicated Bahá’í belief in the oneness of religion than ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s readiness to include references to the Prophet Muhammad in addresses to Christian audiences and His energetic vindication of the divine origin of both Christianity and Islam to the congregation at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. His ability to inspire in women of all ages confidence that they possessed spiritual and intellectual capacities fully equal to those of men, His unprovocative but clear demonstration of the meaning of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings on racial oneness by welcoming black as well as white guests at His own dinner table and the tables of His prominent hostesses, and His insistence on the overriding importance of unity in all aspects of Bahá’í endeavour – such demonstrations of the way in which the spiritual and practical aspects of life must interact threw open for the believers windows on a new world of possibilities. The spirit of unconditional love in which these challenges were phrased succeeded in overcoming the fears and uncertainties of those whom the Master addressed.
Horace Holley (for source of image see link)
Page 40: [After ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing Horace Holley wrote]:
“Now a message from God must be delivered, and there was no mankind to hear this message. Therefore, God gave the world ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá received the message of Bahá’u’lláh on behalf of the human race. He heard the voice of God; He was inspired by the spirit; He attained complete consciousness and awareness of the meaning of this message, and He pledged the human race to respond to the voice of God. …to me that is the Covenant – that there was on this earth some one who could be a representative of an as yet uncreated race. There were only tribes, families, creeds, classes, etc., but there was no man except ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as man, took to Himself the message of Bahá’u’lláh and promised God that He would bring the people into the oneness of mankind, and create a humanity that could be the vehicle for the laws of God.”
Howard Colby Ives (for source of image see llnk)
In Portals of Freedom Howard Colby Ives shared his impressions of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (page 16):
To me, a man of middle age, a Unitarian Clergyman, a student since youth of religions and philosophies, the experience had a disturbing quality somewhat cataclysmic. Why should this man be able so to upset all my preconceived notions and conceptions of values by His mere presence? Was it that He seemed to exude from His very being an atmosphere of love and understanding such as I had never dreamed? Was it the resonant voice, modulated to a music which caught the heart? Was it the aura of happiness touched at times with a sadness implying the bearing of the burden of all the sin and sorrow of the world, which always surrounded Him? Was it the commingled majesty and humility of His every gesture and word, which was perhaps His most obvious characteristic? How can one answer such questions? Those who saw and heard ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during those memorable months will share with me the sense of the inadequacy of words to communicate the incommunicable.
Mahmud-i-Zarqani (for source of image see link)
Earl Redman’s ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Their Midst (page 190) quotes Mahmud’s Diary (page 257):
‘Abdu’l-Bahá was up and packed before dawn and calling for the rest of His party to get up. As He left, He gave the hotel manager a $1 tip for the chambermaid since she was not there at that time. They took a taxi to the train station, where the taxi driver demanded more than the usual fare. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ignored him, saying, ‘A man may give $1000 without minding it but he should not yield even a dollar to the person who wishes to take it wrongfully, for such wrongful behaviour flouts justice and disrupts the order of the world.’
From the Library of Congress Photo Collection,Juliet Thompson with her portrait of First Lady Grace Coolidge (for source see link)
Juliet Thompson, in her Diary (page 285) records this moment:
The Master sat at the centre on the high stage… on the platform of the World Peace Conference.
The Master was really too ill to have gone to this conference. He had been in bed all morning, suffering from complete exhaustion, and had a high temperature. I was with Him all morning. While I was sitting beside Him I asked: “Must You go to the Hotel Astor when You are so ill?”
“I work by the confirmations of the Holy Spirit,” He answered. “I do not work by hygienic laws. If I did,” He laughed, “I would get nothing done.”
After that meeting… the Master shook hands with the whole audience, with every one of those thousands of people!
Lady Blomfield (for source of image see link)
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s foresight saved many lives as Lady Blomfield explains in The Chosen Highway (page 210):
Preparation for war conditions had been made by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá even before His return to Palestine, after His world tour. The people of the villages Nughayb, Samrih and ‘Adasíyyih where instructed by the Master how to grow corn, so as to produce prolific harvests, in the period before and during the lean years of the war.
A vast quantity of this corn was stored in pits, some of which had been made by the Romans, and were now utilised for this purpose. So it came about that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was able to feed numberless poor of the people of Haifa, ‘Akká, and the neighbourhood, in the famine years of 1914-1918.
We learned that when the British marched into Haifa was some difficulty about the commissariat. The officer in command went to consult the Master.
‘I have corn,’ was the reply.
‘But for the army?” said the astonished soldier.
‘I have corn for the British Army,’ said ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
He truly walked the Mystic way with practical feet.
Wellesley Tudor-Pole (For source of image see link)
Wellesley Tudor Pole in Writing on the Ground gives this account (page 150):
On many other occasions the prophetic insight of the Bahá’í leader was made clear to me. As an instance of this, I recall that when visiting him at Haifa, just after the Armistice in November 1918, I spoke with of thankfulness we all must feel that the war ‘to end all wars’ had been fought and won. He laid his hand upon my shoulder and told me that a still greater conflagration lay ahead of humanity. ‘It will be largely fought out in the air, on all continents, and on the sea. Victory will lie with no one. You, my son, will still be alive to witness this tragedy into to play your part. Beyond and following many tribulations, and through the beneficence of the Supreme One, the most great peace will dawn.’
Question: What do these comments, descriptions and anecdotes tell us about what the experience of meeting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá might have been like and what the full significance of His role in history might be?
Group Report Back: this is to be done as an exercise in role play. As far as time permits, one member of each group takes it in turns to explain to a member of the other group what they have learnt and needs to field whatever questions and comments come their way. This should involve those, if any, whom time did not permit to do this earlier. The exact method for this will be determined on the day when we know the exact group sizes
Creative Pause
As we have agreed that memorising is a valuable way to internalise important quotations and can help us in moments of quiet reflection, can we take a few moments now to begin to reflect upon a quotation we have memorised.
Groupwork
The Limitations of His Hearers
Page 25: No objective review of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s mission to the West. . . . . can fail to take into account the sobering fact that only a small number of those who had accepted the Faith – and infinitely fewer among the public audiences who had thronged to hear His words – derived from these priceless opportunities more than a relatively dim understanding of the implications of His message. Appreciating these limitations on the part of His hearers, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá did not hesitate to introduce into His relations with Western believers actions that summoned them to a level of consciousness far above mere social liberalism and tolerance. One example that must stand for a range of such interventions was His gentle but dramatic act in encouraging the marriage of Louis Gregory and Louise Mathews – the one black, the other white. The initiative set a standard for the American Bahá’í community as to the real meaning of racial integration, however timid and slow its members were in responding to the core implications of the challenge.
. . . . . Commitment to the cause of international peace; the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty that were undermining the unity of society; the overcoming of national, racial and other prejudices; the encouragement of equality in the education of boys and girls; the need to shake off the shackles of ancient dogmas that were inhibiting investigation of reality – these principles for the advancement of civilisation had made a powerful impression. What few, if any, of the Master’s hearers grasped – perhaps could have grasped – was the revolutionary change in the very structure of society and the willing submission of human nature to Divine Law that, in the final analysis, can alone produce the necessary changes in attitude and behaviour.
Page 45: However much one may rejoice in the praise poured on the Master from every quarter, the immediate results of His efforts represented yet another immense moral failure on the part of a considerable portion of humankind and of its leadership. The message that had been suppressed in the East was essentially ignored by a Western world which had proceeded down the path of ruin long prepared for it by overweening self-satisfaction, leading finally to the betrayal of the ideal embodied in the League of Nations.
- How do we explain how difficult it was for His hearers to understand ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s message?
- What relevance might that experience have for us now?
The Proclamation of the Faith
Page 35: As war’s inferno was engulfing the world, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned His attention to the one great task remaining in His ministry, that of ensuring the proclamation to the remotest corners of the Earth of the message which had been neglected – or opposed – in Islamic and Western society alike. The instrument He devised for this purpose was the Divine Plan laid out in fourteen great Tablets, four of them addressed to the Bahá’í community of North America and ten subsidiary ones addressed to five specific segments of that community. Together with Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Carmel and the Master’s Will and Testament, the Tablets of the Divine Plan were described by Shoghi Effendi as three of the “Charters” of the Cause.
Question: What can we learn of help to us now in this decision of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s?
His Legacy
We will be looking in more detail at both the Guardianship and the institution of the Universal House of Justice in the last two workshops, in an attempt to understand the implications for our work in the world, whether Bahá’í or not.
Page 41: In His Will and Testament, which Shoghi Effendi has described as the “Charter” of the Administrative Order, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá set out in detail the nature and role of the twin institutions that are His appointed Successors and whose complementary functions ensure the unity of the Bahá’í Cause and the achievement of its mission throughout the Dispensation, the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice.
Page 42: Before the reading and promulgation of the Will and Testament, the great majority of the members of the Faith had assumed that the next stage in the evolution of the Cause would be the election of the Universal House of Justice, the institution founded by Bahá’u’lláh Himself in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas as the governing body of the Bahá’í world. An important fact for present-day Bahá’ís to understand is that prior to this point the concept of Guardianship was unknown to the Bahá’í community.
- In what way might this unexpected development have tested some believers?
- What do such tests signify, if anything?
Group Report Back: this is to be done as an exercise in role play. As far as time permits, one member of each group takes it in turns to explain to a member of the other group what they have learnt and needs to field whatever questions and comments come their way. This should involve those, if any, whom time did not permit to do this earlier. The exact method for this will be determined on the day when we know the exact group sizes
Creative Interlude
Along this journey through the Century of Light we have moved from the pitch black horrors of the First and Second World Wars, with their mixed legacies of trauma and attempted healing, beyond the chilling tensions of the Cold War and its easing into hope, to the turn of the century and beyond where storm and sunlight continue to shift across the globe promising either self-destruction or reconstruction.
This may be a good time to reflect in a different way upon what we have experienced on this journey.
Depending upon our different skills, can we pause to create a poem, story, drawing or song to capture some sense of what it feels like to be poised at a point of faintly glimmering dawn, after a night of such vivid horrors?
If we get through this early we will begin the presentation that starts Session 7
[1] Wikipedia explains as follows: ‘Sidrat al-Muntahā (Arabic: سدرة المنتهى) is a Lote tree[1] that marks the end of the seventh heaven, the boundary where no creation can pass.’
[2] We have met this word ‘Covenant’ already in this last workshop. I will repeat the footnote here for ease of reference. This terminology dates from the time of the Báb as Shoghi Effendi makes clear in God Passes By (page 27): ‘The Greater Covenant into which, as affirmed in His writings, God had, from time immemorial, entered, through the Prophets of all ages, with the whole of mankind, regarding the newborn Revelation, had already been fulfilled. It had now to be supplemented by a Lesser Covenant which He [ie the Báb] felt bound to make with the entire body of His followers concerning the One [ie Bahá’u’lláh] Whose advent He characterized as the fruit and ultimate purpose of His Dispensation. Such a Covenant had invariably been the feature of every previous religion.’
Everybody Means Something 