An Old Believer Looks Up: A Mountain Ascended Many Times

Among the smaller observations Esslemont offers in Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era is a sketch — drawn from accounts the friends in 'Akká had related to him during his own visits in 1919 and 1920 — of the kind of pilgrim who, having attained at last the threshold of the Master's household, would settle into a discipline that visitors from the West did not always understand.

The pilgrim Esslemont describes was an old Persian believer. He had walked from his own province across thousands of miles. He had finally been received into the household at Haifa. The Master had welcomed him, embraced him, asked after his journey and his family. The pilgrim had wept.

Then — and this is the part Esslemont preserves — the pilgrim had settled into his pilgrimage in a particular way. He did not ask many questions. He did not crowd the Master with the private petitions Western pilgrims sometimes felt they had to present. He did, instead, the smallest and most repetitive thing. Each morning, after the early prayers, he would walk up the path that led from the pilgrim house to the upper rooms of the household. He would arrive. He would sit on a low wall in view of the Master's windows. He would remain for some hours, silent, watching the comings and goings of the day. He would then walk back down at dusk.

The next morning he would do it again.

He repeated this discipline for the entire length of his pilgrimage — many days. He spoke only when spoken to. He did not rehearse a long list of personal needs. He was simply there. His pilgrimage was, by the standards of his own village, his entire life's work; he did not wish to spoil it by busy chatter.

Quiet, day after day, the old believer would ascend, watch, and descend — and the visit itself was the speech.

The Master, by every account, especially loved such pilgrims. He would sometimes step to the window so that the silent visitor on the wall would know himself seen. He would sometimes invite the man up to sit at His feet for a while. He would sometimes pass him without further word, knowing that the pilgrim's presence was the prayer the pilgrim had brought.

Esslemont preserved the sketch because his Western readers needed it. Many of them, anxious to use any time in the Master's presence to obtain the maximum verbal teaching, imagined that the long lists of questions they were preparing were the proper form of pilgrimage. The old Persian villager, silent on the wall day after day, was a corrective. There is a presence that needs no words, and a hospitality that needs no agenda. The old believer had been doing both, and the household at Haifa had recognised what he was doing as already the highest form of pilgrimage available to a soul.

Source: J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (George Allen & Unwin, 1923), Chapter 3 and following. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19241.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241