The Master with the Sick Pilgrim
bahaistories.com archive · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
'Akká (today: Akko, Israel)
The bahaistories.com archive collects, from a number of pilgrim memoirs and household recollections, the recurring small scene of Western pilgrims who fell ill in 'Akká during their visits and the manner in which 'Abdu'l-Bahá personally attended to them.
The pilgrimages of the early Western friends were not easy. The journey from Europe or America to 'Akká could take several weeks. The sea passage and the strenuous overland travel exhausted bodies that were not used to it. The climate of the Levant and the unfamiliar food often produced fevers within the first few days of arrival.
The Master's response, in every recollection that survives, was uniform. He would visit the sick pilgrim in person, sometimes several times a day. He would sit at the bedside in His simple white robe, often holding the pilgrim's hand. He would chant the Bahá'í healing prayers. He would speak in quiet conversation when the pilgrim was able. He would direct the household physician where one was available. He would, if the illness extended for days, write personally to the family back home — to wife or husband or aging parent — giving honest report of the condition and offering reassurance.
The pilgrim who falls sick on My doorstep is the family I have been given to nurse.
The phrase, paraphrased through several of the bahaistories.com pieces, named the Master's principle. The hospitality of His house extended through the small acts of greeting at the door. It extended also into the bedroom of the bedridden guest, and into the patient hours of the chanted prayer, and into the careful letter sent home in His own hand to a family member who would otherwise have been worried. The hospitality was the whole work, beginning to end.
Source: bahaistories.com archive (https://bahaistories.com/), paraphrased compilation on 'Abdu'l-Bahá's care of sick pilgrims.
Record yourself reading this story
Recording stays on this device only. Nothing is uploaded.
Related stories
The Master and the Poor of 'Akká
Through the long years of His confinement in the prison-city of 'Akká, 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the care of the poor and the sick His own daily work — a Friday almsgiving at the gate, a warm garment each winter for every one of the city's poor, and morning rounds to the bedsides of the feeble, the forgotten, and the dying.
The Master Keeps the New Year with the Poor
In the prison-city of 'Akká and later in Haifa, 'Abdu'l-Bahá kept the festivals of the Bahá'í year — and Naw-Rúz above all — in a way that turned joy outward: toward the hungry, the sick, the widow and the stranger. The Greatest Holy Leaf and the ladies of the household, whose memories Lady Blomfield gathered, remembered a home where the new year was a season of open doors and open hands.
A Lamp Carried East: Dr. Susan Moody Answers the Call to Tehran
At fifty-eight, when many would be winding down, Dr. Susan I. Moody closed her Chicago medical practice and travelled alone to Tehran at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's call — to carry the light of healing to the sick and the light of learning to the daughters of a country that did not yet think girls worth teaching. Her first letters home carried one quiet, decisive sentence: "The girls' school is assured."
The Healer of 'Akká: 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Sick
In the prison-city of 'Akká, where disease festered in the damp and the poor died unattended, 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the care of the sick His personal calling. He brought physicians to the bedsides of the destitute, paid for their medicines, sat with the dying, and ministered to the bodies and spirits of the people the city had abandoned — winning, by mercy alone, the love of an entire town.