The Sick Must Not Be Neglected: 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Compassion

In Bahá'í World Faith, the 1943 American compilation, a short passage of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's writings places before the friends a plain test of their character: how do they treat those who, by sickness or by immaturity, cannot at present meet the standard they would themselves wish?

The sick must not be neglected because they are ailing — nay, rather, we must have compassion upon them and bring them healing.

The first sentence is bracingly clear. The patient is not a nuisance whose presence is to be tolerated until the patient either recovers or dies. The patient is the work itself. The Bahá'í response to illness is not avoidance, not censure for having become ill, not the implicit suggestion that better hygiene or better discipline would have prevented the situation. The Bahá'í response is to come close, to find what healing the case admits of, and to apply it.

The Master then makes the comparison to children.

The child must not be oppressed or censured because it is undeveloped; it must be patiently trained.

The principle is the same in a different setting. A child is, by definition, not yet what the adult has the right to expect of an adult. The child reasons less well, controls itself less well, forgets, repeats mistakes, makes a mess. The temptation, in many a household, is to react to the child as if it were already the adult that has not yet developed — to scold, to shame, to withdraw approval until the child somehow learns. The Master rejects the entire posture. The child is not to be censured because it is a child. The work is not censure but training, and training that is patient — that adjusts itself to where the child actually is, that allows for the slow accumulation of small lessons, that does not punish the child for the very incompleteness it was born into.

The principle, taken together, sketches the larger ethic. There is in every gathering — every family, every workplace, every spiritual community — at any given moment, a soul who is by some measure not yet equal to the standard the gathering would ideally hold. That soul may be physically sick. That soul may be spiritually immature. That soul may be only tired or sad or overwhelmed. The Master's instruction is the same in every case: do not neglect, do not censure. Have compassion. Bring healing. Train patiently.

The teaching is small in its words. It is enormously large in its consequence. Almost every quarrel that breaks a family or a community can be traced back, in some form, to the failure to extend the patient response to the soul who needed it. Bahá'í World Faith, in placing this passage among its selections, was quietly handing the friends an instrument by which their daily relations could be measured — and, where necessary, set right.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in Bahá'í World Faith (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1943). Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19239.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1943). *Bahá'í World Faith*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19239