The Mathematician at the Window

A retelling based on The Diary of Juliet Thompson by Juliet Thompson. Words in quotation marks are quoted from that diary.

On the morning of 24 August 1911, at the hotel in Thonon, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, Juliet Thompson was on her way to the door of 'Abdu'l-Bahá when she met, as she wrote, the last person on earth she would have looked for: Dickinson Miller, a friend of Percy Grant, the rector of her church in New York. The notes to the diary describe Miller as an educator and philosopher, then a professor at Columbia University.

"You here!" she gasped. "I always wanted to tell you about this."

"Why didn't you?" he asked.

She could not wait to answer, and hurried on to the Master's room. She had not seen Him since her pilgrimage to 'Akká two years before. Later that morning she mentioned to Him that she knew the professor and had always wanted to give him the Message.

"Now I have given him the Message," the Master laughed.

Mr Miller was invited to lunch. The Master placed him with Juliet at the head of the table and sat at the corner Himself. The professor asked about work in and with the Christian Church, which mattered greatly to him because he was thinking of resigning his chair at Columbia to enter the ministry; about the validity of mystical experiences; and, at Juliet's suggestion, about the economic problem.

Juliet wrote that to put the Master's answers into her own language would spoil them, and that she could give only fragments. "His answers were so clear, so brilliant, so simple that you wondered at your own question."

Religion, the Master said, was one truth which the sectarians had divided; but the Light could be found everywhere, and it was good to unite with people, especially in work for humanity, when one's own motive was pure. The saints and mystics had assuredly had real experiences, and the proof of an experience was its fruit: if the result was spiritual, it was from God.

Juliet then asked the professor to put a question for Percy Grant, who believed that social progress must come first, by practical means. The Master replied: "Such people are doing the work of true religion." Then He explained that a new order must come, but that first a solid foundation must be laid for it, and no foundation was solid enough except religion, which was the Love of God.

As Mr Miller took his leave he seemed deeply moved. "I shall never forget this day," he said. The Master put His arms around him, gave him a good strong slap on the back, and bade him goodbye most lovingly.

During the same visit Juliet went with the Master by boat to Vevey, on the Swiss shore, to spend the day with her friend Edith Sanderson and Edith's mother. Before lunch the talk turned to immortality, and Juliet wrote down the Master's answer as it was translated. "Those in the station below cannot see the station above," He said, quoting the Prophet. The mineral knows nothing of the plant, and the plant cannot imagine the animal. "In the human kingdom is an intellectual power not possessed by the animal kingdom. The animal cannot imagine this power." An unborn child cannot imagine a world beyond the womb, with its mountains, villages and cities; yet that world exists.

After lunch Juliet walked over to the hotel terrace and found, sitting in the shade of a tree, two people from her church in New York: a lady she knew and Professor Mitchell. On the impulse of the moment she offered to present the lady to 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The lady declined, and Juliet went back to the Master's room.

Later in the afternoon Juliet, Edith, Edith's mother and Laura sat on the terrace with the Master. The two were no longer there, but, Edith said, they were watching from their windows.

Juliet found this tragic, and explained why. About four years earlier Professor Mitchell, Professor Miller and Percy Grant had belonged to a sort of club where they met with other professors of Columbia University to discuss religion. Professor Mitchell had written up the meetings and published them as a book. "All through it the note is sounded that a great new Light is shining upon the world." As she remembered it, the book ended with the Mathematician, left alone after his guests had gone, standing at the window with the Clergyman's words in his ears: "The rebirth of the Christ in the whole of humanity is close at hand." He looks up at the stars. "Even so," he whispers, "come quickly, Lord Jesus."

"The Mathematician" was Professor Mitchell, and "the Clergyman" was Percy Grant.

Now both professors had come to Switzerland, Juliet wrote, and both had been drawn to the neighbourhood, even to the Presence, of "the Dawning-Point of Divine Knowledge." In Professor Miller she saw "at least a timid response, a peeping out of the soul." In Professor Mitchell she saw a back turned.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Diary of Juliet Thompson by Juliet Thompson.

Thompson, J.. (1947). *The Diary of Juliet Thompson*.