My Knee Was Bent Reverently: Louis Gregory Meets the Master

Louis George Gregory had crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The journey from Washington had taken weeks. On the morning of the tenth of April, 1911, in the city of Alexandria, the American lawyer was led through the streets by a Persian believer named Muḥammad Yazdí to the residence ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was occupying during His stay in Egypt.

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Gregory’s pilgrimage notes — later printed in the small booklet *A Heavenly Vista* — record the moment of arrival in his own words.

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> Following a natural impulse, my knee was bent reverently before > Him. Feeling Him bend over me, I knew that He touched my head > with his lips.

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It was the gesture, in 1911, of a kind that would not have been possible in any white drawing-room in Gregory’s native country. In Alexandria, in the reception room of the Master, it was the plain greeting given to a long-awaited guest.

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After Gregory had been seated, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked, with the solicitude that pilgrims would remark on for the rest of their lives, about his health. Gregory wrote that something in him unclenched.

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> The weariness of the long journey, the suspense, and the > excitement of landing for the first time at an Oriental port, > were all forgotten in His Presence.

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The conversation that followed was a quiet exchange of news — the Master responding to the messages Gregory had carried from the friends in Washington and New York with what Gregory called *fitting responses.* In other words, He answered each loving letter with the personal warmth its writer would have recognised.

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The pilgrimage that began in that reception room would return Gregory to America in May with a new charge. He would devote the next four decades of his life to a single work: the building of race unity inside and outside the Bahá’í community. The Master’s parting instruction to him was the line that he carried, by his own testimony, to the end:

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> Keep your face turned towards the Kingdom and fear nothing!

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