Blessed Are the Poor

A retelling based on The Diary of Juliet Thompson (Kalimát Press; diary entry dated 19 April 1912). The narrative is retold in our own words; the lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the Diary. Read the full text for Juliet's own account.

The Bowery, in 1912, was where New York kept the men it had given up on. On the night of the nineteenth of April, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went to meet them.

Juliet Thompson came with Him, and so did Edward Getsinger, and the two of them carried something unusual into the Bowery Mission chapel that evening: large bags heavy with quarters. Some three hundred homeless men had gathered in the hall. Juliet stood and introduced the visitor to them — this Persian in His robes and turban, who had spent forty years a prisoner and now stood before a congregation of the penniless as though He had come home.

He spoke to them of poverty, and He did not speak down. He told them that the poor were dear to God; He reminded them that Christ Himself had been poor, that His life had been the life of the dispossessed. Juliet caught the heart of it in a single line she set down in her diary —

"Blessed are the poor." He never said: blessed are the rich!

But the words were only the beginning. When He had finished speaking, 'Abdu'l-Bahá took up the bags of coins and went to the door of the chapel, Juliet and Edward beside Him holding the silver. And then the three hundred came — in one long single file, each ragged man passing before Him in turn.

He took each man's hand in His own. Into each palm He pressed a coin — and to the most broken-down, the most destitute, He gave the most. But it was not the money Juliet found herself unable to look away from. It was what passed in the air above the coins: the way each man's eyes rose and met the Master's, and held there, for the length of a heartbeat. Three hundred times she watched a man who was used to being looked past be looked at — wholly, without flinching, with love. She could only describe what she saw as a kind of recognition, divine and mutual, as though the Master were greeting in each derelict face a soul He had always known.

The men shuffled back out into the Bowery night with a quarter in their pockets. It would not change their circumstances. But Juliet understood that something else had been given at that door, something the city had never once offered them — the plain, unhurried regard of a man who believed every one of them was made in the image of God, and acted as though He meant it.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted words are verbatim from The Diary of Juliet Thompson. See the source for Juliet's complete entry.

Thompson, J.. (1947). *The Diary of Juliet Thompson*. Kalimát Press. https://bahai-library.com/thompson_diary