Tea at the Holy Tomb

A retelling based on The Diary of Juliet Thompson (Kalimát Press; diary entry dated 4 July 1909). 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.

It was the Fourth of July, 1909, though the date belonged to another country. Juliet Thompson — a portrait painter from New York, and one of the early American believers — was in the Holy Land as a pilgrim, and on that morning 'Abdu'l-Bahá led a small party out to Bahjí, to the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh.

There were not many of them. Juliet, her friend Alice Beede, the Kinney family with their two small boys, Sandy and Howard, and an elderly Persian believer whose whole life had been poured into this Cause. They came into a plain, whitewashed room near the Tomb, and there something happened that Juliet would spend the rest of her life trying to describe.

'Abdu'l-Bahá made the tea. Not a servant; not a host directing servants — He Himself. And then He sat down on the floor, in the midst of the children, and gathered them to Him. He dropped the sugar into their cups and stirred it and lifted it to them, feeding the little ones with His own hands, smiling all the while with what Juliet could only call infinite tenderness. The Master of so many souls, the prisoner of forty years, the centre toward which the whole Bahá'í world turned — sat cross-legged on a bare floor making sure the children's tea was sweet enough.

Then He rose and brought them to the threshold of the Tomb. There He anointed each forehead with attar of rose, the scent that clings to the holiest places of the Faith, and He chanted — the old Persian cadences rising and falling in that small bright room, while the pilgrims stood with the perfume on their brows and let the sound go through them.

Afterward He led them out into a garden. The children would not leave His side; they pressed against Him as He walked, and His white robes moved about them like sails. He stopped, and pointed — west, past the trees, to where the Mediterranean lay flat and shining under the sun. America was out there, somewhere beyond that water; the country these pilgrims had sailed from, the country the children would grow up in. And standing there with the sea before Him and the children at His side, He said:

America and this land are one. The world is one.

For Juliet, holding the moment the way a painter holds a face she means to keep, it was not a slogan and not a hope deferred to some far century. It was a fact He was stating as plainly as the water in front of them — that the divisions her age took for granted, the oceans and the races and the nations, were already, in the sight of God, dissolved. She had crossed one of those oceans to reach Him. He was telling her there had never really been a far shore.

She went back to America. She painted His portrait; she taught His Faith in New York for the rest of her days; and she kept the diary in which this afternoon survives — the tea, the attar of rose, the children pressed against His robes, and the sentence spoken over the sea. Through her pages we are let, for a moment, into that whitewashed room, and shown what the oneness of the world looks like when it is small enough to sit on a floor and sweeten a child's cup.

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