The Two Wings of the Bird

A retelling for children, based on Mahmúd's Diary (entry of 19 April 1912).

It was a spring afternoon in New York City, and a large lecture hall at a famous university was filling up. Students hurried to their seats. Professors found their places. In the very back rows sat a small group of friends who had come especially to listen. Everyone was waiting for one guest.

'Abdu'l-Bahá had been in America for only nine days. He had crossed an ocean to come, and already so many people wanted to hear Him that the university itself had sent word asking Him to visit. Now He had arrived, and the room grew quiet.

A senior professor stood up first. He told the audience a little about the Bahá'í Faith, and he said how glad the university was that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had come. Then 'Abdu'l-Bahá rose to speak.

The people in that hall were used to clever lectures about machines and numbers and the things you can measure. They may have wondered what a visitor from far-off Persia would choose to talk about. But the subject He picked was not one they expected at all. He spoke about something you cannot put under a microscope: the human soul, and whether it lives on after the body dies.

To help everyone understand, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave them a picture to hold in their minds — a picture so clear that people have remembered it ever since.

Science and religion are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights.

Think of a bird, He said. A bird with only one wing cannot fly. It may flap and flap, but it will only tumble in circles on the ground. To rise up into the sky, a bird needs both wings working together.

People are like that too, He explained. Imagine someone who has only science — who knows how to build and measure and explain the whole visible world, but never trains the heart or learns what is truly good. That person can master many things, yet still not understand the meaning of his own life. And imagine someone who has only religion, but never bothers to study the real world around him. That person can dream up all sorts of ideas, but he cannot always tell which of them are actually true.

Neither one is flying. We need both wings — a trained mind and a trained heart — to truly soar.

Then, step by careful step, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained why He believed the soul does not simply stop when the body grows old and dies. He talked about the wonderful powers each of us carries inside — the power to remember, to imagine, to know right from wrong, to choose. These things, He said, are not made of the same stuff as our bones and skin, and so they are not lost the way the body is.

The whole time He spoke, something remarkable happened in that big room. No one fidgeted. No one whispered. Mahmúd, the friend who wrote all of this down in his diary, tells us that the students, the professors, and the visitors in the back all listened in complete stillness, from beginning to end.

When 'Abdu'l-Bahá finished, the professor who had welcomed Him stood up again. In all his many years of university gatherings, he said, this was one of the finest talks he had ever heard. 'Abdu'l-Bahá smiled, thanked everyone, and quietly went on His way.

That one short sentence about the two wings has been repeated ever since, in countless places all around the world — but the very first time anyone heard it was in that hall, on that spring afternoon. It still teaches us something simple and true: knowing about the world and caring about what is good are not enemies, and they were never meant to be apart. Like two wings on one bird, they belong together — and together, they help us rise.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "At Columbia University: A Talk on the Soul".

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání*. George Ronald.