The Hub Awakens: 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Boston

Mahmúd's Diary records that 'Abdu'l-Bahá visited Boston twice during the American tour: a brief stop in late July 1912 and a longer stay in August. The city had been chosen with deliberate care. Boston was the home of the Unitarian Association, of the Free Religious Association, and of a long generation of New England thinkers — Emerson, Channing, Theodore Parker — who had spent their adult lives arguing that the religions of the world were branches of a single trunk.

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The Master was received in Boston, Maḥmúd records, with a warmth that surprised even the Persian friends. The Free Religious Association invited Him to deliver an address at Tremont Temple. He spoke on the unity of the founders of the world's religions. The diary records the audience as standing for the duration of the closing remarks.

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Several of Boston's Unitarian ministers called on Him at His hotel during the August stay. Mahmúd records the conversations as unusually direct. The ministers had read what they could find of His writings; they came with prepared questions; the Master answered, often at length, sometimes with a single sentence. The diary preserves the impression that He had found, in the ministers, the particular kind of seriousness that He honoured.

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He spoke also at the Metaphysical Club and at the homes of prominent Bahá'ís of the city. The talks turned often to the station of Christ — for Boston, more than most American cities, held the founder of Christianity at the centre of its religious imagination. The Master addressed that centre directly. He spoke of Christ as the perfect Mirror of the divine, of the Sermon on the Mount as the eternal core of the Christian message, and of the present urgent need to live as if those words had been spoken yesterday.

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Mahmúd records, in summary of the Boston days, the impression of a city that had been long preparing the soil for what the Master brought. The seed He scattered there was scattered into ground already broken. Many of the Boston believers of later generations would trace their first interest in the Faith to one of those August talks.

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When at last the household departed for the New Hampshire hills and the Dublin retreat, the Boston friends gathered at the station. Maḥmúd records the parting as warm and the promise of return as freely given.

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entries for July 23-25 and August 23-31, 1912; see original for full text.*

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