He Always Had Time for Them: 'Abdu'l-Bahá with the Children

Mahmúd's Diary preserves, among the political receptions and the hotel banquets and the church-pulpit talks of the 1912 American journey, a thread of small entries that recur in nearly every city the Master visited. They concern the children.

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In New York, in Chicago, in Washington, in San Francisco, in the quiet New Hampshire weeks at Dublin — wherever 'Abdu'l-Bahá met a gathering of Bahá'ís, the children were brought to Him. The diary records their bringing in nearly every entry.

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The pattern was consistent. The Master would interrupt whatever He was doing to receive them. If a talk was in progress, He would pause. If a meal was being served, He would set down the spoon. The children — Persian, American, white, Black, recently arrived immigrants, well-dressed daughters of New York society — were drawn to His knee with no distinction made among them.

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He would ask their names. He would ask their ages. He would ask, in His warm broken English or through Maḥmúd's interpretation, what they had been doing that day. He would listen with an attention that, the parents often noted in later years, the children had received from no other adult in their experience.

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He kept candies in His pocket. The diary records, with the plainness that is one of its most attractive features, that the candies were there *on purpose.* They were never there by accident. They were a piece of the Master's intentional preparation for the children He knew would come. Each child received one. He would press it into the small palm with His own hand and close the fingers over it.

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Then He would kiss the cheek and turn the child gently back toward the parent. The talk would resume. The meal would continue.

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The children did not know, in those moments, what they had received. Many of them remembered only, in later life, that an old gentleman in a white robe had given them a sweet and had listened to them as if they were the most important visitor of the day. Several of them, having grown to adults, would become Hands of the Cause, members of National Spiritual Assemblies, pioneers to distant countries. Several of them, the ordinary believers of the next generation, simply lived the kindness they had received as children into the children they themselves later raised.

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The candies in the Master's pocket were a small thing. They were also one of the recurring images by which Maḥmúd's diary preserves Him.

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), recurring entries throughout the American tour, April-December 1912; see original for full text.*

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