Minneapolis and St. Paul: The Twin Cities Welcome the Master

On the morning of the 19th of September, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His party arrived by overnight train at the Great Northern Station in Minneapolis. The visit had been arranged at the request of Mr. Albert Hall — a Minneapolis attorney and one of the small group of Bahá'ís who had founded the community in the Twin Cities — and would last only thirty-six hours.

Mahmúd records the appointments. The Master was met at the station by Hall and a small delegation of believers. He was taken to the Hall residence in south Minneapolis, where He took breakfast and rested briefly. He spent the morning receiving inquirers in the parlour. In the afternoon He addressed a public gathering at the Plymouth Congregational Church near downtown — a Congregational pulpit then known for its theological openness — on the now-familiar themes of the unity of the human family and the necessity of universal peace.

The audience at Plymouth was, by Mahmúd's estimate, several hundred. The Master's talk was followed by a long question period during which He answered, with His characteristic patience and good humour, the questions the audience put to Him: about the relation of the Bahá'í Faith to Christianity; about the position of women under the new dispensation; about the prospects for international peace given the growing tensions in Europe; about His own personal experience of imprisonment.

The evening meeting was the small one. The Twin Cities Bahá'ís — perhaps twenty-five souls in total, gathered from both Minneapolis and St. Paul — assembled in the Hall parlour for a private session with the Master. He sat among them, served tea, asked each by name about their work and their families, and gave them the kind of close pastoral attention He gave to every small community He visited on the tour.

Each one of you is the center of a city you have not yet seen.

The phrase, lifted by Mahmúd from the Master's closing remarks at the evening gathering, gave the Twin Cities friends the framing for their own next labour. The Master had explained that they themselves — though they were few in number, and though their city was not one of the great American Bahá'í centres — were the seed of an eventual substantial community. They were, He said, the center of a city you have not yet seen. The believers around them, the gatherings that would in time multiply, the Local Spiritual Assembly that would in time be elected — all these were present already, in seed form, in the small parlour where they had gathered that evening.

The next morning the party crossed the river to St. Paul, where the Master greeted the small group of believers there and addressed a brief reception at the Knights of Pythias hall. By that evening the party was on the train westward toward Omaha. The Twin Cities visit had been short. Its imprint on the small community would last for generations.

Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entries for September 19-20, 1912; see original for full text.

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