Omaha Stockyards: A Brief Stop on the Plains

On the afternoon of the 21st of September, 1912, after a long overnight train ride from Minneapolis, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His party arrived at Union Station in Omaha, Nebraska. The visit had been arranged at the request of a small handful of Omaha believers who had written to the Chicago friends asking that the Master, on His westward route, stop briefly to greet them. The visit was to be brief — overnight only — before the westward journey continued the following morning.

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Mahmúd records the small details. The Omaha friends — perhaps ten in number, mostly women, all newcomers to the Faith within the previous five years — met the Master at the station. They drove Him to a hotel in the downtown district where rooms had been reserved. He took a brief rest. He received the friends in the hotel parlour through the late afternoon.

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The talk He gave that evening was, by Mahmúd's note, brief and warmly pastoral. The Master did not, in this small gathering, deliver one of the great public addresses of the American tour. He spoke instead, more intimately, on the spiritual condition of the small community of inquirers that the Omaha friends were quietly building.

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He named, in His characteristic plain manner, the considerable difficulties of being a believer in a small remote place. The Omaha friends had no large gathering. They had no resident teacher. They had no institutional support. They depended, between visits from travelling teachers, on their own private prayer and their own quiet correspondence with friends in Chicago, Cleveland, and Washington. He praised them specifically for what He called the *invisible loyalty* — the steadfastness that does not require an audience to witness it.

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> In the small cities are the seeds of the great communities > the Master sees in the future.

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The phrase, lifted by Mahmúd from the closing portion of the talk, gave the small Omaha gathering its proper framing. The cities of the central plains in 1912 were not, in any of the great American Bahá'í records, prominent centres of the Faith. The Master's view of them was different. He saw, in the present small parlour gathering of ten believers, the seed of an eventual substantial Local Spiritual Assembly, the seed of regional teaching outreach to neighbouring states, the seed of a Bahá'í community that would in time take its proper place among the established American centres.

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The Omaha friends would carry the Master's words home with them. By the late 1920s the Omaha community would be substantial enough to elect its first Local Spiritual Assembly. By the late 1930s it would be a stable centre of the Faith for the central plains. The 1912 evening in the parlour of the downtown hotel was the first quiet planting of what those later decades would bring.

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The party departed by train westward the following morning.

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for September 21, 1912; see original for full text.*

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