The Man Who Lost His Socks to Prayer: Pidar-Ján of Qazvín

*A retelling based on **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.*

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Not every example of loftiness in the early Faith was a scholar who renounced his rank, or a hero who walked to a martyr's death. Some were simply poor and unremarkable people whose hearts had risen so high above the world that the world could no longer reach them. 'Abdu'l-Bahá gathered a number of these quiet souls into *Memorials of the Faithful*, and few of them shine more gently than an old man of Qazvín whom everyone called Pidar-Ján — Father Dear.

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His given name was 'Abdu'lláh. He was among the believers who left their homes in Persia and emigrated to Baghdád to be near Bahá'u'lláh during the years of His exile there, and he arrived with nothing. The Master describes him as "a godly old man, enamored of the Well-Beloved" — and then, with one of those images that linger, as a soul who "in the garden of Divine love" was "like a rose full-blown." He had no worldly position and no fortune to lose. What he had was a heart wholly given over, and that proved to be everything.

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In Baghdád he spent his days and his nights, the Master says, "communing with God and chanting prayers." And here 'Abdu'l-Bahá sets down the line that captures the whole man: "although he walked the earth, he travelled the heights of Heaven." To outward eyes he was an old man making his slow way through the streets of a city. Inwardly he was somewhere else entirely — lifted up, rapt, carried along on the remembrance of his Lord.

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He lived, the Master tells us, "in ecstasy"; he was "a man drunken, bedazzled," intoxicated not with any wine of the world but with the love of God.

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There is a law in the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh that even those with nothing should work and earn their bread, and Pidar-Ján kept it. Having no trade and no goods, he took to peddling: he would tuck a few pairs of socks under his arm and carry them through the streets and bázárs of Baghdád, calling them out for sale, that he might support himself honestly.

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But his mind was so seldom in this world that he made an easy mark for thieves, and they would rob him of his little merchandise as he wandered, lost in his prayers. At last, to keep the goods in sight, he gave up tucking them away and simply carried them out in the open, laid across his two upturned palms as he walked.

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And then came the moment that the Master preserves with what can only be called affectionate wonder. One day Pidar-Ján fell, as he so often did, to chanting a prayer — and as he chanted, the thieves came and lifted the socks from his open, outstretched hands, from directly before his eyes, and he never noticed. His goods were taken from his very palms while he watched, and he did not see it, because he was not, in any way that mattered, there. "His awareness of this world was clouded," 'Abdu'l-Bahá explains, "for he journeyed through another."

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It would be easy to smile at this as the absent-mindedness of a holy old man, and the Master's telling does have a smile in it. But it is also one of the purest pictures of detachment in all of *Memorials of the Faithful*, and it deserves to be taken seriously as such.

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Detachment, in the language of the Faith, does not mean that a person is forbidden to own anything; Pidar-Ján owned his socks and tried, dutifully, to sell them. Detachment means that the things of the world have lost their grip on the heart — that they no longer disturb its peace, no longer command its attention, no longer have the power to make it grieve.

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Most of us, if a thief lifted our goods from our hands before our eyes, would feel it as a small wound: a flash of anger, a pang of loss, a story to retell with indignation. Pidar-Ján felt nothing, because there was nothing in him for the loss to take hold of. His treasure was elsewhere, and elsewhere it was safe.

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This is precisely the inner freedom that the month of 'Alá', the month of the Fast, is meant to cultivate. The Fast trains the believer, through the long hungry hours of nineteen days, to set aside the loud demands of the body and to rest the heart on God instead — to learn, by practice, that the soul need not be the slave of what it craves or the prisoner of what it owns.

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Pidar-Ján had reached the destination that the Fast points toward. He had become a man whose centre of gravity had shifted entirely off the earth, so that the gains and losses of this world passed over him like weather over a mountain, leaving the summit untouched.

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And note what such detachment made of him among people. A heart emptied of grasping is not emptied of love; it is freed for it. The friends in Baghdád did not find this old man cold or remote. They found him so warm, so fatherly, so tender toward them all, that they set aside his given name and gave him a better one.

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They called him Pidar-Ján — Father Dear — "for he was a loving father to them all." The man who could not hold on to a pair of socks held the whole community in his affection. Detachment from things had made room in him for an undivided love of people, and of God.

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Almost every day, the Master records, this poor and rapt old man was admitted into the presence of Bahá'u'lláh — the nearness for which he had left his home and crossed into exile. And at the last, "under the sheltering care of Bahá'u'lláh," the rose full-blown was gathered: he "took flight," as the Master puts it, to "the seat of truth, in the presence of the potent king." He left this world as lightly as he had lived in it, having never let it weigh him down.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá closes the memorial with a prayer over the old man's resting place — that God might make his sepulchre fragrant with the rains of His mercy, and cast upon him the eye of Divine compassion. It is a tender farewell to a soul who owned almost nothing and yet, by the only measure that finally counts, possessed everything: a heart so lofty that the thieves of this world could empty his hands and never come near his treasure.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.*

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