The Last Full Measure: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Final Years of Service

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family and of those who were close to 'Abdu'l-Bahá in His last years. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

We tend to imagine that the end of a long ordeal brings rest. For 'Abdu'l-Bahá it brought, instead, the busiest and most demanding season of His whole life.

The Great War had been a time of danger and privation in the Holy Land. The coast was blockaded; famine stalked the land; and the Master, watched and threatened by the retreating Ottoman authorities, had borne the double weight of His own peril and the feeding of a starving population. Then the war ended. The British took the region. The threats fell away. For the first time in His adult life, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was, in the worldly sense, free: free from the prison sentence, free from the shadow of the gallows, free to come and go. He was by then well advanced in years, in His mid-seventies. By every ordinary reckoning, He had earned His rest.

He did not take it. Freedom came at last, and He spent it not on rest but on a heavier round of service than ever before.

The first thing the peace restored was the pilgrims. All through the war the roads had been closed and the believers of the West cut off; no traveller could reach Haifa, and the Master's correspondence with the world had been strangled to a trickle. Now the gates of the world opened again, and the friends came streaming back. They came from Persia and from across Europe and America, the faithful who had waited years for the chance — old believers longing to see His face once more, and new ones who had never seen it at all. They arrived in a steady stream at the modest house in Haifa, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá received them all. He gave them His time without measure. He spoke with them at table, walked with them, answered their questions, poured into them the spirit and the teachings they had crossed the earth to receive, and sent them home transformed. Those who came in these last years left some of the most luminous accounts we possess of what it was to sit in His presence — and not one of them was turned away because the Master was tired.

The second thing the peace restored was the flood of letters. With the war over, the appeals and questions of a worldwide community came pouring in once more — from isolated believers and growing assemblies, from seekers and inquirers, from those in grief and those in doubt. To this ocean of correspondence 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave Himself day after day, dictating and revealing Tablets in number beyond counting, each one shaped to the soul that would receive it. In these very years He set down, among countless other writings, His weighty message on peace addressed to the leaders gathered at The Hague — laying before a war-weary world, just as the nations groped for some order to replace the carnage, the Bahá'í principles of the oneness of humankind and the abolition of war. He was an old and weary Servant in a small house on a mountainside, and from that small house went out a stream of guidance that reached the councils of the world and the loneliest believer alike.

And through it all, the third and oldest duty went on unbroken: the poor of Haifa. The same hand that revealed Tablets to the West and received pilgrims from across the earth still went out, morning after morning, to the needy of the town. Those who rose early could see Him making His way to the poorer quarters with food, with coins, with warm clothing, knowing the people by name, asking after their families. The high work and the humble work were, to Him, one work. He had carried on the feeding of the poor through the worst of the famine; He carried it on now through the labour of His final years, never imagining that the care of a widow or a blind beggar was beneath the One whom kings would soon mourn.

It was too much for any frame to bear forever, and those nearest Him could see it. The accounts preserved in The Chosen Highway describe how visibly weary He had become. He had carried the weight of the Cause for nearly thirty years — exile, the long imprisonment, the journeys to Europe and America, the famine years, and now this unceasing tide of pilgrims and letters. He began, in those last months, to speak of His own departure — gently, without fear, almost as a traveller speaks of the end of a long road and the longing for home. There was about Him a quiet readiness, as of One who had set His affairs in order and was at peace. He had already written, years before and in His own hand, the Will and Testament that would guard the Cause after Him. He had built the Shrine of the Báb on the mountain. He had given the West its teachings and the poor their bread. The work was, in every essential, complete.

And still He served to the very last. On the final Friday of His life He went, as He had gone for as long as anyone could remember, to the noonday prayer and then out among the poor, giving with His own hand. Within days, in the small hours of the twenty-eighth of November, 1921, He quietly breathed His last, as gently, the family said, as a child falling asleep. He had not slowed; He had simply finished. He poured out the last full measure of His strength in the service of God and of His fellow men, and when the cup was empty He set it down and went home.

There is a particular lesson in this that the busy and the weary of every age can take to heart. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's freedom, when at last it came, was not a reward to be enjoyed but a wider field in which to spend Himself. The years that could have been His rest became the years of His hardest labour, because to Him living and serving were the same thing, and He meant to do both to the end. He taught with His dying years exactly what He had taught with all the rest: that a life poured out for others is never squandered, and that the truest greatness is to keep faith with the smallest duty and the largest alike, right up to the final hour.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://bahai-library.com/blomfield_chosen_highway