A New Continent Turns to Him: The First Western Pilgrims

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family and of the early Western pilgrims to 'Akká, together with the well-documented history of that first pilgrimage.

On the Day of the Covenant we remember that Bahá'u'lláh bade every soul turn toward 'Abdu'l-Bahá as the Centre of His Covenant. There is no more moving picture of what that turning looks like than the story of the first believers of the West who crossed the world to find Him.

It began with a longing. In the closing years of the nineteenth century the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh had reached America, carried in the words of a single teacher, and a handful of souls in cities like Chicago, New York, and Paris had embraced it. They had never seen 'Abdu'l-Bahá. They knew Him only as a name and a station — the Master, the One their Faith told them to follow. And they ached to stand in His presence.

In the autumn of 1898 the way opened. A group of American believers — among them Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, the young and radiant Lua Getsinger and her husband, May Bolles, who would later be known as May Maxwell, and Robert Turner, Mrs. Hearst's butler and the first Black believer of the West — set out across the sea. They sailed in stages, by way of Europe and Egypt and the Holy Land, their numbers gathering as they went. The journey was long and the destination unlike anything they had imagined: not a cathedral or a court, but 'Akká, a walled and fever-ridden prison-town on the coast of Ottoman Syria, where 'Abdu'l-Bahá still lived under the restrictions of a lifelong confinement.

The first of them reached 'Akká in December of 1898. They came quietly, for the authorities watched the Master's house, and too large or too open a company of foreigners could bring fresh hardship upon Him. So they entered in small parties, slipping through the gates of the old city, hardly daring to believe that the hour they had crossed the world for had truly come.

What they found undid them. They had braced themselves, perhaps, to meet a remote and awful Personage. Instead they met a love that seemed to know them already. The recollections preserved of those days speak of a tenderness none of them had words for — of a courtesy and a warmth that wrapped each pilgrim as though he or she were the only soul on earth, of meals at which the Master served His guests with His own hands, of long talks in which the deepest questions of their hearts were answered before they had finished asking them. They had come expecting to give their devotion to a station. They discovered that the station bent down to wash their travel-worn feet.

For Lua Getsinger those days kindled a fire that never went out; she would become one of the most ardent teachers the Cause has known. For May Bolles the pilgrimage was the turning of her whole life; she would carry the Faith to Canada and raise up a community there. For Robert Turner the love he received in 'Akká held him steadfast through every later trial, to the end of his days. Each of them had come as one seeker; each went home as a lamp.

And that is the quiet greatness of this story. These pilgrims were the first believers of the West ever to reach the Centre of the Covenant — the first to do, in the flesh, what Bahá'u'lláh had asked of all His followers: to turn their faces toward His Son. They had recognized Him before they ever saw Him, on the strength of Bahá'u'lláh's word alone. And having found Him, they did not keep Him to themselves. They sailed back across the ocean and became the seedbed of the Bahá'í community of an entire continent — proof that a Covenant kept in even a few hearts can spread, in a single generation, to thousands.

The prison gates of 'Akká had been built to cut 'Abdu'l-Bahá off from the world. Yet here was the world, arriving at His door — drawn from a hemisphere away by the magnet of the Covenant. The walls could confine His body. They could not keep the hearts of the faithful from turning, as they had been bidden to turn, toward the Centre Bahá'u'lláh had appointed.

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.