The Most Great Branch, Eighteen Years Old

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family — among them Bahíyyih Khánum, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh — of the years of exile that carried them from Baghdád onward.

We rightly speak of the Garden of Riḍván as the hour Bahá'u'lláh unveiled His Mission. But it is worth remembering who stood beside Him as He crossed the river that April afternoon. Among the small company who accompanied Him into the Garden was His eldest Son — 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then a young Man of eighteen. He who would one day be known throughout the world as the Master, the Centre of His Father's Covenant, was on that day a youth at the very threshold of the Cause He would spend the rest of His life serving.

To understand what His presence in the Garden meant, one must look back over the years that had led to it. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been a child of only eight or nine in Ṭihrán when the storm first broke upon His family — when His Father was seized and cast into the Black Pit, the family's possessions plundered, and the boy Himself, the recollections of the Holy Family relate, was set upon in the streets by other children because of the disgrace that had fallen on His house. He had walked, in the bitter winter that followed, the long and freezing road of exile from Persia to Baghdád, a journey that broke the health of grown men. Through all of it, even as a child, He had attached Himself to His Father with a devotion that those who knew the family never forgot.

In Baghdád that devotion only deepened. As 'Abdu'l-Bahá grew from boy to young Man, He made Himself, more and more, His Father's shield and His Father's servant. He took upon His own shoulders the cares that would otherwise have pressed upon Bahá'u'lláh — receiving the stream of visitors, easing the burdens of the household, standing between His Father and the troubles of the world so that the work of the Revelation might go forward undisturbed. The believers of Baghdád came to look upon this young Man with a reverence that went far beyond His years. Though no station had yet been conferred upon Him, and though He would never, in all His long life, claim any rank but that of servanthood, those about Him sensed in Him a holiness and a wisdom that set Him apart.

So when the order came that tore the family from Baghdád, and Bahá'u'lláh crossed the Tigris on the twenty-second of April 1863 to enter the garden of Najíb Páshá — the Garden the believers would call Riḍván, the Garden of Paradise — His eldest Son crossed the river with Him. With them went the two younger sons, Mírzá Mihdí and Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alí, and Bahá'u'lláh's amanuensis. The household's women and children would follow only days later, when the flooding river fell. But the Most Great Branch was at His Father's side from the first.

We are not told, in the recollections, the particular words 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke or the precise tasks He performed in those twelve days. What we know is the shape of His life, and it tells us enough. We may be certain that through that fortnight in the Garden He went on doing what He had always done — serving, guarding, easing, attending — so that His Father, in the supreme days of the Declaration, might be free to pour out upon His companions the glad-tidings He had carried in silence for ten years. The roses heaped in the tent, the friends streaming across the river, the long radiant nights: amid all of it moved the quiet, watchful figure of the eldest Son, giving, as He had given since childhood, the whole devotion of His heart to the One He served.

There is something fitting in this. The Garden of Riḍván was not only the dawn of Bahá'u'lláh's open ministry; it was, in a hidden way, the dawn of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's. The Faith proclaimed in that garden would one day be entrusted, by Bahá'u'lláh's own pen, to this same Son — appointed the Centre of His Covenant, the unerring Interpreter of His Word, the perfect Exemplar of His teachings. The Revelation whose first morning broke among those roses would be carried, after His Father's ascension, on 'Abdu'l-Bahá's shoulders to the prison-city of 'Akká, to the cities of Europe and America, and into the hearts of people of every land.

But on that April afternoon all of that still lay ahead, unseen. There was only a river to cross, a Father to serve, and a young Man of eighteen who had already decided — long before the world ever asked it of Him — to spend His life in that service. When Bahá'ís keep the First Day of Riḍván, they remember the unveiling of the Glory of God. It is worth remembering, too, the faithful Son who stood beside Him as the veil was lifted.

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.