The Image and Likeness of God: Lua Getsinger and the Sick Man of 'Akká

A retelling based on the life of Lua Getsinger as preserved in Bahá'í Chronicles and in the documented recollections of her years near 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Phrases in quotation marks are words actually recorded as the Master's, or documented facts of the account.

Lua Getsinger was, by every account that survives of her, one of the most radiant souls of the early Western community of the Faith. Born Lua Moore in 1871 on a small farm in upstate New York, she had come to the Bahá'í teachings in Chicago as a young woman, and in 1898 she was among the very first group of Western believers to make the long pilgrimage across the sea to 'Akká, into the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. That meeting marked her more deeply than it marked almost anyone. She returned to America aflame, and she became the foremost travelling teacher of her generation — so tireless in carrying the Cause from city to city that the Master named her, in His Tablets, Livá, the Banner-Bearer. Wherever she went, hearts caught fire from hers.

But the lesson that shaped her most, the one her name is most often remembered with, did not come in a great hall before a great audience. It came in a filthy back room in 'Akká, and it began with a longing every sincere soul will recognise: she wanted to serve.

She was staying in the prison-city near the Master, and her whole desire was to be of use to Him — to do something, anything, for the One she so loved. So she went to Him and asked to be given some service. And 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who never refused such a request but rarely answered it the way the asker expected, gave her a task at once. There was a man in the city, He told her, who was very poor and very sick — a friendless, wretched creature whom the Master Himself had been visiting and caring for. He had pressing matters that kept Him from going that day. Lua should go in His place: take food to the sick man, and tend to him, exactly as 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been doing.

Here was everything she had asked for. She set off gladly.

She came back undone. The place she had been sent to was worse than anything her comfortable American life had prepared her for. The room was foul; the smell was overpowering; the man himself was in a state of degradation and squalor that turned her stomach. She had nearly fainted at the door. She had done what little she could and fled, before — as she admitted — she could catch some dreadful disease from such a place. And she came back to the Master, no doubt expecting sympathy, perhaps even praise for having gone at all.

She did not get it. 'Abdu'l-Bahá looked at her, the account preserves, sadly and sternly. And then He taught her the thing she had come halfway round the world, without knowing it, to learn. If she wished to serve God, He told her, she must serve her fellow man — because in her fellow man she was to see nothing less than the image and likeness of God. "Dost thou desire to serve God?" He said. "Serve thy fellow man, for in him dost thou see the image and likeness of God."

It was a rebuke, and it was also the highest teaching He could have given her. For He was telling her that the wretched man in that foul room was not a problem to be endured or a danger to be escaped. He was a bearer of the divine image — as surely as the most cultivated soul in any drawing-room she had ever graced. The squalor was real; the smell was real; the disease she feared was real. None of that touched the truth underneath. Stripped of everything the world prizes — health, cleanliness, friends, dignity, hope — the man was still a creature made in the likeness of God, and therefore worthy of exactly the love and care the Master Himself had been giving him.

Then 'Abdu'l-Bahá sent her back. And He did not leave the task vague. If the house was dirty, she was to clean it. If the man was dirty, she was to bathe him. If he was hungry, she was to feed him. And she was not to return to the Master until all of it was done.

So Lua Getsinger — the radiant young American, the Banner-Bearer whom audiences across two continents would rise to hear — went back into that room and did the lowliest work there is. She cleaned the filth she had recoiled from. She washed the body she had been unable to look at. She fed the man she had fled. She did for a friendless stranger exactly what the Master had been doing in secret, and she did not stop until it was finished.

We are not told much of what changed in the sick man under her hands. We are told a great deal, without a word being spoken of it, about what changed in Lua. She had asked to serve God and had been handed a wretched man in a reeking room — and had discovered, in the handing, that the two were the same errand. The love of God that she carried so brilliantly into great gatherings was now tested, and tempered, in the one place where it is hardest to feel and most needed: at the bedside of someone the world had thrown away. She came out of that room a deeper servant than she had gone in. The lesson never left her. She spent the rest of her short life pouring herself out for others, and when she died in Cairo in 1916, still in the field of service, the Master mourned her as the first of the Western believers to give her whole self to the Cause.

This is the beauty the Feast of Jamál sets before us — not a beauty of appearance, which the sick man had wholly lost, but the beauty of a character that learns to see the image of God in a face the world has turned from, and to serve it on its knees. 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not teach the oneness of humankind as a fine sentiment. He sent a beloved disciple into the foulest room in 'Akká and told her that the man lying there was her brother, made like her in the likeness of God — and would not let her come home until she had treated him so.

This is a retelling. For more on her life, see the biography of Lua Getsinger in Bahá'í Chronicles and in the published recollections of the early Western believers.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/lua-getsinger/