One Family at the Master's Table

*A retelling based on **Ten Days in the Light of Akka** by Julia M. Grundy, the notes of a Western pilgrim who visited 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 1905. These are pilgrim notes — a sincere personal record rather than authenticated scripture. Phrases in quotation marks are words she recorded as the Master's.*

1 / 13

In the first years of the twentieth century, a small company of Western believers made the long journey across the sea and the dusty roads of the Holy Land to the walled prison-city of 'Akká, where 'Abdu'l-Bahá was still held captive by order of the Ottoman state. Among them was an American woman named Julia Grundy, who set down afterward, in plain and grateful words, what she had seen and heard in those ten days.

2 / 13

What struck her was not grandeur — there was none; this was a prison town, and the Master and His family lived under restriction and surveillance. What struck her was a quality of love she had never met before, and most of all the way that love quietly dissolved the lines that ordinarily divide human beings.

3 / 13

For the pilgrims did not eat alone, nor among their own kind. At the Master's table they found themselves seated beside believers utterly unlike themselves — Persians and Arabs and Westerners, the cultivated and the unlettered, people of different races and nations and walks of life, who in the world outside would never have shared a meal, and might never even have spoken. Here they sat together as though they had always belonged to one another. To a visitor from a society sorted carefully by colour and class and country, it was a startling thing to witness.

4 / 13

The Master did not leave them to wonder at it in silence. He told them plainly what they were seeing. **"The highest and greatest is the spiritual,"** He said to them; **"the physical is of no importance."** The ties of blood and birth and nation that the world treats as everything, He set gently aside as the lesser thing. What bound this strange and varied company together was of another order altogether.

5 / 13

**"At this table,"** He told them, **"we are joined in spiritual relationship. We are all of one family, because we are under the Shadow of the Blessed Perfection."** Not guests of different ranks gathered for an occasion — one family. Brothers and sisters. Kin.

6 / 13

And He told them how such a family is possible, how love can be made to reach across every difference. **"Man is like a tree,"** He said. **"The tree lives to produce fruit. The fruit of man is love."** A human life that bears no love, He was teaching them, is like a tree that bears nothing, whatever else it may have.

7 / 13

And the love that is the true fruit of a human being is not a love that chooses, that warms to one face and cools at another. **"If the love of God is shining in our hearts,"** He said, then we **"may see that love reflected in every personality, and love all alike."** Every personality — the foreign, the poor, the difficult, the stranger across the table. All alike.

8 / 13

Lest anyone imagine this an easy or sentimental thing, the Master spoke it in its full and costly measure. **"We must love all humanity as the children of God,"** He said. **"Even if they kill us, we must die with love for them."** There was a man who had earned the right to say it.

9 / 13

He spoke those words from within a prison He had not deserved, having spent His whole life — childhood, youth, and age — in exile and confinement for His Father's Cause, surrounded by those who wished Him ill. The love He was describing was not a theory He had read; it was the very air He breathed, and His captors themselves had felt it.

10 / 13

When the ten days were over and the pilgrims turned back toward their distant homes, they carried with them many things — but perhaps nothing they could not forget more than the memory of that table. They had seen, with their own eyes and over an ordinary shared meal, what the world keeps insisting is impossible: people of every race and nation and condition made, in truth and not in word only, one family.

11 / 13

This is the beauty the Feast of Jamál is named for. Not beauty hung on a wall to be admired, but the beauty of the human family when love has gathered it into one — a beauty 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not merely describe, but set before His guests, warm and real, at His own table in a prison by the sea.

12 / 13

*This is a retelling from pilgrim notes. For the fuller account, see **Ten Days in the Light of Akka** by Julia M. Grundy.*

13 / 13