The Opening of the West: The First Pilgrims to 'Akká

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, which records the arrival of the first Western pilgrims in 'Akká. Short phrases in quotation marks are the Guardian's own words.*

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For more than half a century the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh had grown almost entirely within the lands of Persia and the Ottoman Empire, watered by the blood of its martyrs in the East. Then, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it crossed the ocean.

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A small Bahá'í group had formed in Chicago, taught by a travelling teacher; and from that seed a longing arose among the new American believers to look upon the One who stood at the centre of the Faith they had embraced — 'Abdu'l-Bahá, still a prisoner of the Ottoman state in the fortress town of 'Akká.

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The story of how the first of them came to Him is, at its heart, a story of service: of believers who used what they had — their wealth, their energy, their willingness to risk inconvenience and worse — to bind the new community of the West to the Covenant of God.

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The figure who made it possible was Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a wealthy and generous American woman who had heard of the Faith from Lua Getsinger and had embraced it. She conceived the idea of a pilgrimage and, in large part, financed it. In September of 1898 the first travellers set out from the United States. Others were gathered along the way; in Paris, the young May Ellis Bolles and two of Mrs. Hearst's nieces joined the company. In all, fifteen Western believers would make the journey.

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They could not go as a single visible band. 'Abdu'l-Bahá was a prisoner under the eye of suspicious authorities, and a sudden crowd of foreigners descending on 'Akká might have brought fresh danger upon Him and upon the exiled Holy Family. So the pilgrims came quietly, the Guardian records, "in three successive parties." The first of these — including Dr. and Mrs.

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Getsinger — "reached the prison-city of 'Akká on December 10, 1898." For the final approach the travellers went discreetly, slipping across from Haifa, some of them under the cover of darkness, so as not to draw the notice of the watchers.

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Among the party was a man whose presence quietly announced one of the Faith's central principles. Robert Turner, who served in Mrs. Hearst's household, made the pilgrimage with her and attained the presence of the Master — and so became the first person of African descent in the West to embrace the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh. That the very first contingent of Western pilgrims should include, side by side, a woman of great fortune and a Black American servant was no accident in a Faith whose Founder had abolished every distinction of race and rank before God.

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The visits were brief — a matter of days — and hedged about with caution. Yet what passed in those days was, in Shoghi Effendi's reckoning, of the first importance. The pilgrims were brought into "intimate personal contact" with "the Center of Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant." They sat in the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá; they heard Him; they carried away the impress of His character. The Guardian does not measure the event by its outward smallness.

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"All these," he writes of the pilgrimage and what surrounded it, "marked the opening of a new epoch in the development of the Faith in the West, an epoch whose significance the acts subsequently performed by some of these same pilgrims and their fellow-disciples have amply demonstrated."

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That last clause is the key. The worth of the journey lay in what its travellers became. Lua Getsinger would pour out her life teaching the Cause across two continents. May Bolles would carry the Faith to Paris and Montreal and raise up a daughter who would one day stand at the very heart of the Bahá'í world. Phoebe Hearst would be remembered by the Master as a mother of the faithful. From that quiet contingent of fifteen, slipping into 'Akká in the winter dark, ran lines of service that would help establish the Faith across an entire hemisphere.

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This is why the first Western pilgrimage belongs to a Feast of Mulk, of Dominion. The dominion of the Cause is not spread by conquest but by the patient, costly devotion of ordinary believers who go where they are needed and give what they have. A handful of Americans crossed the world to sit for three days at the feet of a Prisoner — and in doing so opened a door through which a continent would follow.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi.*

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