There Is No Prison but the Self: The Master's Forty Years

*A retelling based on **'Abdu'l-Bahá in London**, which records talks 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave during His 1911 visit to England. The passages in quotation marks are His own words as taken down by those who heard them.*

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When 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to London in 1911, He was an elderly Man, white-bearded and serene, and the people who crowded to meet Him knew at least the outline of His story: that He had spent the greater part of His life a prisoner. What many of them wanted to understand was how. How does a soul endure forty years of captivity and emerge not bitter, not broken, but radiant?

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The facts were stark enough. He had been a boy of nine when His Father, Bahá'u'lláh, was driven from Persia into exile, and the child had gone with Him — from Ṭihrán to Baghdád, from Baghdád onward to Constantinople and Adrianople, and at length, under armed guard, to the penal colony of 'Akká, a walled and pestilent fortress-town on the coast of the Holy Land. There the family was imprisoned and closely watched.

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The young 'Abdu'l-Bahá grew to manhood, to middle age, and into old age inside that captivity. Decade followed decade. Only when the Ottoman government that held Him was itself overthrown, with the rise of the Young Turks in 1908, were the empire's political prisoners released — and the chains, as He would put it with a kind of grave wit, were taken from His neck and placed about the neck of the very Sultán who had kept Him bound.

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Forty years. And when, in a drawing-room in London, a visitor asked Him plainly to tell how He had felt in prison and how He regarded His freedom, the answer He gave turned the whole question inside out.

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"Freedom," He said, "is not a matter of place.

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It is a condition." He had been thankful for the prison, He told them; the lack of liberty had been pleasing to Him, because those long years had been "passed in the path of service, under the utmost difficulties and trials, bearing fruits and results." Then He said something that no one in the room could easily have expected from One just emerged from four decades behind walls: "To me prison is freedom, troubles rest me, death is life, and to be despised is honour.

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Therefore, I was happy all that time in prison."

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He went further, and located the only captivity that He believed could truly bind a human being. "When one is released from the prison of self," He said, "that is indeed release, for that is the greater prison. When this release takes place, then one cannot be outwardly imprisoned." And He gave them a picture of it from His own experience.

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When the guards had put His feet in the stocks, He recalled, He would say to them: "You cannot imprison me, for here I have light and air and bread and water. There will come a time when my body will be in the ground, and I shall have neither light nor air nor food nor water, but even then I shall not be imprisoned."

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Here is a power utterly unlike the power that held Him. The Ottoman state had walls, soldiers, decrees, the keys to every gate of 'Akká. It had every outward power there is. And it used all of it, for forty years, against this one Man — and it could not reach Him. It could chain His feet; it could not chain His spirit.

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It could shut Him within a fortress; it could not shut out the light and air He said He found there. The empire that imprisoned Him at last collapsed, and He walked free; the freedom He carried within Him had never, for one day of those forty years, been in the empire's power to take.

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The secret He named was not endurance gritted out against despair. It was a soul already free of the only prison that finally matters — the prison of the self, of fear and craving and the demand that life go as we wish. A heart so released, He told them, receives "the confirmations of the Spirit," which come "to that man or woman who accepts his life with radiant acquiescence." That phrase, *radiant acquiescence*, stayed with those who heard Him; it seemed to them the very thing they had been watching in His face the whole time He spoke.

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This is the power the Feast of Qudrat holds before us. It is not the power of the jailer, who can bind the body and nothing more. It is the power of a spirit so wholly given to God that no wall can contain it and no chain can bind it — the power that turned forty years of captivity into forty years of service, and let a prisoner of empire say, in perfect truth, that he had been free and happy all the while.

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*This is a retelling. For 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own words, see **'Abdu'l-Bahá in London**.*

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