An Open Hand in Paris

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, who hosted 'Abdu'l-Bahá in London and recorded much of His Western journey, together with the recollections of those who were with Him in Paris. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

In the autumn of 1911, after the long decades of His imprisonment had at last ended, 'Abdu'l-Bahá journeyed into Europe, and for some weeks He stayed in Paris. The city received Him as a figure of note. People of rank and learning, writers and thinkers, ministers of religion and seekers of every persuasion came in a steady stream to the apartment where He lodged, to hear Him speak of unity, of peace, of the oneness of God and the brotherhood of humankind. Each morning the rooms filled; each day His words went out to the cultivated and the curious of one of the world's proudest cities.

Yet the people who most surely drew the warmth of His heart were not the distinguished visitors. They were the poor.

For the door at which the great of Paris knocked was open also — and just as wide — to the friendless, the anxious, the destitute, and the broken. Word spread, as it always spread wherever He went, that there was a Visitor in the city who turned no one away; and so to that same apartment came the people who had nowhere else to take their troubles. A workman out of employment. A mother at the end of her resources. The sorrowful, the sick at heart, the ones whom the brilliant life of the city had no time for. They came, and they were received — not as an interruption of the more important callers, but as the callers who mattered most.

Those who watched Him in those weeks never forgot the manner of His giving. He did not deal with the poor at arm's length, dispensing relief from a height. He drew them close. He listened. To each soul who came to Him in trouble He gave His whole heart, those near Him recalled, as though that one were the only person in the world — His unhurried attention, His questions, His comfort, and, where there was need, the money from His own purse pressed quietly into a hand. He sent for physicians for the ailing. He soothed the frightened. He spoke to a weeping woman until the weeping eased. And He did it all with a courtesy so complete that no one who received His help was made to feel the shame of receiving it.

It was the same heart that had spent itself for decades upon the poor of the prison-city of 'Akká — the Friday coins pressed into waiting hands, the winter garments laid upon bent shoulders, the morning rounds to the bedsides of the sick. The walls of His captivity had fallen, and the continents had opened before Him, and the work of His hands was exactly what it had always been: the relief of the overlooked. Paris had merely become a new lane in which to walk that old errand.

There was a particular quality the witnesses tried to describe, and could only circle. It was not simply that He was generous, though He was; many people are generous. It was that His attention had no floor and no ceiling — that the beggar at His door received the very same fullness of regard as the famous visitor of the hour, and perhaps a fuller one. The lowliest person who came near Him went away feeling that he had been truly seen, truly heard, truly loved, very possibly for the first time. In a great city where the poor are mostly invisible, this was itself a kind of healing, before ever a coin changed hands.

He had taught the friends, again and again, that the poor are a sacred trust laid by God upon those who have more — that one must not be intent only upon one's own ease while another goes without. In the drawing-rooms of Paris He taught it in words to the comfortable. At His own door, to the uncomfortable, He taught it in deeds. The two were never separate in Him. The Master who could hold a roomful of Parisian intellectuals with His discourse on the unity of humankind was the same Master who, an hour later, would turn the whole force of that discourse upon a single shabby, frightened visitor — and make it real.

This is the shape of His mercy as those weeks revealed it: that greatness, in Him, bent down. The honour the city paid Him He received with the same calm detachment with which He received everything; but the love He poured out, He poured out first and most upon the people who had no honour to give Him back. That is the test, and the wonder, of a mercy that is genuine. It does not climb toward the powerful. It stoops toward the forgotten — and lifts them up.

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.