Honour Given to the Lowly: The Master and the Forgotten

*A retelling based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, who gathered the recollections of the Holy Family and of those who lived near 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The narrative is retold in our own words.*

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There are two ways to relieve the poor, and the difference between them is the whole difference the Feast of Sharaf, the Feast of Honour, is about. One way is to give the poor man bread and let him remain, in your eyes and his own, a poor man — a recipient, an inferior, an object of your charity.

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The other way is to give him bread *and* to give him, along with it, his dignity — to receive him as you would receive an honoured guest, to speak to him as an equal, to let him feel, perhaps for the first time, that he is a person of worth. The first way meets a need. The second confers an honour.

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And it is the second way, the recollections preserved in *The Chosen Highway* make clear, that marked everything 'Abdu'l-Bahá did among the forgotten.

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Lady Blomfield — the English believer whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá named Sitárih Khánum, "Star" — spent long hours in the Holy Land listening to those who had lived beside Him, and she set down what they told her. What emerges from their recollections is not simply that the Master was generous, though He was endlessly generous. It is that He had a particular genius for restoring dignity to people from whom the world had stripped it. He seemed unable to look at any human being, however low their station, and see anything other than a soul worthy of honour.

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Consider, first, His own household. In the society of that time and place, servants were servants — a class apart, expected to keep their place, addressed with the casual authority that masters everywhere assume. In the household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá it was not so. Those who served Him were treated, the recollections make plain, not as inferiors but very nearly as members of His own family. He inquired after their troubles. He carried their burdens as His own.

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He would not allow them to be spoken to harshly or treated as less than the guests they waited upon. A man who works in such a house does not feel himself a servant; he feels himself honoured. The Master had a way of lifting the people around Him simply by the manner in which He regarded them.

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Consider, next, the poor of the prison-city. It is well remembered how 'Abdu'l-Bahá cared for the destitute of 'Akká and later of Haifa — the Friday gatherings, the winter garments, the visits to the sick. But the recollections dwell on something beyond the giving itself: the *manner* of it. When He went among the poor, He did not distribute alms from above, as a great personage dispensing favours to lesser creatures.

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He went among them as a friend goes among friends. He knew them by name. He asked after their children. He took the hand of the leper and the beggar that others shrank from. He spoke to the man whom no one would hire as though that man's life and worries mattered — because, in His eyes, they did.

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The coin He pressed into an open palm came wrapped in a courtesy that told its receiver: *you are not a beggar to me; you are a person, and you are worthy of honour.* For many of those people, that recognition was rarer and more precious than the coin.

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And consider, finally, what He refused for Himself. The same Master who heaped honour upon the lowly would accept none of it on His own account. Those who knew Him record that He turned aside the deference people tried to show Him, disliked being treated as a great man, and was happiest in the company of children, the poor, and the unimportant. He wore the plainest clothing. He kept the simplest fare.

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When the British government, after the war, conferred a knighthood upon Him in recognition of His feeding the hungry of the whole region through the famine, He accepted the title without ceremony and set it aside; the honour the world offered Him meant little, while the dignity of a single hungry family meant everything. Here is the deep logic of His life laid bare: He poured out upon the forgotten the very honour He declined to keep for Himself.

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He was, one might say, a redistributor of dignity — taking the world's whole scale of worth, by which the great are honoured and the lowly despised, and quietly turning it upside down.

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This was not mere kindness of temperament. It was the lived expression of a teaching. 'Abdu'l-Bahá taught, as His Father had taught, that every human being is a noble creation, that the worth of a soul is not measured by rank or wealth or birth, and that the poor are a sacred trust. Most people who hold such a belief hold it as an idea.

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He held it as a practice, hour by hour, in the way He looked at a servant and the way He took a beggar's hand. The oneness of humanity was, for Him, not a doctrine to be proclaimed from a platform but a courtesy to be extended to the next person who came through the door, whoever they were.

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The world's idea of honour runs upward. It flows toward those already high — the titled, the wealthy, the powerful — and away from those already low. 'Abdu'l-Bahá reversed the current. He let honour flow downward, toward the servant, the leper, the widow, the man no one would employ, the child no one noticed.

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To those the world counted as nothing, He gave the one thing they were never given: the sense of their own worth in the sight of God. And in giving it away so freely, He revealed where honour truly comes from. It is not a possession to be guarded at the top of a social ladder. It is a gift the noble soul confers, and the nobler the soul, the lower it is willing to stoop to bestow it.

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That is the honour the Feast of Sharaf sets before us — not the honour we claim for ourselves, but the honour we are willing to give to those who have been denied it. The Master spent His life giving it away.

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He left us, in the recollections Lady Blomfield preserved, not only the memory of a great Personage who was kind to the poor, but the far more searching example of One who treated the least important person in any room as the most worthy of honour — and called the rest of us, by His example, to do the same.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield.*

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