No Meeting on Mount Carmel Today
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When in Bahá'í history
Haifa (today: Haifa, Israel)
On pilgrimage May Maxwell came to realize that every word and every act of the Master’s had meaning and purpose. The pilgrim party was invited to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ‘under the cedar trees on Mount Carmel where He had been in the habit of sitting with Bahá’u’lláh.’ She recalled that “on Sunday morning we awakened with the joy and hope of the meeting on Mount Carmel. The Master arrived quite early and after looking at me, touching my head and counting my pulse, still holding my hand He said to the believers present: ‘There will be no meeting on Mount Carmel today … we could not go and leave one of the beloved of God alone and sick. We could none of us be happy unless all the beloved were happy.’ We were astonished. That anything so important as this meeting in that blessed spot should be cancelled because one person was ill and could not go seemed incredible. It was so contrary to all ordinary habits of thought and action, so different from the life of the world where daily events and material circumstances are supreme in importance that it gave us a genuine shock of surprise, and in that shock the foundations of the old order began to totter and fall. The Master’s words had opened wide the door of God’s Kingdom and given us a vision of that infinite world whose only law is love. This was but one of many times that we saw ‘Abdu’l-Bahá place above every other consideration the love and kindness, the sympathy and compassion due to every soul. Indeed, as we look back upon that blessed time spent in His presence we understand that the object of our pilgrimage was to learn for the first time on earth what love is, to witness its light in every face, to feel its burning heat in every heart and to become ourselves enkindled with this divine flame from the Sun of Truth, the Essence of whose being is love.”
Source: Vignettes from the Life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Annamarie Honnold), p. 87, quoting May Maxwell, An Early Pilgrimage.
Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: sick-caring).
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