The Master in the Unitarian Pulpit: Brooklyn, 1912

In *Portals to Freedom* Howard Colby Ives — by the spring of 1912 the Unitarian minister of the Church of the Saviour in Brooklyn — describes the Sunday morning on which, having spent some weeks in close company with the Master, he invited Him to preach from his own pulpit.

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The arrangement, he records, had not been an obvious one. Ives's congregation was a small, theologically liberal community that had not previously hosted Eastern speakers. The Unitarian denomination was open to interfaith engagement in principle but not yet much practised in the actual exchange. Ives proposed it nevertheless. The trustees of the church, after some discussion, agreed.

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The Sunday morning was clear. The Master arrived in the small motor-car that had been put at His disposal during His New York stay. The congregation, which had been augmented by some visitors who had heard of the announcement, filled the church. Ives himself, he records, stood in the vestibule with His visitor while the prelude was played, then walked Him up the centre aisle to the chancel. He took his own seat in the front pew. He yielded the pulpit.

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá ascended the pulpit. He stood in His Persian robes in the pulpit Ives had occupied every Sunday for years. He spoke, through the interpreter, on the unity of the Manifestations of God — on the single light that, He said, had come down through Moses, Christ, and Muḥammad, and that was now, in the present age, illuminating the world afresh through the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh.

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Ives sat in his own pew and listened. He records the disorientation of the experience with the candour the book is known for:

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> I sat in my own pew while the Master spoke from my own > pulpit, and the church I had served for years was no longer > the church I had thought it was.

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The talk, he records, did not contradict anything he had been preaching from the same pulpit. It enlarged it. The God of his Unitarian theology — the God of the philosophical monotheism, the God of the moral law — was named with the same words; but the names were now placed inside a frame that included the Manifestations of every age. Ives's own preaching had hinted at such a frame; the Master had simply, in His quiet voice, completed it.

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The benediction was given. The organ sounded. The congregation, some bewildered, some quietly moved, filed out into the Brooklyn morning. Several of them, Ives records, would in later months become Bahá'ís. He himself, by the time the door of his own church had closed behind the Master that morning, was already half-resolved on a step that would take him, in the months ahead, out of the Unitarian ministry and into the service of the Cause to which he would devote the remainder of his life.

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*Paraphrased from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937); see original for full text.*

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