Beggars and Brothers: The Bowery Mission Address

On the evening of the 19th of April, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went in person to the Bowery Mission on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Mission was the principal homeless shelter of lower New York. It served, on a typical evening, several hundred men — labourers without work, immigrants without language, alcoholics without resources — who came in for the evening meal and, when there was room, for a bed.

The Master had been in New York for only eight days. He had asked to be taken to the Mission as one of His earliest American engagements. The Mission's superintendent, expecting the visitor of distinction his guests would not have known how to receive, had set out a small platform at the front of the dining hall and had asked the assembled men to be quiet during the address.

The Master rose. He looked over the hall. He began with a sentence the men had certainly never been addressed by before.

Tonight I have come to meet you, the kings of God's earth.

The Promulgation of Universal Peace preserves the talk that followed. The Master reframed the spiritual condition of the men in the room. They had been told, He said, that they were the failures of the city — that the bankers and the merchants and the property owners on the higher streets of Manhattan were the successful and the worthy. That picture, He said, is upside down.

The kings of any city, the Master taught, are those whose souls are turned toward God. The bankers and merchants of the higher streets — though they had houses and carriages — were often the slaves of their own attachments. The men in the Mission hall, if they would turn their hearts toward the Divine reality, were the freer and more royal souls. The poverty of their pockets did not, in the spiritual ledger, correspond to any poverty of their station. The opposite was often closer to the truth.

He went on, in plain language adapted to the audience, to state the central teachings: the unity of the human family; the equal dignity of every soul; the necessity of seeing in every human face the image of the Creator. He did not preach. He spoke with the gravity of a sage addressing a royal court.

When the talk was finished — and the closing arrangements described in Juliet Thompson's diary entry of the same evening were carried out — the Master moved to the door of the Mission hall. He had asked, in advance, that twenty- five-cent silver pieces be carried in His attendants' pockets. As the men filed out, the Master placed a quarter in each open hand Himself.

The gesture was small. Its meaning, in the spiritual atmosphere of the evening, was immense. The Master had addressed the men as kings. He was now serving them as the host of the visible court. The American friends who had accompanied Him to the Mission — Juliet Thompson among them — remembered the evening for the rest of their lives. The men in the Bowery hall, for whom no Persian sage had ever before come to call them by their proper title, would have remembered also.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of April 19, 1912 at the Bowery Mission, New York. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/