Crumbs for the Pigeons: A Small Habit of Bahá'u'lláh

Mr. Furutan, in Stories of Bahá’u’lláh, preserves a small domestic memory from the last years of Bahá’u’lláh’s life at Bahjí — the country mansion outside ‘Akká where, after the gradual easing of the Ottoman regulations, He spent His final period.

The witnesses preserve that He had taken, in those years, the habit of stepping out into the small garden each afternoon at a particular hour. He carried with Him, in His left hand, a small handful of grain. The pigeons of the plain — wild birds of the sort that gathered on the mud roofs of the village — had, across many afternoons, learned the hour. They would gather on the wall. They would gather in the dust at His feet. He would scatter the grain. He would speak to them, in low Persian, while they ate. When the grain was finished He would stand quietly until the pigeons had finished their visiting and gone back to the wall. Then He would turn, and go in.

A believer of the household once asked, on a day when the weather was poor, whether He would not for once stay indoors. The witnesses preserve the gentle answer. I do not wish to disappoint the birds.

The remark, Furutan notes, became a small saying among the household. The pigeons, after all, had not been promised anything; they had merely been given grain across many afternoons, and they had come to expect it. The Manifestation of God, on a winter day with weather He need not have stepped out into, would not break the small expectation of a flock of wild birds.

The pattern continued, the witnesses record, until the last months. The believers who tended the household after His ascension noticed, in the early days, that the pigeons came at the appointed hour to the wall. There was no one to scatter the grain. The birds waited. After some weeks they ceased to come. The household, recounting this to later visitors, observed that the pigeons had been the last creatures to know.

The story, in Furutan’s short chapter, is small. It is offered not as a teaching but as a witness. The Manifestation of God, the witnesses record, was as faithful to the wild birds of the plain as He was to the kings to whom He addressed His Tablets. The greatness of His station did not displace the smallness of His daily kindness.

Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh (Ali-Akbar Furutan, George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.

Furutan, A.. (1986). *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh*. George Ronald.