The Strong Rope: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet to Mrs. Cline of Los Angeles

Among the small treasures preserved in the Star of the West in Issue 5 of Volume 4, dated June 1913, is a brief Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Mrs. Harriet Cline of Los Angeles. The editors gave it the heading The Strong Rope.

The Tablet was sent in answer, the friends of the Los Angeles community understood, to a question Mrs. Cline had submitted through one of the visiting believers. The Bahá'í community in Los Angeles in 1913 was small. It was scattered across a sprawling young city, met often in private homes, and was made up largely of women. Like the other early American communities, it was passing through the early differences of opinion that were perhaps inevitable in a faith that had been carried by American teachers from Persia to America without yet having laid down the institutional structures that would later provide its corrective discipline. Some of the friends had begun to disagree with one another about the right teaching emphasis; some had begun to take sides; some had begun, by the small movements of human ego, to drift.

Mrs. Cline had asked, in effect, what could hold a community together when its individual members were tempted to pull apart.

The Master's answer was direct.

Firmness in the Covenant is the means of the promotion of the Word of God.

The Tablet went on to develop the image. The friends were like travellers crossing a difficult country. Each one, alone, would be vulnerable to the slips and falls of the journey. Tied together by a strong rope — by the Covenant — they would support one another. The rope was not a doctrine to be debated. It was a binding allegiance to the Centre of the Covenant 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself, named by Bahá'u'lláh in the Book of His Covenant — to whom every believer's obedience was attached and through whom the unity of the body was kept.

So long as the friends held the rope — that is, so long as each of them remained personally and humbly attached to the Master — they would, in spite of any differences of opinion among themselves, continue to be carried forward together by the spiritual energy of the Cause. The moment the rope was let go — the moment a believer began to listen to the small whisperings of those who imagined themselves wiser than the centre — that believer would find himself stranded; and a community of such stranded believers, however well-meaning, would no longer be the community the Cause required.

The Tablet was short. The Star of the West gave it the small heading and printed it without further commentary. The friends who read it in 1913 — in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Boston, in Honolulu — understood at once. They held the rope. The next century of work, in spite of the differences any community would inevitably encounter, was carried by that hold.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 4, Issue 5 (June 5, 1913), Tablet to Mrs. Harriet Cline. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1913). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1