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.*

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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The Master's answer was direct.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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