Quarters for the Poor: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at the Bowery Mission

In Issue 3 of Volume 8 of the *Star of the West,* dated the twenty-eighth of April, 1917, the editors began to serialize extracts from Juliet Thompson's diary of the Master's American journey of 1912. Among the early entries is a small scene from the Master's first weeks in New York — His Saturday evening visit, on the 19th of April 1912, to the Bowery Mission on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

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The Bowery in 1912 was the city's most visible district of extreme poverty. The Mission served thousands of homeless men daily — a meal, a bed when one could be had, the broad preaching of the gospel. The Master had asked, almost as soon as He arrived in New York, to be taken there.

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He was. He addressed the assembled men — several hundred of them — in His characteristic short, plain speech. He told them that they were honoured by God; that the love of God did not notice the small classifications of wealth and poverty by which men ranked themselves; that He Himself, in His many years of imprisonment, had often known the same hunger they knew; and that the spiritual treasure available to each soul was not diminished by the absence of material possessions.

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Then He turned to the practical part of the visit. He had arranged in advance for a supply of silver quarters — twenty- five-cent pieces, the standard small coin of American currency — to be carried by His attendants. As the men filed past Him on their way out of the Mission hall, He placed a quarter in each man's open hand.

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Juliet preserves the simple direction He had given:

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> Surely, give to the poor!

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The phrase, in the Master's voice, was not theoretical. It was practical. He did not merely say it. He did it. He stood at the door of the Mission for the time required to put a quarter into each man's hand personally. He looked into each face. He did not delegate the act.

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The witnesses preserved the detail because they had not seen, in any other religious figure of their experience, quite the same combination: the high spiritual teaching delivered from the platform, then the small silver coin pressed by His own hand into the palm of the poorest man in the room.

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A quarter in 1912 was not a pittance. It was approximately the price of a simple meal at a workingman's restaurant. The men leaving the Mission with the quarter in their pocket had been given a real meal, with the dignity of having received it from the hand of a visiting Persian sage. Many of them would remember the evening for the rest of their lives.

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Juliet's diary captured the small phrase that lay underneath the gesture. *Surely, give to the poor.* The Master had spent His life in a household that had itself often known poverty. The instruction was not theory. It was practice. The American friends who read the entry in 1917 understood at once. So should we.

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