Tea Drunk Without Sugar: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Lesson on the Poor

Visitors to ‘Akká in the years before the Master’s passing recorded a small household story. A guest, sitting at His table, noticed that the Master took His tea black. The guest inquired, in the polite Persian way, whether the absence of sugar was a matter of preference.

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The Master smiled and answered, in the recorders’ several versions, with substantially the same words. He had visited a certain village in Persia in His younger years, He said. The believers there had been very poor. They had set before Him their best — black tea in small cups, brewed dark and strong. There had been no sugar. The believers had apologised for its absence; sugar was a luxury they could not afford.

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The Master had drunk the tea black. He had drunk it black gladly, the visitors record Him saying, because in that village the only sweetness available was the love of the friends, and that sweetness was sufficient. He had returned, in due course, to His own household and to the better-furnished tables of ‘Akká. But He had decided, after that visit, never again to take sugar in His tea.

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The decision was small. He did not press it on others; the guests at His table were given sugar with their cups. He himself simply set the small bowl aside and drank as He had drunk in the village — black, strong, and without sweetness that His distant friends could not share.

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*How could I take sugar in My tea when My friends in that village had none?*

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The recorders note that He told the story without theological elaboration. He did not preach a sermon on the duty of solidarity. He simply, in the course of an ordinary tea, named what He had decided and went on with the visit. The teaching was in the act, not in the lecture.

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The believers who heard it told it again. It became, in the Bahá’í household tradition, a small icon of the Master’s hospitality and His sense of fellowship: that the table at which He sat in ‘Akká was, in His own awareness, the same table as the table of the poor village in Persia, and that nothing would be permitted at one that the other could not also enjoy.

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*Paraphrased from Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 2000); see original for full text.*

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