Tablet to Mrs. Lua Getsinger after Her Pilgrimage

Among the most personally addressed of the Tablets in the 1909 compilation of *Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas* is the Tablet sent by the Master to Lua Getsinger shortly after her return to America from her 1898 pilgrimage to 'Akká.

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Lua Getsinger had been one of the small group of Western pilgrims — the very first such group — who had travelled to 'Akká in late 1898 in fulfilment of the long-standing desire of the early American believers to attain the presence of the Master. The journey had been undertaken at considerable personal expense and under conditions of substantial difficulty: the Holy Land was, in 1898, still under Ottoman jurisdiction, and the visit of foreign pilgrims to a publicly recognised political prisoner was not without risk.

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The pilgrimage itself was brief — perhaps a fortnight in the Master's presence. The intensity of the experience, preserved in the journal Lua kept and in the letters of the other pilgrims of the same party, was substantial. The travellers returned to America transformed.

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The Tablet that the Master sent after Lua's return was not a polite acknowledgement of the visit. It was a commissioning. The Tablet opens with the characteristic salutation — *O thou maid-servant of God!* — and proceeds at once to the work that the Master expected of His visitor in the years that lay ahead.

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> Thy pilgrimage is the beginning, not the end. Arise now > to the work that has been entrusted to thee. The > believers of America are awaiting the teaching that thou > hast received in 'Akká. Disperse it in their cities; let > not a single major town remain unvisited; let not a > single inquiring soul depart from thy presence > unenkindled. The Spirit of the Lord is with thee; the > hosts of the Supreme Concourse are arrayed for thy > assistance.

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The commissioning was substantial. Lua received, with the Tablet, the title that has accompanied her name in subsequent Bahá'í history: *the mother teacher of the West.* The title was not honorific. It was a description of the role the Master expected her to play in the teaching work of the American community in the years to come.

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She lived up to the commission. From her return in early 1899 until her death in Cairo in 1916, she travelled unceasingly through the cities of the United States, through Europe, through Egypt, teaching the Cause in private and public, opening many new American communities, training many later teachers. She was, in the early twentieth-century American Bahá'í community, the most itinerant and the most widely encountered of the early teachers.

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The Master, at her death, sent a Tablet of mourning to the American friends. The Tablet acknowledged her completion of the commissioning that had been laid on her in the earlier Tablet of 1899. *She did the work she was given. Her place is high.*

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The 1909 publication of the original Tablet preserved, for the wider American Bahá'í community, the Master's own words of commissioning to one of their own first teachers.

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