Persian Rugs and Tea: A Visit to the Shrine at Bahjí

Among the most quietly luminous pages of Ten Days in the Light of 'Akká is Julia Grundy's account of her group's pilgrimage to the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh at Bahjí, a few miles north of 'Akká, where the Blessed Beauty had spent the last year of His earthly life and where He is now buried.

The party was driven out from the city on a clear morning. The mansion at Bahjí, then still in the family's possession, lay behind a quiet garden. The Shrine itself — the small chamber in which Bahá'u'lláh is interred — opens off the main building and is reached by a short walk across a tiled courtyard.

Grundy preserves the pilgrim's preparation. The party removed their shoes at the threshold of the Shrine, in the Eastern way. The floor of the inner chamber was covered with long, deep Persian rugs, soft underfoot after the dust of the road. The visitors walked across them, slowly, in single file.

At the centre of the room a low marble slab marks the burial place of Bahá'u'lláh. Around it, the air has the particular stillness that pilgrims of every generation have remarked on — not the heaviness of a tomb, but a lightness, an attention, as if the chamber itself were faintly listening.

The pilgrims knelt. Grundy does not record what was said. There were prayers in Persian, prayers in English, then a long silence. After a while the friends rose and walked out, again in single file, to the courtyard where the air was the air of the world again.

The next moment of the visit, in Grundy's account, is the moment that has stayed with readers ever since.

Ladies served tea afterward while sharing other pilgrims' experiences.

The women of the household — the daughters of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in many cases, and the friends from the families of Bahá'í believers in the area — had set a long table for tea in one of the reception rooms of the mansion. The pilgrims, still in the quietness of the Shrine, were seated and given tea and small sweets. As they drank, the conversation began.

The conversation was not about doctrine. It was about other pilgrimages: who had come last month, what those pilgrims had been told, how the work of the Cause was going in the cities they had come from. The atmosphere was, in Grundy's word, that of solemn communion — the reverence of the Shrine carried, by hospitable Persian custom, into the smaller and more human sociability of a tea table.

The detail Grundy preserved is small. But it captures something essential about how the early pilgrims received the Faith. The high spiritual moments — the kneeling, the prayer, the long silence — were always set into a fabric of ordinary human warmth. The tea was as much a part of the pilgrimage as the prayer had been. The Bahá'í household at 'Akká had taught its visitors, without saying so, that hospitality and worship are not two separate things. They are the same single act seen from two sides.

Source: Julia M. Grundy, Ten Days in the Light of Akka (Bahai Publishing Society, 1907). Public domain pilgrim's notes; archived at bahai-library.com.

Grundy, J. M.. (1907). *Ten Days in the Light of Akka*. Bahai Publishing Society. https://bahai-library.com/grundy_ten_days_akka