The Food Spiritual: A Meal in 'Akká

Among the small scenes Julia Grundy preserved in Ten Days in the Light of 'Akká is a meal at the Master's own table. The American pilgrims had been seated in the long low room. The dishes came in — rice, a stew, the round flat bread that was the staple of the household, perhaps a little fruit. 'Abdu'l-Bahá took His seat at the head, said the formal Eastern grace, and began to eat with His fingers — the customary practice in the Persian household of His upbringing.

Grundy and her companions, accustomed to the elaborate cutlery of the American dining room, watched with mild discomfort. They did not know what to do with their own hands.

The Master noticed at once. He smiled. He did not insist that they imitate Him. He did not condescend to the difference. He turned, with the easy lightness of His manner at table, what might have been an awkward moment into a brief conversation.

The Persian way, He explained, was the older way; the Eastern hand, He said with a smile, knew its own work. There was no difficulty about a knife and a fork; if His Western guests wished, He would have one brought. But there was something else worth noticing — namely, that the most important food of all required no instrument whatever to receive it.

There is a kind of food which needs neither knife nor fork — it is the food spiritual.

The remark turned the table. Grundy preserves the substance of what came next. The Master spoke of the discipline of Eastern hospitality, in which the host eats from the same dish as the guest and the food is shared without separation; He spoke of respect for the customs of the country one is in. Then He drew the analogy.

The body needs daily food. So does the soul. The body's food becomes part of the body and is consumed; the soul's food becomes part of the soul and is added to the soul. The first is consumed and replenished; the second accumulates and never diminishes. Both are necessary. The believer who attends only to the food of the body, however refined his table manners, will slowly starve in the part of himself that finally matters most.

The Master then made a quiet observation that Grundy preserved with care. Some food brings life; some food brings only apathy. Even physical food, eaten without gratitude or eaten in excess, becomes a deadening. So the test of any nourishment, of either body or soul, is whether what one is consuming is making one more alive — quicker to love, quicker to serve, quicker to notice — or less alive, duller, sleepier, more inward-curled.

The meal continued. The American pilgrims, Grundy notes, picked up their own bread now without embarrassment and ate as the Master ate. The small lesson had quietly worked itself into the hour.

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