He Loved Them All: 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Loving Difficult People

Julia Grundy's small 1907 book *Ten Days in the Light of 'Akká* preserves, among many table-talks, an answer the Master gave to a question every Bahá'í who has been long in any community eventually has to ask: how is one to love the person who is unpleasant, who has hurt one, who continues to make oneself difficult to love?

1 / 9

Grundy records the conversation. The Master did not, as His American visitor might have half-expected, soften the question. He took it as it was. He made one observation, simply.

2 / 9

> See how the enemies of Christ persecuted and crucified Him — > yet He loved them all.

3 / 9

That was the standard. Christ on the cross — the most extreme case of personal hostility a holy figure has ever endured — prayed for the forgiveness of those who were killing Him. He did not, in the moment, accuse them. He did not even, in the moment, withdraw His love. *Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.*

4 / 9

The Master's point was that this is not a special, isolated heroic act. This is the standard for the believer. To follow Christ — and to follow Bahá'u'lláh after Him — is to extend love to the people who, by every ordinary measure, do not deserve it. The persecutor, the gossip, the unjust judge, the former friend who has turned away, the family member whose choices have wounded the household, the religious neighbour who has misrepresented the Faith — all these stand under the same spiritual rule. They are to be loved.

5 / 9

The Master then offered an image to make the discipline intuitive. Grundy preserves it.

6 / 9

The believer, He said, should think of himself as a fruit tree. A tree does not select the person to whom it offers its fruit. It simply produces the fruit and lets it fall. The thirsty man who passes is given. The suspicious man who passes is given. The neighbour the tree might in human terms have preferred not to feed is, in fact, fed. The tree's purpose is the bearing and the giving; the moral classification of the person who eats is not the tree's responsibility.

7 / 9

Humanity's purpose, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's reading, is the same. We are made to be expressers of God's love. The love we extend is not earned by the recipient. It is the simple consequence of our own nature when our nature is functioning as it was made to function. Where the love is withheld — where the tree has begun to judge whom to feed — something in the tree itself has gone wrong.

8 / 9

Grundy carried the lesson home. She would later write that the afternoon's conversation had reordered the way she met the person she had previously found hardest in her own circle. The discipline the Master had described — *Christ on the cross; the fruit tree* — had become a small daily test against which her ordinary affections could be measured.

9 / 9