You Are Always Here in Spirit: Julia Grundy's Last Audience
Julia M. Grundy, Ten Days in the Light of Akka, (1907), Bahai Publishing Society · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
'Akká (today: 'Akká, Israel)
Julia M. Grundy was an early American believer who made pilgrimage to ‘Akká in 1905. She kept careful notes; on her return she arranged them into the small book Ten Days in the Light of ‘Akká, which the Bahai Publishing Society of Chicago brought out in 1907 and which has carried generations of readers into the household of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
Among the most-loved scenes in the book is Grundy’s account of a private audience near the end of her stay. She had been summoned to a small room opening from the courtyard of the prison-house.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent for me. I found Him in a little room opening from the courtyard. He was sitting upon a raised chair, His beautiful face, majestic in repose and strength, turned toward the only window.
The conversation was brief but it ranged. The Master spoke of God’s bounty as a sea that knows no limit; He encouraged Grundy to seek spiritual knowledge as more enduring than worldly attachment; He said something that, like other small private sentences spoken to other pilgrims in those years, would shape the rest of her life:
You are near to God, and day by day you will progress by the knowledge of God toward spiritual joy. Then you will be a source of guidance to others.
She had, she wrote, no idea what to make of so generous a promise.
The end of the audience was the harder part. Grundy did not want to leave. She had been ten days inside a household whose like she had never imagined, and she could not see how she would carry even a fragment of it back into her American life. The Master, sensing it, gave her the sentence many pilgrims have repeated since:
You are always here in spirit; you will never be absent now.
She rose. She went out into the courtyard. She returned home, in due time, to America. The notebook in her hand became, eventually, a small book that has not gone out of print in a hundred and nineteen years. She had been, after all, made into a source of guidance.
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.
Cite this story
Grundy, J. M.. (1907). *Ten Days in the Light of Akka*. Bahai Publishing Society. https://bahai-library.com/grundy_ten_days_akka
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