You Are Always Here in Spirit: Julia Grundy's Last Audience

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.

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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.

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> ‘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.

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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:

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> 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.

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She had, she wrote, no idea what to make of so generous a promise.

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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:

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> You are always here in spirit; you will never be absent now.

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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.

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