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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
28 stories on this theme.
A short paraphrase from the Baha'i Stories Blog about a small encounter on a Washington sidewalk: a blind beggar at the corner of the boarding-house street, the Master's daily greeting to him, and the small daily coin pressed into his palm.
In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield records an afternoon in September 1911 when 'Abdu'l-Bahá visited a poor district of east London — a settlement house among the dock-workers' families — and spoke to a hall of children who had never before heard a man speak as one of them.
'Abdu'l-Bahá crossed the whole city of London to visit poor children no one important ever bothered with — and one little girl gave Him a gift she had held in her hand all afternoon.
One night 'Abdu'l-Bahá set aside His busy plans to visit four hundred poor men, calling each one His brother and pressing a coin into every hand.
Mahmúd's Diary records that on the evening of April 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá interrupted His program of formal receptions to go in person to the Bowery Mission in New York. He spoke to four hundred poor men, distributed coins to each from His own hand, and returned to His hotel near midnight.
Pidar-Ján of Qazvín was a poor old man who emigrated to Baghdád to be near Bahá'u'lláh, and there gave his days and nights to prayer. So absorbed was he in the remembrance of God that thieves once lifted the goods from his open hands while he chanted, and he did not notice. 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered him as a soul who walked the earth but travelled the heights of Heaven.
On the Friday before His passing in 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá rose, attended the noonday congregational prayer, and then — as He had done for as long as anyone could remember — distributed alms to the poor of Haifa with His own hand. It was His last public act of the service that had filled His whole life.
Exiled and dispossessed, Bahá'u'lláh spent ten years in Baghdád showering kindness upon all who came to Him — the poor, the lowly, the learned, and even those who had wished Him harm. By the time a fresh banishment drove Him on to Constantinople, the whole city had come to love Him; and on the day He rode away, men and women of every rank wept in the streets and pressed forward to embrace His stirrups.
On pilgrimage to 'Akká, Lua Getsinger longed to serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá. He gave her the chance — and sent her to a poor, sick, friendless man in the filthiest quarter of the city. When she recoiled from the squalor, the Master taught her the hardest and most beautiful lesson of her life: whoever would serve God must serve his fellow man, for in every human being is the image and likeness of God.
On Christmas night of 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went to a shelter in Westminster where about a thousand of London's homeless and friendless men had gathered for a Christmas meal. He told them that His company had ever been with the poor, that He counted Himself one of them, and that in the sight of God poverty was greater than wealth — and He left money so the men might feast again on New Year's night.
Mírzá Maḥmúd of Káshán and Áqá Riḍá of Shíráz walked on foot beside the howdah of Bahá'u'lláh from Baghdád to Constantinople, through famine and exhaustion, cooking and serving the believers far into each night and rising again at dawn. In poverty so deep that seven of them once dined on a single handful of dates, they counted themselves in Heaven — for, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's account, their sole desire was to please Bahá'u'lláh, and they were perfectly content with whatever the will of God sent them.
Ásíyih Khánum — the lady Bahá'u'lláh named Navváb — was born to wealth and rank, a Persian noblewoman of such beauty she was called the Daughter of the Beautiful. When the storms of persecution stripped her household of everything, she let it all go without complaint and embraced a lifetime of poverty, exile, and loss at her Husband's side, accepting each stage of the descent as the will of God.
Through the long years of His confinement in the prison-city of 'Akká, 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the care of the poor and the sick His own daily work — a Friday almsgiving at the gate, a warm garment each winter for every one of the city's poor, and morning rounds to the bedsides of the feeble, the forgotten, and the dying.
In the prison-city of 'Akká and later in Haifa, 'Abdu'l-Bahá kept the festivals of the Bahá'í year — and Naw-Rúz above all — in a way that turned joy outward: toward the hungry, the sick, the widow and the stranger. The Greatest Holy Leaf and the ladies of the household, whose memories Lady Blomfield gathered, remembered a home where the new year was a season of open doors and open hands.
Through the years of His exile in Baghdád, Bahá'u'lláh transformed a place of banishment into a haven. Though His own household often had little, He became the friend and refuge of the poor, the orphan, and the wronged of the city — so beloved that high and low alike sought His door, and His departure cast the whole community into grief.
In the prison-city of 'Akká, where disease festered in the damp and the poor died unattended, 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the care of the sick His personal calling. He brought physicians to the bedsides of the destitute, paid for their medicines, sat with the dying, and ministered to the bodies and spirits of the people the city had abandoned — winning, by mercy alone, the love of an entire town.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to Paris in 1911 He was honoured by the great and the cultivated of the city. But the people who drew His tenderness most surely were the poor, the friendless, and the troubled who found their way to His door — to whom He gave money, comfort, and an unhurried love, as though each were the only person in the world.
Through exile, imprisonment, famine, and bereavement, Bahíyyih Khánum — the Greatest Holy Leaf, daughter of Bahá'u'lláh — made herself the tender refuge of everyone around her: nursing the sick, consoling the grieving, sharing what little the household had with the poor, and binding up the sorrows of a whole community with a mercy that asked nothing for itself.
The recollections gathered in The Chosen Highway preserve a way of living that astonished every visitor to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's household: He treated servants as honoured family, received the poorest as cherished guests, and accepted no deference for Himself. To the people the world overlooked, He gave the one thing they were never given — dignity. It is a portrait of honour not claimed but bestowed.
On April 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the men of the Bowery Mission in lower Manhattan — several hundred of New York's poorest, many homeless, gathered in the Mission hall for the evening service. The Master spoke to them as the equals of any king and gave them, at the close of the address, a silver quarter from His own hand.
On May 4, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called at Hull House in Chicago, the pioneering settlement house founded by Jane Addams in 1889 in the immigrant West Side district. He addressed the assembled residents, social workers and immigrant neighbors in the small main hall and later took tea with Miss Addams herself.
In *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh* Mr. Furutan preserves the household recollection of the small house in Baghdád where Bahá'u'lláh lived in the 1850s — and the standing instruction He had given the family that no one who came to the door, of any creed or condition, was ever to be sent away without food.
Juliet Thompson's diary entries, printed in the Star of the West in April 1917, preserve a small image from the Master's first days in New York in April 1912 — His insistence on distributing silver quarters from His own hand to the men of the Bowery Mission, with the brief direction: *Surely, give to the poor!*
Among the household stories 'Abdu'l-Bahá would tell was the account of why He no longer took sugar with His tea — because the believers in a certain Persian village had nothing but black tea, and He could not bring Himself to take a sweetness His friends could not share.
Among the small stories 'Abdu'l-Bahá would offer to teach the hidden dignity of the poor was the account of an old village woman who walked seven kos for a load of firewood — and a passing prince who learned, in a single conversation with her, what his court had not been able to teach him.
The other meeting was held at the Bowery Mission Hall to help and assist the poor and destitute. First ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke on the subject of the station of poverty and gave the men hope for the future. His words were so penetrating that…
'When He reached the Occident, however, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá faced a condition which troubled Him greatly, because it was beyond His power to assuage the misery He saw constantly about Him. Housed luxuriously at Cadogan Gardens, London, He knew…
While Bahá’u’lláh was in Baghdad, still in possession of great wealth, He left all He had and went alone from the city, living two years among the poor. They were His comrades. He ate with them, slept with them and gloried in being one of…