service

‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, ‘. . . all effort and exertion put forth by man from the fullness of his heart is worship, if it is prompted by the highest motives and the will to do service to humanity. This is worship: to serve mankind and to…

At one time a high official in the federal government of the United States questioned ‘Abdu’l-Bahá about the best way to serve his people and his government. The Master had a ready answer: ‘You can best serve your country . . . if you…

Bahiyyih Randall was only thirteen years old when she went to Haifa to see the Master. She recalled that ‘there was a perfectly wonderful person who always sat on the right of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at dinner. His name was Haydar-‘Ali and he had…

Shoghi Effendi's tribute to Bahíyyih Khánum recalls the years of crisis in Baghdád — when Mírzá Yaḥyá's faithlessness had unsettled the Bábí community and Bahá'u'lláh had retreated for two years to the mountains of Sulaymáníyyih — and the delicate, grave tasks the teenaged Greatest Holy Leaf undertook to hold the household together.

During the Great War, Haifa was crowded with the destitute, the orphaned, and the sick. From the household at the foot of Mount Carmel, the Greatest Holy Leaf — already in advanced age — distributed daily food, money, clothing, and remedies she had herself prepared.

A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the small recurring scene of 'Abdu'l-Bahá visiting Western pilgrims who fell ill in 'Akká, sitting at the bedside until the fever passed, and writing personally to the family at home.

A brief paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the small recurring practice of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in His American cities: the warm conversation with each cab driver who carried Him, the personal inquiry into the driver's family, and the larger tip than the fare required.

A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the steady, almost invisible presence of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, at the elbow of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká: the running of the household, the receiving of women pilgrims, the small reassurances the Master Himself relied on.

In 1912, on the Feast of Naw-Rúz in Alexandria, Egypt, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the meaning of the blessed days appointed in every dispensation — days for rejoicing together, for unity, and for leaving "tangible philanthropic or ideal traces" reaching all mankind.

A Persian Hidden Word — Bahá'u'lláh's tender vision of the believer who walks the world bearing within the inward fragrance of the divine love.

In 1914 The Christian Commonwealth carried words of praise for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: ‘It is wonderful to see the venerable figure of the revered Bahá’í leader passing through the narrow streets of this ancient town [Akká], where he lived for forty…

In June 1912 in New York, the painter Juliet Thompson was given an unprecedented privilege: 'Abdu'l-Bahá agreed to sit for her. The Diary preserves the moment He stopped her on the street, took her hand, and said *come tomorrow and paint;* and the cramped basement studio where He asked her to paint not the man but the *Servitude.*

On May 1, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá traveled north of Chicago to lay the cornerstone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the West. Many stones had been sent from Bahá'í communities for the ceremony. Only one — found in a builders' rejection pile and dragged to the site by Nettie Tobin, a Chicago seamstress — had actually arrived. The Master asked for hers.

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.

'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Áqá Ḥusayn-i-Áshchí — the household cook of Bahá'u'lláh through the long years of exile, whose patient service in the kitchen sustained the daily life of the prophetic Household for decades.

'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Áqá Riḍá of Shíráz — the steadfast companion who served the household of Bahá'u'lláh through the years of exile from Baghdád to 'Akká, never failing in his attendance on his Lord.

'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Ḥájí Amín — the Trustee of Ḥuqúqu'lláh, whose lifetime of patient travel through the Persian provinces, collecting and disbursing the offerings of the believers, sustained the financial life of the Cause for fifty years.

'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Pahlaván Riḍá — the strong man, the wrestler of Yazd, who heard the Cause of God and turned the whole frame of his powerful life into the service of the Beloved.

On June 15, 1912, in a home on West Seventy-eighth Street in New York, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the kind of distinction He wished for the Bahá'ís — not financial or worldly eminence, but a distinction of love, character, and steadfast service.

At Coronation Hall in Montreal on September 3, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed socialists and labour leaders. Drawing on the body's nervous system as His metaphor, He laid out a vision of economic justice in which no member of the human family could be permitted to remain in want.

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.

At the home of Dr. and Mrs. Florian Krug on Park Avenue in New York on July 15, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá distinguished between thanks given by the tongue and thanks given by the conduct of a life — and asked the friends to send Him away from New York with the sight of unity among them.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the pilgrimage of Aḥmad-i-Yazdí — a believer of about sixty who walked, on foot, the 1,700 kilometres from Baghdád to Constantinople in search of Bahá'u'lláh in Adrianople. The Tablet that reached him by the wayside, the *Tablet of the Nightingale,* turned him from pilgrim into teacher and sent him another 2,240 kilometres back into Persia.

Service to God, to Bahá’u’lláh, to family, to friends and enemies, indeed to all mankind – this was the pattern of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s life. He wished only to be the Servant of God and man. To serve – rather than being demeaning and…

A short story preserved by Hand of the Cause Furutan in *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh*: an aged believer who set out on foot from Persia to attain the presence of Bahá'u'lláh in 'Akká, and the welcome that met him at the door when he arrived, exhausted, decades younger in his soul.

Mr. Furutan preserves, in *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh,* the family recollection of an evening in the snowbound forests of Núr when the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí walked alone into the storm to visit a sick villager — and the household that, the next morning, found Him sitting calmly by the cottage fire as if the journey had been an errand of an ordinary noon.

In 1920 the Star of the West printed Corinne True's report on the acquisition of the Temple property at Wilmette, on the shore of Lake Michigan — the small group of acres on which, by the Master's direction, the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West would in time be raised.

In April 1918 the Star of the West relayed an account, from talks of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the Holy Land in early 1914, of a former servant of Bahá'u'lláh's household named Esfandayár, who had remained quietly devoted to the family of the Blessed Beauty through years of persecution.

In a 1913 issue of the Star of the West, the Master praised the American journalist Mrs. Fraser for her newspaper articles on the Bahá'í Cause and gave her a charge that would echo through the vocations of many later teachers: *You must become like a burning torch, that you may melt mountains of snow.*

In 1926 the Star of the West printed the obituary of Howard MacNutt, the early New York believer who had compiled and edited The Promulgation of Universal Peace from the stenographic records of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's American talks of 1912.

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!*

In 1920 the *Star of the West* carried the news of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's investiture as a Knight of the British Empire — an honour conferred in recognition of His humanitarian work in feeding the population of Haifa and surrounding districts during the food crisis of the First World War.

In Issue 1 of Volume 2 of the Star of the West, dated March 1911, the editors reported on the work of the Persian-American Educational Society — a small body of American Bahá'ís that had enrolled sixty-three scholarships and remitted seven hundred dollars to support the Bahá'í schools in Tehran. The Master had asked them, in particular, for *one… efficient in science and arts.*

In 1916 the Star of the West introduced its readers to the young Japanese Bahá'í Saichiro Fujita, who had come from Yamaguchi to study in California, found the Faith there, and would in time travel to Haifa to spend the rest of his life in the household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi.

In June 1913 the Star of the West printed a brief obituary, written by Edward Theodore Hall, for Sarah Ann Ridgway of Manchester, England — a silk weaver who had given her quiet evenings, for years, to teaching the Faith in the working-class district of Pendleton.

In a talk given at Los Angeles on October 19, 1912, and later printed in the Star of the West, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out a small but radical arithmetic: two souls of strong character can equal, in the spiritual measure, the whole world — and the eleven disciples of Christ are the proof.

In Julia Grundy's pilgrim notes from 'Akká in 1905, the Master takes up the practical question every believer must eventually face: how do you love the person who is unpleasant, ungrateful, or actively hostile? His answer points to Christ as the standard, and to the tree as the model.

There are many stories about beloved Grace Robarts Ober who, for so very many years, dedicated every moment of her life to the service of our glorious Cause. And this experience, she felt, was the 'first small step' - to use her words,…

This man who was close to the Divine Threshold was the respected son of Ali-'Askar-i-Tabrizi. Full of yearning love, he came with his father from Tabriz to Adrianople, and by his own wish, went on with joy and hope to the Most Great…

Upon His arrival in Jaddih, the Báb donned the pilgrim's garb, mounted a camel, and set out on His journey to Mecca [to perform His pilgrimage]. Quddus, however, notwithstanding the repeatedly expressed desire of his Master, preferred to…

*World Order* magazine carried, in a 1980s issue, an appreciation of Marzieh Gail — the American Bahá'í translator whose six-decade career rendered into English a substantial portion of the Persian and Arabic Bahá'í Writings, including major works of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi.