To
SHOGHI EFFENDI
The Grandson of
Abdu'l-Bahá
By Him Appointed
Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith
Illustration
ABDU'L-BAHÁ, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1912
Frontispiece
Portals To Freedom was first published before many of the
current translations of Bahá'í writings were available. Some of
the quotations used in this book were taken from earlier renditions of these
works, as for example, The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, The
Hidden Words and others. Also several quotations were taken from a
compilation, Bahá'í Scriptures, much of which has been
retranslated and revised into a newer work called Bahá'í World
Faith. For an accurate rendition of the Bahá'í Writings,
these current editions should be used as references.
"I ask Thee, O Ruler of Existence and King of Creation, to transmute
the brass of existence into gold by the elixir of Thy Revelation and Wisdom:
then reveal unto men by a comprehensive Book that which will enrich them by Thy
Riches."
What is that mystery underlying human life which gives to events and
to persons the power of mutation, of transformation? If one had never before
seen a seed, nor heard of its latent life, how difficult to believe that only
the cold earth, the warm sun, the descending showers and the gardener's care
were needed to cause its miraculous transformation into the growing form, the
budding beauty, the intoxicating fragrance of the rose!
Or who can understand the reason why a chance perusal of a book, the presence
of a friend or the meeting with a stranger often alters a determined course of
action, profoundly affects our attitude toward life, and, not seldom, so nearly
reaches the roots of being and the springs of action that never after is life
quite the same?
It is as if some super-Luther Burbank had, by that seemingly chance event,
grafted into the branch of our crab-apple being the bud of the Tree of
Knowledge, or into the bramble of the wilderness of human thought the rose of
paradise.
To this mystery of mysteries the philosophy of the schoolmen offers no adequate
explanation. We only know that it is a common experience of us all. The effort
towards the description of this catalysis is the essence of all poetry; the
abortive attempt to explain it is at the root or all philosophy, while the
experience of it is the one cause underlying the transformation of human life
and character. All history is its witness and every saint its justification.
In offering to the reader this inadequate account of one such experience my
only excuse is its totality, its all-inclusiveness, its grandeur. It is unique
not because it is rare, since every contact of man with his fellow men
demonstrates it, but because of its supremacy over other transforming contacts.
One might liken it to the difference in effect between touching a cold clod and
the grasping of a galvanic battery, or the meeting with a debased criminal and
the meeting with an Abraham Lincoln.
To those who met Abdu'l-Bahá in the summer of 1912, when He spent eight
months in this country, such comparisons will seem highly inadequate. While to
many that meeting did not convey more than a contact with personified dignity,
beauty, wisdom and selflessness, and so led them, at least, to higher altitudes
of thought and life, to hundreds of others that meeting was the door to
undreamed-or worlds; to a new, a boundless, an eternal life.
We realize the difficulties faced in attempting to bring to the reader a
quarter of a century later, the atmosphere created by this meeting for those
who had the eyes to see, the cars to hear and minds to comprehend, even
slightly, the new and divine world opened before the eager and courageous feet.
In fact to do so with any degree of accurate completeness is all but
impossible. To those bred in the Christian tradition one might ask what would
be the probable effect upon them if they could have been among the audience
when the Sermon on the Mount was spoken, or if one of them, like John, could
have reclined upon the breast of the Master. Without daring to suggest that the
comparison is parallel, my own experience, when brought into close association
with Abdu'l-Bahá, was so overwhelming, so fraught with sensations
suggesting an entrance into a new and super-mundane world, that I can think of
no other comparison more adequate.
I do not propose in relating these experiences to minimize my own reaction to
this great experience by presenting it with even the slightest suggestion of
materialistic or pseudo-scientific explanations. It is my work to report as
faithfully as possible what I saw and heard and experienced during these
meetings and conversations. If at times the recounting flavors of a fancy
bordering on the fantastic I may comfort myself with reflection on the possible
terms applied to Peter, James and John, the fishermen, when they attempted to
describe to their fellow laborers the effect which the Master's Presence had
upon them. What epithets must the former lovers and associates of Mary
Magdalene have applied to her!
To me, a man of middle age, a Unitarian Clergyman, a student since youth of
religions and philosophies, the experience had a disturbing quality somewhat
cataclysmic. Why should this man be able so to upset all my preconceived
notions and conceptions of values by His mere presence? Was it that He seemed
to exude from His very being an atmosphere of love and understanding such as I
had never dreamed? Was it the resonant voice, modulated to a music which caught
the heart? Was it the aura of happiness touched at times with a sadness
implying the bearing of the burden of all the sin and sorrow of the world,
which always surrounded Him? Was it the commingled majesty and humility of His
every gesture and word, which was perhaps His most obvious characteristic? How
can one answer such questions? Those who saw and heard Abdu'l-Bahá
during those memorable months will share with me the sense of the inadequacy of
words to communicate the incommunicable.
At the time I met Abdu'l-Bahá, in the spring of 1912, He was sixty-eight
years of age. Of these, twelve years had been spent in exile with His spiritual
as well as physical Father, Bahá'u'lláh, in Baghdád,
Constantinople and Adrianople. Then forty years, to a day, in the Turkish
prison-fortress of `Akká, ten miles from Mt. Carmel, on the coast of
Palestine. Because of their staunch adherence to their faith in
Bahá'u'lláh as the Manifestation of God, Abdu'l-Bahá with
about seventy others had sacrificed all that they had, preferring imprisonment
and inward freedom with Him to outward freedom and spiritual bondage without
Him. With the overthrow of the tyrannous reign of Abdu'l-Hamid, by the Young
Turk Party in 1908, this long exile and imprisonment ended and that Voice and
Presence was free to prove to the world what He had so completely demonstrated,
that "The only prison is the prison of self."
To what marvelous inner life of the spirit could be ascribed, I asked myself,
the fact that this man, born of a long line of Persian nobility; accustomed to
every luxury until his eighth year; followed by a half-century of exile,
torture and prison life, could emerge into the modem world of Paris, London and
New York and dominate every experience with a calm control of circumstance; a
clarifying exposure of superficialities; a joyous love for all humanity which
never condemned but with forgiveness brought shame?
It is with the hope that, to a degree, the following pages may approach an
answer to this question that they are offered to the reader.
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