Stories about 'Abdu'l-Bahá

To walk in the footsteps of the Disciples of Christ

Mahmud's Diary
August 31, 1912
Montreal

As His carriage passed by the Unitarian Church, He said, ‘Tomorrow we will raise the Call of God in this place.’

The carriage reached the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Notre Dame. Everything was quiet and no one was in sight. The Master alighted and went in to see the huge building. With rapt attention, He gazed at the vast cathedral, its ornamentation and numerous statues and spoke of its grandeur and embellishments. Standing in an open space at the entrance, He addressed us saying:

Behold what eleven disciples of Christ have accomplished, how they sacrificed themselves! I exhort you to walk in their footsteps. When a person is detached, he is capable of revolutionizing the whole world. The disciples of Christ met together in consultation on top of a mountain. They pledged themselves to undergo all manner of hardships, to accept every affliction as a bounty and to consider all difficulties easy to overcome. ‘He who is tied to a family, let him arrange to leave it; he who is not should remain single. He should forgo his comfort and his life.’ Consulting thus, they descended from the mountain and each one went a different way and never returned. It is for this reason that they were able to leave behind such achievements. After Christ, the disciples truly forgot themselves, and not merely in word. Hence, the Blessed Beauty cited:

Either be like women and indulge in adornment and pleasure
Or like men, come out and throw down the gauntlet. [From Sana’i, 12th century, the first of the great Persian mystic poets]

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