Dec. 25, 2020,
Dear Friends and Relatives,
"Merry Everything and a Happy Always!"
From the first time I read this Talk, more than 53 years ago, given at the Bowery Mission, April 18, 1912, in New York City, these spiritual teachings have continued to echo in my heart and to inspire me along our Red Road. They echo, deeply, especially during this time of the year.
My father enjoyed reading this Talk, as well. There were times when I was young when we didn't have that many material things, but we always had good food to eat cooked, with great love, by my mother. My father would do the dishes.
We had the basics covered, and extra's earned from when I started selling Christmas cards when I was eight. From then on I made my own spending money. By the time I was 12, picking strawberries, etc, I earned the money each summer to pay for my school clothes and supplies.
This was not unusual in my day in Walla Walla. Many others did the same.
In my younger and Jr. High years, I worked every day doing chores. This included cutting and carry in daily firewood, for our wood-burning stove, feeding pigs from day old until they were sold at auction, raising and breeding rabbits, and directly selling to customers. Raising sheep, including cutting, feeding, and shearing and raising 4-H Black Angus, to show at the Walla Walla County Fair and Round-up, which happened at the end of August each year.
In the summer of 1958, I flanked calves, for several days, at Unchi Martina and Harry's Sherwood's Ranch's, Annual Round-Up, in the Wakpala district of the Standing Rock Reservation, where my father was born. They had a herd of around 350.
Once my father showed me the ropes, I became a good flanker. When we would encounter a two-year-old calf, after branding, our younger generation would have the opportunity to ride the calf until we got bucked off, and everyone got bucked off.
My rodeo fancies ended on one of these rides when the calf ran directly toward a small tree and at the last minute, turned sharply to the left and I slammed into a tree. I saw stars for a while, but it did not knock me out, but at that moment I knew I never wanted to be a bull or saddle bronc rider.
When I returned home and did my summer work, my father entered me in the Annual Walla Walla County Fair Calf Scramble.
This is the scene. The Rodeo pauses, and you have about 30 boys, and some girls, about 14 years old, going after a small herd of two-year-old calves. Whoever could halter the calf and get the calf across a line in the arena, in front of the Grandstand, won.
With my flanking experience, I knew going in, with my father's guidance, that my strategy would be to flank the calf first and then put on the halter, instead of standing up and fighting the calf, to put the halter on.
It unfolded like clock-work. With some assistance, from the Unseen World, I had the calf flanked, halter-on, and across the finish line before any of my competitors even come close to getting a halter on a calf.
From the time I started, flanked the calf, within a minute, to the calf running across the finish line ahead of me, it was one fluid action, from beginning to end.
Now back to the topic of material poverty.
Both my father and my mother knew physical poverty, but they never complained about it. On the contrary, my father always used to say they never knew they were poor, when they were growing up, or that there was a depression going on in 1929-1934.
In the early part of the Twentieth Century, the rough neighborhood called the Bowery, in lower Manhattan, had become one of the USA’s oldest and largest “Skid Rows.”
These impoverished, blighted urban slum areas housed prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts, the jobless, and the homeless. The term “Bowery bum” originated there, as did the Bowery Mission, a Christian organization dedicated to helping the poor.
These spiritual teachings, which I first encountered more than 53 years ago, continue to warm and inspire my heart and soul until now.
May these coming festive days and 2020 be you and your beloved ones, the very best year ever!
"Merry Everything and a Happy Always!"
With Warm Love and Greetings,
Tiger, Suthida, and Phil
BOWERY MISSION, New York, City, New York, April 18, 1912
“Tonight I am very happy, for I have come here to meet my friends. I consider you my relatives, my companions; and I am your friend.
You must be thankful to God that you are poor, for Jesus Christ has said, “Blessed are the poor.” He never said, “Blessed are the rich.” He said, too, that the Kingdom is for the poor and that it is easier for a camel to enter a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter God’s Kingdom.
Therefore, you must be thankful to God that although in this world you are indigent, yet the treasures of God are within your reach, and although in the material realm you are poor, yet in the Kingdom of God you are precious.
Jesus Himself was poor. He did not belong to the rich. He passed His time in the desert, traveling among the poor, and lived upon the herbs of the field. He had no place to lay His head, no home. He was exposed in the open to heat, cold, and frost—to inclement weather of all kinds—yet He chose this rather than riches.
If riches were considered a glory, the Prophet Moses would have chosen them; Jesus would have been a rich man. When Jesus Christ appeared, it was the poor who first accepted Him, not the rich.
Therefore, you are the disciples of Jesus Christ; you are His friends, for He outwardly was poor, not rich. Even this earth’s happiness does not depend upon wealth. You will find many of the wealthy exposed to dangers and troubled by difficulties, and in their last moments upon the bed of death, there remains the regret that they must be separated from that to which their hearts are so attached.
They come into this world naked, and they must go from it naked. All they possess they must leave behind and pass away solitary, alone. Often at the time of death, their souls are filled with remorse; and worst of all, their hope in the mercy of God is less than ours.
Praise be to God! Our hope is in the mercy of God, and there is no doubt that divine compassion is bestowed upon the poor. Jesus Christ said so; Bahá’u’lláh said so. While Bahá’u’lláh was in Baghdád, 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 friends. He ate with them, slept with them, and gloried in being one of them. He chose for one of His names the title of The Poor One and often in His Writings refers to Himself as Darvísh, which in Persian means poor; and of this title, He was very proud.
He admonished all that we must be the servants of the poor, helpers of the poor, remember the sorrows of the poor, associate with them; for thereby we may inherit the Kingdom of heaven.
God has not said that there are mansions for rich people.
He admonished all that we must be the servants of the poor, helpers of the poor, remember the sorrows of the poor, associate with them; for thereby we may inherit the Kingdom of heaven.
God has not said that there are mansions prepared for us if we pass our time associating with the rich, but He has said there are many mansions prepared for the servants of the poor, for the poor are very dear to God. The mercies and bounties of God are with them.
The rich are mostly negligent, inattentive, steeped in worldliness, depending upon their means, whereas the poor are dependent upon God, and their reliance is upon Him, not upon themselves.
Therefore, the poor are nearer the threshold of God and His throne.
Jesus was a poor man. One night when He was out in the fields, the rain began to fall. He had no place to go for shelter so He lifted His eyes toward heaven, saying,
“O, Father! For the birds of the air, Thou hast created nests, for the sheep a fold, for the animal’s dens, for the fish places of refuge, but for Me, Thou hast provided no shelter. There is no place where I may lay My head. My bed consists of the cold ground; My lamps at night are the stars, and My food is the grass of the field. Yet who upon earth is richer than I? For the greatest blessing Thou hast not given to the rich and mighty but unto Me, for Thou hast given Me the poor. To me, Thou hast granted this blessing. They are Mine. Therefore am I the richest man on earth.”
So, my friends, you are following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Your lives are similar to His life; your attitude is like unto His; you resemble Him more than the rich do. Therefore, we will thank God that we have been so blessed with real riches.
April 18, 1912, Bowery Mission, New York City, New York, Abdul-Baha, with 400-500 homeless relatives.
