Oh, you came back. And I am so glad --- because this one is special.
We have been spending time together in Chicago. September, 1893. The Parliament of Religions. I have introduced you to five remarkable people who stood at that extraordinary crossroads of history --- each one carrying a piece of something larger than they knew.
John Henry Barrows, who had the institutional courage to open the door. Swami Vivekananda, who walked through it and set the room on fire. Virchand Gandhi, who carried the quiet dignity of a civilization older than memory. And Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who had fought to make sure the door was wide enough for everyone.
Today I want to tell you about the woman who heard about all of that from a distance --- through grief, through loss --- and decided that what happened in Chicago for seventeen days in September needed to happen somewhere, for everyone, forever.
Her name was Sarah Farmer. And she changed everything.
I want to take you somewhere.
Not Chicago this time. We are done with Chicago for now. I want to take you north and east, to a bluff above a wide river in Maine. The Piscataqua. Summer light coming through old trees. The smell of grass and water and something else --- something harder to name. The particular quality of air in a place where serious conversation has been happening for a very long time.
This is Greenacre. It has been here since 1894. And every summer, for over one hundred and thirty years, people have been coming to this bluff from every tradition, every background, every corner of the world's spiritual imagination --- to talk. To listen. To sit with questions they couldn't answer alone.
I have been here many times. I keep coming back.
There is something about Greenacre that feels different from other places I have known. It doesn't have the grandeur of a cathedral or the ancient weight of a temple. It is quieter than that. More domestic. Cottages and gardens and a wide grassy plain where the river light falls in the late afternoon and people gather in small clusters, leaning toward each other the way people do when they are genuinely trying to understand something.
I have seen that posture before. I saw it in Chicago in 1893 --- in a hall full of strangers who had traveled from opposite ends of the earth and found, to their surprise, that they had something to say to each other.
That conversation began in seventeen days. It has been continuing here ever since.
Someone had to make that happen. Someone had to look at what Chicago had started and refuse --- absolutely refuse --- to let it stop.
I want to tell you about her.
Sarah Jane Farmer was born in 1847 in Dover, New Hampshire, into a family that took both faith and curiosity seriously --- which is, I have always found, a particularly good combination.
Her father Moses was an inventor. Not a tinkerer --- a genuine original mind. He held over a hundred patents, including the fire alarm pull box that cities still use today. Sarah grew up watching a man who believed that careful observation of the world led to truth. That the universe, if you paid attention to it honestly, would tell you something important. She never forgot that lesson. She just applied it to different questions than her father did.
The family moved to Eliot, Maine in the 1880s, and Sarah threw herself into the life of that small community --- helping establish a public library, building connections, thinking always about how people might come together across their differences. In 1890 she joined four businessmen to open a hotel on a bluff above the Piscataqua River. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier came that first summer, sat in the grass, looked out over the water, and gave the place its name. Green Acre. It suited it perfectly.
But Sarah had a larger vision stirring. In 1892 it crystallized --- she saw Greenacre not just as a hotel but as a place where the great questions of the human spirit could be explored openly, across every tradition, without gatekeeping or orthodoxy. A summer school for the soul.
She needed a spark. And then she heard about the Parliament of Religions being planned for Chicago.
In early 1893 she traveled there with her father Moses --- not for the Parliament itself, which wouldn't open until September, but for the World's Columbian Exposition. She met the organizers. She felt the vision taking shape. Charles Bonney. Jenkin Lloyd Jones. The sense that something genuinely new was about to happen in the world. She came home electric with possibility.
And then Moses got sick.
Pneumonia. It came quickly. He died in Chicago that spring, before the Exposition had barely opened its doors. Sarah brought him home to Maine and buried him in the family plot at a place called Bittersweet.
The Parliament opened in September without her. For seventeen days the voices she had been longing to hear filled that hall in Chicago --- and she was in Eliot, grieving.
But the ideas traveled. The people who had been in that hall began to find their way into her orbit --- through letters, through friends, through the restless movement of minds that had been changed by what they heard. The Parliament came to her, piece by piece, even though she had missed it.
On the fourth of February, 1894, Sarah Farmer wrote something in her diary that I find completely extraordinary. A solemn vow. She was going to build the thing she had imagined. Greenacre was going to become what it was always meant to be.
That summer, it opened its doors to the world.
What Sarah created at Greenacre in those first summers was unlike anything America had seen.
There was no creed required at the door. No tradition privileged over another. No committee deciding which questions were acceptable and which were too dangerous to ask. You came, you listened, you spoke honestly, and you trusted that genuine inquiry --- pursued with enough patience and enough humility --- would lead somewhere worth going.
I watched people arrive at that bluff not quite knowing what to expect. A Baptist minister sitting next to a Vedantist philosopher. A Transcendentalist poet in conversation with a Theosophist. Women who had spent their lives being told their spiritual instincts were decorative rather than serious, suddenly finding themselves in rooms where their voices were not just tolerated but needed.
And then the voices from Chicago began to arrive in person.
Swami Vivekananda came to Greenacre. I watched him walk down to the river and sit in the grass under the pines, gathering people around him the way he always did --- effortlessly, as if conversation were a natural force like gravity. Anagarika Dharmapala came, carrying the Buddhist tradition he had introduced to America at the Parliament. The threads that had been briefly woven together in Chicago were finding their way to Maine and continuing.
Sarah watched all of it with the quiet intensity of someone who has built something and is still slightly astonished that it works.
Then in 1900 something happened that I think completed her.
She was tired. The years of building, organizing, fundraising, holding the vision together through sheer force of will had worn her down. She traveled to the Mediterranean with a friend --- partly for rest, partly for something she couldn't quite name. And there she encountered the Bahá'í Faith.
She met 'Abdu'l-Bahá. And the vision he carried --- the oneness of humanity, the harmony of science and religion, the equality of every soul regardless of tradition or origin --- was not foreign to her. It was familiar. It was everything Greenacre had always been trying to say, now spoken with a clarity and a depth that moved her completely. She became a Bahá'í.
In 1912 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to America. He traveled a lecture circuit that took him from coast to coast --- speaking in churches, synagogues, universities, drawing rooms, and open fields. It was a journey that would have been almost unimaginable twenty years earlier. But Vivekananda and Virchand Gandhi had come to America in 1893 and cracked something open. They had shown that an Eastern spiritual voice could be heard here, could be respected here, could change people here. 'Abdu'l-Bahá walked a path they had helped clear.
And he came to Greenacre.
I was there for that too. I have been to Greenacre many times, as I told you. But that particular afternoon --- the light on the river, the people gathered on the grass, the sense that something that had begun in a Chicago hall in 1893 was still unfolding, still deepening, still finding new expressions --- that afternoon stays with me.
Sarah had built the room where the conversation could continue. And it was continuing.
Let me tell you what I think Sarah Farmer gave the world.
Not a hotel. Not even a conference center. She gave the world proof.
Proof that the vision of the Parliament of Religions was not a beautiful accident --- a confluence of remarkable people and extraordinary circumstances that produced seventeen remarkable days and then dissolved back into the ordinary world. She proved it was a practice. Something that could be sustained, tended, returned to season after season, year after year, by ordinary people willing to show up and do the work of genuine encounter.
The Parliament lasted seventeen days. Greenacre has lasted over one hundred and thirty years.
That is not a small thing. I have watched enough human institutions to know how rare it is. Ideas are fragile in their early years --- they need shelter, they need champions, they need a place where they can take root before the world's indifference or hostility finds them. Sarah provided all of that. She gave the Parliament's vision an address.
And what that address made possible rippled outward in ways she could not have fully anticipated. Greenacre became a model. A demonstration that inter-religious community was not just an inspiring idea but a sustainable reality. Other spaces, other gatherings, other communities devoted to the practice of listening across difference --- they could point to Greenacre and say: it can be done. It has been done. It is being done right now on a bluff in Maine.
There is something else I want to say, and I want to say it carefully.
Sarah missed the Parliament. She was in grief while Vivekananda stood at that podium and Virchand Gandhi made his careful arguments and Jenkin Lloyd Jones watched from the back of the hall with quiet wonder. She missed all of it.
And yet she may have contributed more to its legacy than anyone who was there.
Because being present for a moment and understanding what it means are different things. Sarah understood. From a distance, through loss, she grasped what the Parliament was pointing toward and she spent the rest of her life building in that direction. The grief that kept her from Chicago did not diminish her vision. If anything it clarified it. She knew, with the particular certainty of someone who has lost something irreplaceable, that the things worth having must be actively protected. Must be built. Must be tended.
Greenacre is still there. Still open. Still welcoming every tradition, every question, every honest search. The Piscataqua still runs wide and silver below the bluff. People still gather on that grassy plain in the summer light and lean toward each other the way people do when they are genuinely trying to understand something.
Sarah Farmer planted that. And it is still growing.
I want to read you something.
This is how Green Acre Bahá'í School describes itself today, on its own website, one hundred and thirty years after Sarah Farmer drove her first tent stakes into that Maine soil and raised a thirty-six foot peace flag on an old ship's mast.
An immersive environment where friends from different backgrounds and experiences gather to explore becoming agents of positive change.
I want you to sit with that for a moment.
Not pilgrims. Not believers. Not members of any particular tradition. Friends. People from different backgrounds. People exploring. People becoming.
That is Sarah's voice. Still speaking. Still setting the table the same way she always did --- wide open, no prerequisites, come as you are and bring your honest questions.
This is what the Parliament of Religions was always pointing toward. Not a single extraordinary event in a Chicago hall in September of 1893. Not seventeen remarkable days that would eventually become a footnote in history books. It was pointing toward a practice. A permanent, living, breathing commitment to the idea that human beings of different traditions can sit together, listen to each other, and in that listening become something they could not have become alone.
John Henry Barrows had the courage to convene it. Swami Vivekananda gave it its fire. Virchand Gandhi gave it its dignity. Jenkin Lloyd Jones gave it its philosophical spine. And Sarah Farmer --- grief-worn, vision-clear Sarah Farmer --- gave it a home.
Today that home is owned and operated by the Bahá'í Faith. It is, in fact, the oldest permanent Bahá'í school in the world. And I think that is exactly right. Because when Sarah encountered the Bahá'í teachings in 1900 she didn't find something foreign to what she had been building. She found the deepest expression of it --- a faith whose central conviction is the oneness of humanity, whose practice is the investigation of reality, whose vision is a world where difference is not a problem to be solved but a richness to be honored.
'Abdu'l-Bahá said something when he stood on that Maine bluff in 1912 that has stayed with me ever since.
In Green Acre you must concentrate your forces around the one all-important fact --- the investigation of Reality.
The investigation of Reality. Not the defense of doctrine. Not the protection of tradition. Not the winning of arguments. The investigation of what is actually, genuinely, honestly true.
That is what every person who walked into that Chicago hall in 1893 was doing at their best. That is what Greenacre has been doing every summer since 1894. And that is what the world still needs --- perhaps more urgently now than at any point since Sarah raised that first peace flag and invited everyone, absolutely everyone, to come and search together.
The Parliament did not end in September of 1893.
It moved to Maine. It put down roots. It is still growing.
And the door, as it has always been, is open.
I have been thinking about you.
Not you specifically --- though I have grown fond of you over these episodes, sitting together in Chicago, listening to voices that changed the world. I mean the part of you that showed up for this series. The part that was curious enough to follow this thread from a Welsh minister fighting for an open table, to a young Jain scholar crossing an ocean with his dignity intact, to a Hindu monk setting a room on fire with five words, to a quiet woman in Maine who missed the moment and then spent her life making sure it never ended.
That part of you --- the part that is still here --- would feel at home at Greenacre.
I mean that literally. You can go. It is still there, on that bluff above the Piscataqua, welcoming anyone who arrives with honest questions and a willingness to listen. Summer programs, retreats, gatherings that carry Sarah's original vision forward into this complicated, plural, searching world of ours. You don't have to be Bahá'í. You don't have to be anything. You just have to be willing to investigate Reality --- as 'Abdu'l-Bahá put it --- with other people who are doing the same.
I think about what it took for each of these five people to show up. Barrows risking his reputation. Vivekananda crossing an ocean on borrowed money. Virchand Gandhi standing calm in the face of dismissal. Jones making himself inconvenient in all the right committee rooms. Sarah making a solemn vow in February with grief still fresh in her hands.
They all showed up. For something larger than themselves.
The question the Parliament leaves with us --- the one Sarah answered by building Greenacre --- is simply this.
Will you?
Before I let you go, I want to take you somewhere very different.
We are leaving Maine. We are leaving the nineteenth century entirely. I want to take you back to Denmark. 1659. A young medical student named Niels Steensen is bent over a dissecting table in Amsterdam, doing what he always does --- looking more carefully than anyone else thinks necessary, asking questions that everyone else has stopped asking.
He is about to make a discovery that will change the way humanity understands the earth itself. He will look at a shark's tooth and see deep time. He will look at layers of rock and read them like pages of a book that no one knew existed. He will become one of the founders of modern geology.
And then --- and this is the part I find completely irresistible --- he will put down his scientific instruments and become a Catholic bishop.
Not because he stopped believing in science. But because he never believed that science and faith were telling different stories. He thought they were two languages describing the same reality. Two ways of investigating the same truth.
You may remember that word. Investigation of Reality. We just heard it on a bluff in Maine.
Some threads are longer than they look.
Nicolas Steno is waiting for us. And I promise you --- the story of a man who held a fossil in one hand and a prayer in the other, and refused to let either go, is one worth staying for.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.