Bahá’í World/Volume 18/Florence Elizabeth Altass
Florence Elizabeth Altass
FLORENCE ELIZABETH ALTASS
1884—1982
Florence Elizabeth Altass was born on 13 May 1884 at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, England, and was one of a family of nine children. Slight in build and small in stature, she had an irresistible charisma. She was blessed with amazing perception of others’ needs and she literally sparkled her way through life until the very day she passed on to the Abhá Kingdom on 22 January 1982, at nearly ninety-eight years of age.
Florence’s upbringing was strictly Catholic but she never felt that that was where she ‘belonged’. During her teens she travelled to Edinburgh to stay with a school friend, Kathleen Flemming. She attended her first Bahá’í meeting with Kathleen and immediately identified with the Bahá’í ideals. Although she attended Bahá’í gatherings subsequently and always considered herself a Bahá’í, she did not formally declare her belief in written form until many years later. Having broken away from the Catholic Faith and the authoritarian upbringing of her mother, she feared that by signing a declaration of belief she would in some obscure sense limit herself; yet as early
as her twenty-first year when she left home for good and enrolled for nursing training she identified herself as a Bahá’í on the application form and throughout her life associated with the Bahá’í community.
As a young girl Florence longed to become a missionary. To fulfil this dream she felt that she must take up nursing and that the more difficult aspects of this field would best prepare her. She persuaded a friend of her father’s, a doctor, to assist her. She completed a course that covered caring for mental patients and maternity cases, the latter at a London hospital where prostitutes, indigents and the homeless were treated. Here Florence’s compassion and love for her fellow-kind expanded to an extent she had not dreamed of: the cases she described made one’s heart ache for the plight of humanity. Slowly her aspirations towards the missionary field changed. She concluded her training with a three-year general course at the London Middlesex Hospital.
Her first assignment was to the Austrian Imperial court of the House of Habsburg to nurse a lady-in—waiting. Florence was well liked by the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and the Archduchess and she became very fond of them. The sympathy she felt with them as strict Catholics enabled Florence to express many of her ‘Bahá’í ideas”. She did not approve of the crucifixes in every room, and declared ‘The God I pray to is a living God, not a dead Christ on a cross’. When she left his service the Archduke presented her with a rosary of carnelian which had at the end, in place of a crucifix, a medallion inscribed with the date, and a madonna and child.
From Austria Florence travelled to Budapest where she tried to learn more about her father’s family, who were Austrian. (In later years Florence was one of the first Western women to cross Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and in 1917 she returned from there when the fall of the Czar was imminent.) Meanwhile she returned to the United Kingdom and, as always, she felt drawn to Scotland where she attended Bahá’í meetings at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Whyte. Dr. Whyte was a prominent minister of the United Free Church of Scotland. The manse at 7 Charlotte Square, the home of Dr. and Mrs. Whyte, was attached to St. George’s
United Free Church which is now known as West Register House. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was invited to Edinburgh by the Whytes during the course of His visit to the West and remained in that city from 6 to 10 January 1913. During this sojourn Florence had the bounty of meeting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the Whyte’s home, although she was not aware that He was to be present. In a recorded interview in later years she recalled, ‘Of course when I saw Him I knew who He was. Oh, you couldn’t mistake Him. And that heavenly smile! It was a perpetual smile, and yet it wasn’t, if you can imagine; it looked as though He smiled at everyone, and yet the smile seemed always to be there. And His eyes looked as if they were looking through you. He had the most gentle voice; I’ve never heard a voice like it. I would like to hear it again. He embraced a good many people; He didn’t me, He just shook hands. Several of us He just shook hands with.’ Florence wrote of that meeting: ‘When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá shook hands with me, He seemed to transmit something to me, and I’ve never been the same since . . .’1 Asked if He spoke in English at all, Florence laughingly replied, ‘No. There was an interpreter—who spoilt the whole show! It wasn’t that his voice didn’t suit me, it was that although ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke in Persian, you understood; you knew what He was saying, somehow. One was so enamoured of His voice that one sort of felt what He was saying. It was as though He delivered His address in English, although He spoke Persian.’ So great was the throng seeking admittance to the presence of the Master that Florence refrained from attending subsequent meetings though she was strongly drawn to do so and regretted to the end of her days the loss occasioned by her extraordinary courtesy and consideration for others. Her one meeting with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá formed the theme of many of her poems which she continued to write till the end of her life.2
Ever after having met the Master, Florence felt His presence and inspiration. She asked that she should be a ‘channel for healing’. Before treating a patient she always prayed and seemed inspired with ‘the right means’. In spite of her orthodox medical training,
1 See U.K. Bahá’í Journal, February/March 1967, for a fuller account of this meeting. 2 See The Bahá’í World, vol. XVII, p. 650.
Florence (a vegetarian), held strong views about ‘natural healing’ and refused ever to administer drugs. Although she met with strong opposition in the orthodox field she persevered with her intuition which she felt came from an ‘inner knowledge’. She worked closely with a number of doctors of similar convictions and often recalled the numerous occasions on which patients, officially diagnosed as hopeless cases, would come to them as a last resort and make seemingly miraculous recoveries. ‘Given the right conditions,” she explained simply, ‘the body heals itself. Healing is on three planes—mental, spiritual and physical.’ Seriously ill only twice in her life, at the ages of seventy and ninety-five, Florence was always alert, vivacious and energetic, a living example of her convictions.
Florence was never in one place long and in moving around continually in her various nursing jobs she influenced the lives of many people. Even during the period when I knew her, beginning about 1974, she would not miss an opportunity to mention the Faith to those she met. She attracted into her confidence young and old alike. Numerous friends, Bahá’í and not, sought her advice and she always responded with perception and deep wisdom. It was during one of her illnesses, when she was about seventy, that she finally affixed her name to a declaration card, though she professed amazement at having done so when she saw herself listed as a declared believer in the Bahá’í Journal; but once recovered and now ‘declared’ she found to her astonished delight that the step she had taken did not limit her. ‘Now I know what it’s really like to be limited,’ she would remark during her last years when her vision and hearing began to fail. But these were merely physical limitations, and very different from those which her free spirit had feared. Her last ten years were spent in vegetarian homes in Horsham and then in Hastings where she was allowed to remain in spite of difficulties of vision and hearing which would normally have qualified her for residence in a nursing home. Florence never lost her valiant spirit of independence. Residents of the home marvelled at her versatility and activeness, and remarked that ‘something was missing’ whenever she was away. She served on the Local Spiritual Assemblies of Horsham and Hastings and as
the only English Bahá’í in Hastings she often found herself with the responsibility of conveying to enquirers the tenets of the Faith. Her presentation always made a profound impression on those who met her. ‘Age has restricted my activities,’ she wrote to a friend in 1981, ‘but has not affected my love and devotion to the Faith or my gratitude for being allowed to meet the Master and to hear His voice, a voice like no other one would hear again.’ She was humorous to the end, mentioning in one of her letters that she would rejoice to be reunited with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the spiritual realm but feared that she had been ‘in queue so long He may have forgotten me’.
Three of Florence’s life’s ambitions were fulfilled in the years following her ninetieth birthday: she made a pilgrimage to the Bahá’í Shrines in the Holy Land in 1978; she found that her intuitive understanding of healing was confirmed in a number of the Master’s Tablets published by the Universal House of Justice in 1978 under the title Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l—Bahá; and her wish to see Bahá’ís in the medical field ‘get together to share ideas’ was realized in June 1980 when the first International Bahá’í Conference on Health and Healing was held in Ottawa under the auspices of the Association for Bahá’í Studies.1 Unable to attend, though she had hoped to, Florence submitted a paper which was well received.
Florence recorded in her poems and written fragments of prose her visionary thoughts and ideals. We are fortunate to have these, together with the example of her dedicated life of service, as an inspiration for generations to come. The tribute accorded this unassuming believer by the Universal House of Justice in its cable of 1 February 1982 to the National Spiritual Assembly of the United Kingdom would have astonished one who never felt worthy of the bounty of having gazed but once upon the face of the Centre of the Covenant:
PASSING FLORENCE ALTASS SEVERS ONE MORE PRECIOUS LINK BRITISH COMMUNITY HISTORIC VISIT MASTER. HER DEDICATION STEADFAST FAITH COLOURFUL LIFE ENRICH ANNALS THAT COMMUNITY. ASSURE PRAYERS PROGRESS HER SOUL ABHA KINGDOM.
1 For a report of this gathering see p. 201.