My Mother — Page 37
Devoted Mother 37 my allegiance, and her making her covenant six weeks later, fol- lowed by my father making his covenant within a week, had left me under the impression that I was now formally a member of the Movement. Hazrat Maulvi Nooruddeen’s suggestion was a reminder that a personal initiation was needed for the establish- ment of spiritual relationship of Preceptor and disciple. Ever since my father had joined the Movement, he had made it a rule to spend the greater part of the month of September— when the civil district courts were closed—at Qadian, and also to attend the Annual Conference of the Movement in the last week of December. On these occasions, he took me along with him. In pursuance of the suggestion of Hazrat Maulvi Nooruddeen, after the Noon Prayer service on September 16, 1907, I begged the Promised Messiah to accept my allegiance which he graciously did, and thus, I—unworthy as I am—by the sheer grace of Allah, was admitted to the exalted fellowship of the companions of the Promised Messiah, to which my parents had already been admit- ted three years earlier. I am profoundly grateful to Hazrat Maulvi Nooruddeen for his timely suggestion, for that Grand Roll of Honour was closed by the demise of the Promised Messiah a few months later. He had arrived in Lahore for a visit towards the end of April 1908. The revelations vouchsafed to him had progressively indi- cated the approach of his death, but he remained diligently occu- pied with conveying the Divine message committed to him till the end of his last day. He fell ill during the night of May 25, and died shortly after 10:00 a. m. on the 26th. The news of his death came as a shattering calamity to the members of his Movement,