Transcription
Friends, it makes me nervous when they're like that. It's very hard, I'm sure, for all of us to take in so much emotional feeling. I know I feel like a sponge that has sucked up and sucked up and sucked up and doesn't know what to do with it, what it's got.
[Applause]
You know, evidently, I'm not alone in that sensation. And I suppose that this is one of the great bounties of a gathering such as this is that we can absorb as much as we can. Then we can get tapes of this wonderful occasion. We've made notes. We've followed the different talks with profound interest and attention, and we go out from here with our cup overflowing.
My colleagues, my very dear fellow Hands, I think have presented some of the important things in Baha'i history and in the needs of the present time very beautifully. And I'm not going to try and go on with that same theme because I think that they have expounded it very clearly. After all, they are Hands of the Cause, and they are highly skilled.
So I thought that I would tell you a few anecdotes, things that have come to my mind about the Baha'is and about events in the past because we're all very fundamentally simple people here, and we're devoted Baha'is. Whether we're born Baha'is, whether we're Baha'is of five days' standing, whether we're people that are not yet enrolled as Baha'is, still we're fundamentally nice, simple, sincere human beings.
And then we leave this place and we go out into the world and, according to our capacities, we will try and share with others, our family, our friends, the public, our schoolmates if for young people, we are working mates in different professions and jobs that we're in, something of what this has meant to us and what it means, we think, for the City of New York and for the world.
But I, the whole picture in life, aside from the, the um, great um outlines of immense values, is always composed of little bits of pieces, and we are the little individual pieces that make up the whole. And I am always very moved by stories of Baha'is. I see things perhaps in a simple way in my mind. I see things in terms of stories and of people and of incidents.
And I was thinking of my mother. So often here, here she was, one, as you know, of the Disciples of Abdul Baha. And she was a very wonderful person. And from the time she was about 20, she was almost all her life an invalid and very frail and suffered a great deal. But she was also a very dynamic servant of the Faith.
Whenever I came to New York with mother, which we did very often because Montreal was very cold and she suffered from the cold, so we came down sometimes for a month or two in the worst of the Canadian winter to New York, and at other times. And my mother would take a taxi and she would go to 87th Street here in New York, on the River, on that side, near the Hudson. And she would get out and stand in front of the house of Mrs. Champney. I don't know who it belongs to now or whether it even looks the way it used to. And she would stand there silently and pray because this was the place that Abdul Baha had been in New York. This was the place that he had lived in the Champney home and where he had received so many hundreds of guests and where he had had this great impact on the city of this very, very famous and very important metropolis of the world.
It's nice to remember the intimate things about human beings. I can relate much easier to acts of other people and the character of other people then I can onto a long scientific treatise. I can read it, hopefully, I can understand it, but it won't move, move me as much as just ordinary human beings' experiences.
And so I thought I would tell you a few anecdotes about the older Baha'is. When Martha Root was coming to Montreal, you know, Shoghi Effendi called her the star servant of Baha. She's the one who gave the message to Queen Mary of Romania, to other crowned heads in Europe, to presidents. They're people of great importance politically, socially, and so on. And she came to Montreal. And I was about 16 or 18. And I had, of course, a great love for my mother, and also I was very proud of my mother because I knew she was one of the first Baha'is of the West. And, uh, she was May Maxwell, and so on. And, uh, my mother made a terrible fuss about Martha coming. And in my 16-year-old mind, I thought, "What, she really, it isn't necessary to make quite so much fuss."
So she bought a beautiful bunch of tulips. It was in the spring, and she put them on the radiator in the vestibule of our home in Montreal, which is now called a Baha'i shrine because it was visited by Abdul Baha and he slept there for a few days. And as she went out to call, to have a radio call or visit the head of the radio station of Montreal, it was the beginning of radio then, no television. And as she went out of the front door to go and call on the man who was the head of the radio station that my mother hoped would accept to let her speak on the air for the first time in Canadian history about the Faith, she picked up one of these tulips, a raw tulip out of a vase, just one.
And in those days, we were much more formal than we are now. Nobody except my age group can remember how much more, the French call coming, f, with how much more discipline and and uh, uh, reserve we lived our lives, at least in public. And I'd never seen anybody pick up a tulip and walk out of the front door. So Martha went down. My mother told me about this afterwards. I was not present. And she walked into the radio station and met the head of it. And my mother introduced her, said, "This is Miss Martha Root." And she came. She was a very homely woman and had no sense of clothes whatsoever, and her head was cut like a spaniel's hair, like this hair, and she was full, she was full of wrinkles. Anyway, she walked in, mother said, and she walked over to this man and she said, "I brought you this." And she handed him this naked tulip, without any tissue paper, anything around it. And the man took the tulip in his hand, and his eyes filled with tears, and he said, said, "How did you know I am a Dutchman, and that this is my national flower of Holland?" And it was finished. She could have the air. She could talk about the Baha'i Faith. The whole door opened in Canada to the first radio broadcast mentioning the Faith, open as far as I remember, the very first in any case of any nature, just because of this intuition of Martha and this one tulip to the head of the station.
Another anecdote that I remember with a great deal of pleasure is Marian Jack. There are lots of Canadians here, and they will remember Marian Jack. She was a Canadian Baha'i. She was also a painter. Extremely poor painter, no doubt about it. Jackie is going to go down in history as a perfectly marvelous servant of the Faith. And Abdul Baha called her General Jack. But she couldn't paint. Even I could paint better. Anyway, General Jack eventually went to Europe. I saw her in Esling in Baha'i summer school. God bless Jackie. She was very ample. You wouldn't call her exactly fat, but she's sort of in all directions. There was a lot of her. And she had an enlarged heart. I mean, seriously, I don't know the anatomical state of her heart, but I do know that it was dangerously enlarged. She was very, very poor, and she had almost no money. And she decided to go to Romania and teach the course. She went and got a room in a hotel in Romania. And then World War II was coming. And Shoghi Effendi was worried over her. And the Baha'i Bureau in Geneva, Switzerland, was even more worried. And they sent word to her. And as I remember, they asked Shoghi Effendi if they shouldn't try and get her to leave what was going to be behind the enemy lines. She was going to be behind the lines of Hitler and his armies and allies. And, uh, Shoghi Effendi did not press her, but he said that if she left, of course, it, they, they were free to ask her to leave. Well, she wouldn't leave. That's the main point. And she stayed there with God knows what possibility of eating. She went out in the streets. And the hotel that she was living in was hit by a German bomb. So she couldn't even salvage any possessions from the hotel. She had what she was standing up in. And the American, Canadian, she was a Canadian subject, they were evacuated down to a school in the country. And she slept on a cot in a corridor in the winter. Anybody can imagine in the winter in Romania, sleeping in a corridor open at both ends with no heat, what the conditions were like. And this is how Jackie spent the war.
And after the war, one of these, um, international agencies of some kind or other, a woman came to call on us. And I saw her, and she said, "I've been in Romania and I have a message to tell you that Marian Jack is alive, and she's all right." And we managed to get from her an address. That was the first news we'd had of Marian all during the war. And I wrote her and asked her what she wanted. Now, you can imagine this wonderful, wonderful Baha'i, this servant of Baha'u'llah, old Canadian Baha'i, under her condition, staying there all during the war. There isn't anything that any of us wouldn't have given her or done for her. And I wrote her and said, "What do you want? Anything that we can send you? Anything we can do for you?" So she sent me back two pieces of paper on which she had drawn the outline of her foot, her feet. And she said, "I haven't any shoes, but if you could buy me a pair of shoes, I'd be very grateful." So I went out and bought the best pair of shoes in Haifa that these pieces of paper would fit in. And we, we sent them to Marian. And that's all that Marian wanted, you see. So that's one of the kind of servants of the Faith of Baha that we have as our examples.
Then there was, then there was Lili and James in New York. I suppose I'm the only person in this hall that knows who she was, the only person old enough to remember Lili and James. She became a Baha'i in Paris. She was a poor, the very poor one, and, uh, in every sense of the word. And, uh, eventually my mother knew her there and kept up this friendship with her all their lives. She went back to Chicago and in the worst part of Chicago, she taught the piano. And, I mean, really in the slums of Chicago, she earned her living by giving piano lessons. So, eventually, she told me this herself. Eventually, she saved up enough money so that she had 25 cents that she hadn't, you know, absolutely got to spend for her room or her food. She saved it by walking. She was an old woman, to her piano lessons in Chicago. And she saved $25 cents. And she sent it for the Temple Fund. And we were building the Temple, the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, and Wilmette at that time. And, um, so she gave this money and she got back a receipt. And then finally, they had built the Temple, and she's still never seen it, you know, it's very near Chicago. So she decided she would, was going to treat herself and she was going to go and see that Temple that had been built. And she got on the train and she went out to Wilmette. And she walked to where the Temple was. And she saw this Temple in front of her. And she said, "All I could say was, 'Oh, you darling.'"
[Applause]
Had another Baha'i here in New York City, and I'm very glad to mention her. Her name was Carrie Marsh. And she was small and stocky and tough and muscular. And her profession was to have a little tiny suitcase. And she went around to all the big dry goods show stores here in New York. Of course, it was much more, want to say, less rigidly controlled and security and God knows what that we have today. And she used to go around with this little suitcase to the different counters. And she would open her suitcase, and it had safety pins and needles and thread and perhaps some aspirin tablets and things like that, notions. And she'd sell it to the serving girls who used to get off their work in New York after everything was, was closed at very long hours in those days. And then she would teach them the, the Faith.
And Carrie Marsh, I was very afraid of her because she, she knew my mother. She's a great friend of my mother. And I was about 8 years old at that time. And she was very strong. And every time she came to see my mother, she'd hug and kiss me and almost break my ribs. So I was really quite timid about getting hugged by Carrie. But that woman, and I think that these are things that are good to remember. So help me God, Carrie Marsh could have sat next to a university professor at a dinner party and talked to him about the Baha'i Faith on about the same level of comprehension as another university professor that was a Baha'i might have done. She knew the Cause of God that well. And I think we have to remember that knowing the Cause, least of all serving it and dying for it, is not confined to a university degree. It's not confined to being literate. It's confined to how much understanding and love you have in your heart, and how much common sense and wisdom you have in your head. There's no monopoly on it.
[Applause]
The last election of the Universal House of Justice. And I pass this on to you because a great many of you undoubtedly come in contact with the press. You have press interviews, maybe you have radio interviews, maybe going back from here, you will have occasion to speak about this Congress and then speak about the Baha'i principles of true Brotherhood and equality, not just theoretic, but true. In our last International Convention in Haifa, as I was on the stage as a Baha'i official, we had a great big theater which was, well, not as big as this, but quite a big theater. Big is all this area perhaps could hold a thousand people or something. And was full of Baha'i delegates from all over the world. It wasn't all the delegates, but it was all the delegates being present at the International Convention. And as you know, the National Spiritual Assemblies are the delegates for the election of the Universal House of Justice at the Electoral College. And as I looked this hall full of Baha'is, I saw up in the back row, some Baha'is that I knew were from Ethiopia. And they happened to be villagers from Ethiopia, Vett. And I had village at that village. And we had met them. Totally illiterate, couldn't write their names. And another of the delegates was a Bush Negro from Surinam, also totally illiterate. Now, for these people, the Universal House of Justice put one of the secretaries, women secretaries of our, uh, staff in Haifa at their disposal to sit next to them and write down the names. And they voted, you see. This is the caliber of the religion to which we belong. It's not just the 12 basic principles and all the intellectual teachings, if you like, and the ramifications of the administration. These are the things that make this religion worthy as a solution and will be the solution to the problems of the entire human race. It's not things in books. There are lots of books.
I just want to tell you two more stories. We have a Baha'i in Haifa, the French Baha'i. For all I know, he may be here. He lives in my house, at least on the property of Abdul Baha's property, because we have to have more people living there for security. And he walked from France to Haifa. He's a member of the staff in Haifa serving the Faith. And he got there on his two hind legs.
In Madrid, years and years ago, the pioneer was called Virginia Orbison. And she was a very, very remarkable woman. As I remember, she'd already been a pioneer in South America or Central America. She spoke Spanish fluently. She's a beautiful woman and a very beautiful person. And she went to teach the Faith and pioneer in Spain. Spain in those days, Spain was a, a very, uh, religious community. They were very, uh, conscious of the behavior of women. A woman could not risk her good name. She had to conduct herself in a way that would win the respect of other people, and they would consider that she was a proper behaving woman. And that meant that she was not at all free to teach, teach the way young people and older people now are when they go to teach the Faith. She had to stay home a great deal in her apartment. And she had to be very circumspect.
And, uh, I remember a conversation in the Western Baha'i Pilgrim House. There was a little tiny, um, sweet young thing from Europe who was pioneering somewhere. And then there was Virginia from Spain. And so this little sweet person was complaining that she could never find anybody to teach. She said, "I can never find anybody to teach, and people aren't interested." And she went on and on lamenting. And so Virginia drew herself up and she said, "I never have any trouble finding somebody to teach." And this little woman looked at her, you know, like this. "What did she do?" "Oh," she said, "it's very difficult. I have to, to be very careful. The woman alone in Spain has to be extremely careful." She said, "I sit in my apartment and I pray to Baha to send me somebody to teach, and he always does."
[Applause]
That's how she established the Faith in that country. And I think that these are the kind of people that have built the Cause all over the world. These are the kind of Baha'is we have. Thank God. Now we have very distinguished Baha'is, very distinguished people in their professions, professors, intellectuals, and so on. And when they travel in Europe or China or the East Asia, they add a great deal of prestige to the Faith in the estimation of people. And I think that we can be very proud of this. That we never had this sort of thing when I was a girl. Baha'is in the audience of my generation, they know what this means. You take everything for granted. But just think of it. We've got opposite numbers to Chinese professors and Chinese scientists. And when our opposite number goes to China, they are received by their own type of people. They can't do mass teaching, and they often go on some kind of a scientific or academic mission. But we've got them now. We never had them before. We have them now all over the world, in Asia, in Africa, North, South America, Europe, and so on. This is a tremendous step forward in the Faith, and it's a very wonderful thing. And this is opening a gate. We are infiltrating into new areas, new zones where we can teach the Faith.
Then take the Baha'i youth. All of us here, there are lots of young people here. They cannot get conceited from my remarks, please. But the fact remains that the Baha'i youth are simply wonderful, really are. One of the things that I think impresses my generation very, very much. You know, we're not all little innocent angels. We're people that grew up in this society, and we knew our own nations and our own society. And the fact that we have Baha'i young people now who are exemplary in their moral behavior, who are arising to go on these various teaching trips to Russia, to the East, to different countries, and also, I am sure, throughout the Americas. This is the most marvelous development that I have seen in recent years in the Cause of God.
I, I had dinner the other night. The young man is probably sitting here. I hope he isn't, he'll hear me. I had dinner with him the other night. He's from, um, Siberia, and he's a new Russian Baha'i. Lovely young man.
[Applause]
That's exciting, you see. And if I had more contact with the audience here and had more opportunity to meet with all of you and talk to you, I would hear this story duplicated over and over and over again. It is the most marvelous thing, the kind of people that are Baha'is now, the number of youth that are Baha'is now, the way the youth have arisen and are serving the Cause of God with understanding, with enthusiasm, with clean characters, and with knowledge. I think that we have such a marvelous setup now for spreading the Word of God, the teachings of Baha'u'llah, to the whole world. And I certainly think that there's going to be a very, very great receptivity.
But I would like to recommend to you, friends, two things, if my personal opinion from living in Haifa for so long and being so occupied all my life with Baha'i affairs, and being now so occupied the last year since the Guardian passed away with official Baha'i affairs, is that what we Baha'is lack is not love, not devotion, not even enough financial resources. We haven't got enough money to do a lot of the things we could do if we had more money, but we're not all that broke. We do manage to get around and do teach and travel and do things, you see. But what we Baha'is lack is
[Applause]
imagination. I tell you what I mean by that. I sit here and I, I look down at all of you, and the ones that are well-lighted and near me, I can actually see their faces all right. And I look at you and I make this beautiful speech, and then I say, "Well, of course, you could do it." You see, I always, well, don't point at that person, young man, because what I'm trying to say is that the young people and the older people, in other words, you, it's up to you. Who is going to do my work for me in this world? Who's going to live my life for me? Who, for that matter, is going to answer to Baha for me? I've got to do it myself because the responsibility is my own.
I'd like to tell you one little story of my life with Shoghi Effendi. I don't remember now what it was apropos of. And, um, I was always, never, never, never obviously argued with the Guardian or disagreed with anything he said or wanted. But I can remember once Shoghi Effendi, uh, told me something. I really can't remember. Did I want to wear it, or did I want to do it? It was one of the two. I'd been married perhaps less than a year. And Shoghi Effendi said I better not, because, you see, it was the East, and my life was no longer in Europe or America. And how I behaved myself and looked as the wife of Shoghi Effendi was quite different from Mary Maxwell. And he must have seen a little bit of disappointment in my face. And he looked at me very sweetly and he said, "You have sacrificed so much, you can sacrifice this too." You know, that is a very, very profound statement. We, one way or another, we feel that we have sacrificed for Baha in service, in money, in devotion, in changing something that we would rather have not changed, but we changed it for His sake, and so on, you see. But you could give more. In other words, don't just say, "Well, I gave it once." Give it as a sort of a regular rhythm of your living that you are willing to sacrifice for the service of the Cause of God. Because that is the service to mankind. And mankind needs service, needs redemption, needs to hear of the teachings of Baha.
And another thing that Shoghi Effendi said to me, which I was horrified because I, I was so, I never, you know, believed that I was worthy to be the, the wife of Shoghi Effendi. But at least I said to myself, "Well, now, now I don't have to worry anymore." You know, this terrible thing at the end of the Iqán. If you know your Baha'i scriptures well, it says, I put it in my own language, Baha says that many a sinner, as in his last breath, has ascended to the up, you know, and many a saint has done a nose dive. He doesn't put it in that vocabulary, but if you look at the last, you look at the last few pages of the Iqán, this is what he says, you see. And my mother was a last-breather, and she was forever, you know, terrified of her last breath. Was she going to be acceptable with her last breath? So I was raised, you see, on this last breath business. Then I, when I was married, I said, "Well, isn't that wonderful? I don't have to worry anymore. All those other people have to worry, but I don't have to worry because I'm tucked under the arm of Shoghi Effendi now. I'm safe, you see. Don't have to be have any anxieties about my last breath."
And one day Shoghi Effendi, I don't know what it was about, it wasn't a very serious thing, but evidently he wanted to say it to me, and he did. He said, "And your destiny lies in the palm of your own hand." Of course, I didn't say anything, but I just sort of looked and thought, "My God, it's back again." You see. I, I thought, I'm, I'm making you laugh, but I assure you it wasn't a laughing matter for me. It was a terribly serious matter.
You might like to hear some of the things that had happened to me in the lifetime of the Guardian. One or two things. And after all, I was just Mary Maxwell of an old Baha'i family. And my mother, of course, um, because of her services to, I think, Abdul Baha and to the Covenant, um, maybe the reason one reason Shoghi Effendi married me. But I would know that I would, I lived, lived a very usual sort of middle-class life. And, uh, I can remember once, um, one of the servants died in Abdul Baha's house. And, um, we don't have any embalming there. First of all, the Jews don't like it, and second, the Arabs don't like it, and the third, the Baha'is don't like it. So we don't have it, you see. And, uh, you have to bury people very quickly.
So this old coachman, Asfandiyar, the coachman of Abdul Baha, died. And he died around 5:00 in the afternoon. When Shoghi Effendi came home, I waited for him because he came back from visiting the shrines with the Baha'is. And I told him Asfandiyar had died. And he came and stood by his bed for a moment. And then he went upstairs. And what to do with this Asfandiyar? So we had a Baha'i carpenter who was also the undertaker. And it was very convenient because he could build the coffin, you see. And he also was the high undertaker and washed the dead. And this was the funeral the next day. It is, maybe some of the people here understand this kind of a situation. They come from developing countries in Africa. And maybe the other people that live in New York City are horrified. But whatever.
So that night, um, we were worried over Elias, um, Asfandiyar. He wasn't going to be buried till 3:00 the next afternoon. And of course, in every way that I could, I tried to not burden Shoghi Effendi with things that he didn't have to be burdened. Every five minutes, "What shall we do with the corpse of Asfandiyar?" So we took it downstairs and we put it in the, uh, the reception room of the male Baha'is. In the old days, when, when women were segregated. And we put him on a table and put, you know, bowls of water under the feet of the table so that the rats couldn't get at him. And I remember, uh, Hallow took the feet. As remembers in. And anyway, he took the feet, and I took the head. And we lifted this rigid corpse and put it on, on the table.
The next day, when the funeral was taking place, the ladies never went to the cemetery because it was the custom of the Baha'i women to be like the Muslim women and more dignified, and they never went to the grave. So we were all upstairs. We're going to have prayers. And the men were downstairs, and he was going to be taken away. And I sat there and I thought, "Where did Mary Maxwell go? What happened to Mary Maxwell? I was Mary Maxwell, you know, before I was married. And I thought, where did Mary Maxwell go? Lifting up a corpse and putting it on a table. It seems so strange, you see. So far, far away from Montreal, Canada, and New York City where I was born and so on."
What I'm trying to say is that it's, we're all here from different backgrounds. Many of you know what I'm talking about because you come from cultures where you're used to that kind of thing. You wash your dead, they die at home, you bury them, you see. And of course, that's very, very far from the civilization of a big city like this. But the, the fact is, look at us. We're all here together. All of us of these different backgrounds, different continents, different nations, different races. And here we, we are in this hall, sheltered by the Universal House of Justice, eager to go out from this place and teach our fellow men the glad tidings of the message of Baha, ready to serve at this difficult period in history in any way that we can, so that we will be worthy of having heard the name of Baha. I'm sure that marvelous things are going to go all over the world out of this gathering through all these Baha'is.
[Applause]
Here.
[Applause]
Really unbelievable.
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
Good for Anya B.