Lua Getsinger: The Mother-Teacher of the West

Lua Aurelia Moore was born in 1871 on a small farm in Hume, New York. She came of vigorous, evangelical American stock; she was educated at the public schools of her county; she went out, as a young woman, to teach school in the West. Her character, the chronicle records, was warm, dramatic, and unusually open to the spiritual.

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She came to the Bahá'í Faith in Chicago in 1897, through the small circle of seekers that had been gathering in that city around Ibrahim Kheiralla. She was one of the fifteen Western believers who undertook, in February 1899, the pilgrimage to 'Akká that would, for the first time in the history of the Cause, bring Western Bahá'ís into the presence of the Master.

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The pilgrimage marked her, the chronicle records, more deeply than any of the fifteen. She returned to America with a single calling: to spread the Cause in her own country. She married the chemist Edward Getsinger; the two travelled together across the United States in the years that followed; she addressed gatherings in city after city; she founded believers in Ithaca, in Washington, in Boston, in San Francisco, in many of the smaller towns between.

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The Master, the chronicle preserves, named her in His Tablets *Livá* — the Persian-Arabic word for the standard or banner. The naming was deliberate. He recognised in her the quality of one who could carry the Cause out into the new country and plant it, again and again, in fresh ground.

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Her later years were less easy than her early ones. The marriage to Edward Getsinger came under strain. She travelled, across her later teaching trips, increasingly alone. She served in Europe, in Egypt, in the Holy Land itself for long periods at the Master's side. She translated. She received pilgrims. She corresponded.

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She died, in May 1916, in Cairo, on a teaching trip. She was forty-five years old. The Master, the chronicle records, was profoundly grieved. He arranged for her burial in Cairo and wrote, of her, a Tablet of unusual personal warmth. He named her, in that Tablet, the *first western martyr* of the Cause — not because she had died by violence, but because she had used herself up entirely in the work of teaching, and had been spent in the field of her service before she had reached old age.

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The Bahá'í communities of the United States have, in the generations since, remembered Lua Getsinger as the first of their travel-teachers — the radiant young woman who had brought back, from her 1899 pilgrimage, a love for the Cause so undefended that it had used up the whole of her in the work of carrying it.

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