Advise Remain Sofia

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Khánum, with details from Star of the West, H. M. Balyuzi's 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Diary of Juliet Thompson, Adib Taherzadeh's The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh and letters and cables of Shoghi Effendi. Words in quotation marks are as recorded in those books.

Marion Jack was a Canadian, from New Brunswick. She was studying art in Paris and London when she first became interested in the Bahá'í Faith, and in 1908 she travelled to 'Akká. For six months she was in the company of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, teaching His four daughters English. Her father was a general, a report in Star of the West explained, and "Abdul Bahá often called her a general, too."

In 1911, when 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to London, several Bahá'ís arranged meetings for Him besides those at His residence. Among them, H. M. Balyuzi records, was Marion Jack, "whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá called 'General Jack'." Juliet Thompson, waiting in London that August for His coming, wrote in her diary: "Every night we all gather at dear Miss Jack's and pray."

From 1930 she lived in Sofia, Bulgaria. In October 1933 she and Martha Root went together to Adrianople, the city of Bahá'u'lláh's exile, to look for "traces of the Traceless Friend" and to portray it for the Bahá'í world, in Martha Root's words "Miss Jack through her brush and the writer through her pen."

She was living as a Bahá'í pioneer in Sofia when war broke out. Shoghi Effendi, concerned about how dangerous her position had become, wired her: "Advise return Canada wire whether financially able."

She replied, "...how about Switzerland," and at the same time assured him of her implicit obedience. The Guardian wired back: "Approve Switzerland."

She still did not want to leave her pioneer post, and she begged to be allowed to remain in Bulgaria. The Guardian replied: "Advise remain Sofia love."

A letter written on the Guardian's behalf in 1954 says that during the war he urged her more than once to seek safety in Switzerland rather than remain behind enemy lines and be entirely cut off. "Lovingly she pleaded that he would not require her to leave her post, and he acquiesced to her request."

Another letter written for him that year, to the German National Spiritual Assembly, recalled that her health had been very bad as far back as 1935, when she attended their summer school at Esslingen, and that it never improved. In the war she was bombed and evacuated, and she slept in a cold, draughty room in a school in the country. After the war, when money was hard to get through to her, she was often, the letter says, almost hungry and insufficiently clad. She never mastered the language, and she had no friends there from her own country.

Rúhíyyih Khánum tells this story as an example of how the spirit of a believer could sometimes persuade Shoghi Effendi to change his own instructions. He always advised the friends to follow a moderate and wise course, she writes, "but if they did not, and chose to rise to heights of heroism and self-sacrifice, he was immensely proud of them." She compares it to an aeroplane: on the ground it goes along steadily on its wheels, but when it leaves the ground and folds its wheels away it is in another realm, and the values are different. "When we are on the ground we get good sound earthly advice," she writes, but those who choose to leap into higher service and sacrifice do not get that kind of advice any more.

On the same pages she tells of other pioneers the Guardian encouraged. Ella Bailey, elderly and disabled, longed to pioneer in North Africa; he encouraged her to go, and the place where she died is marked with a gold star on one of his maps. A pilgrim at his table asked where she and her husband should pioneer. "Africa," he said. Any particular place? "South Africa." Any particular city? "Johannesburg." And so, Rúhíyyih Khánum writes, "her destiny and that of her family were settled in four words."

Marion Jack died in Bulgaria in March 1954, still at her post. The Guardian called her an "immortal heroine," and said no one had surpassed her in "Constancy, dedication, self-abnegation, fearlessness" except the "incomparable Martha Root." In his cable he wrote that her activities over almost half a century, in North America and in Southeast Europe, had attained "their climax in the darkest, most dangerous phase of the second World War." He offered to share the cost of a worthy monument at her grave.

Writing to the British National Assembly about its pioneers, his secretary said: "Let them remember Marion Jack, who for over twenty years, in a country the language of which she never mastered; during war and bombardment; evacuation and poverty; and at length, serious illness, stuck to her post, and has now blessed the soil of the land she had chosen to serve at such cost with her precious remains, every atom of which was dedicated to Bahá'u'lláh."

Among the remarks of his that Rúhíyyih Khánum preserved is this one:

"You cannot be a hero without action. This is the touchstone. Not movement, coming and going, but in the evidences of your character. Jacky [Marion Jack] is a heroine because of her conduct, the heroic spirit reveals itself in her. Martha [Martha Root] had the heroic action. She went 'til she dropped."

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Khánum, chapters 6 and 8, and Shoghi Effendi's cable of 29 March 1954 in Citadel of Faith.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*.