A Ransom Accepted: The Purest Branch

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

When Bahá'u'lláh and His family were sent into their harshest exile, they were shut up in the grim prison-barracks of the city of 'Akká, behind walls and guards, cut off from the world. Among them was Bahá'u'lláh's younger son, Mírzá Mihdí — a gentle, devoted young man of about twenty-two, the full brother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. For his purity of heart, he came to be known as the Purest Branch.

Mírzá Mihdí had one beloved habit. In the evenings he would climb to the flat roof of the barracks and walk there alone, chanting prayers, wrapped so completely in his devotions that the prison and its sorrows seemed to fall away from him.

One evening in 1870, pacing the roof and lost in prayer, he did not see the open skylight in his path. He stepped into it and fell to the floor far below, landing upon a wooden crate that pierced his side. The injury was mortal.

Bahá'u'lláh hastened to His son. And there, in the last hours of the young man's life, Bahá'u'lláh asked him what he desired — for it was understood that a wish breathed in such a moment, by such a soul, would be granted.

Mírzá Mihdí might have asked to be healed. He might have asked for the pain to stop. He asked for neither.

Instead, knowing that crowds of believers had journeyed great distances only to be turned away at the gates of 'Akká, never permitted to look upon Bahá'u'lláh, he asked that his own life be accepted as a ransom — a sacrifice offered so that those who longed for Bahá'u'lláh's presence, and were kept from it, might one day attain their heart's desire.

Bahá'u'lláh granted his son's request. Mírzá Mihdí passed from this world, and Bahá'u'lláh revealed words of staggering tenderness and grandeur over him, testifying that He had accepted this offering, and that through it a door long closed would open.

And so it proved. Before long, the harsh restrictions began to loosen. The gates that had been shut against the lovers of Bahá'u'lláh slowly opened, and pilgrims who had been turned away were at last able to come.

The Purest Branch was young, and his life in this world was short and spent mostly in captivity. Yet in his final hour he reached for the one thing that can never be imprisoned: the freedom to give himself away for others. He did not ask, "Save me." He asked, "Let my going make a way for them." That is the quiet heart of sacrifice — to spend even one's last breath on someone else's nearness to God.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/