The Night the Guardian Went Home

A retelling for children, based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum, the wife of Shoghi Effendi, who was with him through his last days and wrote them down plainly, just as they happened.

On a cold evening at the end of October, in the year 1957, a tired traveller arrived in the great city of London. His name was Shoghi Effendi, and the world's Bahá'ís called him the Guardian, because for many years he had watched over the Bahá'í Faith and guided it, the way a careful gardener watches over a growing garden.

He had been away in Europe — first in Switzerland, then in Germany — partly because he was not feeling well and needed a doctor's care, partly because he needed rest, and partly because he was hard at work planning a great worldwide effort to share the Faith all across the earth. Now he had come to London at last, and he checked into a small hotel to stay for a while.

A few days later, Shoghi Effendi caught what seemed, at first, to be an ordinary kind of flu — the same illness that had been going around Europe that whole autumn. So he went to bed to get better, the way you do when you are sick. His fever climbed higher, and a doctor came to see him.

At first the doctor was not too worried. After all, Shoghi Effendi was sixty years old and, apart from being very tired from so many years of hard work, he was usually quite healthy. Everyone expected him to rest a few days and then be well again.

But in the dark, quiet hours before dawn on the fourth of November, everything changed. The illness had moved down into his lungs, and his heart — worn out, perhaps, by a lifetime of never stopping his work — grew too weak to carry on. And so, very quietly, in the small hours of that morning, the Guardian passed away.

He was not alone. Rúḥíyyih Khánum, his wife, was sitting right beside him, holding watch over him to the very end.

Later that same day, with a heavy heart, she had to send a message to Bahá'ís all over the world to tell them what had happened. It was the shortest message she ever sent in her whole life. It told the friends that the Guardian had passed away, it asked them to pray, and it promised that she would take care of arranging where he would be laid to rest.

There was a great deal for the friends to think about. The Guardian had not left behind anyone to take his place. But years before, in 1951, he had chosen a special group of devoted helpers called the Hands of the Cause of God. Now these trusted helpers would carefully look after the affairs of the Faith for the next six years — until, in 1963, the Bahá'ís of the world chose a new guiding body called the Universal House of Justice.

Rúḥíyyih Khánum talked with the Bahá'ís in Britain about where Shoghi Effendi should be buried. She decided to leave him there in London, among the Western friends he himself had helped raise up and gather together. He was laid to rest in a cemetery in the north of the city, and over his grave stands a tall marble pillar topped with a globe of the earth and an eagle. From that day on, Bahá'ís travelling on pilgrimage to the holy places in Haifa would stop in London along the way, to visit him.

For thirty-six years Shoghi Effendi had served as the Guardian. In that time the worldwide family of Bahá'ís had grown to be four times as large as the one he had been given to care for. The friends were filled with a sorrow so deep that they had not felt anything like it since the passing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá long before.

When someone we love finishes their work on this earth, it is right to feel sad, and right to remember them. But the truest way to honour a faithful life is to carry forward the work they began — and that is just what the Bahá'í world set out to do.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Sudden Passing in London, November 1957".

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.