The Boy Who Climbed the Mountains to Pray

A retelling for children, based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.

High in the mountains of Switzerland, where the air is thin and cold and the silence stretches on forever, a young man walked alone. He climbed for hours, up the long stony paths, past the very last of the trees, until there was nothing around him but rock and sky. He was not running away from anything. He had come to these mountains for a reason. He had come to pray.

His name was Shoghi Effendi, and a very great thing had just happened to him — so great that it had nearly knocked him off his feet.

Not long before, he had been a student, far away in England, at a famous school called Oxford. Then word reached him that his Grandfather, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, had passed away. Shoghi Effendi hurried home, his heart heavy with grief. And there, he opened a paper his Grandfather had left behind — 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own Will. Inside it, he read something he had never expected. The Master had chosen him. He was to become the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith. He was to lead and protect the entire Cause.

Imagine being handed a task that enormous. There had never been a Guardian before. There was no one he could ask, "How is this done?" The whole Bahá'í world, in every country, would now look to him. He was still so young — and the weight of it felt almost too heavy to lift.

For a few weeks he tried. He set himself to begin the work. But the sorrow and the size of it pressed down on him until, at last, his strength simply gave way. He could not go on the way he was. He needed to stop. He needed to be alone — to think, to pray, to prepare himself for the burden he had been called to carry.

And so, in the spring of 1922, he went to the mountains.

He chose them on purpose. He had visited the Alps once before, and he had loved them — the high clear air, the long walking paths, the great stillness above the trees. Something up there answered something inside him. Day after day he walked, very long days, climbing higher and higher. He prayed as he went. He wrote almost no letters at all. He simply walked, and climbed, and opened his heart to God, gathering the strength he was going to need.

But who would look after the Cause while he was away in the mountains?

Back in the Holy Land, in the city of Haifa, there was someone the believers trusted with their whole hearts. She was Bahíyyih Khánum, the most beloved sister of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. People called her the Greatest Holy Leaf. She had been carrying heavy burdens for the Faith since she was a girl, all the way back to the hard days when the family had been prisoners. Now she stepped forward again.

The Greatest Holy Leaf agreed that Shoghi Effendi truly needed this time away. She wrote letters to the believers all around the world, gently explaining where the Guardian had gone and why, and asking them to keep up their work and keep saying their prayers. And quietly, calmly, she herself held the affairs of the whole Cause steady while he was gone. The little notes she wrote in those days were kind and sure and never rushed — the work of someone who had learned, long ago, how to carry great things without making a great noise about it.

The truth is, Shoghi Effendi went back to those mountains more than once. In the early years, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for longer, he returned to the high paths and the quiet air. The task he had been given was almost more than even his remarkable strength could bear in those years. That was simply the truth of it, and Rúḥíyyih Khánum, who wrote his story, did not pretend otherwise.

But here is what he carried down from the mountains. In all that walking and praying, he learned exactly how to do the work — what he could carry and what he could not. He learned to use his hours carefully. He would write his urgent messages in the dark, quiet hours before dawn, translate at his small desk through the afternoon, and welcome pilgrims who came to see him in the evening. He kept to that careful pattern for thirty-six years.

So the way the Guardian led the Bahá'í Faith — steady, ordered, and strong enough to last a lifetime — was quietly shaped up there, in those silent Swiss mountains.

Sometimes, before we can do something truly hard, we first need to go quiet. We need time to rest, and think, and pray, and let our strength come back. Stepping away to gather yourself is not giving up. For Shoghi Effendi, it was exactly how he made himself ready to carry a task that would have crushed almost anyone else.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Mountains of Switzerland: A Young Guardian Withdraws to Pray".

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