The Grass That Would Not Grow

A retelling for children, based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Rabbání. The line in quotation marks is taken word for word from the book.

High on a mountain called Carmel stood the Shrine of the Báb, a holy and peaceful resting place. But the slopes around it were dry and brown. The sun beat down, the summers were harsh, and hardly anything green would grow there at all.

Shoghi Effendi looked at those bare, dusty slopes and saw something no one else could see. He was the young Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, and he had a great many enormous jobs to do — but he had set his heart on this one. He wanted soft green lawns, living grass, growing all around the Shrine of the Báb.

When he told people his idea, they shook their heads. Grass did not grow here, they said. The soil was too dry. The weather was too hot. It had never been done. Better, they thought, to give up such a hopeless dream.

But Shoghi Effendi did not give up.

Instead, he set to work with all his might. He wrote letters far across the sea — to seed sellers in France, to seed sellers in England — asking them to send him grass seed. When the letters did not bring answers fast enough, he wrote again, and again, more urgently each time.

And when the first seeds finally came, they were no good. Someone else might have sighed and given up there. But that was not how Shoghi Effendi did things. He sent off for fresh seed from four different companies all at once, until at last he held in his hands seed that was good enough to do the job.

Then he planted it. And the grass grew.

Green and cool and soft, the very first big lawns that land had ever seen spread out all around the resting place of the Báb — in the exact spot where everyone had promised him that grass could never, ever grow.

Someone who watched Shoghi Effendi work said it best of all. When he set his mind to a task, this person said,

He descends on it like a hurricane and never lets up until it is done.

The lawns may seem like a small thing — just grass on a hillside. But they show us something big about how Shoghi Effendi served all his life. He took on jobs that everyone called impossible, and he poured such patient, loving care into them that the impossible slowly came true. So the next time somebody tells you a good thing simply cannot be done, remember the green gardens on the mountain that everyone was so sure would never grow.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Gardens No One Believed In".

Rabbání, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://bahai-library.com/khanum_priceless_pearl