A Queen Reads the Word: Martha Root and Queen Marie of Romania

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which records Queen Marie's recognition of the Faith and the part Martha Root played in it. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Bahá'u'lláh, from His prison in the fortress of 'Akká, had addressed the kings and queens of the earth — among them Queen Victoria — calling them to justice, to peace, and to the recognition of the Day of God. In His own lifetime, none of those sovereigns answered His summons. Yet the Word He had sent out did not fall to the ground. Two generations later, in a quiet drawing-room in eastern Europe, a reigning queen would take up the Writings of that same Faith, read them for herself, and become the first monarch in history to bear public witness to them.

The one who carried the Word to her was, by the world's measure, no one of consequence: a small, modest, frail American woman named Martha Root. A journalist by training, she had given the whole of her later life to travelling the earth as a Bahá'í teacher — alone, on slender means, crossing continents again and again to speak of Bahá'u'lláh to whoever would listen. Shoghi Effendi would come to call her the foremost travelling teacher of the first Bahá'í century. Where others saw an unremarkable lady with a suitcase of books, the Cause had found one of its most devoted servants.

In 1926 Martha Root sought an audience with Queen Marie of Romania — a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a woman of letters as well as a queen, known across Europe for her intelligence and her independent mind. Martha came not to petition the Queen for anything, but to offer her something: the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh and of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the revealed Word of the Faith. The Queen received her, and received the books.

What followed could not have been arranged by any human design. The Queen read. And the Word reached her. She was moved, deeply and at once, by what she found in those pages — and, being the woman she was, she did not keep the discovery to herself. Queen Marie set down her testimony in writing and gave it to the newspapers. In a series of published tributes that ran in the press of North America and beyond, she told the reading public, in her own name and over her own signature, what the Bahá'í teachings had become to her. Bahá'u'lláh's Word, she wrote, was a cry come "from afar" that brought peace to the soul; she commended the Faith's message of unity and its summons to live in love, and she urged her readers to seek out those teachings for themselves.

Shoghi Effendi records the magnitude of what had happened. Here was the first reigning sovereign in the history of the Faith to acknowledge it — and to do so not in a private letter but openly, before the world, in the public prints. The homage that Bahá'u'lláh's royal addresses had failed to draw from the thrones of His own century was offered, freely and unsought, by a queen of the next. And the instrument of it had been a single, unsalaried believer who had brought nothing to the palace but the Word itself.

The friendship endured. Queen Marie continued to correspond warmly with Martha Root and to affirm her regard for the Faith through the remaining years of her life, even as political pressures swirled about her court. Her testimonials were gathered, reprinted, and carried by Bahá'ís around the globe as a precious witness — the voice of a queen confirming what a friendless prisoner had proclaimed from 'Akká decades before.

This is a story made for a Feast of Words, for its whole turning-point is an act of reading. No argument was won by force, no allegiance bought. A woman placed the revealed Word into a queen's hands; the queen read it; and the Word did the rest. It is a parable of how the Cause of God advances — not by the power of its messengers, who are often the least and quietest of people, but by the power that lives within the Word they carry.

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/