Martha Root and Queen Marie of Romania

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, which records Queen Marie's recognition of the Faith and Martha Root's part in it. Words in quotation marks are quoted from that book, including the Queen's own words as it gives them.*

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Martha Root was the first to arise, in 1919, in response to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablets of the Divine Plan. For twenty years she travelled almost without a break, four times around the globe, carrying the Message of Bahá'u'lláh to kings, queens, presidents, professors and people of every kind. Shoghi Effendi calls her "that archetype of Bahá'í itinerant teachers."

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When she arrived in Bucharest in January 1926, she sent a note to **Queen Marie of Romania**, together with a copy of *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. The Queen, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, read the book into the small hours of the morning. Two days later, on 30 January 1926, she received Martha Root at Controceni Palace, and in that audience she said she believed that "these teachings are the solution for the world's problems." It was the first of eight audiences between them over the next ten years.

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The Message reached the Queen at a hard time in her life. "It came," she later wrote, "as all great messages come, at an hour of dire grief and inner conflict and distress, so the seed sank deeply."

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That same year, on her own initiative, Queen Marie published three testimonies to the Faith. They appeared in nearly two hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada and were later translated and published in Europe, China, Japan, Australia and the Near East.

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In the first she wrote that the writings of Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá are "a great cry toward peace, reaching beyond all limits of frontiers, above all dissensions about rites and dogmas." She urged her readers: "If ever the name of Bahá'u'lláh or 'Abdu'l-Bahá comes to your attention, do not put their writings from you." In a later appreciation she wrote: "The Bahá'í teaching brings peace to the soul and hope to the heart."

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She went on reading, and she knew that some disapproved.

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"Some of those of my caste," she wrote in a personal letter, "wonder at and disapprove my courage to step forward pronouncing words not habitual for crowned heads to pronounce, but I advance by an inner urge I cannot resist." On a visit to the Near East she passed through Haifa with her youngest daughter, Princess Ileana, intending to visit the Bahá'í Shrines, but was denied the pilgrimage she had planned.

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In June 1931 she wrote to Martha Root: "Both Ileana and I were cruelly disappointed at having been prevented going to the holy Shrines." At an audience in 1936 she spoke to Martha Root of the Kitáb-i-Íqán and of *Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh*, which she called a wonderful book.

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Shoghi Effendi writes that, of all Martha Root's services to the Cause, this response of the Queen was "the most superb and by far the most momentous." He adds that she "may well deserve to rank as the first of those royal supporters of the Cause of God who are to arise in the future." She died in July 1938.

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

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