Four Times Around the World

A retelling based on Shoghi Effendi's account of Martha Root in God Passes By (chapters 20 and 25) and his cablegram on her passing in Messages to America. Words in quotation marks are from those texts.

Martha Root, an American Bahá'í from Pittsburgh, was the first to answer 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablets of the Divine Plan in the very year they were unveiled in the United States, 1919. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had called her "herald of the Kingdom" and "harbinger of the Covenant." That year she set out on the first of the journeys that filled the rest of her life.

Her travels took her to South America, where, Shoghi Effendi wrote, "though equipped with no more than a handful of inadequately translated leaflets," she visited every important city on that continent. Over the next twenty years her travels took her four times around the globe. She went four times to China and Japan and three times to India. She lectured in more than four hundred universities and colleges, visited all but two of the universities of Germany twice, and visited nearly a hundred universities, colleges and schools in China. She spoke to religious congresses, peace societies, Esperanto associations and women's clubs, published articles in the newspapers of almost every country she visited, gave broadcasts, and placed Bahá'í books in private and state libraries. She also oversaw translations of Dr. Esslemont's Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era into many languages.

In January 1926 she arrived in Bucharest and sent Queen Marie of Romania a note with a copy of that book. The Queen read it into the small hours of the morning, and two days later, on January 30, received her at Controceni Palace. There the Queen said that she believed "these teachings are the solution for the world's problems." That same year, on her own initiative, the Queen published three testimonies to the Faith, which appeared in nearly two hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada and were later published in Europe, China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere. Martha Root had eight audiences with Queen Marie in all, the last in 1936.

She met kings, presidents and scholars, among them King Haakon of Norway, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Sun Yat Sen and Rabindranath Tagore. She made a pilgrimage to Persia and visited the Bahá'í historic sites there. In Adrianople she searched out the houses where Bahá'u'lláh had lived during His exile in that city and the people who had met Him.

Shoghi Effendi wrote that neither age nor ill-health, nor lack of money, nor harsh climates, nor political disturbance could turn her from her purpose. She endured "a deadly and painful disease." In 1939, on the last lap of her fourth journey around the world, she was hurrying home to help with the Seven Year Plan in America when she was stricken on the way. She died in Honolulu on September 28, 1939.

In his cablegram to the American believers, Shoghi Effendi wrote: "Posterity will establish her as foremost Hand which 'Abdu'l-Bahá's will has raised up in first Bahá'í century." In God Passes By he called her "that archetype of Bahá'í itinerant teachers" and gave her the title "Leading Ambassadress of His Faith and Pride of Bahá'í teachers, whether men or women, in both the East and the West."

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, and Messages to America.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/