The Globe Her Parish: Martha Root in Service to the World

*A retelling based on the biographical record of Martha Root published by **Bahá'í Chronicles**, drawing on the documented history of her travels. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.*

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Some servants of a great Cause build a single thing and stay beside it all their lives. Martha Root did the opposite. She built nothing of stone and stayed nowhere; she gave up home and comfort and almost every possession, and made the whole round earth her parish.

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For the last twenty years of her life she was very nearly always travelling — by ship and rail and the rough roads of four continents — carrying one message, the message of Bahá'u'lláh, to peoples who had never heard it. When she died, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Faith, ranked her among the foremost teachers the Cause had yet produced and the leading Hand raised up for its service in the West in his time.

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It was an extraordinary verdict on a woman who had begun as nothing more remarkable than a small-town newspaper reporter.

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She was born in 1872 and grew up in western Pennsylvania, a bright, bookish girl who became a journalist — a profession not easily open to women of her day. She had the reporter's gifts: curiosity, persistence, an ear for a story, and an ease with words and with people. In 1909 she heard of the Bahá'í Faith, and in 1910, in Chicago, she embraced it. For a few years she went on with her ordinary life, writing and lecturing. But something in her had been set alight, and in time it consumed every lesser plan she had made.

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In 1919 Martha Root sailed from the United States and began the work that would define her. She had conceived a simple and enormous idea: that she would go, herself, to the countries of the world and tell them, one by one, of the new Day. She had no church behind her sending funds, no organization arranging her way.

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She travelled on her own slender means, eked out by her journalism, staying in cheap lodgings, often eating poorly, often unwell — for she carried, through much of these years, a grave illness that would eventually take her life, and which she simply refused to let stop her. Where she went she sought out the editors of newspapers, the heads of universities, the leaders of learned societies, the people who could open a door for an idea.

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She placed articles in the press, arranged lectures in halls and classrooms, gave Bahá'í books to public libraries so that the message would remain in a country long after she had left it, and gathered around her, in city after city, the first small clusters of those who believed.

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Four times she went all the way around the world. She crossed and recrossed Europe; she travelled through the lands of South America; she carried the Faith into the Far East — to Japan, to China, to India, to the islands.

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She went into places where she did not speak the language and into places where a foreign woman travelling alone with a strange new religion was an object of suspicion, and she went on regardless, with a courtesy and a fearlessness that disarmed almost everyone she met.

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She learned to use whatever bridge was at hand — the press, the universities, the international language Esperanto, the simple human warmth that crossed every border — to reach the minds and hearts in front of her.

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Her most famous achievement was the friendship she formed with a queen. Marie, Queen of Romania, was one of the notable women of her age, and Martha Root, the newspaperwoman from Pennsylvania, sought her out, was received by her, and spoke to her of Bahá'u'lláh. The Queen recognized the truth of what she heard.

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She became, in time, the first reigning monarch to accept the Bahá'í teachings and to say so openly, writing in praise of the Faith in words that were published in the press of several nations. That a travelling teacher of no rank or fortune should have carried the Cause into the heart of a royal court, and won from a queen a public testimony to its truth, struck many as little short of miraculous.

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But Martha Root never made the Queen into a trophy. She had given exactly the same patient care to a roomful of students in Tokyo, to a circle of seekers in Buenos Aires, to a single inquirer met on a train. She made no distinction between the great and the obscure. To her every soul was worth the whole journey.

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What sustained her was not robust health, for she had little; nor money, for she had almost none; nor ease, for she chose hardship deliberately and lived for twenty years without a settled home. What sustained her was love — an inexhaustible love for Bahá'u'lláh and for the human race He had come to unite — and an iron detachment from everything that might have held her back.

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She let go of comfort, of security, of the natural human wish to rest, and in the letting go she found a freedom to serve that few attain. She kept moving even as her illness advanced. In her final years, gravely sick, she was still travelling, still teaching, still planting the seed in new soil, unwilling to lay the work down while a single hour of strength remained to her.

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She died in 1939, far from the country of her birth, in Honolulu, in the middle of the Pacific — still, in a sense, on the road, still between one shore and the next, exactly as she had lived. When the news reached Shoghi Effendi, he mourned her in the highest terms and called for her memory to be honoured throughout the Bahá'í world, ranking her achievements with those of the greatest teachers of the Faith's history.

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The slight, quiet reporter who had once covered local stories for a Pennsylvania paper had become one of the immortal servants of a world religion, simply by deciding that the whole world was her assignment and then giving everything she had to it.

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This is why Martha Root belongs to a Feast of Mulk, of Dominion. The Cause of God does not spread of itself; it spreads through those who carry it, and some are called not to build one community and tend it, but to go — to the next city, the next country, the next continent — and lay a first seed wherever none has yet been laid. Martha Root was the supreme example of that going.

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She owned nothing, settled nowhere, and gave the world more than most who own a great deal. She made the whole round earth her parish, and walked it to the end.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the biography of Martha Root at **Bahá'í Chronicles**.*

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