The Banner-Bearer Before a King: Lua Getsinger and the Sháh

*A retelling drawn from **Bahá'í Chronicles**, which gathers the accounts of the early heroes and heroines of the Faith. Words in quotation marks are titles or phrases preserved in that record.*

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Lua Getsinger was born Lua Aurelia Moore in 1871, on a small farm in the state of New York. She came of plain, hardworking American stock, was schooled in the country schools of her county, and might, by every ordinary expectation, have lived a quiet and unremarked life. Instead she heard, in Chicago in the late 1890s, of the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh; and from the moment it reached her, her warm and dramatic nature took fire.

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In 1898 she was among the first small band of Western believers ever to make the pilgrimage to 'Akká and stand in the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. She came home changed for life, with one consuming desire: to teach.

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She became, in the years that followed, the most celebrated travelling teacher of her generation in America — addressing gatherings from city to city, kindling believers in town after town, spending herself without measure in the work. The Master, recognising the quality of one who could carry the Cause out and plant it in new ground, gave her a name in His Tablets: *Livá* — the standard, the banner. She was the Banner-Bearer.

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It was as the Banner-Bearer that she was called, one day in Paris, to her most extraordinary errand. The year was 1902. Muẓaffari'd-Dín Sháh, the monarch of Persia, was making a state visit to Europe and had come to Paris in the course of his travels. In Persia itself, the Bahá'ís were a persecuted people — robbed, imprisoned, and put to death under the indifference or the connivance of the very throne the Sháh occupied.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá, far away, determined that the sovereign should be made to hear, to his face, a protest against the wrongs done to the believers in his name. And the one He chose to carry that protest to the king was Lua Getsinger.

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Consider what the charge meant. Lua was an American, a woman, a private person with no rank, no office, no diplomatic standing, and no natural means of approaching a reigning monarch surrounded by his court and guards. By every worldly calculation she was the least likely envoy imaginable. Kings are approached by ambassadors and ministers, not by farmers' daughters from New York. Yet this was the messenger the Master appointed, and this was the message she accepted to bear.

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She did not refuse it, and she did not fail in it. With the persistence and the fearless directness that marked her whole life, Lua made her way to where the Sháh could be reached, and there delivered to him the message she had been given — a plea and a protest on behalf of the oppressed Bahá'ís of his kingdom, that the killing and the plunder should cease. She had no power to compel him. She had only the word entrusted to her and the courage to set it before the face of a king. She spoke it.

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The chronicle does not pretend that the monarch was transformed by the encounter. The persecutions of the Persian believers did not end with one woman's protest in Paris. But that is not the measure of what Lua did. The measure is that the word was delivered — that the wrongs done in secret in a distant land were named aloud before the throne responsible for them, by a messenger who would not be turned away.

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The Cause does not ask its servants to guarantee the outcome of a testimony. It asks them to bear it faithfully, and leave the rest to God.

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Lua Getsinger went on teaching to the very end of her short life. She served in Europe, in Egypt, in the Holy Land at the Master's side; she gave herself to the work until there was nothing left to give, and died in Cairo in 1916, still in the field, only forty-five years old. 'Abdu'l-Bahá grieved for her and named her, in a Tablet of great tenderness, the first Western martyr of the Cause — not because she had died by violence, but because she had used herself up entirely in its service.

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The Feast of Qawl remembers her for the boldest single act of speech in that spent and shining life: the day the Banner-Bearer, armed with nothing but a message and her own fearlessness, carried the word of the Master to the ear of a king. Rank does not qualify a soul to bear the truth. Love does.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Bahá'í Chronicles**.*

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