The Mountains of Switzerland: A Young Guardian Withdraws to Pray

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum writes with unusual candour about the months that followed her husband’s sudden elevation to the Guardianship. The young man who had returned from Oxford to bury his Grandfather had then opened the Master’s Will and discovered an office that no human being could be entirely prepared for. He set himself, for some weeks, to begin the work; and then his strength failed.

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He went, in the spring of 1922, to the mountains of Switzerland. The destination was deliberate. He had loved the Alps from a brief earlier visit; the high air, the long walking paths, the silence above the tree-line answered something in him. Rúḥíyyih Khánum quotes from his own letters of the period and from the witness of those who saw him in those months. He walked very long days. He climbed. He prayed. He wrote almost no correspondence.

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The decision to withdraw was not a flight. The Greatest Holy Leaf — Bahíyyih Khánum, the most beloved sister of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá — consented to it; she wrote, in her own correspondence, to the believers explaining the Guardian’s absence and asking them to continue their work and their prayers. In the meantime she herself, in Haifa, quietly held the affairs of the Cause. The small notes that survive from her hand to the believers in those months are gentle, firm, and unhurried — the work of a woman who had been bearing such burdens since the days of the imprisonment.

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The withdrawals were repeated. Across the early years of his Guardianship Shoghi Effendi went to the mountains again — for short periods, for longer. Rúḥíyyih Khánum is honest that the weight he had been given was almost more than even his exceptional strength could bear in those years. She does not romanticize the suffering. She names it.

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What returned with him from those mountains, however, was a working method that lasted thirty-six years. He learned, in the walking and the praying, what he could and could not carry; he learned to ration his hours, to write cables in the dark hours of the morning, to translate at his small desk through the afternoon, to receive pilgrims in the evening. The institution of the Guardianship, as the Bahá’í world has known it, was shaped in those silent Alpine months.

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*Paraphrased from The Priceless Pearl (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1969); see original for full text.*

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