A Burning Torch: The Master's Counsel to Mrs. Fraser

In Issue 19 of Volume 3 of the Star of the West, dated the second of March, 1913, the editors printed words spoken by the Master to Mrs. Fraser, an American journalist who had been writing pieces on the Bahá'í Cause in the press of one of the American cities. The Master had seen the articles, had been pleased, and had spoken about them when Mrs. Fraser came to 'Akká on pilgrimage.

He praised the work directly.

You have written excellent articles in the papers in regard to the Cause. I will never forget these services of yours.

The phrase — I will never forget — was the Master's characteristic acknowledgement of a service that had registered in His heart. The friends who heard such a phrase carried it as a small private treasure. Mrs. Fraser, at the receiving end of that praise, had been told that her work, however obscure to the wider world, had been seen by the One in whose service it had been done.

But the Master did not stop with the praise. He turned the encounter into a charge.

You must become like a burning torch — so that you may be able to melt mountains of snow.

The image is exact. The world the Bahá'í teacher faces is, in many places, frozen — long traditions of religious indifference in some quarters, long traditions of religious hostility in others, long mountains of accumulated misunderstanding that no merely intellectual argument can remove. The work of the teacher is not, in the Master's reading, primarily the production of better arguments. It is the production, in oneself, of more heat.

The torch melts the snow not by reasoning with it. The torch melts the snow because the torch is itself burning. The warmth of a soul aflame with the love of God can soften prejudices that no series of public lectures can address. The mountain yields, slowly, because it is being approached by a fire.

The Master is asking Mrs. Fraser to deepen, in her own inward life, the source of the heat. The articles she has written are the visible product. But the writing will only continue to do its work if the inward fire in the writer continues to burn. The journalist is being asked to become, before she is anything else, a burning torch.

The instruction has been carried, by many later Bahá'í teachers in many later contexts, as the word that orders their work. The standard Mrs. Fraser was given in 1913 still stands. The torch comes first. The articles, the lectures, the books, the public events — these follow. Where the torch has gone out, no amount of competent professional output will melt the snow.

The Star of the West printed the brief exchange because the American friends needed it. Many of them, like Mrs. Fraser, were teachers of one sort or another in their own contexts — in classrooms, in newsrooms, in pulpits. The standard given to one journalist was, by extension, the standard given to all of them.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 3, Issue 19 (March 2, 1913), words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Mrs. Fraser. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1913). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1