A Shining Light: Leslie Armstrong of Montreal

In Issue 19 of Volume 3 of the *Star of the West,* dated the second of March, 1913, the editors printed a short obituary notice forwarded by friends from the small Bahá'í community of Montreal.

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Leslie Armstrong was six years old when he died. He had been struck and fatally injured in a Montreal street by an automobile in January of that year — automobiles still being, in the cities of 1913, a relatively new and inadequately regulated presence on the streets where children played.

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The Armstrongs were among the small group of Montreal Bahá'í families. They had been in attendance during 'Abdu'l-Bahá's brief visit to the city in late August and early September of 1912. Like many of the friends, they had brought their child to the Master's gatherings.

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The detail the obituary preserves is the one that gives the notice its weight.

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The Armstrongs recalled that, during the visit, the Master had called Leslie to Him. He had filled the small boy's hands with fruit from the table. He had laid His hand on the child's head. He had spoken, in His characteristic way of addressing children with grave kindness, a sentence the parents had not forgotten and would never forget.

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> He will be a shining light for God.

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It was the kind of sentence the Master spoke, in different forms, over many of the children He met in His Western journeys. He saw in each child the soul, not the size. He addressed the soul as the soul deserved to be addressed.

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Five months later, the boy was dead.

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The obituary in the *Star of the West* did not attempt to explain how the Master's blessing was to be reconciled with the child's death. It simply printed the recollection. The parents wished the friends across the Bahá'í world to know that their son had been seen, blessed, and named — even if his ministry as a *shining light* had been the brief one of a small boy who never reached his seventh year.

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In Bahá'í teaching the soul does not stop at the body's death. The light promised over Leslie's head was, in the Bahá'í reading, a light that would continue to burn in the next world, and from there into the spiritual life of those whom the boy had touched. The grieving parents, by submitting the small notice, were entrusting their son's memory to the worldwide community of which the Master had blessed him a member.

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The notice is short. It is one of the most quietly moving pieces in the early *Star of the West*. The Master had filled a small boy's hands with fruit and named him a light. The boy had been claimed early by the world's hardness. The Master's sentence outlasted the loss.

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