The news of dear Martha Root's death was not unexpected as
the Guardian had been sent the doctor's reports which were pretty hopeless.
These are not the things which burden him. He knew she could not live forever!
Like the Master, a breath of violation or the thought that anyone may be even a
potential violator is, one might say, death to him! I often think it profoundly
organic, the sense that the Center of the Cause has for this most venomous
disease. Hence the importance he attaches to your vigilance in protecting the
Faith and being on the look out - the duty indeed of every Baha'i.
Disobedience, an incorrect attitude towards the fundamentals of the Cause,
failure to push on the teaching and temple work, these are the things he
suffers from and not all the things the friends think he suffers from.
He does not suffer over the deaths of others the way the Master did. He is here
to judge and not to pity. You remember the Master said one bad apple would
decay a whole barrel of good ones? The protection of the Faith is what burns
into him!
Everyone from the center outwards to the furthest point, has
failed befittingly to heed ‘Abdu’l-Baha's injunction ‘that no dust of
despondency may stain his radiant nature . . .’. I sometimes feel desperate. I
feel if I could only bring to him the living sense of the love of the friends -
why don't they pour their love on him? Don't they realize how alone he is! How
isolated, how heavily burdened?
- Ruhiyyih Khanum (From a letter to her parents, dated mid-October 1939,
‘The Maxwells of Montreal, vol. 2’)
