Jul 19, 2015

His smile is a precious bounty

His face is beautiful, as it is so pure in expression and so impersonal, yet at the same time tender and majestic...I saw large grey-blue eyes...His nose is a combination of what it was in the pictures of him as a little boy - he still looks much like that! - and the sort of ridged nose of the Master. His years seem no more than forty-eight instead of sixty. He had a small, greying moustached, tightly clipped. His mouth is firm and pure, his teeth white and beautiful. His smile is a precious bounty... 
(Recorded by a pilgrim in 1956; quoted by Ruhiyyih Khanum in ‘The Priceless Pearl’)

Jul 5, 2015

Shoghi Effendi’s “intense objectiveness”

[1939]: "I sometimes feel that this intense objectiveness of Shoghi Effendi is one of the factors God has endowed him with. He is an absolutely unselfconscious instrument. His impulses are violent and no one (I mean no disinterested observer) could doubt the tremendous achievements of his for the Cause, all carried out on these unhesitating impulses. That is all his decisions -- but of course he revolves things for weeks, sometimes years in his mind before acting. All the thought in the world is there but when he feels the urge he never waits five seconds!" 
- Ruhiyyih Khanum  (Entry from her diary, ‘The Priceless Pearl’)