Baha'i Administration - Shoghi Effendi
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Page 187 of  196

The beloved of God and the handmaids of the Merciful throughout the United States and Canada.
Brethren and fellow-mourners in the Faith of Baha'u'llah:
A sorrow, reminiscent in its poignancy, of the devastating grief caused by Abdu'l-Baha's sudden removal from our midst, has stirred the Baha'i world to its foundations. The Greatest Holy Leaf, the well-beloved and treasured Remnant of Baha'u'llah entrusted to our frail and unworthy hands by our departed Master, has passed to the Great Beyond, leaving a legacy that time can never dim (187:7)

The community of the Most Great Name, in its entirety and to its very core, feels the sting of this cruel loss. Inevitable though this calamitous event appeared to us all, however acute our apprehensions of its steady approach, the consciousness of its final consummation at this terrible hour leaves us, we whose souls have been impregnated by the energizing influence of her love, prostrated and disconsolate (187:10)

How can my lonely pen, so utterly inadequate to glorify so exalted a station, so impotent to portray the experiences of so sublime a life, so disqualified to recount the blessings she showered upon me since my earliest childhood -- how can such a pen repay the great debt of gratitude and love that I owe her whom I regarded as my chief sustainer, my most affectionate comforter, the joy and inspiration of my life? My grief is too immense, my remorse too profound, to be able to give full vent at this moment to the feelings that surge within me (187:11)

Only future generations and pens abler than mine can, and will, pay a worthy tribute to the towering grandeur of her spiritual life, to the unique part she played throughout the tumultuous stages of Baha'i history, to the expressions of unqualified praise that have streamed from the pen of both Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha, the Center of His covenant, though unrecorded, and in the main unsuspected by the mass of her passionate admirers in East and West, the share she has had in influencing the course of some of the chief events in the annals of the Faith, the sufferings she bore, the sacrifices she made, the rare gifts of unfailing sympathy she so strikingly displayed -- these, and many others stand so inextricably interwoven with the fabric of the Cause itself that no future historian of the Faith of Baha'u'llah can afford to ignore or minimize (187:12)

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