To the list must be added the name of Queen Marie of Romania, whom the ages will hail as the first crowned head to recognize the Revelation of God for this day. The courage shown by this lone woman in publicly declaring her faith, through the letters she fearlessly addressed to the editors of several newspapers in both Europe and North America, in all probability introduced the name of the Cause to an audience numbering millions of readers.
Despite the impressive response that the earliest of these efforts elicited, the lack of an organized means of capitalizing on the results initially limited the benefits accruing to Bahá’í communities in Western lands. The rise of the Administrative Order dramatically changed the latter situation. As Local Spiritual Assemblies came into being, goals were set, resources were made available to support individual teaching efforts, and those who declared their faith found themselves participating in the many activities of an engrossing Bahá’í community life. It was now possible to systematically translate and publish literature, news of general interest was regularly shared, and the bonds that linked believers with the World Centre of the Faith grew steadily stronger.
The two chief instruments by which Shoghi Effendi set about cultivating a heightened devotion to teaching in both East and West were the same as those on which the Master had relied. A steady stream of letters to communities and individuals alike opened up for the recipients new dimensions in the beliefs they had embraced. The most important of these communications, however, now became those addressed to National and Local Spiritual Assemblies. Their effect was intensified by the stream of returning pilgrims who shared insights gained by direct contact with the Centre of the Cause. Through these connections every individual believer was encouraged to see himself or herself as an instrument of the power flowing through the Covenant. The invaluable compilation that eventually appeared under the title Messages to America, 1932-1946 provides a review of the steps by which Shoghi Effendi drew the North American believers ever deeper into the implications of the Master’s Divine Plan for “the spiritual conquest of the planet”:
By the sublimity and serenity of their faith, by the steadiness and clarity of their vision, the incorruptibility of their character, the rigor of their discipline, the sanctity of their morals, and the unique example of their community life, they can and indeed must in a world polluted with its incurable corruptions, paralyzed by its haunting fears, torn by its devastating hatreds, and languishing under the weight of its appalling miseries demonstrate the validity of their claim to be regarded as the sole repository of that grace upon whose operation must depend the complete deliverance, the fundamental reorganization and the supreme felicity of all mankind.[84]
The Guardian held up before the eyes of the North American Bahá’í community a vision of their spiritual destiny. Its members were, he said, “the spiritual descendants of the heroes of God’s Cause”, their rising institutions were “the visible symbols of its [the Faith’s] undoubted sovereignty”, the teachers and pioneers it sent out were “torch-bearers of an as yet unborn civilization”, it was their collective challenge to assume “a preponderating share” in laying the foundations of the World Order “which the Báb has heralded, which the mind of Bahá’u’lláh has envisioned, and whose features ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, its Architect, has delineated....”[85]
The language of the messages is magnificent, enthralling. In acknowledging the darkness that widespread godlessness, violence and creeping immorality was engendering, Shoghi Effendi described the role that Bahá’ís everywhere must play as instruments of the transforming power of the new Revelation:
Theirs is the duty to hold, aloft and undimmed, the torch of Divine guidance, as the shades of night descend upon, and ultimately envelop the entire human race. Theirs is the function, amidst its tumults, perils and agonies, to witness to the vision, and proclaim the approach, of that re-created society, that Christ-promised Kingdom, that World Order whose generative impulse is the spirit of none other than Bahá’u’lláh Himself, whose dominion is the entire planet, whose watchword is unity, whose animating power is the force of Justice, whose directive purpose is the reign of righteousness and truth, and whose supreme glory is the complete, the undisturbed and everlasting felicity of the whole of human kind.[86]
In 1936 the Guardian judged that the administrative structure of the Cause was sufficiently broad and consolidated in North America that he could begin the first stage of the implementation of the Divine Plan itself. With the world sliding into another global conflagration, and the scope possible to the efforts of the Persian believers being severely limited, the focus would necessarily have to be on the expansion and consolidation of the Bahá’í community in the Western hemisphere in preparation for the much larger undertakings that lay ahead. Calling on the Plan’s appointed “executors”, the believers in North America, the Guardian laid out a Seven Year Plan, scheduled to run from 1937 to 1944. Its objectives were to establish at least one Local Spiritual Assembly in every state of the United States and every province of Canada, and to open to the Cause fourteen republics in Latin America. To these objectives was added the task, immensely demanding of a community with still very limited numbers and severely straitened financial resources, of completing the exterior ornamentation of the “Mother Temple of the West”.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum has pointed out a striking parallel between two developments during this period of history. On the one hand, powerful nations were launching armies of invasion whose goal was to seize the natural resources of neighbour states—or simply to satisfy an appetite for conquest. During this same period, Shoghi Effendi was mobilizing the painfully small band of pioneers available to him, and dispatching them to the teaching goals of the Plan he had created. Within a few short years, the vast battalions of aggression would be shattered beyond recovery, their names and conquests erased from history. The little company of believers who had gone out with their lives in their hands to fulfil the mission entrusted to them by the Guardian would have achieved or exceeded all of their objectives, objectives that soon became the foundations of flourishing communities.[87]
In appreciating this undertaking, it is helpful for Bahá’ís to understand not only the role that planning plays in the life of the Cause, but the unique nature of this instrumentality in its Bahá’í expression. The systematic identification of objectives to be achieved and decisions as to how to achieve them does not mean that the Bahá’í community has assumed the responsibility of “designing” a future for itself, as the concept of planning customarily implies. What Bahá’í institutions do, rather, is to strive to align the work of the Cause with the Divinely impelled process they see steadily unfolding in the world, a process that will ultimately realize its purpose, regardless of historical circumstances or events. The challenge to the Administrative Order is to ensure that, as Providence allows, Bahá’í efforts are in harmony with this Greater Plan of God, because it is in doing so that the potentialities implanted in the Cause by Bahá’u’lláh bear their fruit. That the provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ensure the success of the efforts of the Bahá’ís is dramatically demonstrated in the unbroken series of triumphs that fulfilled the plans created by Shoghi Effendi.