Bahá’í World/Volume 18/Gladys Anderson Weeden
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GLADYS ANDERSON WEEDEN 1906—1979 Knight of Bahá’u’lláh
SADDENED LEARN PASSING KNIGHT OF BAHAULLAH GLADYS ANDERSON WEEDEN. HER SERVICES HAIFA DAYS BELOVED GUARDIAN TEACHING ACTIVITIES THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES AND AT PIONEER POST ANTIGUA WELL REMEMBERED. KINDLY CONVEY SPIRITUAL ASSEMBLY CONCORD NEW HAMPSHIRE OUR GRATEFUL APPRECIATION CABLE AND ASSURANCE PRAYERS HOLY THRESHOLD PROGRESS HER SOUL KINGDOMS GOD.
Universal House of Justice 16 September 1979
People seldom succeed in rounding out their own destiny, in fulfilling, even to a minor degree, their own potentiality. Not so Gladys Weeden. Of Swedish grandparents who had sought freedom of religious outlook in the New World, she was about five years old when her mother died in childbirth with the baby and Gladys’s father found his burdens too heavy and disappeared; her mother’s sister, Mrs. Anderson, legally adopted her; Gladys went to school until she finished eighth grade but her aunt now had children of her own and the cruel years of the great economic depression forced her to go to work; Gladys stayed at home to keep house and mind her much younger brother and sister. I can remember nothing easy in Gladys's life; at sixteen. when the children were older, Gladys got her first job as salesgirl in a store. It is no exaggeration to state that she worked hard, all her life, until she died, a fact which certainly produced in her a strong and wonderful character. Raised in a strict Baptist atmosphere, she recalled that its church and Sunday school had made no deep impression on her. In her own words, it was not until the years of the Depression. in 1919, that ‘. . . people began to re—evaluate their lives . . . there was a lack of everything, money in particular . . . we realized that the material things . . . were no support . . . I began to start my spiritual thinking.” She was twenty-three years old.
Even to purchase petrol for an outing was a rare luxury, but on a sunny July day in 1932 Gladys and her husband, Frank Cotton, whom she had married in 1925, and from
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whom she was divorced in 1941, went on a day’s excursion to the White Mountains in New Hampshire with another couple. I (then Mary Maxwell) and Rosemary Salal were motoring from Montreal to Green Acre in Eliot, Maine, and we all met at a sightseeing spot called Lost River. Years later Rosemary told Gladys that I had said to her: ‘That girl is going to become a Bahá’í.’ Thus began a very deep friendship that lasted forty-seven years.
Gladys came to see me in Green Acre and her first reaction—on seeing Bahá’ís of different races—was, ‘O Lord, this is a religious place!‘ But the new friendship held firm and, combined with the love and teaching of my mother, May Maxwell, eventually brought Gladys into the Faith. She lived and worked in Haverhill, Massachusetts, but we met again at Green Acre in 1933 and also corresponded; a letter of mine to her, in 1934, seems to forecast the future: ‘. . . I feel you and I need each other in life as friends . . . When you spoke this summer of that feeling you have, that some day there is something great for you to do, I know you are right and I know you will do it. Who knows, perhaps our paths lie together in some great service? I feel they do.’
Although Gladys did not become an enrolled Bahá’í until January 1937 in Worcester, Massachusetts, from the very beginning she blossomed in love for the Faith. In November 1935 she wrote her first spontaneous letter to Shoghi Effendi. In his reply the Guardian urges her to study the Teachings and prepare herself for ‘intensive work in the field of teaching’, and in his own handwriting assures her of ‘my loving prayers for your spiritual advancement and for the complete realization of your highest hopes in the service of our beloved Faith . . . may your endeavours be richly blessed by Bahá’u’lláh.’ Before Gladys left Haverhill for Worcester she was already holding a weekly meeting for a few friends; in Worcester she taught the teenage children’s class, telling me in one of her letters: ‘I have so much love to give and I just lavish it all on them. I wish they were all mine.’ A letter was duly sent to Shoghi Effendi about this activity and in his own writing he assures her: ‘The clear evidences of your accomplishments in the service of our glorious Faith greatly
' See ‘ln Mcmoriam‘, p 713.
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IN MEMORIAM
Gladys Anderson Weeden
hearten me in my task. I am so glad to observe the signs of your activity, devotion and progress in promoting the interests of our beloved Cause. I wish you to persevere, nay to redouble your efforts, and not to feel disheartened under any circumstances . . .’ This postscript became her mandate; to it she clung through thick and thin until her death. During those Worcester years, because Gladys was devoted, creative and industrious, her Bahá’í activities steadily increased: she obtained publicity, organized new occasions for teaching enquirers, served on the Local Assembly, was appointed to the Regional Teaching Committee of the six New England States. She always aspired to new heights in her personal life, ‘I have been attending a public speaking class all winter,’ she wrote to me, ‘and it has helped me a great deal. I have also tried to improve my English and increase my vocabulary.’ Her longing to go forth and teach was steadily growing; once it was a dream that we two would go to Haiti; later it was Cuba and she started learning Spanish; as early as 1935 she wrote to me: ‘We would like to curl up in some remote place for an
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indefinite stay, but our Bahá’í conscience will not let us. Life would hold no meaning if we could not feel we were doing something for the Faith . . . you know darling I am going to do something, I am so positive of it . . .’ Her chance came in 1942; during a Regional Committee meeting the urgent call for pioneers was raised; Gladys wrote to me, ‘Out popped the words . . . I’ll go anywhere you want me to!’ The goal of the Seven Year Plan—which would end in 1944—was to establish a Local Assembly in each State of the Union. She was stunned by her audacity and thrilled at her chance! On 18 February 1942 she was installed as a pioneer in Brattleboro, Vermont, with no need to take a job for the first three months so she could devote full time to teaching: ‘I go out to walk and say the Greatest Name on every route I take . . .’ This further great step in her Bahá’í life opened the door to many blessings. By April 1943 she had her Assembly and was on it; ‘. . . this new Assembly came forth,” she wrote to me, ‘very much like the birth of a child With joy, pain and heartache. After the birth comes the responsibility of the child’s future welfare and guidance.”
In September a man she was greatly attracted to accepted the Faith; he was Benjamin Dunham Weeden,l her future husband, a man with a singularly sweet nature, a cultured gentlemanly person who became a very convinced Bahá’í and who, in the twenty-two years of their marriage, brought her much happiness. By 1945 Gladys was chairman of the Brattleboro Assembly, Ben secretary. The Cause was well established there but Gladys was not satisfied or happy; her task seemed accomplished but her relation to Ben was static, with no marriage in prospect. Again she reached out to me, as she had many times since I left North America in 1935, and wanted to meet me somewhere, anywhere, for a few weeks. My own responsibilities were crushing; my father, then seventy-one, was designing the superstructure of the Báb’s Shrine and trying to carry on additional tasks for Shoghi Effendi who was very alone and very overworked himself at that difficult period in our lives. When he saw that Gladys was free, supposedly, of personal ties, wanted
' See ‘In Mcmoriam', The Bahá'z’ World, vol. XV, p. 478.
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to leave Brattleboro for good and was longing to be with me, he came and stood by my bed one day when I was ill and said, ‘You can’t go on like this’, and then asked if I thought Gladys would be willing to come to me and serve in Haifa. On 4 February 1947 she wrote that my cable inviting her to come to Haifa had been received and she was in a dizzy whirl: ‘Had a fairy godmother given me a wish that was dearest to the heart, the news in your cable fulfilled it!’ On the morning of 30 March she was met in the Port of Haifa by my father, Sutherland Maxwell, and brought to the Western Bahá’í Pilgrim House which was to be her home for almost five years—years of great civil turbulence in what was then Palestine but soon became Israel, years when the Bahá’í pilgrimage was suspended. After praying in the Shrines, that same afternoon Gladys met the Guardian in the drawing-room of the Master’s house; as usual, I was present. She had thought she might be called upon to help me in domestic duties and be my companion, but the Head of her Faith, sitting opposite her, welcoming her warmly, making her feel ‘completely at ease and at home with him’, had other ideas. She was never to forget ‘the beauty of his face’ or the ‘resonant voice’ or that ‘it was just like a bubbling stream to hear him laugh’—or that ‘Shoghi Effendi never did the possible, he always did the impossible, and he expected you to do that too’. It now seemed to Gladys this was what was expected of her! Next morning Mr. Maxwell would take her downtown and introduce her to various key ‘people, the eventual range of which included dealing with not only our local law firm, our bank and various business firms, but the local city and government officers of Haifa and ‘Akkz’i, as well as high-ranking officials in Jerusalem. In 1938 she had written to me, ‘my lack of education pops up to disturb me’——but it did not disturb the Guardian who used her many capacities, and her willingness, to great advantage.
The first months, at four o’clock every afternoon, Gladys reported to the Guardian. ‘1 will always give you a plan of guidance,3 she says he told her, ‘if you find that you are unable to carry out this plan, you must report to me in detail and I will give you another plan . . . but you must always tell me the truth.’ Sometimes there were things to report which
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she knew would distress him and then these words were her protection, for her heart ached to have to add bad news to his burdens.
The feelings of Mr. Weeden—combined with a legacy that put him in a better financial position to marry—now came to a head; the upshot was that he would come to Haifa and be of assistance to Mr. Maxwell in building the Shrine. They were married on 20 March 1948 in Jerusalem. Ben was a distinguishedlooking man; Gladys had a handsome, upright figure and always looked exceptionally neat and attractive. Together they attended many official functions, sometimes representing Shoghi Effendi, as well as social functions connected with the American Consul in Haifa and other prominent people. Gladys had a real gift for friendship and did a great deal, in the new State, to back up the esteem in which the Head of the Faith was already held. I was sad that Ben’s health should become the cause of their returning to America just as our local Bahá’í life entered a new and wonderful phase. During November 1950 Shoghi Effendi invited five members of what was to be the future International Bahá’í Council to come and serve in the Holy Land: Luṭfu’lláh Ḥakím, Jessie and Ethel Revel], then Mason Remey, and Amelia Collins all arrived in Haifa before Gladys and Ben left at the end of February 1951, the idea being that they would go back for Ben’s medical treatment and return later to Haifa. The Guardian—who for the first time since pilgrimage had been suspended before the war, resumed his custom of having a meal at the Pilgrim House table—announced to us all that we were members of the new and historic Council he was forming; Gladys’s and Ben’s membership remained in abeyance until it later became clear that they would no longer be serving in the Holy Land.
Gladys then suffered the greatest test of her life: Ben was very run down, and she adored him. On the other hand there had been no time, nor indeed necessity, as they were supposedly returning, to hand over all the Guardian’s highly involved work to the newcomers. When Gladys wrote making it Clear that because of Ben’s condition they would not be coming back, Shoghi Effendi immediately cabled her, on March eighteenth, BEN SHOULD REMAIN CARE DOCTOR. YOUR
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IN MEMORIAM
PRESENCE ALONE NOT LATER APRIL FIFTEENTH ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. DO NOT WORRY. PRAYING FERVENTLY SHOGHI.
Gladys’s love for the Faith, her loyalty to the Guardian, the self—discipline a hard life with many sorrows had taught her, now came to her rescue; she left Ben and returned alone. So that summer of 1951 Gladys was still the trusted postman; she held the affairs at the World Centre firmly in hand during Shoghi Effendi’s absence; she not only assisted the new co-workers to understand the work, the restrictions and responsibilities of the World Centre, but launched them socially in Haifa through her good public relations and many friendships.
In November the Guardian and I returned to Haifa and she rejoined her Ben who was in good spirits and greatly improved in health. Serving the Cause becomes a habit, indeed it should become a habit. Gladys and Ben now offered their services to the American National Spiritual Assembly; after meeting with them it was agreed they would tour the country and stimulate the Bahá’ís during the final year of their second Seven Year Plan. Gladys wrote to me on 2 April 1952, ‘We both feel we should do what we can to help this homefront situation.’ They bought a cart motored to all forty—eight States of the Union and visited the friends in seventy-five major Bahá’í communities! By December they were tired out and withdrew to Vermont, but the National Teaching Committee requested them to help out in Greensboro, North Carolina, to which they retired to recover and to serve.
In April 1953 we met at the Centenary celebrations and inauguration of the Guardian’s great Ten Year Plan; in July Dorothy Baker, the Hand of the Cause and an old friend, wrote them suggesting they pioneer to the West Indies which, she assured them, was ‘just ready to pop . . . if you act, act fast . . .’ On 16 October the Weedens arrived in Antigua, a tiny island in the Leeward group of the Caribbean; everything was very unfortunate: there had been terrible drought; prices were prohibitive; far from living, as they had been assured, on their income, they faced a heavy annual deficit; housing was astronomically dear; their hotel was about to go into ‘season’ prices of thirty per cent increase.
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After two months they left—‘to lick our spiritual wounds and straighten out our financial debts”. as Gladys wrote me. Nevertheless, they received the immortal title of Knights of Bahá’u’lláh. Tired and discouraged, they settled in Henniker, New Hampshire, 21 very small New England town where Ben was to live sixteen years and Gladys twenty-five. It was the end of their spectacular services, a fact which weighed heavily on Gladys.
Ben, who was fourteen years Gladys‘s senior, died in 1970 after an illness that had been harrowing for both of them. Gladys wrote to me, “After I have made my adjustment to this loss, I know there is plenty for me to do . . .’ Her gift for speaking led to many invitations to give courses in Bahá’í Summer Schools, very often on the subject of the Guardian and her years of service in Haifa. Our own deep friendship never failed us; in 1973, after an absence of three years and ten months, I found that the Master’s house needed radical renovation and asked her to come and help me. Although we had met during my visits to America and at the dedication of the Panama Temple, this was her first return to Haifa since the days of the beloved Guardian. She stayed almost five months; we both worked very hard and very happily together; when she left I wrote to her that ‘no words from either of us could express what it had meant’.
In 1974 I was able to spend a few days in her home in Henniker and always hoped to repeat it for a longer visit. Again in the spring of 1977 Gladys returned to Haifa, this time for a much shorter visit. During the last years of her life she kept busy, going twice to Vancouver, visiting the Alaskan Bahá’ís for- a month, paying her respects at Shoghi Effendi’s grave in London, going on a trip to Ireland, giving courses at Summer Schools. In the winter of 1977—1978 she spent some months in Wilmette at the invitation of the American National Assembly to help out on a long backlog of letters. In June 1979 she wrote to me: ‘I don’t feel old but I am now in my seventy-fourth year and that makes you realize that eighty is
the next landmark, heavens! . . . Ikeep happy and contented even though I miss my dearest Ben more as the years roll by . . .’ In Septem ber at the suggestion of the National Assembly she went to speak on the Guardian at a
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Bahá’í event in New Mexico; returning home very tired, she died in Hebron, New Hampshire, on the thirteenth, peacefully, in her sleep. An enviable end to a beautiful life.
RUHIYYIH