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Tomorrow January 10th is the anniversary Dorothy Baker was killed

January 10, 1954

Death of Dorothy Baker, Hand of the Cause of God

She was appointed by Shoghi Effendi as a Hand of the Cause of God on December 24, 1951. On January 10, 1954, she was en route home from India. Over the Mediterranean island of Elba the plane exploded and her mission had ended at age 55.

I thought it would be good to find some more things about her to appreciate what she contributed and remember her in the Abha kingdom...

Bahaikipedia has the following:

Dorothy Beecher Baker (December 21, 1898 - January 10, 1954) was appointed a Hand of the Cause by Shoghi Effendi in 1951. She was a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born on 21 December, 1898, in Newark, New Jersey.

Dorothy Baker died on 10 January, 1954, as a result of an infamous crash of a BOAC DeHavilland Comet, the first model of jet powered passenger airliner to be in service. The crash was due to stresses caused by the aircraft's large, square windows. A focus of numerous documentaries, including an episode of National Geographic's Sixty Seconds From Disaster (2008), the plane went down with a loss of all passengers and crew in the Mediterranean near the island of Elba.

Dorothy was an enthusiastic Bahá'í teacher, quite literally to the very end. A few days after the crash, fishermen found a purse belonging to one of her fellow passengers washed up on the shore. Inside the purse was a Bahá'í pamphlet.

More on Dorothy Baker:

Dorothy Baker's nine days in Malwa was a whirlwind of speaking engagements (many of which had been arranged by Ms. Boman). The American arrived in Indore late in the afternoon of December 23, and less than two hours later she was giving a discourse to members of the Gita Samiti. The next day she spoke to members of the Rotary Club, and on Christmas day she addressed thirty-five members of the press at an Indore hotel. Later that evening she traveled to Ujjain and spoke at the Vikram Lodge in Madhavnagar under the auspices of the local Theosophical Society. Upon her return to Indore Mrs. Baker made seven presentations in three days including talks to the students and staff of Gujurat College, members of the Balodiya Samaj(Children's Welfare Society), the Maharashtra Sahitya Samaj, the Indore Theosophical Society, and Y.M.C.A., and the students of Holkar College. (9) In addition she found time to meet with several members of the Holkar Royal Family including Princess Usha Raja at the Manick-Bagh Palace. Another trip to Ujjain found her making two more presentations, one at the Grand Hotel and the other at Maharajwada school at Mahakaleshwar in Ujjain City. During this second visit to Ujjain Mrs. Baker made a side excursion to the nearby district of Shajapur. In the town of Shajapur proper she addressed her largest audience in Malwa, as over 2000 people including the District Magistrate gathered in a local theater to hear her presentation. (10)

As reports of her trip indicate, the Indian Bahá'ís were primarily impressed by the large numbers of contacts that Dorothy Baker was able to make during her short stay in Malwa. But in hindsight, perhaps the most significant event of the fortnight was a day trip to the village of Harsodan. As Shirin Boman has written:

In this village she went with her high heels and walked in the dust because the car could not carry us right to the village. We had to leave it on the roadside. When we went into the village she embraced the women folk who were all in dirty village dresses, and she spoke to them about Baha’u’llah. She poured all her love on them and won their hearts. (11)

Baha?i Proselytization in Malwa, India

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Here's another photo of Dorothy Baker I came across:

Dorothy Baker | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MAN

Editor's Note: Dorothy Baker, Hand of the Cause of God, prepared this talk for a radio program in Lima, Ohio, United States. It is taken from "From Copper to Gold: The Life of Dorothy Baker, pp. 149 - 150 by Dorothy Freeman. Hands of the Cause of God of the Baha'i Faith are people who have been appointed by Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha, and Shoghi Effendi, to be the Chief Stewards of the Baha'i Faith)

"One day a businessman said to me, 'Secretly I wonder about myself. I arise in the morning, eat, keep shop, sleep and then do it all over again. I begin to feel like that person who said, "Man matters only to himself; he is fighting a lone fight against a vast indifference."'

What a strange creature man is! He stands at the very apex of creation and forgets his own preciousness in the sight of God. Sometimes we go into dark closets of our own building and stuff up the keyhole and the cracks. Then we say, 'The sun is not shining for me.' We build the closets of our own odd variety of materials - envy, fear, selfishness, sadness and sometimes just a sense of frustration and futility. And there we stay, mainly because we have not thought out our position there and so we are not doing anything about it. Often we hear the sighs of others in nearby closets and we wish we could liberate them, but not having freed ourselves, we find it pretty hard to tell them what to do.

Now the first thing that is probably needed is a larger perspective. I had the good fortune to have a remarkable grandmother. How well I remember hearing her say, 'If anything troubles you very much now, look at it in terms of five years from this time, or twenty-five, or fifty, and if it still looms pretty large, measure it in terms of eternity. Now that is my theme of eternity. Then look back, if you will, and wonder what became of your darkest closet.

The great thing is to find for ourselves the purpose of being, and to hold to that through everything. Baha'u'llah said, 'O God, I testify that thou hast created me to know Thee and to adore Thee.' There is God at the far end and here are we are at the near end, on this lonely little island, the earth, needing to discover in that brief flash, an enormous purpose like that! And it is brief! He also said, 'Count all the days of thy life as less than a fleeting instant.'

To know and adore God! Think of the things we deplore every day that all the while may be really speeding us on our way! Take the matter of trouble, for example. Baha'u'llah, in His Tablet to the Shah of Persia, wrote, 'I am not impatient of calamity in His way nor of affliction for His love. God hath made afflictions as a morning shower to His green pasture, and as a wick for His lamp, whereby earth and Heaven are illumined.'

A morning shower! Often trouble opens the heart to God. And after that it becomes purified, little by little, so that the self or Satan of the heart dies out and makes room for the Divine Beloved. I came just this morning upon these words, 'Purify thy heart for My descent. The Friend and stanger cannot dwell there together.' Trouble is often just the testing ground of the soul. There is a real freedom in it. As a Kreisler after difficult years of drudgery is free in the world of music, as an athlete after long discipline of the body has supremacy in the world of sports, so does your soul win a sovereignty through a life that challenges it to be at grips with the world. Tests often come again and again to teach a single lesson, until at last there is a victory and a former weakness is replaced by strength. Every time this happens, it marks a milestone on the path to God."

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