The Laying of the Wilmette Temple Cornerstone

In *God Passes By,* Shoghi Effendi devotes a substantial passage to the laying, by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, of the cornerstone of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár at Wilmette on the afternoon of 1 May 1912. The Guardian places the event among the most significant of the entire American journey of the Master and notes its providential weight in the long arc of the American Faith.

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The site at Wilmette had been acquired, parcel by parcel, by the small Temple Unity body across the years from 1908 forward, in fulfilment of a sequence of Tablets the Master had revealed beginning in 1903. By the spring of 1912 the acquisition was substantially complete. The site was a modest tract of a few acres on the western shore of Lake Michigan, perhaps fifteen miles north of the centre of Chicago. The Master, on the spring leg of the American tour, agreed to lay the cornerstone in person.

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The arrangements for the ceremony had been made in haste. A formal cornerstone of cut and inscribed marble had been ordered from a Chicago monumental works but had not been delivered in time for the appointed afternoon. The arrangements committee, by mid-morning of 1 May, was in distress: the Master was on His way to the site; the ceremony was to take place; the cornerstone was missing.

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A small American believer named Nettie Tobin, the wife of a Chicago labourer, who had come out to Wilmette by streetcar to witness the ceremony, had brought with her a small unprepossessing field stone she had found by the side of the road on her walk. She had not known what she would do with it. She had simply felt called to bring it.

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When the absence of the formal cornerstone was discovered, Nettie Tobin offered her field stone to the Master. The Master accepted it. He carried it Himself to the site of the laying, refusing to allow any of the men present to take the burden from Him. He placed it Himself in the prepared receptacle. He pronounced the formal blessing over it. The first physical foundation of the House of Worship was Nettie Tobin's wayside stone.

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The Guardian, in *God Passes By,* reads the small detail as providential. The cornerstone of the first House of Worship of the Western Bahá'í community was laid — not in prepared marble, not in commissioned splendour, but in a small piece of wayside rock carried by an obscure American working-class believer who had felt the impulse to bring it. The choice exemplified, in a single unrepeatable image, the spiritual character of the Bahá'í community the Master was calling into being.

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The construction itself would take four decades. The dome would not be raised until the late 1920s. The exterior ornament would not be completed until the late 1940s. The formal opening would not take place until 1953. But the foundation, set in 1912 with Nettie Tobin's small field stone at its centre, was the first physical proof that the House of Worship the Master had named into existence in His 1903 Tablet was, in time, going to be built.

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*Paraphrased from God Passes By (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1944); see original for full text.*

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