A Temple for the Children's Children: The Mother Temple of the West

*A retelling based on the contemporary record preserved in the **Star of the West**, the early Bahá'í magazine, including Corinne True's reports on the House of Worship at Wilmette. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.*

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Some kinds of grandeur are raised in a single lifetime by a single hand. The grandeur of the Mother Temple of the West was raised by thousands of hands across half a century, and most of those who lifted it never saw it stand complete. That is what makes it one of the most moving monuments in the Bahá'í world — not only the beauty of the finished building, but the long, patient, sacrificial love that built it, gift by small gift, for a generation that had not yet been born.

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The story begins with a Tablet. In 1903, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — then still a prisoner of the Ottoman state in 'Akká — wrote to the believers of the American Midwest in answer to their longing to build a House of Worship. In that Tablet, and in others that followed, He pointed them toward the work and, in time, specified where their temple was to rise: on the shore of Lake Michigan, near Chicago.

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A House of Worship — a Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, "the Dawning-Place of the Praise of God" — was no ordinary building project. It was to be the first of its kind in the Western world, a place open to all peoples and all faiths, dedicated to prayer and to the unity of the human family. The believers, a scattered and newly-gathered community of modest means, took up the charge.

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The most luminous moment in the early history of the enterprise came in the spring of 1912. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, by then released from His long captivity, had crossed the ocean to visit the believers of North America. On the first of May, during His journey, He came out to the property at Wilmette, and there, before the gathered friends, He laid the foundation stone of the Temple with His own hand.

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The believers had brought a humble, ordinary stone for the purpose, and the Master consecrated the ground with it. It was a small, brief act on a patch of empty land by the lake — and it set in motion a labor of forty years.

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What followed is best told through the witness of those who lived it, and the *Star of the West*, the early Bahá'í magazine, preserved that witness. In its pages, year after year, the friends reported on the slow accumulation of the funds and the slow assembling of the site.

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Foremost among the reporters was Corinne True of Chicago, a tireless servant of the project whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá would call "the mother of the Temple." In a long signed report in the *Star* in 1920 — by which time the work was already seventeen years old — she described how the believers across the United States had been giving, in dollars and in dimes, toward the purchase of the land and the building to come; how the small national body charged with the project had bought the parcels of the Wilmette site one by one as the money came in; and how, by 1920, the full tract had at last been gathered together, a few acres looking across the water toward Chicago.

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In that report Corinne set down a sentence that has been quoted lovingly ever since, because it captures the whole spirit of the undertaking. The land, she wrote, was not for the present generation at all:

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> This land is not for us. It is for the children's children of these friends.

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Sit with what that meant for the people who were giving. They were not, for the most part, the rich. They were working women and immigrants, clerks and shopkeepers and people of small means, who put aside their dimes and dollars out of households that had little to spare. And they were giving, deliberately, into a future they did not expect to enter. They knew the Temple would not be finished in their own lifetimes.

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They were laboring for a grandeur their grandchildren would inherit — building, in trust, for souls they would never meet. There is a particular nobility in that. The world's monuments are often raised by the powerful to be admired in their own day; this one was raised by the humble to be enjoyed after they were gone.

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It is worth pausing on what kind of building they were laboring to raise, for the grandeur of a Mashriqu'l-Adhkár is not only architectural.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá had taught that the House of Worship is the heart of a whole pattern of community life: that around the central edifice of prayer, in time, would gather institutions of service — a school, a hospital, a home for the aged, a refuge for the traveler and the poor — so that worship within and service without would form a single living whole.

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The temple was to have nine sides and nine entrances, opening toward every direction, a sign that the peoples of all the earth and all the religions are welcome to enter and to pray. This was the vision the believers were building toward: not a monument to themselves, but a dawning-place of the praise of God, open to all humanity, and a wellspring of love poured back out into the world around it.

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To raise such a thing, in trust, for a future generation was a labor worthy of every dime it cost.

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And the building, when at last it rose, was worthy of the sacrifice. The first great dome was raised over the structure in the late 1920s. Then began the painstaking work of the ornamentation — the intricate, lacelike tracery of the exterior, in which symbols of the world's great religions are woven together in cast stone, so that the finished surface seems less like masonry than like white lace turned to architecture.

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That ornament was not completed until the late 1940s. The first formal devotional services were held in the Temple in 1953 — fully half a century after the first Tablet, and more than four decades after 'Abdu'l-Bahá had knelt to lay the stone. By then many, perhaps most, of the donors who had given their early dimes had already passed from this world, exactly as they had foreseen.

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But Corinne True herself, the mother of the Temple, was granted a mercy. She lived long enough to see the dome finished and the formal opening of the House of Worship for which she had labored across a lifetime. The land she had asked her generation to gather, in trust, for the children's children, had been held in their hands and passed faithfully on — exactly as she had said it would be.

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To stand today before the Mother Temple of the West — its nine sides open toward every direction, its white dome rising above the gardens by the lake, its walls worked in that astonishing tracery — is to feel a particular and quiet grandeur. It is not the grandeur of conquest or of wealth.

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It is the grandeur of a community's faithfulness: of a humble people who took up a charge given by a released Prisoner, who gave out of their poverty for a glory they would not live to see, and who held the trust unbroken across two world wars and a great depression until the temple stood.

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That is greatness of a rare order — greatness measured not in what one generation seizes for itself, but in what it builds and hands on.

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This is why the Mother Temple of the West belongs so fittingly to a Feast of 'Aẓamat — Grandeur. The Cause of God raises its great edifices not by the power of the mighty but by the love of the faithful; and the most enduring grandeur is the kind that a people builds, in trust and in sacrifice, for the children's children they will never meet. 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid a humble stone on an empty lakeshore.

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Out of forty years of dimes and devotion, a temple of lacelike majesty rose above it — a gift held in trust, and faithfully delivered, to a future the builders gave their hearts to and never saw.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the **Star of the West** and the histories of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár at Wilmette.*

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