Mother of the Temple: Corinne True and the House of Worship

A retelling based on the biographical record of Corinne True published by Bahá'í Chronicles, drawing on the documented history of the building of the House of Worship at Wilmette. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

There is a kind of service that no single dramatic act can ever capture — the service of the person who takes up one great task and will not put it down, through year after year, until it is finished. Corinne True was such a person, and the task she took up was as large as a building: the first Bahá'í House of Worship of the Western world. She gave the better part of fifty years to it. She did not live to begin it as a young woman and abandon it; she began it past the age of forty and carried it, with others but always at the centre, into her own ninth decade. By the time the Master had finished honouring her work, He had given her a title that says everything. He called her the Mother of the Temple.

Corinne Knight True was a Chicago woman, a wife and the mother of a large family, who came into the Cause in the very first years of the American community, near the turn of the twentieth century. Like so many of those early believers she was hungry to serve and uncertain at first how. The answer came on pilgrimage. She made the long journey to 'Akká — the first of nine pilgrimages she would make across her lifetime — and there, in the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, she received the charge that would organize the rest of her years. The believers of America, the Master told her, were to raise a Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, a House of Worship, in their land. And He laid a particular responsibility for that enterprise upon her.

She came home and went to work, and the work proved to be the labour of a lifetime, because a House of Worship is not built by signing a cheque. It is built by a whole community, slowly, out of its own substance — and the American community of those days was small, scattered across an enormous continent, and for the most part not wealthy. Corinne True's genius was the genius of patient organization. She helped bring into being, in 1909, the body first known as Bahá'í Temple Unity, the national instrument through which the believers of all the cities could act together for the one great purpose. She served it as financial secretary and as a guiding spirit, and through it she did the unglamorous, indispensable thing: she gathered the gifts.

And what gifts they were. The contributions that built the Temple at Wilmette came, overwhelmingly, not from a few rich patrons but from a multitude of ordinary believers giving what little they could — dimes, dollars, the savings of working people, the pennies of children, sums set aside out of household budgets that had little to spare. Corinne True received them, recorded them, husbanded them, and reported on them year after year in the pages of the community's magazine, the Star of the West. She watched over the buying of the land — a small parcel of acres on the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Chicago, purchased piece by piece as the money allowed. She was present in 1912 when 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself, then travelling across America, came to Wilmette and laid with His own hand the foundation stone of the building, turning the first earth of an enterprise that would outlast almost everyone then standing on the ground.

Then came the long testing. For the building of that Temple was not the matter of a few years; it stretched across decades, and across some of the hardest decades the modern world has known. The First World War interrupted it. The Great Depression of the 1930s, which emptied so many purses, fell upon it. The Second World War interrupted it again. There were stretches when the work on the structure had to halt entirely for lack of funds, when the rising shell of the House of Worship stood unfinished and exposed to the weather, when a less steadfast community might have quietly let the dream lapse. Through every one of those discouragements Corinne True held on. She kept the cause of the Temple before the believers; she kept gathering; she kept the faith that what had been begun at the Master's word would, in time, be completed.

The building itself was a marvel — a nine-sided House of Worship whose every surface was wrought into lacelike ornament gathering the symbols of all the world's great religions into a single harmony, the work of the architect Louis Bourgeois, who poured the last years of his own life into its design. But a design on paper and a structure in stone are two different things, and the distance between them is measured in money and labour and time and unwavering human will. Bourgeois drew the vision. The community, marshalled and encouraged and held together in no small part by Corinne True, made it real.

She lived to see it. This is the part of the story that moves so many who hear it, because it so easily might have gone otherwise. Most of those who gave their dimes to the Temple in the early years died long before it was done; they built on purpose for a generation they would never meet. But Corinne True, who had received the charge as a woman in middle life and carried it across nearly half a century, was still living when the House of Worship at Wilmette was at last completed and dedicated to public worship in 1953. She had attained her hundred-and-first year. She had outlasted the war, the depression, the doubt, and the long silences of the unfinished structure, and she stood at the end within the very walls she had given her life to raise. Few servants of any cause are granted so complete a sight of their own labour's fruit.

What 'Abdu'l-Bahá had called her, she had become in full. The title Mother of the Temple was not a courtesy. A mother is the one who carries a thing through the long, hidden, exhausting work of bringing it to life, who does not abandon it in its weakness, who stays through every danger until it can stand on its own. That is precisely what Corinne True did for the first House of Worship of the West. She did not design it and she did not, by herself, pay for it; her service was something at once humbler and greater than either. She kept it — kept the vision alive in a young community, kept the gifts flowing, kept the faith through forty years of obstacles — until the day it opened its doors to all the peoples of the world to come and pray.

This is why she belongs to a Feast of Mulk, of Dominion. The Cause of God establishes itself in the world not only through the words of its teachers but through the institutions its people are willing to build and sustain — and the House of Worship is the most visible of those institutions, a place set apart where the mention of God may rise from every heart. Such a building is raised by the steadfast, by those who will labour at one thing for a lifetime and trust the finishing to God. Corinne True was the steadfast one at the centre of that labour. She was the Mother of the Temple, and the Temple stands.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the biography of Corinne True at Bahá'í Chronicles, and the contemporary reports she contributed to the Star of the West.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/corinne-true/