A Temple of Light and Unity: Louis Bourgeois and the Mother Temple of the West

A retelling based on the biographical account of Louis Bourgeois published by Bahá'í Chronicles, together with the documented history of the Bahá'í House of Worship at Wilmette. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in those records.

Some servants of the Cause spend their lives carrying a vision before they ever learn its name. Such a man was Jean-Baptiste Louis Bourgeois. Born in Quebec in 1856, trained first as a sculptor and then as an architect, he wandered the world in his younger years — through Italy and Greece, through Egypt and Persia — filling his eye with the great sacred buildings of every civilization. And out of that long looking there grew in him a single conviction, one he held, the records say, "long before he had heard of the Bahá'í Faith": that his mission in life was to build a universal temple of Truth, a gathering place for all humanity. He did not yet know that anyone was about to need such a thing.

Then, in New York in the first years of the new century, Louis Bourgeois encountered the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh, and embraced it. In a single stroke the vision he had carried alone became a commission shared by a whole community. The American Bahá'ís had resolved to raise the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West, the Mother Temple, and a call had gone out for designs.

There is a small, telling moment in the story of how that design took shape. An early believer, Roy Wilhelm, travelling to 'Akká, carried with him some of Bourgeois's architectural work to lay before 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The Master's response was characteristically brief and went straight to the essence. His one direction, the account preserves, was that the Bahá'í Temple "should have nine sides." Nine — the number of perfection and of unity in the Bahá'í teachings, the number that would shape every House of Worship the Faith would build. Bourgeois took the guidance to heart and worked his great conception around it.

In 1920, at the Bahá'í Temple Unity Convention in New York, the delegates of the American community chose his design, revised to nine sides, as the basic design for the House of Worship to rise at Wilmette, on the shore of Lake Michigan. What he had drawn was unlike any house of worship then standing. Its nine pillars rose to a single dome; its surfaces shaded from grey stone at the ground to a pure white crown; and over the whole he laid an intricate lacework of ornament that deliberately gathered, side by side, the sacred symbols of the world's religions — the cross and the crescent, the star of the Jews and the signs of the older faiths of the East — so that no one who looked could mistake the message written in the very stone: that all the religions of God are one. The arabesque panels were pierced to let the daylight pour through and to glow from within after dark, so that the building became, in the phrase that has clung to it ever since, a "Temple of Light and Unity."

The raising of it was the labour of a generation. Ground was broken, and by 1922 the Foundation Hall beneath the Temple was complete and already in use for the gatherings of the friends. But the building rose slowly, as funds came in dollar by dollar from believers across a continent and around the world, through years of prosperity and then through the lean years of economic collapse. Louis Bourgeois did not live to see his vision finished. He died on the twentieth of August, 1930, his work incomplete, the great dome not yet clothed in its white lace. The Temple he had designed would not be completed and dedicated until 1953 — more than two decades after his death, and well over forty years after he first set his hand to it.

That is the shape of his service, and the reason it belongs to a Feast of Mulk, of Dominion. The dominion of the Cause is built by people who give their finest work to something larger and longer than a single life — who labour for an edifice they will not see crowned, trusting that others will carry it on. Bourgeois had dreamed of a universal temple before he knew it could exist; he poured that dream into the Mother Temple of the West and then laid down his tools before it was done. Today the white House of Worship stands above the lake, drawing the light by day and giving it back by night, a building that says to everyone who comes that the peoples and religions of the earth are one. The man who imagined it did not live to enter the finished sanctuary. He had built, instead, for the world that was coming.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the biography of Louis Bourgeois at Bahá'í Chronicles.

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