A Lamp Lit in Paris: May Maxwell Carries the Word to Europe

A retelling drawn from Bahá'í Chronicles, which preserves the lives of the early believers of the Faith. Phrases in quotation marks are words kept in that record.

May Ellis Bolles was a young American woman of delicate health, living in Paris at the close of the nineteenth century, when the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh first reached her. In the winter of 1898 to 1899 she joined the small company of Western believers — the first ever to make the journey — who travelled to 'Akká to attain the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. She was frail when she went; the meeting with the Master, the chronicle records, kindled in her a love that would direct the whole remaining course of her life. She returned to Paris with one purpose fixed in her heart: to share what she had found.

She had no pulpit and no public office. What she had was a home, a circle of acquaintance, and the power of speech given to a soul on fire. And so, in her own rooms in Paris, she began simply to talk — to tell the friends who came to her, and the seekers they brought, of the new Revelation she had encountered: of the oneness of God and the oneness of His Messengers, of the dawning of a new day for the human race, of the Master she had met behind the walls of 'Akká. She spoke of these things not as a lecturer to a crowd but as one friend to another, across a tea-table, in the quiet of an afternoon, one heart reaching toward another heart.

The effect was out of all proportion to the modesty of the means. Around May Bolles in Paris there gathered, the chronicle records, the first group of believers on the continent of Europe — the seed of every Bahá'í community that Europe would later know. Hers was, in the simplest terms, the voice through which the Cause first took root in European soil. And the souls she drew were not ordinary in their consequence. Among those who came to the Faith in that Paris circle, or were strengthened in it there, were men and women whose own service would afterward reach far across the earth.

It was in May Bolles's Paris that the gifted young Englishman Thomas Breakwell embraced the Cause — a soul whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá would cherish and whose swift, shining devotion became a treasured memory of the early Faith. It was through the teaching life that began in those rooms that other seekers, English and American and French, were turned toward Bahá'u'lláh. May herself would in time marry the Canadian architect Sutherland Maxwell and carry her teaching across the Atlantic; their home in Montreal would become a centre of the Cause in Canada, honoured by a visit from 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself; and the daughter born to them would one day serve at the very heart of the Faith. But all of that lay in the future. It began with a young woman talking, in her own sitting room, about what she had seen.

There is a particular lesson in this for the Feast of Qawl — the Feast of Speech. We are apt to imagine that the bold proclamation of a great truth requires a great stage: a hall, a crowd, a famous name. May Maxwell's life says otherwise. She lit a continent's first lamp not by addressing thousands but by speaking, faithfully and lovingly and often, to the few who were within her reach. The spoken word, offered from a full heart in an ordinary room, proved enough to open a whole new field for the Cause of God.

The Master, who knew the worth of such service, held May Maxwell in deep affection through all the years that followed. When at last she died — fittingly, on a teaching journey, in South America in 1940 — the Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi, mourned her as a precious soul whose passing in the field of service had ennobled the record of the Cause. She had spent her life as she had begun it in Paris: telling people, one by one, the news that had changed her own.

This is why her quiet voice belongs to the Feast of Speech. Not every proclamation is shouted from a height. Some are spoken gently, again and again, across a table — and from such speech whole communities are born.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'í Chronicles.

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