From Montreal: May Maxwell's Letter to the Star of the West

In Issue 1 of Volume 3 of the *Star of the West,* dated the 21st of March, 1912 — Naw-Rúz of that year — the editors in Chicago printed a letter from May Bolles Maxwell, then in Montreal. May had married the Canadian architect William Sutherland Maxwell in 1902 and had moved with him to Montreal, where she had become the quiet axis around which the small but growing Canadian Bahá'í community gathered.

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The letter she sent to Chicago described what she had been doing in Montreal in the months before the Master's expected arrival. She had been giving lectures in halls she had been able to secure — including, she noted with a particular pleasure, the halls of Montreal's socialist organizations, whose audiences had proved unusually open to a teaching about the spiritual unity of mankind. She had been quietly cultivating the city's newspapers, which had begun to carry friendly notice of the Bahá'í teachings and of the anticipated visit of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

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> Lectures to socialists and notice in the Montreal newspapers — > Canada was being prepared.

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May was, in the long view of the Faith, doing what would later be called *teaching the Faith.* What she was doing in particular was something else: she was preparing the soil of a city that had not yet been visited by the Master, so that when He came — which He would, in early September of that year — the soil would be ready and the seed would take.

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The visit of September 1912 fulfilled what the letter had prepared. 'Abdu'l-Bahá arrived in Montreal on the 30th of August. He stayed in the Maxwell home on Pine Avenue. He addressed the audiences May had gathered for Him — including the labour leaders and socialists at Coronation Hall on the 3rd of September. The Master returned south after just over a week. The community May had been preparing held.

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The *Star of the West* letter, dated months earlier, read in retrospect as a kind of prophecy quietly fulfilling itself. The work of an obscure American-Canadian believer, in lecture rooms and newspaper offices, had been the foundation on which the Master's brief Canadian visit was built. The same pattern — the quiet preparing believer ahead of the great event — would repeat itself, in city after city, across the long century since.

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