Friends, felicitations! The Neocrats are today mindful of their first anniversary.

Doubters and enthusiasts alike must be tempted by the notion that a building of perfection is moments away. Step out of your house at the daggy hour of dawn and within minutes you reach the Dawning Place, a title which gives apt translation to the term Mashriq, often used to refer to a Bahá’í House of Worship. Any googler will quickly find images of these buildings, of which there are currently one for each continent (although the South American building is only in the commencement stage). At the hour of dawn this morning I ate apple porridge and watched the full moon, hauntingly bloody two nights ago, dip over some distant houses. But imagine stepping at such an hour into the Dawning Place and spending some moments in contemplation. A culture which was moulded around such a practice would be less likely than ours to support (and promote) the deforestation of land the size of a football ground every second.

Inside a building one can feel spaces wider than the outdoors. One experiences calm more perfect than the Silent Valley. There is an admixture of culture, aesthetics and technical skill. If nature is the manifestation of God’s will, as our Bahá’í Writings teach us, then the cultural products of humankind can become a distillation of this will.

The Bahá’í Temple is intended to be the perfect building. Its nine sides are symbolic of perfection and its dome encourages the psyche to rise upwards to where the ladder-music brings you. The dome is an inverted mountain. The mountain is a symbol of the spiritual journey. Ulster’s highest mountain is Slieve Donard and in the 19th Century locals believed that St. Donard lived inside the mountain and would reappear at the end of time (which was just around the corner). In a symbologically (sic. but I write it deliberately) similar manner the Persian Twelvers believed that the last Imam would reappear also when the Final Day arrived. And yet it was just around the corner. The trumpet was sounded, the stars fell, the moon was cleft. Why is this so hard to accept?

And to return to my subject: the new Bahá’í Temple in Chile is a masterpiece because it combines with complete perfection the following essential requirements: technique, intelligence, an eye turned towards futurity, a memory of the endless past, and the radiance of spiritual ecstasy. This is not modernism, but a new aesthetic which seems to be emerging amongst Bahá’í thinkers. It satisfies all my needs.

Where will the next temple after Chile be built? I think this question is reasonably obvious. Politics permitting I think that the Crown of Carmel will follow. That is, in 10-20 years we may see the finalised design for the Dawning Place atop the glorious mountain of which the prophet Isaiah wrote “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.â€?

And to return to my first sentences: these Dawning Places are not intended simply as supremely significant sites in the heart of each continent. On the contrary, eventually, when the numbers of Bahá’ís increase, there will be Houses of Worship to meet demand. For me this implies that there will certainly be grand monuments to faith in solitudinous locations, but that there will also be more intimate ‘inverted mountains’ in the suburbs and exburbs, wherein will be heard the reverberation of the intoned Word.

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