Fires in Many Hearts: Memoirs of an early American believer

Doris McKay was born in New York state in 1894. She married Willard McKay in 1923 and took up residence on a successful fruit farm.

The greatest adventure of Doris and Willard’s lives began two years later, when they embraced the Bahá’í Faith through the teaching efforts of Howard and Mabel Ives. This book tells the story of that adventure – of Doris and Willard’s work and warm friendships with people such as the Ives, Grace and Harlan Ober, Louis Gregory, May Maxwell, Martha Root, Dorothy Baker, and other early American Bahá’ís. It tells the story of the McKay’s work in the racial amity field and their eventual pioneering move to eastern Canada in the 1940s.

Doris tells her story with clear-sightedness, zest – and love. This book provides an intimate glimpse into the spiritual life of a dedicated Bahá’í teacher and the development of the Bahá’í Faith in America.

. . . Your gift for capturing the essence of personalities in a few sentences, and of evoking those very wonderful days of the 1920s and the activities of the friends is unequalled; I have never read a more exciting, poetic or detailed chronicle. Its value to the Faith will grow with every passing year. Of special interest, I found, was your uncanny capacity to depict – dare one call them “mystical” experiences: the epiphanic and transcendental moments in the lives of the Bahá’ís. . . The facts are almost always retrievable, and anyone with a Sherlock Holmes inclination can usually dig them out; but what you have preserved is that much rarer thing – the feeling, atmosphere, texture and spiritual shape of the events you describe ...

Roger White