Beautiful Day in the Boston Neighborhood

It was a beautiful day in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood Monday, especially at Old South Church.  Affectionately called The Church of the Finish Line, the 344-year-old church is located at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, on the city center Boylston Street block where 20,000 runners, cheered on by half a million spectators complete the 26 mile race, as they have every year since 1896. 

Old South had held their traditional “Blessing of the Athletes” worship service the day before, the Sunday service overflowing with runners in their sweats receiving prayers and laying on of hands and encouragement from scripture; “May you run and not be weary, may you walk and not be faint.” 

Old South Church by Nancy RichardsonThe Boston Marathon is always held on Patriot’s Day, the April Massachusetts sacred holiday marking the 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord that began the Revolutionary War.  It’s a full weekend; not just the Marathon and a Red Sox baseball game, but historic reenactments on the Lexington Green, patriotic speeches about Paul Revere and Bunker Hill, reminders of all those names and dates we learned in American History class.  Amidst all the hoopla and cheers we are reminded that these old towns were the site of battle deaths as well as victories; we feel gratitude for the sacrifice of those men and women as well as pride that they eventually won our freedom.

This year’s race, those 26 miles, was dedicated to the 26 victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting earlier this year, and each mile marker had the name of one of the dead kids or their dead teachers.  Folks from Newtown, Connecticut ran and received louder cheers than most.

And then the noisy cheers turned into noisy explosions, the yells of encouragement became yells for help, cries of pain.  The beautiful day in that neighborhood became a bloody scene of smoke and shrapnel and lost limbs and death. 

Old South’s minister Rev. Nancy Taylor was up in the church tower Monday afternoon watching the race. She had preached about the Marathon, about Boston’s pride in how loudly their spectators cheer on the runners.  “In this race, as in life, we never run alone.”  Usually the church building is open to the public on Mondays, as it is every day, 9-5, unlike most churches shuttered tight except Sunday morning.  But it was a holiday.  So she watched alone as the sidewalk turned red with blood, bodies and limbs exploded, people ran.

Two days later, speaking alongside President Obama at the Interfaith Memorial Service at the Catholic Church across town,Taylor said, "And from the church's tower, this is what I saw that day - I saw people running toward, not away from, toward the explosions, toward the chaos, the mayhem, toward the danger, making of their own bodies sacraments of mercy...We are shaken, but we are not forsaken."

(Old Sound is still shut down, as is the whole neighorhood, because it is an active crime scene; there are still barricades, trash, runners' gear. Informing her congregation that they would worship Sunday at a nearby church, Taylor said, "the last time Old Sound Church was closed this long was in 1775, during the British siege.")

Taylor's words about folks running towards those in need reminded me of the words of another pastor, Fred Rogers, the Presbyterian minister who for decades hosted a popular daily morning TV children's program, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...won't you be my neigborhood?" he would sing at the beginning of each show. (I read a profile of him once and the author said they were walking around New York and got on a subway train and everyone in the car recognized Mr. Rogers and spontaneously broke into the song they had learned as kids, as the train rattled underground, "Its a beautiful day in the neighborhood...")

The electronic church known as Facebook has been passing around another quotation from Mr. Rogers in recent weeks – I think I first saw it after the Newtown shootings.  “My mother always told me, when scary things happen,” Mr. Rogers once said  - Mr. Rogers had a mother?  What was she like? - “My mother always said, in scary situations, to look for the helpers.  There are always helpers.  Don’t just look at the scary things.  Look for the helpers.”

Old South Church has been around for a long time, especially for America, nearly 350 years.  Benjamin Franklin was baptized there on the day he was born.  Abolitionists preached there.  Since then, and today, they are involved with all kinds of programs, promoting justice and service, sometimes in controversy, in what can be a conservative town.

The church has been in the news for a very different controversy recently.  Among its many historic treasures are two copies of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, two of the only eleven copies still extant, which was the first book printed in then British North America.  A psalm book in English prepared for the residents of this new land, an early chapter in the book of American reformation and revolution.  Those freedom fighters then found comfort in those psalms of lament and praise.  How long O Lord?  I was glad when they said, let us go into the house of the Lord.  God restores my soul.   (You can read a digital copy of the book here. 

The church has decided to sell one of the copies.  In good congregational polity all the members studied and deliberated and then voted as a group.  They expect to receive up to $20 million for this rarest of books when it is sold next fall.  They intend to use the money for their ministries of justice and compassion; the 17th century could gift the 21^st, they decided.

The decision was controversial, but the local paper affirmed the decision.  A church, the Boston Globe wrote,” is more than a collection of assets and artifacts, a church is a group of people.  The future is valuable too.”

Those psalms of praise and comfort can help serve modern Bostonians as well.  The church will be able to keep those doors open every day, tend to the wounded and weary every day, cheer on the fainthearted and offer comfort to the city today, every day, next year on Patriot’s Day at the finish line.  The church is for this city now.

This city now, these people running towards the dead and wounded, this nation, shaken but not forsaken, this beautiful neighborhood.

Copyright © Deborah Streeter