COMING HOME
Or, How a Church Becomes Real
James Ishmael Ford
19 September 2004

Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.
Angela Carter

I decided I wanted to know the source of the line “home is where the heart is.” For me that phrase is the cornerstone of any reflection on this building, its history or its living significance. I think “home is where the heart is” is the cornerstone of why we should want to support this building’s maintenance and upkeep. As you probably already knew, it’s a folk adage, another of that store of wisdom given to us by anonymous.

However in my researches I stumbled upon a sentence written by a twentieth century symbolist novelist Angela Carter that caught my imagination. She uses it as part of a longer sentence, “Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.” When thinking about our coming home to the Society, to this old building and the people within it, I think that sentence pretty much summarizes the whole thing. This is a home. Our hearts are here. And, what a movable feast it is.

For the last couple of months I’ve been obsessed with the tragedy befalling our sisters and brothers within the local Roman Catholic archdiocese and particularly with our neighbors down the street at St. Bernard’s. They, like us, have invested years and years, time and money; lives spent full, within a special place, a place that has become sacred to them. But, because of their polity, that is how they organize their religious community, with its centralized authority, St Bernard’s is being closed, and presumably the building will be sold. I’m appalled at that fact. And even though I have no taste for conspiracy it bothers me this was a successful church that seemed only to have two features to lend itself to this fate: an uppity priest and an eleven million dollar property.

It means a lot to me that our congregational polity means that if Dr Sinkford over at our denominational headquarters got it in mind he’d like to sell FUSN, we could and would simply tell him “go jump in a lake.” As our denominational president, Bill Sinkford represents us before the world, and I think he does a pretty good job at that. I was so proud of him this past month when he was arrested in front of the Sudanese embassy while protesting the genocide that government is committing against a part of its people. So, he and the denomination are worth supporting. But if Bill wanted our property, we know of several good lakes in the area we could direct him to. We own this building, lock stock and barrel. And when I say we, I really mean us, you and me, the signed members of this Society. That’s how it is and that’s how it should be.

This is our building, the home for our hearts, our moveable feast. Friday we mourned the death of Ryan McGough, a child of this congregation, here in our building. Yesterday we celebrated our beloved member Karen Burns and her beloved Maryann Civaletti’s wedding, here in our building. Weddings, funerals, child dedications, coming of age programs, so much has happened here over the many years. When the First World War ended, people came here to our building. That stained glass window for the Christian knight, in many ways problematic for many of us, is a memorial to one of our children, Ellery Peabody, who fell in battle during that war. When the Second World War ended, people came here to our building. In the wake of the horror of September 11th, we came here, to our building. When bad things happen, when good things happen, this place is so often a signal part of it. Home for our hearts, our moveable feast.

Let’s explore a bit of this building in which so much has gone on over so many years. Let’s consider this home of the heart, this movable feast. Its origins date back to the summer of 1844 when William Parker, the superintendent of the Boston and Worcester Railroad called on Newton’s resident Unitarians, including the likes of the radical educator Horace Mann and the noted abolitionist Nathaniel Allen to meet at the local watering hole, the Davis Tavern. This informal gathering of Unitarian gentlemen, mainly, met sporadically for the next several years, finally formally organizing as a real congregation, the First Unitarian Society in 1848.

The first building was constructed in 1860 at the site where the West Newton Cinema now stands. It was slowly expanded to meet growing needs, but in 1895 when the dynamic era of the Reverend Julian Jaynes’s distinguished thirty-eight year ministry began, the congregation soon found it needed to construct a much larger building. That’s when this property was acquired. It had been used by Dr Mann to house his Normal School for Girls which was the first teacher training college in the state. Later Nathanial Allen and his family ran the Allan School at this site, and it was from the Allen family that the property was acquired by the Society.

Julian Jaynes was a remarkable figure. It was during his tenure the Society first gained prominence as a center for spiritual quest and the work of justice, becoming a presence within our denomination. He really wanted a Gothic cathedral. And, as you can see, he got it. The Society engaged Ralph Adams Cram to design the new building. Cram was the great advocate of the Gothic revival, his most notable project being the Episcopal cathedral in New York City, St. John the Divine. The grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Boston’s Emerald Necklace of parks as well as New York’s Central Park.

What we got is an embarrassment of riches. Our Unitarian Universalism is generally given to a more austere spirituality, the New England Meeting House. A type I’m particularly attracted to I have to admit, what I think of as New England Zen. But we got this: A glorious mess, a magnificent tribute to the western tradition. Some among us are embarrassed by the angels while others note the many problems with the windows. And every board of trustees that has served this congregation has worried about upkeep.

When I first realized I might be coming to serve this congregation frankly, I was a little concerned about the building. Not that it represented a theology that wasn’t exactly mine, but that I didn’t want a ministry to a building. I was willing to have a part of my ministry be to the upkeep of a historically significant building, but I didn’t want it to be the center of my ministry. But I quickly learned while most of us understand this is an important building and we have a quiet if sometimes conflicted pride in it; we know what’s really important, and that’s the living that has gone on within it. We understand our priorities here.

That said, we can appreciate what we have. I kind of like how visitors usually ask “When did you acquire it from the Episcopalians?” Because I then get to point out how it really is a Unitarian Universalist building. Yes there are more crosses than you can shake a stick at. But they’re motif crosses, part of the design. They’re never central and they’re never crucifixes that powerful but alien to us symbol of the suffering and dying Christ. Rather as we look at the windows we see Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the teacher. The single mythic/archetypal image is the window showing a nativity scene.

As we all know the Puritans outlawed Christmas as a pagan holiday. It was we Unitarians who brought Christmas to New England. Our ancestors did this for several reasons, one for the sheer joy of the Christmas holiday. And second and more importantly because it represented the shift of our tradition from a focus on death and resurrection, of what is essentially an other-worldly emphasis, to the birth of a child, to an emphasis on a spirituality of the here and now. That’s all present in this our building.

Now being a properly p.c. kind of person, I’ve diligently avoided the inclination among some ministers to speak of “my” church and “my” congregation. This is really and truly a “we” sort of deal. But there is one exception. The central part of my call, my election as the minister of this community is said to be to a “free pulpit.” The phrase free pulpit doesn’t mean any fool has the right to speak from our pulpit, it means by that election for as long as I serve among you, I am the fool who gets to speak freely from this pulpit. The free pew is the other half of that equation. And no one here lets me forget that. As it should be.

So, very much knowing this is a trust, a loan as it were, I do always speak of this thing, this artifact as “my” pulpit. And I love it. Carved out of oak by the renowned Italian sculptor Angelo Lualdi it is a remarkable example of what I can only call Unitarian triumphalism. And as such it has to be unique in the world. Triumphalism, as you know, is the belief one’s own perspective is the core, perhaps the culmination of all perspectives. So, in addition to panels showing Jesus with the little children and of the Unitarian preacher Francis David holding forth before King John Sigusmund of Transylvania, leading to the establishment of the first official Unitarian church in the world, there are a series of full rounded statuettes representing the evolution of western religious thought beginning with St. Paul, going on to St. Augustine, then to John Wycliffe the Bible translator, to the reformer Martin Luther, to John Biddle the English Unitarian pamphleteer, and finally culminating in the flowering of western religious thought with the Boston divine, the wonderful William Ellery Channing.

When thinking about this building, its beauty and its problems, Margery Williams book the Velveteen Rabbit popped into my head. “What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were laying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. ‘Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?’ ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.’ ‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.’ ‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

“’It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’”

Worn and shabby are part of the process. And we’ve got more than a little of that going on here in this building. Gradually this building has become real. It has involved losses. For instance the spectacular inner courtyard that had been designed by Frederick Law Olmstead has been lost, sacrificed to our need to be a church for the whole family, to build our classrooms. We’ve used this building, we’ve lived and loved, we’ve laughed and cried, we’ve worn this building. And now it is in need of some serious repair.

Unlike for a velveteen rabbit, we can only let things go so far. In order to keep this very real place going; to keep it from springing too many leaks, to prevent the furnaces from collapsing, to keep it from ceasing to be useful we have to maintain it. Some good news in that regard: The capital campaign is already well under way; we’re more than two thirds to the goal.

I just ask as you’re asked to contribute, you will think hard about what it is that we’re about here, about what this building supports, about the real and the fragile, and then be as generous as you possibly can. After much reflection Jan and I decided to make the largest pledge we’ve ever made, ten thousand dollars, to this work. Many have given a lot more. And we’re very mindful at the same time of the power of the widow’s mite. We’re only asking for serious reflection and for us to be as generous as we can.

This building, as difficult, problematic and beautiful as it is all at once, is the home of our communal heart, the center of our movable feast. It is about the real, what was and what is and what shall be in the future. The real. Isn’t that something glorious? Isn’t that worth our time and our effort and, of course, our money?

Amen.