Brattle Street Elegy: How Beautiful Our Waters of Mormon

I attended the University Ward from 1997-2000 and then the Cambridge Second Ward 2000-2002. My younger brother now at￾tends the Cambridge First Ward and called me Sunday morning (my time) with the shocking news of the fire. He was standing there watching the hoses pour water in. I was brought to tears that day as I reflected on the loss of that building and all the memories I had in my years there.

For me, the Longfellow Park building and that after-church dinner was the comforting place I went after my first few days as a culture-shocked freshman. Years later it’s where I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with shell-shocked Latter-day Saints for a special broadcast from Salt Lake City a few days after the September 11 attacks. Before I met him (at an after-church dinner), my husband, Damon, was baptized in that building, received both priesthoods there, and decided to go on a mission. I think he put it best when he said, “Whenever I read in Mosiah about the waters of Mormon and ‘how beautiful they are to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer,’ I think of that building and how my testimony of Christ, and every other good thing I have now, come from the years I spent there.”

Some things do last forever, and I think many of us gained those things sitting inside the walls of our beloved Longfellow Park chapel.