Brattle Street Elegy: Treasures

I started attending the chapel at 4 Longfellow Park in 1969 when I was a freshman at Wellesley College. It was my introduction to Mormon life, since I had joined the Church in Illinois at age nineteen after waiting two years for my parents’ permission to be baptized. I had so many thoughtful, spiritual mentors there. I thought the whole Mormon Church was just like my experience in those University Ward for years.

My first Mormon Sunday School teacher was Tony Kimball who quoted C. S. Lewis all the time and gave articulate, intellectually and spiritually rich institute lectures. That was my introduction to C. S. Lewis; it was the perfect segue for me—a committed Protestant Christian whom God had just tapped to become Mormon. Others here have mentioned the large round window in the chapel and its changing hues, “target” design, etc. I always enjoyed finding a kind of cross in it, a comforting hidden treasure to my way of thinking.

I remember plays on that stage. Watching Wait until Dark on a movie night in the gym. Dances in the low-lit cultural hall, including one tune I recognized as “Sympathy for the Devil” although I don’t know that anyone else knew what it was. I experienced Relief Society for the first time in that room with the lovely bay window. I attended meetings with missionaries at the mission home, then just a few doors down. I remember black carpet with a floral pattern in squares in the foyer.

I remember confiding in my bishop, Richard Bushman, that I’d been thinking about attending a different college for my senior year and his telling me that he thought that the answer to that decision would have something to do with meeting my husband. I asked him if he were speaking as a guy with a hunch or as a bishop under inspiration. He said he thought it was as a bishop under inspiration. I stayed at Wellesley and, although it took four more years for all the pieces to be in the right place, I did meet my husband in that building. Our first child, Christina, was blessed in that chapel by my husband Chris. That was a rare event in our singles branch, where Roger Porter served as bishop.

After a thirteen-year absence while we lived in Chicago, we returned to Massachusetts for my husband’s work. That brought us an entirely new Longfellow Park Ward experience as he served as bishop for a couple of life-changing years. When our son Peter attended Brown University many years later (and after we’d moved back to Chicago), he traveled up from Providence to Cambridge on Sundays for church in that building and taught Gospel Doctrine class for a while.

So much of my shaping as a Latter-day Saint Christian was nourished by the generations of friends and mentors I met in that building. Its destruction by fire is stunning news. Happily the experiences and memories, wrestlings and witnesses that affected me in that building are worked well into the marrow of my bones by now.