Brattle Street Elegy: My Spiritual Home

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I started attending the Longfellow Park chapel in the fall of 1993 as a new student in the University Ward. I didn’t know a soul. I still live in New England today, and this chapel has been my spiritual home for most of the last sixteen years. It has seen me through countless friendships, wonderful shared experiences, and two marriages, on a long strange journey that I wouldn’t have believed could have happened to me if someone had told me so on the day I first walked in there.

I have many happy memories of my time in that church—playing the organ, DJ-ing Church dances, rehearsing and performing with various groups, hiding out up in the balcony watching peo￾ple scratch each other’s backs, distributing copies of the late great Juvenile Instructor. Many of the closest friendships of my life were forged in that building.

Lots of things have changed over the years, but that building was always my rock, a focal point of my adult spiritual life.

It was a wonderful building too, full of nooks and crannies to explore, like that weird passageway between the gym and the Relief Society room. It was wonderfully unique; and, like others, I hope that whatever ends up there eventually will not lose that character.

I only find myself in Cambridge on Sunday mornings about once a month these days. On the morning of the fire, I was singing a service at Christ Church around the corner on Garden Street. It is not unusual to hear sirens occasionally during services, but that morning they kept getting progressively louder and more numerous. It became clear that something unusual was happening, and near the end of the service the priest said a prayer for whoever was affected by the fire. I had no idea it would be me.

When the service ended and the doors opened, smoke wafted in. As I walked outside, someone said the Mormon church on Brattle Street had burned down. We rushed over to the smoldering ruins of the church and watched for several hours as the firefighters worked to put out the blaze. It was strange to see wa￾ter pouring into the charred remains of the chapel, to see the collapsed roof beams littering the gym, flames flickering along the rose window, and to see the upstairs hallway illuminated with bright sunlight, no longer shielded by a roof.

Several neighbors and ministers of neighborhood churches stopped by to talk. One remarked how horrible it was to see a place of gentleness consumed in such a violent manner. We moved around to the front of the building and watched the firefighters start to wind things down. Ward members had lined up and were busy pulling as many books as possible out of the li￾brary, which is now downstairs where the mission office used to be. There was a touching moment as two firefighters carried a large portrait of Jesus ministering to the rich man out of the front door of the church.

I am glad that fate found me up in Cambridge the morning of the fire, and that I had a chance to say good-bye to the building that has meant so much to me over the years.