Brattle Street Elegy: Holding a Master Key

Heresy, I know, but . . . it was a quirky old building that didn’t work very well. While I would never have chosen to tear it down, after the fire the only architectural feature I would replicate is the window in the chapel. 

But the people, the music, the Sunday lessons. Those are priceless. In two different decades (the ’70s and the ’90s), in several stages of my life, in multiple administrations, the Longfellow Park chapel was and remains the one Mormon place where I have felt comfortable and allowed. Where I felt I could speak without fear, and listen and sing and pray and learn. Not that everybody was like me. Rather everybody was so not the same that there was room even for me without quibble or constraint. 

When I left the building in 1996, I spirited out a master key that opened every door. I know that action was forbidden and I have no defense before the law or the Church. I never used the key; I haven’t been able to find it for at least a decade now; and anyway, in the ordinary course of events, the locks were probably changed within a year or two. Furthermore, I didn’t really have any use for a key. The half-dozen times I’ve been in the building since the mid-1990s, I found the Longfellow Park-side doors wide open.

The point is that I wanted access. I wanted to sit in the balcony and watch the people and sing a hymn and see the light change in the window. And pray. The spirit of God—a very big God with wide, welcoming arms—was in that place.