Brattle Street Elegy: Spiritually Housed

I’m presently a member of the Longfellow Park First Ward and have been here since 2006. I know it’s just a building, but the Longfellow Park Chapel was one of the reasons I knew Boston was my home. For at least the first six months I lived in Boston, my heart was full of comfort and a general feeling of “rightness” when I entered that building every Sunday. 

Far from the hub of Church activity out west, chapels in this area are hard to come by. The Longfellow Park chapel was the oldest in Massachusetts, boasting a rather unusual history and design. All of that’s gone now—the roof collapsed, windows broken, and a charred brick shell a ghost of the lively activity historically housed within the walls. So many, many unknowns for the members of our wards—where we’ll meet, if our wards can stay together, if we’ll be disbanded during the rebuilding . . . The magnitude of the situation is still surreal and hard to fathom. 

The fire today has destroyed the physical facade; but for hundreds of members of the Church currently in the Longfellow Park wards, the spirit of what we felt within those walls will now be spiritually housed within each of us, as a physical facility no longer exists. Maybe this is the chance for us individually to help rebuild the building that rebuilt so many of us.