40 Days, 40 Churches

Day 12: First Parish Church, Manchester MA

We're going ecumenical this week, starting with the local Congregational (or United Church of Christ, depending how you look at it) church in my home town. This is the typical New England white wooden church on the village green, the church at the center of town. Its clock is the one everyone looks at to get the time, and its bells not only rang the hour, but two or three times a day they played a song. The tree outside the church was for years the town Christmas tree (now the "Friendship Tree"), and it was the location of the baccalaureate service the night before the high school graduation (which started the year after I graduated).

For the central place the church has in the town, I've only been in it a few times, pretty much only for funerals. This was my mom's church, but she didn't go that much herself. When she did go to church she generally went with us, though she often went to midnight Mass for Christmas on her own, before going to work (she did overnights at a nursing home). She was much closer to our priest than the First Parish pastor, to the point where our priest performed her funeral service. And yet for all that she never converted, which always kind of blew my mind a bit. But thinking about it now, it probably says something about what she learned at this church, the importance of faith over the details that we tent to put into it. Or, as Bart Simpson said, "It's all Christianity, people! The little stupid differences are nothing next to the big stupid similarities!"