Perry's Ponderings

I hear; I forget. I see; I remember. I experience; I understand.

 Boston Photos

This rang true for the high school youth who got to play the bells in the tower at Arlington Street Church on the Coming of Age Unitarian Universalist Heritage Trip to Boston. It was more than the music that resounded in their minds as they experienced the historic sites.

The day began at Walden Pond where the youth met Henry David Thoreau (character played by historian Richard Smith). Thoreau's thinking, the social times, and the revelations of his experiment of solitude came alive through our questions and walk along the pond. At the original site of the cabin, the youth each placed a rock that "had spoken to them" on the cairn built up by years of visiting Coming of Agers.

Next in Concord the youth shared their interpretations of quotes from Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson at their gravesites. The souls of those who provoked a Unitarian Universalist sense of justice left their mark on the youth. With Emerson's unique gravestone as a backdrop, I relayed the transformative thoughts from Emerson's Harvard Divinity Address of 1838. "A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to [us] when [our] hearts and minds open to the sentiment of virtue...this sentiment is the essence of all religion...[It] is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation, that I can receive from another soul."

From Concord we headed to downtown Boston. Arlington Street Church held the first gay marriage in the nation and was also the place a Vietnam War draft card was burned for the fist time. In that historic sanctuary, the youth climbed the stairs to the imposing pulpit where they each read a part of William Ellery Channing's famous sermon, "Unitarian Christianity," that implored the use of reason when reading the Bible, tolerance for varying religious views, and a focus on deeds more than words.

Crossing the Boston Common we stopped at the relief of the first black regiment in the Civil War, led by Unitarian Robert Gould Shaw. It is a striking reminder of the sacrifice for justice. In front of the statue of Unitarian minister and author Edward Everett Hale, the youth made a connection to the words he lived by, "I am only one. I cannot do everything. Still, I am one. I can do something and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something I can do." Those words were especially poignant coming before the youth viewed the haunting Holocaust Memorial near Quincy Market.

The Kings Chapel tour held history below our feet and over our heads. The youth saw the last, but "sweetest," bell cast by Paul Revere, as well as the church crypt holding those honored and those cast aside but finding a final resting place in the Strangers' Tomb. Even a secret, illegal, Catholic burial was held in the tomb for a Frenchman, fitting for the first U.S. congregation to purport Unitarian views. The youth shared their amazement at the striking differences between the congregations and how different they both were from CUC.

We arrived home with a deeper appreciation of our Unitarian Universalist roots and our  religious home in White Plains.