Several years ago, I—a nonagenarian who served as a parish minister, campus minister, and academic—discovered six poems by Marilyn Nelson in my mailbox. They had been torn from a literary quarterly and mailed to me by my best friend, who knew that the transmuting of history to poetry is a process I value. Nelson’s poems would eventually become a part of The Meeting House—a long work made up of short poems about the history of an actual congregation, First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Connecticut. The poems span from the church’s inception to its 350th anniversary.
Most church histories are either a celebration of themselves that differs little from public relations or an exercise in academic history, or a synthesis between the two. Usually there is emphasis on buildings, clergy, and temporary movements that distinguish one period from another. Usually there is little emphasis on the laity and almost nothing about the pattern of personal piety in the lives of everyday parishioners, whether reading scripture or saying grace before a meal. Usually there is much about faith but little about doubt.
Though The Meeting House, published in 2016 by Antrim House, is a difficult book to find copies of, it brings all our era’s critiques of common life to bear on the past of the congregation: questions of gender, race, and class. Generally church histories don’t give us the subjectivity of church members: their dreams and nightmares, their lifestyles, their interior monologues. But in The Meeting House we find reports on dreams, enter into stream of consciousness musings, and overhear dialogue. The result is an honest church history, depressing as well as inspiring.
