Tag Archives: funerals

Extravagantly Kind

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Proper 10A, 16 July 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Genesis 25:19-34. If it is going to be this way, why do I live?
  • Romans 8:1-11. You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.
  • Matthew 13:1-9 [10-17] 18-23. Hear then the parable of the sower.

O God of grace, grant us the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

There is an old Jewish wisdom teaching that God created humans because God loves stories. Two of our three readings this morning are stories. We have the story of Rebekah bearing twins, Esau and Jacob, and of the most expensive bowl of red-lentil soup there ever was in the history of the world. Our Gospel portion includes a memorable story, parable. I often think that the Apostle Paul’s letters might have been more comprehensible and less objectionable, if they focused more on stories than high rhetoric, elegant as it is. Continue reading →

2021

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  • 1 Jan. Orbis Books published When Tears Sing: The Art of Lament in Christian Community by our 11th rector, The Rev. Dr. William Blaine-Wallace.
  • 21 Jan.  Boston Sun article by Seth Daniel, “Made for This Time: Surprisingly Emmanuel Church Was Engineered for COVID-19”, discussed the efforts of Michael Scanlon and Julian Bullitt to monitor air quality throughout our building, which was designed in the time of tuberculosis.
  • March.  The Rev. Tamra Tucker and our rector formed two mixed groups of parishioners from common cathedral and Emmanuel to follow The Episcopal Church’s Sacred Ground dialogue series on race and faith.
  • July 29.  Kevin Neel retired as organist and parish administrator par excellence.
  • 26 Sept. We celebrated the retirement of Pat Krol, who had served as Executive Director of Emmanuel Music and greeter since 2006.  We funded the cantata and dedicated in her honor these doors, which she held open every Sunday while our choristers and liturgists to processed into the Sanctuary.
  • 31 Oct.  Memorial service for The Rev. Dr. David J. Siegenthaler (1926-2020), former priest in charge, was held in our well-ventilated sanctuary.  After leaving Emmanuel, Dr. Siegenthaler had served as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Duxbury MA, and then as archivist at the Episcopal Divinity School, where he taught for four decades.

1943

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The Rev. Robert Gifford Metters became rector.  For more about the Metters years please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.

  • 17 September.  The Rev. Henrietta Rue Goodwin died.  She had retired from the faculty of the National Cathedral School to live with her sister Helen Goodwin French, wife of Hollis French, who was warden here from 1914-1940. After her burial from the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem PA, which the Goodwins had helped to found, a memorial was held at Emmanuel. For a discussion of her ministry here, see also: 1897.

1939

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  • Priscilla Rawson Young (1909-2000), benefactor of our series of Bach Cantatas

    Our benefactor Priscilla Rawson (Young) studied music with Stanley Chapwell at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Craig Smith, founder of Emmanuel Music, who also had studied with Chapwell, kept this portrait of her on his desk. See also 1909, 1942, 1971, 1973, 1994 & 2000.

  • January.  A funeral was held at Emmanuel for our organist Albert Williams Snow, who had recently retired and died at the age of sixty.  Having studied under Wallace Goodrich at New England Conservatory of Music, he had become organist at Church of the Advent, Boston, before he replaced our organist  Lynnwood Farnum in 1918.  During his tenure he taught at NEC and served as organist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  His memorial plaque (#G4), reconstructed by Ted Southwick in 2021, can be seen behind the chancel organ.

 

1922

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25 Nov.  William Lindsey, Jr. died before completion of his last and greatest creation, our Leslie Lindsey Memorial Chapel.  He had been born to Maria and William Lindsey on 12 August 1858 in Fall River MA. He is buried in the Lindsey plot (6462) on Cherry Ave. in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. For his Horatio Alger story, see FindaGrave. His funeral was held here on 29 November. He was survived by his wife Anne Hawthorne Sheen (whom he had married in Fall River in 1884), their son Kenneth L. Lindsey and daughter Dorothy Lindsey, his sisters Ann & Eliza Lindsey, and his brother Dr. John H. Lindsey.

1918

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Albert Williams Snow replaced Lynnwood Farnum as organist.

January 20. The Anthony Memorial Organ in the West Gallery was dedicated, honoring Silas Reed Anthony (1863-1914), who served as Parish Clerk (1887-1898), Vestryman (1898-1906), and Junior Warden (1906-1914). The organ was a gift of his widow, Harriet Weeks. who later became Mrs. Randolph Frothingham.

March 22.  Bishop William Lawrence and Rector Elwood Worcester officiated at the funeral of Andrew Robeson Sargent, who at the age of 42 died in his sleep. After graduating from Harvard College in 1900, he had followed in his father Charles Sprague Sargent‘s footsteps and worked as a landscape architect with his brother-in-law Guy Lowell.  His wife Maria de Acosta Sargent, daughter of the writer Mercedes de Acosta, had been painted by his third cousin John Singer Sargent. His mother Mary Robeson Sargent and sisters Henrietta, Molly, and Alice Sargent gave in his memory our hymn boards and the carved doors to leading from our sanctuary to the “Bride’s Lobby”.

See also:

  • His letters to his father Charles Sprague Sargent in the archives of the Arnold Arboretum.
  •  “Andrew Robeson Sargent, Class of 1900.”  The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, 1918.
  • “Andrew Robeson Sargent Dies.” The New York Times, March 21, 1918.
  • “Many Friends Mourn Andrew R. Sargent.” The Boston Daily Globe, March 23, 1918.

August 26.  Col. Cranmore Nesmith Wallace, who had served on our vestry from 1896 until his death, died at the age of 74.  His widow Eunice Sprague Wallace gave 2 lancets in our sanctuary (#18: Adoration of the Magi) in his memory

November 2.  The Churchman (p. 518) reported that the Emmanuel Memorial House was serving as an emergency shelter for children made homeless by the influenza epidemic.  Nurses and workers from the Children’s Aid Society and the (Episcopal) Church Home Society were supervising children housed in its “clubrooms” until they could be placed with families by “the usual placing-out services”.

Aimee Rotch Sargent (born 1852) died. She had married at Emmanuel in 1874 Winthrop Henry Sargent (1840-1916). In 1893 she had given funds to create our sanctuary’s reredos in memory of her parents Annie & Benjamin S. Rotch and her siblings Arthur and Edith Rotch.

1914

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See also World War I Memorial and Katharine Lane Weems.

The Students’ House Corporation, under the direction of Mary S. Holmes and Charlotte Upham Baylies, built at 96 The Fenway a home for our Students’ House, which had been in rented quarters since its inception in 1899. They engaged architects Kilham & Hopkins, raised a large portion of its construction cost ($124K), and secured a mortgage for the remainder.  The building is now Kerr Hall, a Northeastern University dormitory.

Gardiner Martin Lane from Harvard College Class of 1881 biography of him in the papers of Katharine Lane Weems at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.

 

October 6.  About a thousand people attended the funeral service for financier, philanthropist, and parishioner Gardiner Martin Lane (born 1859).  The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester, The Rt. Rev. William Lawrence,  The Rev. John W. Suter of Winchester, and The Rev. Prescott Evarts from Lane’s Harvard Class of 1881 officiated.  Pallbearers included President  A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Francis Adams, and several of his partners from Lee Higginson & Co.. Lynnwood Farnum played a Tchaikovsky funeral march and “Dead March” from Handel’s “Saul”. The boys choir sang “Abide with me” and “The strife is over”.

As treasurer of the New England chapter of the International Red Cross, Lane collected and distributed relief funds for the Salem fire (1914), the San Francisco earthquake (1906), and other disasters.  Appointed trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1906, and elected its president in 1907, he oversaw its move from Copley Square to the Evans Building on Huntington Ave., which was designed by Emmanuelite Guy Lowell.  Spearheading the Museum’s fundraising effort for the new facility, Lane said, “A mere collection of beautiful objects is of little value unless seen, appreciated, and understood by many.”

His widow, Emma Louise Gildersleeve Lane, and daughter, Katharine Lane Weems, were parishioners for years after his death and generous benefactors to Emmanuel.

The Lanes’ home at 53 Marlborough is now the French Cultural Center.

The Lanes’ summer house, The Chimneys, in Manchester by the Sea, MA was designed by Emma G. Lane’s brother Raleigh C. Gildersleeve.

1913

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Lynnwood Farnam

Lynnwood Farnam

When Weston Gale retired, Lynnwood Farnam became Emmanuel’s organist, a post he held until 1918, when he left to join the Canadian Army.  According to the L. F. Society, when the Music Committee asked what he would play for his audition, “He handed them a notebook containing a list of 200 pieces which he had memorized, saying “Anything in this book.”

For more about Lynnwood Farnam, see 1917, 1930, and History of Music at Emmanuel.  Listen to a recording of his playing via the the Royal Canadian College of Organists, whom we thank for this photo.

13 Mar. Bishop William Lawrence presided at the funeral of Silas Reed Anthony, which was attended by more than 400.  Born in 1863, he had become a Boston banker and served as Clerk of the Vestry (1887-97) and Jr. Warden (1907-13).  Assisting the bishop were the Rev. Dr. Samuel McComb and the Rev. Ralph Bray of Emmanuel and the Rev. Charles Clark of Church of the Ascension. Among the pallbearers were Sr. Warden Walter Cabot Baylies, William Endicott, Jr.,  Philip L. & Richard M. Saltonstall, and several Anthony and Weeks relatives.

31 May.  Nora Iasigi, daughter of parishioners Amelia Gore Iasigi and the late Oscar Iasigi, married at St. Paul’s Church, Stockbridge, US Solicitor General William Marshall Bullitt, great uncle of our parishioner Julian Bullitt.

 

1902

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Vicar Arthur L. Bumpus reported that the Sunday School of our mission Church of the Ascension had on its books 500 children, of whom about 300 attended on a given Sunday. The Rev. Bumpus, who was born 1871 in Quincy MA, son of Judge Everett C. B.,  graduated Harvard College in 1891, and joined the Rev. Edward L. Atkinson at Ascension in 1899.  He eventually became rector of Trinity Church on Long Island NY, where his funeral was held in 1926.

1874

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Our second rector, The Rev. Dr. A.H. Vinton, presided at the funeral of Benjamin Tyler Reed, a founder and early vestryman, who had served as warden from 1863-72. Pallbearers included John Cummings; founding vestryman and early warden Enoch Redington Mudge; our first senior warden, Edward Sprague Rand; Henry Winthrop Sargent; and Amos Adams Lawrence. Among the many in attendance were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Quincy, and Robert Charles Winthrop.  According to the April 3 Boston Evening Transcript, the cortege to Mount Auburn Cemetery comprised some twenty coaches.