The Fifty-Year Pulpit

Lyrics

The meeting house is quiet now.
The air is dust and sunlight on the pews.
But the pulpit still stands.
Hewn pine. Dark with age.
It remembers the grain of a hand, resting on its edge.

October twenty-first, seventeen-thirty.
We called the young man from Harvard. John Stone.
Twenty-four years old and steady in his gaze.
The town voted him seventy pounds a year, use of the parsonage,
and a proper supply of good firewood.
(We argued about the firewood every winter).
He brought Sarah, his wife, down from Watertown.
And for his ordination, we purchased rum and wine.
A community requires a voice.
A town must have a center.

And the pulpit held him.
For fifty-five years.
One man, one high place.
Baptisms in the brittle January air.
Weddings in the humid breath of June.
Funerals when the ground was hard as iron.
The pulpit saw every child named.
The pulpit heard every promise made.
Our steady, wooden heart.

Then the Great Awakening came, a fever from the coast.
Shouting in the pews, talk of new light and the old, cold ways.
Deacon Brigham shifted in his seat.
Stone stood above it.
Calm.
He sorted through the fervor,
found the kernel of the thing.
He kept the congregation from shattering.
Mostly.
Some families left for other churches. Some always do.
But the pulpit stayed.

And the pulpit held him.
For fifty-five years.
One man, one high place.
Baptisms in the brittle January air.
Weddings in the humid breath of June.
Funerals when the ground was hard as iron.
The pulpit saw every child named.
The pulpit heard every promise made.
Our steady, wooden heart.

Then the King's arms burned on the common green.
The world was turning upside down outside our doors.
He was an old man then.
Nearing eighty.
Ezra Stiles came through, wrote him down: "a solid, steady... good man."
He was.
We have no portrait of him, no sketch of his face.
Just the memory of a voice
from that high, square place.
A voice that held us together through a war.

March eighteenth, seventeen-eighty-five.
He died in the parsonage, as the winter broke.
The bell tolled across the thawing fields.
Fifty-five years.
The pulpit was empty.
But it was never silent.
It still isn't. Not really.