Last year our chapel in Cambridge caught fire dramatically during a Sunday meeting. All members were evacuated without injury while twenty-two fire trucks from five neighboring communities battled the flames. Longfellow Park Chapel was the oldest in the Boston area (1956) and a home away from home for thousands of Mormons who have passed through Boston over the past 50 years.

Since the fire that destroyed most of the building, we have been meeting at Harvard Episcopal Divinity School across the street from Longfellow Park Chapel. We have felt very welcome at EDS and our sincerest thanks go out to our kind and generous tenants of the past year.

While it was providence that provided us with a place to hold our congregations together last year, how excited we were to dedicate a building of our own this past weekend. Construction on the LP Chapel is not yet complete, but the first Mormon Stake Center in the Cambridge area was completed less than three miles away.

Details of building size, square footage, and pre-dedication activities are available elsewhere, but newspapers and other media do little to convey spiritual sentiments and insights at a time of such importance to members. of the area.

True, I haven’t spent most of my life as a Mormon in Boston. I wasn’t born here and probably won’t die here. But almost four years into my life as a resident, I feel so connected to this place that my history in the area has meaning and importance. I feel connected to church members in this area as they have struggled to plant their gospel seed in sometimes rocky soil and fertilize it to the best of their ability. “We all drink from wells we didn’t dig and walk across bridges we didn’t build,” our stake president so eloquently said yesterday. I am grateful for the ancestors who came before me to this place.

Printed inside the service program is an excerpt from Longfellow Park Chapel’s original dedication booklet:

“A chapel is not an end in itself. It is a place where people can come together and learn the principles of the everlasting Gospel and obedience to these teachings; where peace, love and happiness can reign. As well as the justice of the saints in the past has brought the blessings of today, so the righteousness of the saints today will bring the abundance of the Lord tomorrow.

And so the saints hope and pray that soon their faith and works will bring a stake of Zion as prophesied; and that the time will come when a Latter-day Saint Temple will overlook the Charles River as it flows to the sea, along the course traveled by the patriots who lived, fought, and died so that this land might meet your destiny”.

The original Cambridge branch referenced above was a branch 54 years ago. That branch has split, and split, and split again, and there are now 30 districts and branches in this region because of the faithful service and diligent action of that original Cambridge branch. I wasn’t even close to living in 1956, but I am eternally grateful for those strong members of the original Cambridge Branch Patriots, because they have made Boston feel like home.