Sharing our legacy

This week, we're getting ready for our participation in Waltham History Month, which we'll observe this Saturday with a service of historic Morning Prayer according to the Book of Common Prayer of 1792. After the service, we'll have tours of the church.

Each Sunday as I celebrate the Eucharist, I face our "Great West Window." The dominant images are, of course, Jesus, Mary, and other ordinary stained glass fare. But if you look closely, you also see more unusual images: a lathe, a car, a watch mechanism, gear pump, bicycle wheel, spindle and shuttle, and a foundry ladle. The industrial history of our city is all there (looking even more closely, the window is full of tiny rivets). My own work life is pretty comfortable--there are the occasional late nights and early mornings, but 200 years ago the typical Waltham woman worked at the Lowell textile mill, not in a nice office. The "mill girls" worked for twelve hours a day, from 5 am to 7 pm. They lived together in factory- provided housing, had only Sundays off, and were paid $0.40 per day, less than half of what the lowest paid male worker received. Ouch!

When it comes to Waltham history, of course, you can't go far without meeting the Paines. In our church you can't go far without them; Robert Treat Paine, Jr was elected senior warden of Christ Church in 1897. He was a man of a lot of privilege, the grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (Robert Treat Paine, Sr), and a very wealthy lawyer. Paine Jr's wife, Lydia Lyman P, died suddenly during the construction of the church, and they dedicated the chancel windows in her memory (the woman kneeling in red in the window is based on a picture of Lydia herself).

Paine was instrumental in building this church and Trinity Church, Copley Square, but he was also intensely dedicated to the rights and protection of those who were less well-off than he. Deeply influenced by his friend Phillips Brooks, the rector of Trinity, he founded a number of organizations to benefit working people, and funded the construction of affordable housing in Boston--many of which were sold to workers at cost. He also was president for many years of the pacifist American Peace Society.

When the demands of his philanthropic work became too demanding, he gave up his work in law. On this decision, he said, "This I regretted for many years. Yet at length I reached the conviction that as we only had this life on earth once, I was not willing to devote at least half of it to the mere business of making money."

The "mere business of making money" --he'd already made a ton of it by that time, but it's still a moving transformation on the part of someone who could have gone from having everything to having--what?--more of everything. We may wonder whether the care and feeding of this behemoth structure we've inherited is worth our time and energy. Paine did--in one part of his autobiography he says that if he knew from the beginning how much the construction of Christ Church would end up costing he may not have gone through with it. But he did, and here we are. After our beautiful church service in the garden on July 4, it'll feel different being inside again.

Still, it is a blessing, and not just for us. This Saturday's service is a chance to open our doors to the wider community and offer a day for them to share this gift. A group lead by Shawn Russell, our treasurer, is busy at work on a grant to apply for Waltham CPA (Community Preservation Act) funds to help restore our building. It's part of Waltham's history--Paines and Lymans and Storers all called this home. This year at history day, we're especially mindful of the legacy of Paine's work--and our place in continuing both his love for the church and his work on behalf of those who are less fortunate.