The Old Stone Church



I was reading James Lilek's blog (which Blogger.com wouldn't allow for some reason, so I couldn't post it) about his home town of Fargo, ND. He has a picture of downtown Fargo back in "the day", as they say now. It is a highly focused, wide-angle black and white picture from a good ol' manual SLR film camera. (Am I prejudiced for the old cameras? You betcha!) He muses on how the businesses along the street were family-owned and run the whole time he was growing up. It is a kind of anti-Walmartian, possibly sentimental piece about a uniqueness in our cities that has all but vanished.

I could say alot about this whole idea because I feel very much the same way. But time marches on, as they say, and, like SLR film cameras, uniqueness in home towns is mostly a thing of the past. The picture at left isn't a store in downtown Cleveland, but a Presbyterian church. You can see how the city built itself around the Presbyterians, and they didn't go away. The church is now a national historic site and can't be touched, thank God. It sits on one corner of Public Square (kind of like the German language, Cleveland names things for what they actually are). While shopping downtown, or hanging out, as a teenager, I found this little oasis of silence in the midst of the city and happily went inside. I like to think this is one of my earliest experiences of meditative awareness after puberty (I suspect meditative awareness during early childhood is a given). After traffic and people and such, silence can be alive. It is a substance that permeates. It shimmers, and that day it lived and shimmered for me inside that church. My life, growing up, was not always very agreeable (I like understatement), and coming downtown to get away meant being drawn into the interior of a place of peace. It still sits there, this lovely relic, and of course it isn't the only old building in downtown Cleveland, but much has changed, some bad, some good. Like James Lilek's Fargo, Cleveland's businesses may have gone away and been replaced by, if not Walmart, certainly Victoria's Secret, but its historic churches shoulder the responsibility of representing home for those of us who still love their home town.
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Comments

Cher Stepanek said…
Gail:
This is a lovely post. I too used to go into the Old Stone Church to meditate when going downtown as a youth. Thanks for this.
Cher
July 23, 2009 at 10:15 AM
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