Author Archives: Elizabeth Richardson

1989

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  • April 8.  Emmanuel Music gave a concert in honor of Principal Guest Conductor John Harbison’s 50th birthday (20 Dec. 1988).  His wife Rose Mary Pederson Harbison opened with a violin concerto she had played at its 1980 premiere.
  • Katharine Ward Lane Weems died and bequeathed a pair of Spanish candelabra now standing in the  baptistery of our Sanctuary.  Born 22 Feb.1899, she was the only child of  Emma Gildersleeve and Gardiner Martin Lane, who was chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1907 until his death in 1914. They lived at 53 Marlborough Street and were members of Emmanuel.

Katharine attended the Museum School from 1915 and began to show her work in 1920.  She designed the brick friezes and bronze doors of Harvard’s Biological Laboratories with two massive bronze rhinoceri (one pictured below) installed in the courtyard in 1937.

See also

Image by Daderot, WikiCommons, of her sculpture at the Museum School, Boston

1988

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  • June.  Organist Michael Beattie joined Emmanuel Music for rehearsals in our Music Room of Peter Sellars‘ version of Mozart’s opera Le Nozze di Figaro, which played that summer in the PepsiCo Theater in Purchase NY.  Craig Smith conducted; Frank Kelley sang the part of Basilio; Jayne West, the Countess; and Susan Larson, Cherubino.
  • In her “Peace Pentecost” sermon at our Cathedral Church of St. Paul, poet Denise Levertov (1923-97) emphasized the connection between contemplation and action:  “If we neglect our inner lives, we destroy the sources of fruitful outer action.

    Thanks to U. of California Press for this image.

    But if we do not act, our inner lives become mere monuments to egotism.” At Emmanuel she founded a Peace Group to foster the links between spiritual thought and action among her fellow parishioners.

Earlier in the decade she had been attracted to Emmanuel by our social-justice activities, beautiful music and liturgy, and rector Al Kershaw, who counseled her.  “He assured her that doubt was part of spiritual growth and the darkness she encountered might increase her sense of dependence and lead her to God,” says her biographer Dana Greene citing Denise’s diary entry for June 13, 1988.

Denise’s father, Paul Philip Levertoff (1878–1954), born in Belarus, an early proponent of Messianic Judaism, took holy orders in the Anglican Church and preached wearing an alb with a tallit and kippa.

The Rev. Paul Philip Levertoff

In 1922 he had become director of what is now the London Diocesan Council for Work among the Jews and edited its quarterly journal, The Church and the Jews. He was a prolific writer on theological subjects in Hebrew, German, and English and translated into English the Midrash Sifre on Numbers (1926) and the Zohar  (1933).

See also:

  1. Dana Greene.  Denise Levertov:  A Poet’s Life.  Urbana IL:  U. of Illinois Press, 2012.
  2. Denise Levertov.  Making Peace.  Breathing the Water.  NY:  New Directions, 1987.
  3. Donna Hollenberg.  A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2013.
  4. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, eds.  The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov.  NY: New Directions, 2013.
  5. Paul Philip Levertoff. Love and the Messianic Age.
  6. Timeline: 1994

 

1987

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1985

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  • Jan. Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot joined our vestry for a 3-year term during the tenure of Rector Al Kershaw.  
  • March 31. Our own composer John Harbison preached on the 300th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach.
  • July 1. The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline Murray died in Pittsburg PA at the age of 75.  She is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, beside her partner Irene Barlow, whose death in 1972 had led Murray to discern a call to the priesthood at Emmanuel. The Episcopal Church has designated July 1st as her feast day.

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1984

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  • The Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts 1784-1984: A Mission to Remember, Proclaim, and Fulfill by Mark J. Duffy, Director of the Archives of the Episcopal Church, was published by our diocese with references to our missions.  Bard R. Hamlen wrote its chapter on Emmanuel (pp. 162-6).
  • June.  Carolyn Roosevelt joined the Parish Choir, directed by Andy Castiglione, and has been its faithful soprano ever since.

1978

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  • 21 April.  Gov. Michael Dukakis proclaimed it to be Johann Sebastian Bach Day in the Commonwealth as “the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston…after seven years [had] completed for the first time in the USA the cycle of [his]194 sacred cantatas”.

  • Constance visited us in Oct. 2017

    Constance Hammond was elected our first woman (junior) warden. After ordination in our diocese, she served as rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland OR (1990-98) and then as rector and priest in other churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon Since 1998, she has been a practitioner and instructor in the Healing Touch Program.  See also:  1986.

1977

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January 8.    Pauli Murray was ordained a priest at the Washington National Cathedral by the Rt. Rev. William F. Creighton, bishop of the (Episcopal) Diocese of Washington. She was the first African American woman, and one of the first women, to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

February 13.  At the invitation of the rector of The Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill NC, the Rev. James Peter Lee, The Rev. Dr. Murray celebrated her first Eucharist.   She read from her grandmother Cornelia Smith‘s Bible, from a lectern that had been given in memory of the woman who had owned Cornelia, Mary Ruffin Smith. This was the first time a woman celebrated the Eucharist at an Episcopal church in North Carolina.  In her autobiography (1987), p. 435) Pauli described her thoughts about the service, which our Parish Historian Mary Chitty attended:

Whatever future ministry I might have as a priest, it was given to me that day to be a symbol of healing. All the strands of my life had come together. Descendant of slave and of slave owner, I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher, and friend. Now I was empowered to minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no black or white, no male or female – only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.

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1976

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  • 27 Jan. Craig Smith & Edward Simone conducted a free concert in celebration of Mozart’s 220th birthday.  With standing-room only in our sanctuary, soprano Jane Bryden brought the house down with Popoli di Tasaglia (K.318), which Globe correspondent Richard Buell deemed “flabbergasting [and] insouciant”. They celebrated Mozart’s birthday with a concert for years to come.  Lenny Matczynski, who later became its executive director, joined the orchestra of Emmanuel Music.

  • Pauli Murray received a Master of Divinity degree from General Theological Seminary.  She was then ordained a deacon in The Episcopal Church by The Rt. Rev. Morris F. Arnold, Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts.

  • The Episcopal Church, at its General Convention in Minneapolis, voted to ordain women as priests, beginning January 1, 1977.