Bob Stevens’ house was up the street.
He was 75 and lived here for decades and passed away on Thanksgiving, an old man in a small town a couple of miles off the Interstate.
I only knew him in passing, as our sons had been friends years ago. But I knew his tendency to smile and his general good cheer and that he was beloved, he and his wife, Smidge. When their house burned back in 2015, people swarmed around them like family.
And that’s how it was Saturday, as well, at the United Church, as people filled the pews and stood lining the wall in the back, come to remember him.
They were the people of town, people I have come to know or know of over the 35 years I’ve been one of them. Many are tied together by blood or marriage, some whose roots stretch back to the town’s settlement, the largest number the intermingled descendants of Italians who came here a hundred years ago to work in factories long since closed.
I am shy and have a very bad memory, and so I know relatively few of the Mount Morris people and often can’t remember the ones I do know. But their faces are familiar, and they have become my tribe, and I feel comfortable and intimate around them, even if for the life of me I couldn’t tell you their name or their family connections. I’m a spectator here, but I love what I see.
Which brings us to Saturday, at the United Church.
Bob Ossont led the service. I don’t think he’s a pastor of any kind, but he’s a village judge and a Mason and he’s got a hand in most things, and he did a very good job. Smidge and the family were in the three rows on the right, up front, and the people from town filled the rest. All a little older, most a little heavier, all in a new light.
At least to me. And that’s the point of this.
As we sat there and sang, “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses,” I remembered that my mother had them sing that when my step-father died, almost 54 years ago. “And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me that I am his own.”
It rung like an anthem within the walls of the old church. Filling it, passionately, like when Bob Ossont concluded his invocation and we all joined in to recite the Lord’s Prayer, not halting and mumbled, but loud and clear, full throated and certain, not hoping, but knowing, the best that people of faith can know.
It was the faces and the people of decades of interaction, of various connections and separations, all mouthing the words of the same Lord, professing a faith in the same Christ. Probably the largest number go to St. Pat’s, a congregation surviving from the days of the canal diggers, with some others at the Baptist Church and the United Church and a good number at the Pentecostal church up the road, and a few others, like me, sprinkled hither and yon at congregations across the countryside.
But there we were, singing in unison, in a moment of shared and comforting faith. And I saw them all differently. I saw us all differently. We’ve been together at parades, basketball games, ambulance calls, Italian festivals, calling hours, elementary school open houses, graduation parties and fire department chicken barbecues. We’ve greeted one another at Coniglio’s, the Leaning Tower, McDonald’s, the various dollar stores, and randomly on the sidewalk.
I knew that we were neighbors, but at Bob Stevens’ funeral, I saw that we were brothers and sisters, as well. I’ve always understood that in theory, but sitting in the pew on Saturday, I saw it demonstrated in fact.
Brought together by our shared admiration of one man, we demonstrated that we were believers in one God, that there was a spiritual component to our bond, a reflection of the spiritual nature of our very existence.