The Mother Church - Boston

I don't have anything to post for yesterday because all we did was drive, in order to get from Virginia to Massachusetts in time to meet Karl.  But now he's here and I have so many pictures from our day in Boston that I'm going to put them in several posts.

Today is Sunday, so we went to church.  But not just any church.  A few weeks ago we visited the Mormon mother ship, today we visited our Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston.

We picked a great day to visit, because they brought the Sunday School kids into church to sing the final hymn, and our kids got to be included.  They're in that picture somewhere!

The organ is stupendous and is apparently the 9th-largest organ in the world!

After the service, we got to do a tour of the main church and the smaller original church building next door.  The main church was designed in a big, round Romanesque style because of space requirements.  Since it was bound on several sides by streets, the architects had to design a building to seat 5,000 in a very small space, so they chose a dome shape with 4 pillars that support the weight, but leave the whole internal space open.  It's a great design.  The church also has some lovely stained glass.

The original building.

I got a great picture of the kids in front of the reflecting pool.

Here is where the Christian Science Monitor is published.  I love the Monitor; it's a great paper.

They had some interesting art exhibits around the grounds, including these rocks in trees.  I kind of like them.

We also toured the Mary Baker Eddy Library.  I loved it!  There's a room called the "Hall of Ideas" that had a round fountain with words made of light shining on the water.  The words shift and move and tumble, and spill out onto the floor and the whole effect is enchanting.  I wasn't able to get a picture of it, but I found one on the internet.

But the best part of the library was the Mapparium.  It's a huge, stained-glass globe that you walk through on a catwalk.  It's got amazing accoustics: if you stand in the very center, your voice is amplified in surround-sound, and if you whisper at one end, you can be heard at the other.  We weren't allowed to take photos, but here's one from the internet.  There's a lot more detail than what you can see in this picture.

Here is a picture of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.  I find it very inspiring to realize that she was older than I am when she began most of her life's work.  She founded a newspaper when she was in her 80's!  Isn't that cool?