Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Healing and Meditative Landscape | Page 31

People and Happenings
Tribute to a Treasure
On Sunday, October 1st we gathered to celebrate
the preservation of the monument to Reverend William Ellery
Channing (1780-1842), one of the foremost religious thinkers
of the nineteenth century and the spiritual leader of American
Unitarians. Thanks to a successful fundraising campaign through
Faithify, a Unitarian Universalist crowdsourcing platform and
to the efforts of Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski, Mount Auburn
Docent, the monument underwent crucial restoration work to
ensure that it will continue to honor his memory in the years
to come.
“William Ellery Channing has been described as the most
important figure in the history of American Unitarianism, who
preached that religion was not to scare or belittle people, or
drive them into adversarial hatred, but rather to bring a spirit
of peace and compassion into the world and to create com-
munities of understanding and hope. A child of America when
people literally ached to build a nation that was obsessed with
moral perfection, Channing affirmed the moral capabilities and
responsibilities of human beings when he asked what can I do
to improve my own soul? His significance was that he urged
us to be better in all ways. We honor his legacy in preserving
this monument because he reminds us that if we hear his words
again today we can bring our moral potential to bear on a world
that increasingly needs us to build communities of love and
justice.”
— Rev. Mark W. Harris,
Minister
First Parish of Watertown
2018 Volume 1 | 29