Quarterly message from MOSSAR Chaplain

Dan Philbrick, Chaplain
Missouri Society, Sons of the American Revolution

Autumn 2024

A short time back, Anita and I traveled to Alexandria, Virginia to attend their Scottish Christmas Walk, in connection with her Clan Scott Society annual meeting. While there, we were privileged to attend Sunday morning Eucharist service at Christ Church, which is a historic Anglican (now Episcopal) church dating to Revolutionary times. This is still a thriving, vital congregation.

This was the church General George Washington helped to build, and attended. Washington’s box pew is still in its original four-sided form. The rest of the box pews were altered as the church was modernized with a heating system and now face the altar in the front. But since it was Washington’s pew, it was left as originally built.

We were welcomed and were privileged to be invited to sit in General Washington’s pew. What a thrilling honor, to be able to sit in this historic church, in the very place where he and his family worshiped more than two centuries ago.

George Washington’s Pew Box

Christ Church Exterior

Christ Church Interior

Until very recently, every sitting president has occupied that pew.  The Secret Service stopped it because they couldn’t  control security issues

Quote from Samuel Adams:

“Other nations have received their laws from conquerors; some are indebted for a constitution to the suffering of their ancestors through revolving centuries. The people of this country, alone, have formally and deliberately chosen a government for themselves, and with open and uninfluenced consent bound themselves into a social compact. Here no man proclaims his birth or wealth as a title to honorable distinction, or to sanctify ignorance and vice with the name of hereditary authority. He who has most zeal and ability to promote public felicity, let him be the servant of the public. This is the only line of distinction drawn by nature. Leave the bird of night to the obscurity for which nature intended him, and expect only from the eagle to brush the clouds with his wings and look boldly in the face of the sun.

“We have no other alternative than independence, or the most ignominious and galling servitude. The legions of our enemies thicken on our plains; desolation and death mark their bloody career, while the mangled corpses of our countrymen seem to cry out to us as a voice from heaven.”

With these words, one of our founding fathers restated what many of them espoused, an “Appeal to Heaven”.  Yet he, (and most of the others) were careful to safeguard the founding principle that we should be able to worship according to our conscience.