God’s Acre

I walked to God’s Acre with a friend yesterday. Of course, in one light you could say we are always walking to or walking on God’s acre, but this was different. We began on a small path at the edge of a community ball field (empty but well-maintained) about a half-mile from the Boundless Way Temple where I live.

It was a lovely afternoon for a walk in the woods. The morning rain and clouds were dispersing and the air temperature perfectly in the low 70’s. The trees here in central Massachusetts are just starting their annual display of fall colors. The first reds and oranges are appearing in the mostly green landscape. Yellow leaves are already dropping to guild the sidewalks and paths around town.

God’s Acre is a parcel of over 300 acres of wooded land that is currently being managed for recreational use by the Greater Worcester Land Trust. This particular site gets its name from the ten acres it contains that were owned in the mid-eighteenth century by a local mystic named Solomon Parsons who believed the world was going to end in 1843.

Apparently, things were not going so smoothly in that time either. The mid-nineteenth century gave rise to numerous utopian and millennial cults. The urge to escape the confines of traditional culture that led to the countercultural movement of the 60’s and 70’s that I was on the fringe of, was a well-worn tradition in America.

My friend and I walked for thirty or forty minutes – appreciating the gift of the autumn woods and the company of each other. I’ve known this friend for almost thirty years and in the last few we’ve developed the practice of deep conversation and occasional long walks. Any topic is fair game—from updates on the grandchildren to reflections on our increasingly evident mortality to reports our latest efforts to decipher our ongoing the struggles and triumphs.

Yesterday, it was the usual rambling conversation, accompanied by some heavy breathing as we followed the winding and hilly trail. Eventually the narrow path widened out to what had clearly been a road. Along this grassy way were a couple of square holes, clearly where houses had stood many decades ago, now filled with trees like the rest of the area.

Just after catching our first sight of some current-day houses to our left, we went through a gate and came to a jumble of rocks—the large post-glacial type that can be ten or fifteen feet high and lie in apparently random places among the trees. Glacial erratics, I think they are called.

By now the sun was shining through the trees, illuminating the fallen leaves and the perfectly strewn boulders. My friend wandered around a little and finally found it–the rock on which Solomon had paid a local artisan $125 to inscribe a legal document deeding this land to God. It’s now known as deed rock and apparently the inscribed words were the basis of an extended court case over who this land belonged to. I’m told that God eventually lost the case because he had neglected to sign his name to the document so the land passed into other hand—temporarily.

I was touched to see this wet rock bearing the marks of holy intention from a fellow local spiritualist from 180 years ago. Maybe I should begin work carving some new agreement with the Universe on one of the rocks behind our Zen Temple? I think Solomon would approve.