Banners went up around Morristown on Friday proclaiming: “They were all our children.”
The message of solidarity with the people of Newtown, CT–who lost 26 children and staffers in a massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School one week ago–began with the Morristown Clergy Council.
Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty, the Morristown police, the Morris School District and Morristown Medical Center–which paid for all 20 banners–quickly came on board, said the Rev. Janet Broderick, rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.
“This is very powerful for the community,” said Janet, who suggested the banners. “Any solutions (to violence) that we’re going to work out, we’re going to work out together. We care about our children, and we need to look after them.”
“It’s just a way to communicate that we are all together, and it’s important that we support each other,” Mayor Dougherty said. Like the rest of the nation, everyone in Morristown is struggling to cope with the sadness and horror of the Connecticut shootings, he said.
Banners went up at St. Peter’s, Bethel AME Church, Morristown United Methodist Church, St. Margaret’s Church,Church of the Redeemer, Temple B’nai Or, Assumption Church, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, the Jewish Community Center, the Market Street Mission, the Presbyterian Church in Morristown, town hall and Morristown High School.
As funerals continued in Newtown, church bells across America tolled 26 times on Friday morning to commemorate the victims.
Correction:
There are three ways that Church bells are rung: normal (peal) ringing, chiming, or tolling. Tolling is a slow, somber way to proclaim to all within earshot that someone died, not just victims.
In his 1624 prose work,Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, the English priest and poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote:
Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.
Twenty-eight people died in Newtown, CT. I think the bells should have been tolled 28 times.
There are three ways that Church bells are rung: normal (peal) ringing, chiming, or tolling. Tolling is a slow, somber way to proclaim to all within earshot that someone died, not just victims.
In his 1624 prose work,Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, the English priest and poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote:
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Twenty-seven people died in Newtown, CT. I think the bells should have been tolled 27 times.
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