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Feast of the Ascension barbecue in Lowell
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Mary Tusuubira with parishioner from St. Anne's Church
In the 1830s, young farm women from all over New England were recruited to work in Lowell as mill girls with a starting salary $1.00 per week. That was big money for working women in those days, so many took up the offer even though the work was grueling and often dangerous. Of course comfort and independence didn’t come free. Room and board had to be deducted from their $1.00 paychecks, as did pew rent because Sunday church participation was mandatory. On the other hand, these women were still able to save a little for inexpensive amenities, entertainment, and also for their families back home.
Pew rent was collected for the upkeep of the church the mill owners built, St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Lowell. The worker might not belong to the denomination, but attendance at St. Anne’s was still mandatory.
Nearly 180 years later, St. Anne’s is still thriving without the pew rent. On Thursday, May 21st, Episcopal Churches in Merrimack Valley gathered for the Feast of the Ascension—the ascension of Jesus’ body into heaven 40 days after Easter.
But there is a marked difference at St. Anne’s from the 1830s. Today’s celebrants are not ladies from the farms of New England. On Thursday, Eucharist was celebrated by a Cuban, a Sri Lankan, and a Ugandan priest. The Current Rector of St. Anne’s and St. John’s churches in Lowell is the Rev. Ramon Aymerich. He was born in Cuba and arrived in the United States when Castro came to power. The Rev. Chitral DeMel, the Urban Missioner at the two churches is from Sri Lanka. The Rev. Mary Tusuubira, the first woman ordained by the Anglican Church of Uganda and co-pastor of a Ugandan congregation in Waltham, will begin a Ugandan Anglican Service at St. John’s Church on May 31st.
The Rev. Tom Barrington, Dean of the Merrimack Valley Deanery and rector of All Saints' Episcopal Church in Chelmsford, said it this way, “It is hard to know if those titans of industry who built Lowell could conceive of the diversity of cultures and peoples that would settle here. As the congregation gathered last Thursday to worship in English, Spanish, Sinhalese, and Lugandan, they knew a piece of Jesus commandment to spread God’s word to all nations is being lived out in their presence.”
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