Watermelon Festival!!
Picture a townhouse-style Reading Room tucked between two buildings that carry facades to the sidewalk. Painted a lively yellow with a bright blue awning, adorned with a perky flower bed awash with color, the Reading Room has perched in its niche on Cary Street for years. Doing okay. Hanging in there.
Now imagine a street festival that attracts approximately a 140-150,000 people meandering the closed streets on a hot August day, right in front of the Reading Room. For one Sunday a year, the Carytown Watermelon Festival converts Cary Street in Richmond,Virginia, into a big party. A street party. Music, food vendors, families with strollers and dogs on leashes. What does the Reading Room do?
First, we open our doors for a few hours on that Sunday afternoon. Nothing happens. Our light is definitely not shining. The Reading Room tries a few years of putting out a table with Reading Room stock in front, manned by a couple of volunteers. No one is too excited about the effort. They offer free cups of water to the hot and thirsty. Almost no one stops by to chat or survey the Reading Room wares. Just too hard a job, some felt. Too difficult to share Christian Science is such a hurly-burly atmosphere.
Does the church give up and go back to closing up for the festival?
No way. The church has learned its lesson. Hiding a light under a bushel is a bummer. The next year, a generous budget is set. The church rents two spaces in the middle of the street, sets up tents and chairs, sponsors a Christian Science lecture for the middle of the festival day, and orders extras of everything. A couple hundred copies of Science and Health in bright blue paperback. A couple hundred blue Bibles. People who never heard of Christian Science sit in the lawn chairs under the tent and hear a great lecture. Several stay and ask questions of the speaker, Sarah Hyatt. Passers-by hear a phrase, stop dead in their tracks and listen from the street. The Reading Room is involved and part of the festival.
Yet somehow that pesky bushel gets popped over the Reading Room’s candle once more. Several lean years follow, but the church is praying its way to the street once more.
Another group gathers to try a tent in the street. This time, many candles will be lit. Pretty green T-shirts with “God Heals, ask me how” printed on the back, and the Cross and Crown symbol on the front shoulder in vivid pink are worn by church members. Monitors are rolled and tied with pink and green ribbons attached to equally festive helium balloons emblazoned with “Christian Science Reading Room, 3431 West Cary Street,” and handed out to passers-by. Hundreds of free Sentinels are accepted by the curious. Festival-goers stop in the tent and chat, maybe to escape the August heat, but also out of curiosity. They ask if the tent belongs to Scientology (which has a new building a block down the street). What fun to explain we’re not. Tent workers get tons of chances to talk about Christian Science and share healings they’ve experienced in their own lives.
The next year, the church orders even more Monitors, more Sentinels for giveaways. And they’re accepted by the passers-by. With each year, and increased orders for periodicals, the volunteers find they’re able to hand out all of them. Each gift to a festival-goer opens a door to a conversation, a chance to talk about God and Christian Science, and spiritual healing.
People head inside to the Reading Room proper, where volunteers answer more questions. The Reading Room stock inside grows depleted. The day is alight with candles without bushels.
More visitors, simple seekers of Truth, visit after the Festival than ever before. The Reading Room has taken it to the streets, and the streets have found the Reading Room. How very grateful the church is for this tangible evidence of the efficacy of prayer.
