To the Editor,
Every year on September 1s, my church goes around Jamaica Plain helping people move. We call it “The Big Move.”
Usually we walk. If it’s rainy, like this year, we drive. We prowl around JP looking for parked moving trucks. When we spot one, my pastor hops out and approaches some focused person with a box on their hip and asks if they’d like help moving, for free, no strings attached. People don’t all say yes immediately. But people say yes. We get the yes signal and pile out of the van like some odd Christian trojan horse. Our method’s down pat: We form a human assembly line and start passing bureau drawers and couch cushions and flatscreen TVs hand-to-hand all the way from truck to top floor. (It’s a yearly joke that no one in Boston moves into ground floor apartments, because no one vacates them.)
Here’s 9 reasons* why this particular volunteer activity is uniquely edifying:
1. It’s plain-old, flat-out, cut-and-dry helpful. Moving requires physical labor. You provide physical labor. You help.
2. It allows you to meet new people, who happen to live near you.
3. It makes you freshly grateful for your home, if you don’t want or have to move anytime soon. Also freshly dubious of your spiral staircase.
4. It gives you a chance to look at people’s belongings.
5. It gives you a chance to look at Jamaica Plain real estate (i.e. scope out future living spaces).
6. It’s good exercise.
7. It reminds you—I mean it really drills down—that it’s best not to own too much stuff.
8. It rewards people for their good intentions, while freeing them of their obligations. The boyfriends whose girlfriends have a lot of books, the elderly parents of postgrads, the friends who say they’ll show up and do—they’re off the hook. But they still get credit for being willing. Now everybody’s mildly euphoric. Now everybody can get pizza earlier.
9. It spritzes a little grace into the world. It’s a distinct kind of relief when you were prepared for hardship and are unburdened of it without asking. I’m not gonna get too deep in The Gazette, but that’s on the road to what I like about church writ large.
Boston’s unofficial holiday “moving day” is reputationally dreadful, but there’s a hack to make it fun, unusual, and expansive. Next year if you’d like and can, come help strangers move with Arborway Community Church (up on the hill across the street from 7-Eleven).
*9 reasons because we moved eight houses this year
Emily Huizenga