The Prayer List at the Back of the Bulletin

On a warm Sunday morning in the last week of June, at a curved oak pew in the third row of Grace Congregational Church on the green in Woodstock, Vermont, a seventy-one-year-old retired reference librarian named Constance Fairchild — Connie to everyone in the parish, and to the two roommates from a corner double in Battell Hall in the fall of 1973 — sits with the church bulletin open on her lap to page six.

Outside, the maples on the green have not yet turned. Inside, the last note of the postlude has just left the pipes of the 1911 Hutchings organ, and the Reverend Sarah Whitman is standing at the back door in her small careful way, shaking the hand of every parishioner she has, in her four years at Grace, learned to greet by first name.

Page six of the bulletin has, at the top, in a serif italic that Marge Halloran the parish secretary has been setting in the same nine-point Century Schoolbook since 1988, the small typewritten column headed In Our Prayers.

Connie reads it every Sunday. She has been reading it, in the same third-row pew, since the first Sunday after Labor Day, 1978.

Under the column, on this Sunday, is the second name from the bottom.

Please continue to hold Elmer Fairchild in prayer, as Elmer begins hospice care at home this week, and Connie in her tender care of him.

She reads it once.

She holds it a beat.

She turns to page seven.

What Marge sets on Wednesday afternoons

The bulletin is printed on Wednesday afternoons in the parish office — a small windowless room off the choir loft with an HP LaserJet 4250 that was donated by the estate of a former organist in 2007 and has not, in the plain steady way of small church printers, been asked to stop.

Marge Halloran, who is sixty-three and has been at Grace since her son Peter was two, sets the prayer list on a Wednesday afternoon between one and two, from a folder in the top drawer of her metal Steelcase desk. The folder is labeled, in her own round hand, Concerns. It contains a small stack of index cards, in the handwriting of the pastoral care committee, in the handwriting of Reverend Whitman, and, once in a while, in the handwriting of a member of the church who has, on a Sunday between services, come into the office and asked Marge, quietly, to add a name.

Marge does not judge the names. She sets them. She sets cancer the same as knee. She sets hospice the same as travel. She sets the Chambers family, in the loss of Frank the same as Julia, as she enters her senior year at Middlebury.

She has been setting the In Our Prayers column, in the same nine-point Century Schoolbook, since the fall of 1988.

She does not send it anywhere. She sets it on top of the credenza in the parlor at eleven fifty-eight on Sunday morning, and the ushers hand a copy to every person who walks through the door.

What the CRM has, on the same Sunday

Somewhere on the third floor of a converted mill on the Otter Creek in Middlebury, on the same Sunday morning at ten fifty-two, the record for Constance Fairchild, class of 1977, reads as follows.

Address: 42 River Street, Woodstock, Vermont. Spouse: Elmer H. Fairchild. Class: 1977. Giving since: 1979. Last gift: December 12, 2025. Interests: Museum, Chapel, Athletics.

There is no field on the record for hospice.

There is no field on the record for the second name from the bottom of page six of the bulletin at Grace Congregational Church on the green in Woodstock, Vermont.

There is no field on the record for Marge Halloran, who has been setting the prayer list, on a Wednesday afternoon at one, in nine-point Century Schoolbook, since 1988.

The record does not know that Elmer — who Connie married the June after graduation in a service Reverend Whitman's predecessor's predecessor performed at this same church — is on hospice care at home this week, on a hospital bed the DAV brought over on Tuesday, in the front room with the window that looks out on the sugar maple Connie and Elmer planted in the fall of 1979.

What Ruthie has been doing

Ruthie Beaumont is the class of 1977's volunteer class agent. She has held the job since 1985. Nobody has ever asked her to stop.

She is seventy-one. She lives in a small yellow farmhouse on a dirt road in Cornwall, Vermont, ten minutes south of the campus. She is a retired middle-school music teacher. She keeps a spiral-bound Franklin Planner in which she has been writing, in a round loopy hand, the names, addresses, birthdays, spouses, and quiet news of the four hundred and thirty-one members of the class of 1977 since a class-agent training in the summer of 1985.

Ruthie subscribes, in the small unfashionable habit of a middle-school music teacher who reads three papers on a Sunday morning, to the paper editions of the Sunday bulletins from four Congregational churches — Grace in Woodstock, First in Manchester, Union in Waitsfield, and Trinity in Middlebury — because most of her classmates, in the plain arithmetic of a small liberal-arts college in a small state, still worship in one of them.

She reads the prayer lists at her kitchen table on Monday mornings, with her cup of Earl Grey, in the way Nan Fogarty used to read the Recorder on the second floor over Federal Street Books in Greenfield.

On the Monday morning after the last Sunday in June, Ruthie reads Elmer Fairchild's name in the second-from-the-bottom line of the In Our Prayers column at Grace Congregational Church in Woodstock. She sets her cup down. She writes, in her small round loopy hand, in the June page of the Franklin Planner, four words:

Connie F. — Elmer — hospice.

Then she pulls a plain cream Crane's card from the shoebox in the pantry — the shoebox she has been keeping since 1985, since the Christmas her mother sent her the first box of Crane's — and writes three sentences to Connie, in blue ink, in her own hand, on the porch, before the mail truck comes at ten twelve.

She has never told the college about the prayer lists.

The college has never asked.

What Nan understood

Nan Fogarty understood two things about the prayer list that the CRM did not.

She understood that the In Our Prayers column at the back of a Sunday bulletin is not a piece of church business. It is, in the plainest sense, an early edition — the first place a change in the giving life of a donor is set in type. It is set on a Wednesday afternoon at one, by a secretary who has known most of the names on it since her son was two, in nine-point Century Schoolbook, in the small careful way of a person who is not going to write to the college about it because it does not occur to her that anyone at the college would want to know.

Nan understood that a donor's giving life does not begin on the day the obituary prints in the Boston Globe. It begins on the Wednesday, eighteen months earlier, when the pastoral care committee slid an index card across Marge's desk, and Marge added Elmer to the folder in the top drawer, and set his name in the second-from-the-bottom line of the column that was going to be handed to every person who walked through the door on Sunday.

Nan understood, finally, that a college whose earliest reliable signal about a fifty-year donor is a paid obituary in the Rutland Herald has, in the plain unhurried reading, missed eighteen months of a woman's tender care of her husband — and eighteen months of the small quiet chances she had, in that time, to send a note that said, in the plainest possible sentence, that she was thinking of them. The prayer list is the first draft of everything the CRM will eventually get around to knowing.

The CRM reads it last.

What Rōmy is doing about it

Rōmy does not sit in the third-row pew at Grace Congregational Church.

It does not stand at the back door with Reverend Whitman, and it is not going to be handed a bulletin at ten fifty-two on a Sunday morning by the eighteen-year-old usher named Caleb whose grandmother is buried in the churchyard behind the parking lot.

What Rōmy does is smaller than that. It is the small quiet thing Ruthie Beaumont has been doing on her porch in Cornwall on Monday mornings since 1985. It is a reading.

Rōmy reads the Sunday bulletins.

All of them. The four Congregational churches in central Vermont. The Episcopal parish in Woodstock. The two Presbyterian churches in Rutland County. The synagogue in Burlington that posts its weekly newsletter as a PDF on the last page of the community section of its website every Friday afternoon. It reads the In Our Prayers columns and the In Memoriam notes and the small typewritten paragraphs at the back that say, in the plain unhurried language of parish life, that a member of the congregation has moved into memory care, or entered hospice, or become, on a Thursday in April, a grandmother.

It reads them on Monday morning, exactly the way Ruthie reads them on her porch with her Earl Grey. It cross-references — quietly, in the corner of the associate director of advancement's screen at eight-forty on a Monday morning — every name against the CRM.

On the Monday morning after Connie's Sunday, Rōmy puts, at the top of the associate director's list, a small quiet note:

Elmer Fairchild, husband of Constance Fairchild (class of 1977, giving since 1979, last gift December 2025), began hospice care at home last week. The parish office at Grace Congregational Church in Woodstock, Vermont — Marge Halloran, since 1988 — set his name in the In Our Prayers column of Sunday's bulletin. Attached: the bulletin (page six), the class-agent's Franklin Planner entry (from Ruthie Beaumont, since 1985), and the sugar maple Elmer and Connie planted in the fall of 1979, which is visible from the hospital bed the DAV brought over on Tuesday. Suggested: one plain cream card, in your own hand, this week, mentioning Elmer by name, and the tree by the front window, and — if it isn't a bother, and only if it isn't — offering to bring, at any time, a jar of the parish's blueberry preserves that Connie has, since Marge's mother started making them in 1974, always been the one to walk down from River Street with on Christmas Eve. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The card goes out on Tuesday.

The bulletin is still on the credenza in the parlor at Grace. The bulletin is still on Ruthie's porch table in Cornwall. The bulletin was never the point.

The reading was the point.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before anything else, do one small unfashionable thing.

Pick, from your top fifty donors, the three who worship — or once worshiped — in a small congregation in a small town. If you cannot remember which three, pick the three whose last gift was made in December, and whose spouse's name was in the salutation of the letter you did not answer.

Go to the website of the church, or the synagogue, or the parish. If it has a bulletin — a PDF, a web page, a mimeographed sheet Marge's cousin's daughter posts on Sunday afternoon — click through to the In Our Prayers column, or the Concerns of the Congregation, or the small paragraph at the back that begins Please continue to hold in prayer.

Read it, slowly, on Monday morning, in the plain unhurried way Ruthie Beaumont reads hers on her porch in Cornwall.

If a name you know appears — a donor, a donor's husband, a donor's mother, a donor's grandson at Middlebury — take a plain cream Crane's card out of the top drawer of your credenza.

Do not put a case for support in it.

Do not put a QR code in it.

Do not sign it with a title.

Write three sentences, in blue ink, in your own hand. Say the person's name once. Say the small specific thing you have — from the prayer list, from the alumni file, from the fifty years of Sunday bulletins in which she has, quietly, been present.

Say, in the plain language of a person who was paying attention, that you are thinking of them.

Walk it, on your lunch break, to the post office on your corner.

The prayer list is set on Wednesdays at one, in nine-point Century Schoolbook, in the parish office at Grace Congregational Church on the green in Woodstock, Vermont.

Marge has been setting it for you since 1988.

Turn to it. ♡