Open since 1789, The Madison Church remains the focal point of this small mountain community. (Photo courtesy of The Madison Church)

The poet E.E. Cummings and his wife Marion had finished supper at the Conway Café and were driving back to their Silver Lake summer farm when something stopped them in their tracks.

On the side of Rural Route 113 in Madison, a crowd swelled outside a small, non-descript white church – an old, green-shuttered, clapboard structure no different from any other house of worship in the region. On this evening, however, the tiny church was lit up like Christmas, its tiny bell echoing in the outsize shadow of Mt. Chocorua.

It was VE Day, May 1945, and word was out that World War II had come to an end. A pastor led an ongoing convocation, as residents from Madison and surrounding communities milled in and out to pray and offer thanks.

The image so struck Cummings that he stopped his car and got out. Friends say Cummings had never been the churchgoing type – or much of a fan of organized religion. His writing, however, often showed a reverence for spirituality. Cummings famously discarded capital letters from his poetry, some say out of humility. A rare exception was in reference to God.

Amid the hum of crickets and the idling engine, Cummings stood in the shade of the tree-lined road that evening and observed. In The Madison Church, he’d seen something special – something that couldn’t be seen by just driving past; something that transcended wood and paint and glass. He returned with Marion to Joy Farm. There, in the artist’s loft his father had long ago built for him, Cummings wrote one of his favorite, and perhaps least known poems: i am a little church (no great cathedral).

i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection;
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever;
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

For Cummings, or ‘Estlin’ as locals called him (for Edward Estlin), “i am a little church” symbolized how something so outwardly ordinary could hold such importance for a community.

Cummings waited until 1958 to publish “i am a little church.” It would not earn him the renown or schoolbook celebrity that other iconic works like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” or “i thank you God for this most amazing” would. But when Cummings appeared before more than 10,000 at the Boston Arts Festival in 1957 – the largest public reading of his career – it was his snapshot of life in Madison he chose to recite.

“He really does capture the finite and the infinite with this poem… how a church can be the central part of this kind of rural rhythm of life,” says The Madison Church’s pastor, Sean Dunker-Bendigo.

Five decades after Cummings published his poem, The Madison Church stands just as it did – unadorned, but undoubtedly the heart of this tiny mountain community of less than 2,000 people; its only house of worship, open since 1789.

Despite its Baptist beginnings, it is the place where neighbors of all faiths and political stripes gather to contemplate and offer thanks, to celebrate beginnings and mourn endings.

Each Sunday, 70 or so residents young and old, many of them farmers, pack The Madison Church’s cozy pews; folks like Donna Nichols, the church’s treasurer and a deacon, who’s been on church missions to Haiti and Mississippi and greets parishioners with a big, enveloping hug; folks like 80-year-old Ruth Shackford, a former caretaker for Cummings’ farm, who’s been going since she was a little girl, and each year whips up crowd-pleasing cakes for the church’s annual Oyster Stew, Corn Chowder and Fancy Cake auction for charity. (This year’s is set for Nov. 1.)

“It’s truly a special place,” says Shackford. “It’s not something you’d necessarily see just by driving past, but it really is the focal point of the town.”

At its heart, parishioners say, is a faith that extends beyond psalms and sermons – a coming together of ordinary people to help their neighbors. The Madison Church houses the town’s only independent, non-religious pre-school. It’s where Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are held on Friday nights. An average day for Dunker-Bendigo may be split between chopping wood for parishioners in the morning, helping to run the church’s call-in and shuttle services for seniors, and responding to a five-alarm blaze as a volunteer firefighter.

As for Nichols, the deacon, it is a place that summons emotion each time she thinks about it.

Nichols had just moved to Madison with her daughter and boyfriend, when the home they built burned to the ground one awful night three decades ago. Left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, she would awaken the following morning to find an Angel of Mercy from The Madison Church bearing pots and pans, clothing, and gift certificates to grocery and department stores.

“I was not a churchgoer; I wasn’t even a member,” Nichols says, her voice breaking. “They didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. They just knew I needed help.”

The deliveries continued every day for another three or four weeks – food, furniture, breadboards, things Nichols says even she wouldn’t have thought of. She eventually rebuilt her family’s house in Madison, and began attending the church off and on. Today, Nichols is among The Madison Church’s most active members, leading efforts to help others in times of need.

“It’s a community church, plain and simple,” Nichols says. “It is for the community. That’s who it serves, and that is why it’s endured for more than 200 years.”

And that, no doubt, is the snapshot Cummings took with him as he closed the door of his car and drove away from the little white building on Rural Route 113. It is a snapshot that hasn’t faded in the years since and likely won’t for decades to come.

Special thanks to Ruth Shackford and Carol Batchelder of Silver Lake for their help with this story.