The day was cold, but the sky was clear blue. So, it was one of those winter interludes when we are starkly aware of the bright, unusually blue, sky, the grey interceding trees, and the white snow-covered ground. Picture perfect in a countryside way.

The grey gravestones mirrored the trees scattered here and there as sentinels of the dead. Numerous large green spruce claimed a natural ever-green, pasted with forethought to project the supernatural with the year-round green of their nature, to proclaim an afterlife for those skeletons ground-bound below their sweeping boughs.

It’s all so rural, from so long ago when the road was dirt and the journey to God took all day.

The church stands in the middle of fields. If you look across the road you see the parsonage built in 1751 of stones from those fields. To the east you see the cemetery with its black wrought-iron fence and the listing headstones. South, you have fields and headstones and open sky with a treelined horizon. But if you look west from the parking lot in front of the church, if you stretch your gaze past the brown shingled outbuilding, the gentle decline takes you to the Shawangunk Kill, and then back up to the rust-purple mountain with the rose-colored cliffs. The view can be imagined as it was 270 years ago when this congregation -- or their slaves -- chipped the first fieldstones for construction.

I was called in as a consultant. The church, like the parsonage, is a simple stone building, rectangular in shape and as plain in design as some beliefs require in the face of their all-powerful. I have had a fortunate life. I have sat alone in the pews of the world’s greatest cathedrals and listened to the organ playing of masters. But when I entered this simple, unadorned church with the sunlight refracted from the stained-glass windows, east, behind the altar, and observed the arching domed wooden ceiling, and stood in the blue-grey painted balcony, it was as spiritual and captivating as any religious site on earth. And I am not religious. There is just something about it. Let’s put aside all the teachings and doctrines and what constitutes a church and focus on the building. Like so many of our nation’s churches, they’re in trouble, they’re falling down. As the size of congregations dwindle through attrition by death, or through loss to other houses of worship with more dynamic ministers, whatever the cause, these small churches, in this day, almost never have the resources to keep up their physical structures.

The Shawangunk Church was constructed in 1755. It was altered and the roof raised enough to build the balcony in the 1770’s. Not much has changed since then except the slaves were freed by July 4th, 1827. I sat down on the balcony benches where the slaves are rumored to have been allowed to worship and I looked down on the pews and alter below and the large windows and I could almost see the bonnets and braided hair and the heavy wool pea coats of winter. I talked with Dwight Williams, who is spearheading the process of restoration for the church, and with Bruce Terwilliger, interested party and knowledgeable builder and whose ancestors are right outside under the spruce. I won’t bore you with construction details, but I pointed out one glaring problem needing immediate attention. The roof is made of tin shingles, painted copper green. Some think the roof is copper, but it is not. The shingles on the south side of the church do not quite reach far enough over the soffit boards to prevent water from sucking in under the tin, into the soffit, and then down into the stone wall leaving evidence of moisture damage inside and out. That’s just one small thing. The stone wall at this point is bulging out. Too much to go into here.

I promised Dwight to hook him up with our local grant writer, Kerron Barnes. I called Kerron. Luckily he recently finished a grant for the Bloomingburg Reformed Church. Kerron has the knowhow to get the ball rolling on finding outside money to save treasures like this, and if I am trying to say anything with this column it is simply: much of our history is tied up in religion. We do not have to be religious to admire and take inspiration from religious works -- buildings or otherwise. The Shawangunk Church has a leg up because it is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Other churches and cemeteries are not so fortunate. While I believe in a firm separation of church and state, the blood in my historical veins says there should be federal and state funding available to help save these endangered national treasures.

Take a ride out Hoagerburgh Road someday and see for yourself.