The North End neighborhood in Boston has been around since the days of Paul Revere. You can find his house there… and it is also the starting point for his famous midnight ride to Lexington and Concord. The Old North Church where Robert Newman hung two lanterns to signal Paul Revere that the British were coming is in the North End neighborhood, too. The code was simple, “one if by land, two if by sea”… two lanterns sent Paul Revere riding from his home.
Today, North End is Boston’s oldest residential neighborhood. With tight winding streets and an eclectic mixture of Georgian, Victorian, and Federal architecture with the occasional Italian villa sprinkled in just for good measure, the cobblestone streets intermingled with more modern additions are a reminder that by American standards, Boston is old and boasts a long-storied history. The Kennedy family finds its roots there – Rose Kennedy, the matriarch, specifically grew up at 4 Garden Court Street. A sure sign that your neighborhood is old? When there are addresses that are only one digit long.
The North End of Boston also is home to one of the oddest disasters in the history of America… and it all happened on January 15, 1919.
I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way.
Before we return to the narrow streets of the North End of Boston we must take a temporary detour to discuss the uses of sugarcane in the early 1900’s. Sugarcane is a warm climate crop. Grown around the world from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, sugarcane is a stalky fibrous plant that is beloved by every sweet tooth the world over. In the early 1900’s the southern climate of states like Louisiana were ideal for growing sugarcane. The stalks were harvested by machete wielding laborers who then transported the cane to a sugar mill where the sugarcane was crushed to extract the juice. In 1919, the sugar mills were typically mechanized, but it still took a lot of work to load the cane into the crushers. From there, the sugary juice would be clarified to remove impurities and then placed into evaporation kettles where the water would be removed turning the juice into granulated sugar.
And after the sugar was extracted – well folks, the liquid that remains is called molasses. Each evaporation cycle produces different grades of molasses with lower and lower sugar content… and in 1919 what do you do with all that molasses after you’ve extracted all the sugar crystals you can muster? You ship it off to Boston – that’s what you do. Specifically, you ship it to the Purity Distilling Company in North End Boston to extract industrial alcohol from it. Industrial alcohol that would be used in explosives and munitions production because in 1919 – the United States was still replenishing its munitions supplies after winning the Great War just months earlier.
Which means that if you were walking through the tight, windy streets of Boston on January 15, 1919… you were within spitting distance of a distilling company that was actually a munitions factory slowly fermenting molasses for the purposes of extracting industrial grade alcohol, and on January 15 it was a lovely, unseasonably warm day… and the molasses was fermenting a little too quickly. Unbeknownst to the good people of Boston, there Purity Distilling Company had a two million gallon storage tank full of molasses that was building up pressure in the surprisingly balmy January weather… and that pressure it built up until the tank burst with a horrific bang like some Willy Wonka nightmare.
Molasses rushed through the streets at speeds up to 35 miles per hour. The sickeningly sweet wave of molasses was 25 feet high and the noise of it rushing through the cobbled pathways of North End created a deafening roar as it relentlessy drove forward with tsunami swiftness. It was powerful enough to break girders, rip apart buildings and overturn horseless carriages.
To make matters worse, the tank ruptured right around lunchtime when the streets were packed with people. Sadly, twenty one lives were lost in the Great Boston Molasses Flood, and emergency personnel struggled to find and help survivors due to the sticky residue they had to wade through. The tank had been strong enough to hold the molasses under the best of conditions, but nobody factored in less-than-ideal conditions such as a warm snap in the middle of January in the heart of cold weather Boston. Warm weather had led to rapid molasses fermentation, increased pressure inside the tank, and eventually structural failure. The Great Boston Molasses Flood led to a revolution in engineering throughout America – the lesson was learned – you have to prepare for the worst, not just the best.
And that is exactly the lesson I want you to learn about love. Love isn’t just for the good times, it’s for the bad times. Love isn’t for when everything is sweetness and light – love is meant to protect you from the overly fermented molasses flood of life.
Proverbs 17:17 says, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”
The mistake we make with life is a lot like the mistake they made in Boston – we assume when things are good that they will stay good so we don’t invest in preparing for when things will be tough.
As a preacher, I often see people that sit on the fringes of spirituality. They like the church, they like God, but they also don’t get heavily involved. They aren’t deeply invested in the relationships with the people and they aren’t deeply invested in their relationship with God – it isn’t bad, there aren’t any overt problems or bitterness – things are just shallow. They show up on Sunday and then they head out when services are over. As long as things are good, this arrangement works fine, but eventually adversity shows up. A health scare, their children start acting out or struggling, they lose their job, a midlife crisis arrives, or their marriage hits a rough patch – pick your adversity, it really doesn’t matter which one – the point is that the pressure starts building in the tank and they haven’t invested the effort into the relationships and connection… and then the tank gives way. In their mind, the adversity is the problem, but the truth is that they hadn’t prepared for the struggle and without a network of loving people around them the find themselves in a painful, sticky mess.
The church can, and should, try and reach out to these folks during their trials, but oftentimes the church doesn’t even know until it is too late because distance kept the problems secret until the streets were already flooded and the rescue workers couldn’t get there in time. You don’t wait until you have trials to surround yourself with loving friends, brothers, and sisters – you have to do that before the disaster. Lesson #1 from the Great Molasses Flood – learn to build strong bonds before the catastrophe. Intentionally love better when it is good, and you will have love for when it is bad.
The next lesson is similar, but different – the Molasses Flood all happened because of unseasonably warm weather, but it also happened because nobody was owning the safety standards for the molasses tank. It was an accident for sure, a horrific and tragic industrial accident, but it was also preventable – after an extensive and very public trial, the blame was placed upon the United States Industrial Alcohol Company and it’s subsidiary company, Purity Distilling, they were the owners and operators of the molasses tank and it had been poorly constructed. Thin steel, inadequate rivets, lack of proper safety inspections – a lack of standards and a history of neglect led to catastrophic failure.
And that is true in life, too. You must take ownership of your own molasses tank. Far too often we neglect our lives. We don’t construct lives worth living, we neglect our health (both physically and spiritually), we don’t hold ourselves to the same standard of behavior we hold others to, and in short – we don’t love our future enough to take ownership of our present and then we wonder when the rivets rip out and the thin steel buckles.
Peter very pointedly addresses this issue of taking ownership in his first letter. In 1st Peter 3:10-12 he writes, “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."
Did you catch the use of the word ‘love’ in those verses? If we desire to love life, we must make some choices to do good, turn from evil, pursue peace. These are construction and maintenance choices. Jesus puts it this way in Luke 6:47-49:
“Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great."
If you want to love life, then you need a life that is well built. Don’t cut corners on your spirituality. Refuse to be average and lean into the hard work that craftsmanship requires.
Lesson #2 from the Great Molasses Flood – Build well and don’t cut corners. Compromising your character and taking shortcuts doesn’t work. Well-built lives take work, commitment, and a hatred of mediocrity. If it was easy to be a good person, everyone would do it.
Which brings us to the last lesson from the Molasses Flood. Lesson #3 Learn to love safety inspections. Get some outside counsel to make sure your construction is up to code. After all, you already learned lesson #1 Build strong bonds before the disaster – use those strong healthy friendships and relationships to hold yourself accountable. Proverbs 27:6 says that the “wounds of a friend are faithful”… and the verse above it is similar, “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.” If you surround yourself with godly people that you can ask to independently check your progress – they can help you with some safety inspections on your soul. You want people in your life that will tell you that you need to grow up. If you don’t have anyone in your life that will openly rebuke you, then you have a bunch of people who are hiding their love because everyone does stuff worthy of rebuke from time to time.
Everyone needs people who will tell them when they are getting out of balance or are out of alignment with God’s plan. Safety inspections are about finding people who will see the flaws and point them out because they want the same thing you do – they want you to love life and see good days. You don’t want to sin, right? So empower some good people to help you avoid being a fool. Embrace good counsel.
Imagine what kind of a king Saul could have been if he had been willing to accept the advice of good counselors. Saul had a lot of great points, but being blind to his weaknesses was a type of arrogance that ruined him. Inversely, Peter had lots of flaws but he accepted open rebuke and because of that became a truly great man. The best leaders are really good at accepting criticism. They’ve learned to love safety inspections.
Two million gallons of molasses. It would be an absolutely hilarious story if it wasn’t so tragic. Life is meant to be sweet… but only when we build strong lives, invest in good relationships, and are open to the safety inspections that keep the sugar where it is supposed to be. Molasses is only good in small doses.
Learn to love better – learn to love life and see good days.
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And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”
