WHS Students Walk Track for One Fund

Saturday night, about 60 people did 12-and-a-half laps around the Westborough High School track.

This support for those affected by the Boston Marathon tragedy was the latest such effort at Westborough High.

The proceeds from Saturday night’s 5K walk/run and candlelight vigil organized by all four classes' officers will benefit The One Fund Boston. There was a $10 cover fee at the door for walk/run participants.

"Living in Westborough, Boston has been and always will be our city,” senior Mark Aronson told the crowd during the candlelight vigil.

“We all know the Marathon bombings struck a deeper chord, because we could all somehow relate to someone who was running in the race, or someone who was there at the finish line."

Junior Addie Egan said that after the tragedy, the class officers and administrators together brainstormed ideas for "a means of supporting our grieving community.”

They started with message boards for students to offer "condolences to the families and friends of those affected, to show our appreciation for the good work done,” Egan said.

Aronson said he has grown up in a world "where we know people use violence as terrorism as a means of making a statement."

But, besides seeing the explosions during the Marathon,"I also saw people and police tearing down barriers to get to people" to help.

"The worst of times can bring out the best in us. And what I saw from Boston two weeks ago was nothing less than its best,” Aronson said.

Aronson said there are "thousands times more people who want to bring about healing.”

"I believe that we are growing up in a world accustomed to violence. But that does not mean that we have to accept it,” he said.

Three Westborough clergy members reflected on the Marathon during the vigil.

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz of Congregation B’nai Shalom said she began Marathon Monday in Hopkinton. Her step-daughter volunteers for Achilles, a charity that "enables people with disabilities to run the Marathon,” she said.

"She was one of a team of four people that was supporting a man with cerebral palsy, who does the whole Marathon backwards in his wheelchair with just use of his feet to push him along,” Gurevitz said.

Gurevitz said that in Hopkinton, she observed "veterans with one or two artificial legs, those without legs who are using hand-cranked bikes, those who were doing the Marathon in wheelchairs.”

"Six hours later, when we got the awful news of the events at the finish line, my first response was one of just sheer anger,” she said.

“When I thought about the time and the dedication and the courage and the hope that I saw in that school at the start line, and how two thoughtless, heartless individuals could seek to rip that apart."

Gurevitz said that it struck her from reading two selections from Leviticus a few days after that "what we are asked to do is to respond in holiness.”

"The kind of holy anger that we might feel is the kind that gets us re-dedicated to caring a little bit more, to building up relationships, to loving our neighbors as ourselves,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Derek Duncan of the Chapel of the Cross said he was a pastor in Oklahoma City in 1995 when a building blew up there, killing 168 people. "I was one of the first responders."

Duncan offered the students advice "to think about as you process what's happened" in Boston.

"A lot of these things can make you very fearful,” he said.

"If you live in fear, it's just a bad life. There's no joy in it. There's no hope in it."

Meanwhile, Msgr. Michael Foley of St. Luke the Evangelist Church said that on Marathon Monday, he "watched the end of the elite runners coming in.”

A Westborough family then called him to its home to be with an elderly man, "and he literally died in my arms."

Foley said he heard about the Marathon tragedy at home.

"If violence is the enemy, we have to deal with it. We have to deal with it in our own lives. We have to live lives that do not solve problems by turning to violence,” Foley said.

Foley offered this prayer during the vigil, asking those gathered "not give in to anger, and not give in to fear, but let the real power of the generous, compassionate, creative spirit rest in all of our hearts."