The days following the bombing at the Boston Marathon have been filled with images. Many have been grisly and terrifying: maimed bodies, blood streaked on the sidewalk, smoke filling the air. Some, of people rushing to care for strangers, have shown resiliency and projected feelings of hope. Others capture both despair and hope, such as the now famous photograph of a young man who’d lost both his legs being rushed from the scene by a man in a cowboy hat. (The story behind it, from the Times, is heartbreaking—as so many stories about the bombing have been.)

And then there are the videos of the explosions and their aftermath, playing on a loop. Repeated close study of all these images is useful for investigators but has diminishing positive returns for the rest of us. They are harrowing and provoke deep emotion, but they can be numbing and isolating.

The interfaith vigil held on Tuesday night at the Arlington Street Church, which is just a few blocks down Boylston Street from the finish of the race, produced new images: parishioners lined the rows beneath the church’s big, vaulted, white ceiling, which is simple and beautiful and has just enough peeling paint to insist, as a friend noted last night, that the place is real and old. The building was completed in 1861. It was host to the first legal same-sex marriage in the country, in 2004. It played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on its bells earlier this month for the Red Sox home opener—and last night the bells rang again, a more sombre song at a slower, sadder pace, calling people inside.

There were runners there, a few wearing their medals or the orange or blue windbreakers that are common every marathon season, but this year have gained new meaning. Reverend Kim Crawford Harvie, senior minister at the church, which since the sixties has hosted a Unitarian Universalist congregation, opened the evening by asking runners to stand, along with any volunteers who had worked at the marathon or had come to the aid of someone on Monday afternoon. They lingered standing, amidst applause. Later, everyone lit a candle and sang.

Yet, for these poignant visual moments, the service’s great power came through words, sung and spoken. “Imagine” and “Amazing Grace,” with its soaring final section, which sends many of our eyes down to the hymnal from its unfamiliarity: “When we’ve been here ten thousand years / bright shining as the sun. / We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise / then when we’ve first begun.”

There were benedictions from local leaders of various faiths: We will remember the dead, in all seasons. We feel compassion for the injured—and for the perpetrators of the crime, from the place of ignorance or hate or despair from which it came. A call and response, from the Unitarian Universalist hymnal:

We need one another in the hour of success, when we look for someone to share our triumphs.

We need one another in the hour of defeat, when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.

A reading of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things”—with its celebration of creatures “who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief”—was a call to a kind of courage, which, though Berry celebrates a wild place away from the human world, includes the courage to assemble. The poem ends:

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And Isaiah 40:31, a passage about speed and fatigue and moving forward:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

More candles were lit. Then the crowd filed outside, moving toward the Public Garden for a final gathering of small sparks in the darkness. An April breeze turned stiff, and soon the flames were blowing out. The crowd lingered for a few moments in the park; and for some of us, thoughts were already turning to other things, to speculation about the unsolved case, and even to more mundane worries about daily life—there was a sink full of dishes waiting at home. It is hard to keep feelings of hope and peace and forgiveness going in times of doubt and anger and noise. The candles kept blowing out, and then people kept lighting them again.

Read more of our coverage of the Boston Marathon explosions.

Mourners leave the Arlington Street Unitarian Universalist Church on their way to the Boston Public Garden during a candlelight vigil, on April 16, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph by Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty.