How to Dress Up a Puritan

A Reflection on a Teenage Prank, 30 Years in the Making

Around this time of year—early spring if you're reading this at some other time or part of the world—the high school seniors in my hometown of Enfield, CT, are given the great honor of violating one of the town's most auspicious monuments to its Puritan roots.

If they still do it (it's been a few decades since I lived there, after all), you might at this moment be driving through the center of the old part of town and see a statue of a slender man, finger pointed in certain punctuation of the point he is making. It's the statue of Puritan pastor Jonathan Edwards, whose hard eyes has judged the town for generations. If the town's high school seniors have done their job well, the light grey stone of his smooth frame will be brightened up with the hot pink or lewd yellow of the laciest, tawdriest women's lingerie a 17-year-old's money can buy. In my generation, this would have been purchased at the JC Penney's at the Enfield Mall, but probably now on Amazon.

The reason why this is so delightful is that Jonathan Edwards wasn't just any Puritan. He was a Puritan made famous by the speech he gave at that spot in town titled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which was delivered (as noted in the subtitle) "At a Time of Great Awakenings, and Attended with Remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers."

Cat Watching a Spider. Oide Tōkō. ca. 1888-92

Growing up under Ol' JE's stony gaze, we, too, were "many of the hearers," as we had to read and analyze that speech in every English class from middle school until senior year. So it feels like a rightful last word for the students of Enfield to tell Jonathan Edwards to lighten up a little before they run out of town to chase their own dreams.

Spiders Dangling Over Fire

It's a heavy speech, and the theme is pretty much as the title suggests. But it's the imagery and description that I think makes it special. Here's a taste:

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours."

God dangles us, sinners, like spiders held by these fragile threads that connect us to his merciless hands, so disgusting he can barely look at us. The only hope for control over God's random power to cut that delicate thread at any moment is by following his church's fervent rules for purity.

I want to interject here that at the time of being introduced to this speech, I also begged my mom to take me to the REO Speedwagon concert where Cheap Trick was opening at the Hartford Civic Center, so JE didn't really capture my heart and mind as intended.

Almost Working

What did capture my heart and mind–and still does, but is dangling by a thinning thread, thanks be to God and middle age—is the belief that there is a place that I can reach that is above the trouble of life. A place I am just one more book, program, diet, achievement, or income level away from finding out. And once I find it, as long as I adhere to the program with consistent and total purity of heart, I can be free of this annoying tendency to feel so dang precarious and uncertain all the time.

I think—maybe—this belief comes from those Puritans and has just evolved to meet our post-religious times in the politics and products that do their best to arrest our attention.

Except that it doesn't quite work. Almost. But not quite.

Loss comes for us in one way or another, heaps of trouble we didn't expect no matter how hard we tried. Our own soft and insistent animal selves come out no matter how hard we try to pretend they don't exist, and oops, we've "sinned" again.

I heard some addiction expert say this once: anything that almost works is what people will want more of. And that tracks in this case. In fact, ol' JE himself went on to apologize for the fury of the Great Awakening that he fueled—the movement that went off the rails and didn't lead to the peace and loving community of innocent pure hearts he thought he was creating.

Wake Up, But Not Like That

What JE was trying to do was get our attention. And he succeeded.

He was saying, Wait! Pay attention! All these routines and rituals you participate in day in and day out have a tendency to lull you to sleep, but wake up! Nothing is certain, definitely not your everlasting peace. You have to commit all the time, to remember in every moment to enter the next with as pure of a heart as you can manage.

He got people to pay attention, for sure. But sadly that attention became rooted to the judgment, fear, and fury he used to get it. And once those seeds were planted, they sprouted in all manner of violence and cruelty against each other and against their own selves. Oops!

The Tender Alternative

But you know what else gets my attention? Tenderness.

When in cold, sterile hospital rooms enduring uncomfortable procedures, it's the nurse's gentle touch on my arm that gets my attention. When sitting in the tiny pre-op cubicle while the technician pokes around for a vein for the IV and says to the nurse, "Hey, she's funny," at some stupid joke I told to regulate my own nerves—the tenderness of him seeing me as the lighthearted spirit knitted together by all those veins he can’t find gave our mutual attention a course correction towards patience, kindness, and joy.

Ol' JE talks a lot about mercy in his speech. At the end, he talks about mercy as a door that Christ has thrown open—but not in a tender way, more like a "Quick! Get in, losers. You're missing your chance!" That's where I think JE missed his own chance for tenderness. Rather than tending to his flock to save them, he aimed to fix their wandering attention on fear and judgment in order to control where their wild natures might take them.

A City of the Dead, Full of Life

My own wild nature led me for a morning walk through Oakland Cemetery last Friday. Oakland Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in the city, and similar to JE, full of contrasts and nuances in its history.

I am using a lot of restraint right now not to do a deep dive on Oakland cemetery here, but I'll just say this much: even before the Civil War, it was in rough shape, vandalized and falling apart. It got a chance at renewal from the Hebrew Benevolent Society who was in need of a place for Jewish burials. The new design eventually took a page from other Victorian-era garden-cemeteries like the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA, which I also used to live close to.

It's full of meandering, curving paths and botanical garden-worthy flowers that change with the seasons. The weaving pathways intersect often so that I never experience the same walk inside of it twice. That, added to quirky century-old names—Forest Greene!—seasonal plantings, and inspired funerary art, mean that you are sure to experience some delicious surprise of beauty or nature or quirk, and often all three.

After one of the many design improvements in the late 1800’s, the Atlanta Constitution paper said, "We think our citizens may well feel a... gratification in view of the manner in which they have cared for their 'city of the dead.'"

The Courage to Tend

Two centuries later, this citizen of Atlanta did feel gratified by that care. The delight I took on this walk was best described as pure. It was like I was finally in that rare space of doing the right thing with my time in the right place. It felt like "clean" enjoyment, inspiring, uplifting. I think it's the kind of rightfulness JE was going for and maybe a few of those other Puritans, too.

When I thought about what resonated with that pure heart in me about the cemetery, the word that came to mind is one I've already used often here: tended. This was a place that has been lovingly tended. No one rips out a weed here—not without first considering what else might be lost. I imagine each creeping weed that threatens infestation is carefully examined and gently coaxed out so the ground remains intact. Many areas therefore get overgrown, so there's still some wildness here too. You have to risk some wildness when you want to truly see what beauty exists to cultivate. To do it well, tending takes the slow care of attention.

Oakland Cemetery gives me the sense that much attention is paid to beauty and nature, and the careful gentleness of that tending is infectious, much like the tender touch of a nurse or the respite of shared laughter. And not like the infectious speech of a judgemental Puritan, raging with urgency to save us.

Tending also takes courage. It doesn't offer a rescue for problems or the powerful arm of control. When you're being gentle like that, you often use a light touch or an open hand. Some offenses to your hopes for a pure and rightful life without trouble will slip through.

The Tender Thread

Look closely at the word "attention" and you will find "tending" right there in the middle where it loves to be. The root of attention is tendere, which means "to stretch" in Latin. They adopted it from the old French meaning of "tender," which meant the act of offering. The small boat assisting a large ship is called a tender. We tend to our children, to our homes, to the sick, to our gardens, and, if we want to have some joy and peace while we're here, to our own soft hearts.

If we go even deeper into the history of the word tender, it’s also connected to the word tendril which originally described the cartilage of plants. Like cartilage, our attention, depending on where we put it, can act as the soft connective tissue that strengthens bone and makes the movement between points of friction easier.

Those fragile tendrils of the spider's web that connects us to JE's God are also connecting us to each other. Maybe we’re meant to bear witness to the cruelty below, if we’re still privileged to be dangling above it, albeit precariously, but not to make that the focus point of our attention. Maybe if we pay attention to what these tendrils of our web are attaching us to, if we look up and around, we see a God that isn’t full of dispassionate rage, but one of beauty, compassion, and tenderness. That might give us the courage to proceed with careful compassion, connection, and creativity rather than the satisfying appeal of judgment and swift retribution.

Maybe the way forward isn't about denying the precariousness of our situation or pretending we can control the outcome with our attachments to more information and the just-right plan out of this mess. Perhaps it's about acknowledging how tenuous our connections can be while still choosing to strengthen them through acts of gentle tending.

So instead of dressing up the dangers in trashy lingerie to mock them before escaping for better stomping grounds (I have grown a little in maturity since 17, afterall), maybe we can be clear-eyed witnesses and keep our attention trained on the soft tendrils that strengthen our ability to stay connected to love.

With love,

Tricia

PS: My friend and very un-puritanical pastor Jenelle Holmes got my wheels turning about many of the themes here (mercy, attention, purity) while discussing the beatitudes last Sunday. She’s great and a coach! You can learn more about her and her work here: https://bringlightcoaching.com/

PPS: As much I would love, for the sake of poetic justice, for Jonathan Edwards to neatly fit into the stereotype of the repressed, fire and brimstone Puritan as this one famous speech suggests, he does not. A fact I got a lot more interested in after reading about him in Garrard Conley’s notes on his own obsession with JE that he included at the end of his beautiful novel All the World Beside. The novel is inspired by JE, but not based on him for the record. This post took so long to write because I too fell into the rabbit hole of learning more about JE's life and times.