The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Author:Sarah Vowell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Colonial Period (1600-1775), 17th century, Puritans - New England - History - 17th century, Christianity, Religion, Political Science, NH, Government, VT), New England, New England (CT, RI, State & Local, United States, Biography & Autobiography, State & Provincial, Historical, History, ME, MA, General, Religion and politics - New England - History - 17th century, Religion and politics, New England - Politics and government - To 1775, Puritans, Politics & State
ISBN: 9781594484001
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-10-06T06:22:12.614853+00:00

In 1635, Williams’s surging obsession with his wall of separation between church and state turns him into a bricklayer straight out of Poe—barricading himself into his lonely little garden until no other person gets in, not even his wife. Winthrop’s journal notes that one of Williams’s half-baked notions du jour is that visible saints should only pray with other confirmed visible saints to the exclusion of all others, even if said others include his wife and child. How did that go over chez Williams? Sorry, honey, you know I love you guys, but if you want me to say grace over this bowl of mushy corn, you and the kids are going to have to leave the room. John Cotton later reveals his compassion for poor Mrs. Williams, a woman “of meek and modest spirit” who suffered Williams’s “offensive course which occasioned him for a season to withdraw communion in spiritual duties, even from her also.”

Once, Roger Williams was away from home and got word his wife was seriously ill. He wrote her a letter, later published as the pamphlet Experiments in Spiritual Life and Health, that gives a reader an inkling of what it must have been like to be married to him.

He addresses Mrs. Williams as “My Dearest Love and Companion in This Vale of Tears,” a pleasant enough start. “I now send thee that which I know will be sweeter to thee than honey,” he writes, “and of more value than if every line and letter were . . . gold and silver.” And what is this gift a girl wants more than jewelry? A sermon on proper Christian behavior, of course.

“For as the Lord loveth a cheerful giver,” he points out, “so he also [loves] a cheerful preacher.”

Flowers would have been nice. Can’t go wrong with flowers. Oh, but that’s exactly how Williams sees this how-to manual—as a bouquet. “I send thee (though in winter) a handful of flowers made up in a little posy for thy dear self, and our dear children, to look and smell on, when I as the grass of the field shall be gone, and withered,” he writes. See? This is better than regular flowers. Regular flowers can’t boss her around from the grave. “All my flowers shall be some choice example, or speech of some son or daughter of God, picked out from the garden of the holy Scriptures.”

This charming, romantic get-well card includes this recurring image of a repeat sinner: a dog vomiting, then lapping up its own vomit. There is the comforting reminder that Mrs. Williams should regard her bout of the sniffles as a “warning from heaven to make ready for a sudden call to be gone from hence,” i.e., as good practice for death. There is the section in which the women sleeping with biblical men try (and fail) to distract their men from devotion to their Creator: “Hence Job in his great passions and cursings could not be brought (no not by his wife) to speak ill of God.

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