The Wordy Shipmates (6 page)

The first time I read that I wondered where I had seen it before. Then I realized it was at the end of
The Great Gatsby,
the great novel of ambition. After the striving title character meets his tragic end, his father arrives from Minnesota for the funeral, bringing with him a book in which his son had inscribed a list of his ambitions as a youth. There is a rigid schedule that begins with getting up early, and filling the day with work, exercise, and study. From five until six p.m., he is to “Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.” Then, in a list of “general resolves,” he orders himself to quit smoking and wasting time, “read one improving book or magazine per week,” set money aside, and “be better to parents.” Gatsby’s father tells Gatsby’s friend the list proves that his boy “was bound to get ahead.” Sure, his son had just died in a swimming pool, but at least it was a very fancy pool.

The ambition and toil Calvinism requires will lead the economist Max Weber to coin the term “Protestant work ethic” to describe the Puritans’ legacy of rolled-up sleeves. Tireless labor and ambition in pursuit of salvation, he opined, led to a culture of tireless labor and ambition and a new religion—capitalism. No wonder a German historian dubbed John Calvin “the virtual founder of America.”

It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. “A Model of Christian Charity” is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.

Here, for example, is Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending “enhanced investigation techniques” is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

“Man,” Winthrop reminds his shipmates in “Christian Charity,” is “commanded to love his neighbor as himself.” In the Semon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies . . . do good to them that hate you.” He also cites Romans 12:20: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”

The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn’t burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it’s the mark of a Christlike Christian to know that he’s supposed to.

Winthrop’s future neighbors? Not so much. In fact, one of his ongoing difficulties as governor of the colony is going to be that his charges find him far too lenient. For instance, when one of his fellow Massachusetts Bay magistrates accuses Winthrop of dillydallying on punishment by letting some men who had been banished continue to hang around Boston, Winthrop points out that the men had been banished, not sentenced to be executed. And since they had been banished in the dead of winter, Winthrop let them stay until a thaw so that their eviction from Massachusetts wouldn’t cause them to freeze to death on their way out of town. I can hear the threatening voice-over in his opponent’s attack ad come the next election.
John Winthrop: soft on crime.

This leads us to something undeniably remarkable: “A Model of Christian Charity” was not written by a writer or a minister but rather by a governor. It isn’t just a sermon, it is an act of leadership. And even if no one heard it, or no one was listening, it is, at the very least, a glimpse at what the chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed he and this grumpy few before him were supposed to shoot for come dry land. Two words, he says: “justice and mercy.”

For “a community of perils,” writes Winthrop, “calls for extraordinary liberality.” One cannot help but feel for this man. Here he is, pleading with Puritans to be flexible. In promoting what he calls “enlargement toward others,” Winthrop has clearly thought through the possible pitfalls awaiting them on shore. He is worried about basic survival. He should be. He knows that half the Plymouth colonists perished in the first year. Thus he is reminding them of Christ’s excruciating mandate to share.
If thine enemy hunger, feed him.

Winthrop tells them that even if they have next to nothing, their faith commands them to give away everything. “If your brother be in want and you can help him . . . if you love God, you must help him.”

When John Cotton’s grandson, Cotton Mather, wrote his
Ecclesiastical History of New England
in 1702, he told a story about Winthrop that I would like to believe is true. In the middle of winter, Boston was low on fuel and a man came to the governor complaining that a “needy person” was stealing from his woodpile. Winthrop mustered the appropriate outrage and requested that the thief come see him, presumably for punishment. According to Mather, Winthrop tells the man,

“Friend, it is a severe winter, and I doubt you are but meanly provided for wood; wherefore I would have you supply yourself at my woodpile till this cold season be over.” And [Winthrop] then merrily asked his friends whether he had not effectually cured this man of stealing his wood.

If Mather’s story is to be trusted, perhaps Winthrop was winking at Giles Tilleman. Tilleman is the “Cutler of Brussels” Winthrop mentions in “Christian Charity,” along with other “forefathers in times of persecution” he would have heard of while reading John Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs,
a popular compendium of the lives of Protestants who had been burned to death by Catholics for their beliefs. According to Foxe, when Tilleman saw the large pile of kindling that was to be used to burn him alive, he asked his executioner if most of the wood “might be given to the poor, saying, ‘A small quantity will suffice to consume me.’ ”

In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time also when Christians . . . must give beyond their ability.”

Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles’ times.” (It is so curious that this sermon, in my lifetime, would become so identified with the Communist-hating, Communist-baiting Ronald Reagan, considering Winthrop just proclaimed that a follower of Christ must be willing to renounce property. Utter Commie talk.)

After the Old Testament Israelites, the colonists’ second-favorite biblical role models are the first-century churches founded by Christ’s apostles and the missionary Paul. The small, local nature of churches such as those at Corinth and Ephesus is where the Puritans get their Congregationalist critique of Catholicism and the Church of England’s Catholic power structure, in which local parishes are beholden to the dictates and whims of faraway bishops. In a Congregationalist church, the church members are answerable only to one another.

Winthrop quotes Corinthians. Which is to say, he quotes Paul’s letter to the Corinth church admonishing the congregation to stop its bickering and heed Christ’s words of love. Winthrop surely knows that the men and women before him heading to the boondocks of English territory are at least as capable of squabbling as any congregation in the provinces of Rome.

“Christ and his church make one body,” Winthrop says, paraphrasing Paul (1 Corinthians 12:13-14: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. . . . For the body is not one member, but many”). Furthermore, claims Winthrop, “The ligaments of this body which knit together are love.” Then he quotes Paul’s letter to another church, in Galatia, “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

This body of Christ, connected with the ligaments of love, is not merely pretty poetry or spiritual mumbo jumbo to Winthrop and his people. It is a “bond of marriage between Him and us.” Which is to say it is a contract. Remember, Winthrop was a lawyer. That might be why the final paragraphs of “Christian Charity,” the ones that will be the most quoted later on, are the most profound. Given the task of outlining a binding legal pact between Massachusetts and God, Winthrop comes alive. “We are,” he writes, “entered into covenant with Him for this work.”

There is no concept a lawyer, especially an English one, cherishes more than that of precedent. And to Winthrop and his shipmates, the tradition of a covenant—a handshake deal between man and God in which man promises obedience and God grants salvation in return—extends, writes Perry Miller, “unbroken from Abraham to Boston.”

“And I will make of thee a great nation,” God had promised Abraham. The price of such greatness, as Cotton’s farewell sermon already reminded the colonists, is a great big headache. Their duties, writes Winthrop, are these: “Now the only way to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” (Micah, an Old Testament prophet, said that God’s words “do good to him that walketh uprightly”; as for God’s promise to the sinners, “ The mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before a fire.”) Failures of justice, mercy, and humility, Winthrop warns, will cause God to “surely break out in wrath against us.”

Winthrop uses a word to describe such a calamity that must have been especially terrifying if he was delivering this sermon at sea: shipwreck.

“ The only way to avoid this shipwreck,” he says, is to be “knit together in this work as one man.”

Winthrop then utters one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language:

We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

I am a reasonably happy-go-lucky person with a serviceable sense of humor and a nice-enough apartment in New York, the most exciting city in the world. Once I decided to devote years of my life to deciphering the thoughts and feelings of the dreary religious fanatics who founded New England nearly four hundred years ago, I was often asked at parties by my fellow New Yorkers the obvious question, “What are you working on?” When I would tell them a book about Puritans, they would often take a swig of the beer or bourbon in their hands and reply with either a sarcastic “Fun!” or a disdainful “Why?”

At which point, depending on my mood, I would either mumble something about my fondness for sermons as literature or mention taking my nephew to the
Mayflower
replica waterslide in a hotel pool in Plymouth. I would never answer with the honest truth. Namely, that in the weeks after two planes crashed into two skyscrapers here on the worst day of our lives, I found comfort in the words of Winthrop. When we were mourning together, when we were suffering together, I often thought of what he said and finally understood what he meant.

Perhaps my favorite of the countless times I broke into tears in the days following the attack, I watched citizens happily, patiently standing in a very long line. I marveled, remembering the time years earlier when a former president’s motorcade had blocked Forty-second Street at rush hour and, forced to wait for ten whole minutes to cross to the other side, a businesswoman pointed at her watch and asked me, “Just who does he think he is?” and I answered, “I’m pretty sure he thinks he is the leader of the free world.” But that long line of patient New Yorkers in 2001? They were giving blood.

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular name brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers’ headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.

The fact that Winthrop’s words, so remarkable to me, were so apparently unremarkable to him and his people that his sermon did not bear mentioning, that neither he nor they recorded it in their diaries or letters home, makes me fond of him and them. Despite their unruly theology, their sometimes hair-trigger hate, the fact that the image of being members of the same body was so agreed upon to the point of cliché, makes them worth getting to know.

These English had affection for the Old Saxon word
weal.
It means wealth and riches but it means welfare and well-being, too. In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop tells the colonists they must “partake of each other’s strength and infirmity; joy and sorrow, weal and woe.” Later on, Roger Williams would write, “ There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society.”