Notes from a Puritan

It was a little hard to wrap my head around it, but in the end, I had to admit it: Heather Cox Richardson is right. I am a Puritan.

 

A very bad Puritan—so very bad that any serious Puritan (if there are any serious Puritans today….) would scoff at the idea. Actually, I hope he (or she) would scoff: rage, nausea, revulsion are all more likely reactions.

 

I’m an old, homosexual drunk. 

 

That might not have surprised the Puritans, who seem to have had a surprising grip in reality. True—I know nothing about the Puritans except from what Richardson has told me. In fact, I grew up thinking that the Puritans were joyless, mean-spirited people. Haunted, as Mencken said, by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 

This was the prevailing view of the Puritans in the 1960’s in the United States, which is when and where I first perked my head up and looked about me. They were as grim as their clothes, and anything good about them was accidental. 

 

An odd point of view, since I love New England, and everything about the place screams Puritanism, at least to me. The long, tall, white churches, unadorned except for a window admitting the grey light of winter. The sense of order, the calm.

 

I was last in the United States over a year ago, and went with my brother and sister-in-law to New Hampshire and Vermont. The area is over-grown, now, and we saw the rocks that previous generations of farmers had taken from their ground and piled to make a fence around their fields. The people are gone, their children and great-grandchildren have forgotten them and their fields and their stones. 

 

The Puritans, for me, were only a couple of generations (and unimportant ones, at that) away from the earnest and deadly people that ran the 1950’s. The Puritans had invented Hell, and delighted in sending me to it. They were repressed and hypocritical.

 

That’s what I thought, and what I believed everybody thought. But it turns out that while I was away being adolescent, more serious scholars were looking at the Puritans more charitably. The Puritans were serious people, after all, and what they achieved was in some cases spectacular.

 

I assume that my grandmother got it right, and that I am a descendant of Henry Herrick, of Salem. Who was he, and what did he think?

 

He could not have been a simple man—not the way we have become simple. He believed utterly in a God, but a God who knew the future (since God knows everything, right?). He knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell, and He wasn’t saying. But nothing you did, and nothing you thought, made the slightest difference. I am an old, homosexual drunk, but I may still have my ticket onto the cloud with the angel strumming away at her harp.

 

Blameless YOU, on the other hand….

 

This is a view of God, and the spiritual life, which is completely foreign to us in 21^st century America, where God has become a Hallmark greeting card, a joke, a weapon, but never any serious figure. I think about God all the time, as I think my ancestor did. But I have no belief that he (if it is a he and not “them”) loves me, and I certainly don’t trust people who tell me he does.

 

So I go to heaven and you do not—or maybe it’s the other way around. Who—besides God—knows? The Puritans did not react as I would react; they didn’t say, ‘well, we’re fucked,’ and go off and get drunk.

 

Instead, they spent their entire adult lives seeking to become better and better people (in their eyes) and dreading the day of judgment. They had, if I read Wikipedia right, a weird sort of relationship with God. They believed in predestination, but also that you had to live an exemplary life to get it. For Puritans, the Bible study, the endless church services, the hours spent in prayer—all of that was preparation for a conversion experience, in which you became (and tried to convince everybody else that you had become) one of the “elect.”

 

The elect ran things, and decided who was a witch and which family truly owned the back forty acres down by the creek.

 

At the back of their minds must have been terror, and a drunk knows that pretty well. I am terrified too—mostly of ending up a drunk lying on a cardboard refrigerator box outside of Walgreens. Terror got me up and to a meeting of AA this morning; terror might have gotten Henry Herrick up and off to church, and then off to be a magistrate.

 

Neither of us believes that we have any friend up there in the sky. And neither of us believes, I suspect, that what other people think about us makes any difference. But it must have been inevitable for Herrick not to look sideways at the people and wonder: are they favored by God? Are they one of the “elect?”

 

Am I?

 

This view of God was completely uncomfortable, unless you happened to live in the society that was spawned from it. Education was huge—you had to read that Bible to get saved, or not—so you have great schools, universities, and libraries. Work was essential, to the point that Richardson confessed that she had always taken her knitting to any meeting / class / activity when she was a young woman. Idle hands may be the devil’s playground, but the Puritans were anything but idle. They were out making fortunes, and the United States was almost unimaginably fertile and fecund.

 

Money was a snare, of course, and so had to be hidden away in banks and trust funds and other unassailable vessels of probity and virtue. You could be spectacularly rich, but never could you show it. It was like being one of the “elect,” people knew about it and respected it—but you could never be sure of it yourself.

 

If a guy named Winthrop gave a speech and said that we were “a city on a hill,” it wasn’t that we were great and everybody loved us. It was that we had made a spectacular claim for ourselves—we were creating a new, divinely ordered society—and the entire world was watching. It wasn’t a pat on the back, it was a call to action.

 

How exhausting it must have been—to wake up each day to obligations, duty, trials. To derive no satisfaction from the opinion of others, to strive mightily with no idea of whether any of it was necessary or made any sense. To have no belief that one’s actions made any difference, and to fear the afterlife and its deadening mate, eternity.

 

The Puritans were adults, dude.

 

And it wasn’t easy, which is why some of us became old alcoholics. It’s also why, when I finally entered the rooms of AA, I was instantly at home. The Puritan ideas, of course, had merged with other, more awful and evangelical forms of Christianity. But if my bed is made (check) and my bedroom is clean (mostly check) this morning, it’s because I grew up a Puritan, and needed the rooms of AA to revive it. 

 

It's the end of the year, and we are in that week before the New Year and after Christmas. I am exhausted, though I have done nothing, or so I tell myself.

 

I lived through this year.

 

I should tell you that Trump is fulminating in Mar-a-Lago—the Department of Justice has released a miniscule portion of the Epstein files and yes, it appears that the cover-up has failed badly.

 

Nor do I know anything more than I knew at the start of the year. It may be exhaustion or the Christmas spirit that keeps leaking through, dammit, but it feels as if we’ve…

 

…turned the corner?

 

…come to our senses?

 

Or maybe we’re just gotten tired. I am tired of the people who love God and are so very loved by him that they have no need to be anything but brutal to everybody else. I am tired of pretending that God put us up here to shine brightly for the world to see on this damn hill. I am tired of believing in endless progress and future joy.

 

I lived through this year, I wrote a book that nobody will read, and I will die. In the end, none of it matters, and I know that. But I need to get through today, and the best way of doing it, oddly, is by being a Puritan. It means waking up early, making your bed and getting down to work. It means yearning to be at the beach when you are making another notebook. It means no screaming at the worker in the club who has just now turned on the television to impossible audio levels. It means doing a lot of shit that I don’t want to do, but that needs to be done.

 

But it also means that at the end of the day, I can put my head on a pillow and sleep. I never got to the bottom of who Henry Herrick of Salem was, or Nicholas Coleman Pickard. Do I know my own heart?

 

I lived through this year, I wrote a book, I will die. And who is this “I?”

 

Oddly, I think all that I am is a man who walked down Mounds Park Road, sometime in 2012. That was thirteen years ago, but I remember a cool, foggy morning, and I remember the carpet of white trillium that had been reestablished on the forest floor. I remember emerging from that forest and walking down the road to where my mother had once lived. She was gone, and I knew inside that I too, was walking the road for the last time. There was no reason to come back to that house (now sold) or that hill.

 

There was great comfort in the anonymity. My mother had died, I was soon to be gone as well. The hill remained, gazing at the people walking or driving the road. The hill sees everything and remembers nothing.

 

Other people will walk that road. It doesn’t matter that I will never walk that road again.

 

Only that I once did.