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.”
This ideal will become so fundamental to the New England psyche that when the time comes for statehood, the citizens of Massachusetts do not become a state, but rather a commonwealth. John Adams put the following in the Commonwealth’s Constitution:
The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.
Let’s pause here amidst all the magic words like “commonwealth” and “common good” and savor what I like to call a snowball moment. There is a scene in the film Reds in which the two main characters, Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, American socialists in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, are caught up in the swirling, stirring romance of revolt. A whole people comes together to stand up for equality and brotherhood. Which sounds so very upstanding. But the genius of the film is that it also captures the giddy
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.”
This ideal will become so fundamental to the New England psyche that when the time comes for statehood, the citizens of Massachusetts do not become a state, but rather a commonwealth. John Adams put the following in the Commonwealth’s Constitution:
The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.
Let’s pause here amidst all the magic words like “commonwealth” and “common good” and savor what I like to call a snowball moment. There is a scene in the film Reds in which the two main characters, Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, American socialists in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, are caught up in the swirling, stirring romance of revolt. A whole people comes together to stand up for equality and brotherhood. Which sounds so very upstanding. But the genius of the film is that it also captures the giddy
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