Purified

We trace ourselves back to the Puritans,

like the Pilgrims, dissatisfied, only more tolerant,

less radical than the Mayflower group, content

to purify from within, until … too much, too great a task

in England’s church to hold to simple services,

Biblical without the flash and fanfare of rituals

subject to a King bending the law and the church

for his own purpose, driving them the way of the Pilgrims

to the Netherlands and then to the New World, unfettered

from England’s reach, rebels and dissidents, seeking freedom,

the risk of the unknown far better than the certainty of death

by a King, insulted at their insolence and their desertion;

and declaring the Bay Colony their new home, a City upon a Hill,

a New Jerusalem in North America, the Puritans were strict

in conformity to their religious beliefs and practices, a land branded

with this new Protestant Ethic, this lingering burden of guilt and angst,

piety on their shoulders carried and paranoia into their stockings

tucked, New England their church now with a God-given superiority

over Pilgrims and Natives, “a light to the nations”. And in that church

grew Daniel, and John, and Stephen, three brothers, sons

of John, Preacher’s kids stereotyped, perhaps, angelic rebels set free

in a new world, fatherless, young boys facing the wilderness, confronting

themselves, the very nature of life and the nature of God, the rod

not spared, the child not spoiled, but perhaps, too, lonely and isolated,

they questioned even the god of their father, his values, his beliefs,

his dogma, and not finding the answers in this new place,

a strange place with a devil in every dark place, in every hidden

thought of young men thinking, wondering, exploring,

questioning, radicals themselves, John’s sons, like their father,

in a new land expanding, outgrowing itself, a land of opportunity

shared now beyond the faithful, beyond England’s new colony, England’s

old reach returning, and the Puritans rejecting it all, all but themselves,

even as they had before on England’s soil, been driven out to this

new world, and now forbidding others as they had once been forbidden,

driving out the unfaithful churches, Baptists and, worse, Quakers,

those believing everyone as good and equal, radical Puritans

seeking the right thing leading to heaven, not the Puritan way.

And in that Quaker influence, Daniel and John and Stephen

found their answers in this wild land, God not in the Wilderness

where the Devil may have lurked, not in some promised land,

but in themselves and in each other, in all men, in all people,

God in those who shared this new land, this New England

from whence we all hail now, we who trace ourselves back

to England’s separatists, radical religious rebels seeking God,

Puritan blood running in our veins tempered by the faith of Quakers.