Vespasian Bradford of early 17th century London was a craftsman belonging to the city livery company, or guild, of cooks, people involved in the preparation of food.
Vespasian’s namesake was the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who ruled Rome from 69 to 79 AD. Who named the English child born in 1560 this unique name is a mystery. His parents were either William and Alice Bradford or Richard and Catherine Bradford.
Vespasian was likely born in Yorkshire, England, in 1560, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth Tudor. He died during the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, James Stuart.
Vespasian married late in life, to Joane Burrowse, on May 28, 1604, when he was 44, and she was 12. This young woman was the daughter of Sir Richard Burrowse and Lady Barbara Burrowse. They were married in the Shoreditch Church in London.
According to The Parish Registers of St. Thomas the Apostle, London, containing the Marriages, Baptisms, and Burials from 1558 to 1754 (London, 1881) Vespasian and his wife had a son Richard, baptized June 25, 1605, a daughter Margaret, baptized May 15, 1606, a daughter Elizabeth, baptized May 9, 1607, a daughter, Anne, baptized June 18, 1608, a daughter Jane, baptized July 6, 1609, a daughter, Joane, baptized Aug. 7, 1610, and a son Richard, baptized Dec. 9, 1611.
Vespasian was a member of the Worshipful Company of Cooks in London, a very old livery company. In 1616 he was listed in the charter of the Worshipful Company of Cooks as an Assistant, one of a small group of liverymen who were in charge of the guild—the Court of Assistants.
Vespasian was buried April 11, 1618, at St. Antholin Church, Budge Row, London—an Anglican church in the heart of the city.
Joane outlived Vespasian by seven years, dying in 1625. Their grandson, Richard Bradford, emigrated to Virginia in the 1650s. His great-great granddaughter, Lena Bradford, married James Amos. She is my fifth great-grandmother on my mother’s side. Vespasian is my 11th great-grandfather.
William and Margaret Harwood Hawkins were among the first English settlers of Rhode Island. William, by trade a glove-maker, was a native of Exeter, England, born in 1609; his parents were William Hawkins and Katharine Gonson. William, Jr, sailed from England in 1634 bound for St. Christopher (St. Kitts). On board the same ship was Margaret Harwood who listed her home as Stoke Gabriel, also in Devonshire, south of Exeter. She was born in Bulmer, Essex, north of London, in 1612. Her father was Thomas; one record said she was a bastard, hence her mother was unnamed.
Whether William and Margaret already knew each other, or romance blossomed onboard the ship to America, is not known. One record suggests the possibility that they did know each other before sailing: “February, 1634, among persons bound for St. Christopher’s who have taken the oath of allegiance before the Mayor of Dartmouth: William Haukins of Exter, Devon, glover about 25 and Margaret Harwood of Stoke Gabriel, Devon, spinster about 22.” A perplexing question is: what were the two young English people doing aboard a ship for the new English colony of St. Kitts? William and Margaret were both young, perhaps strong and able-bodied. The English were recruiting such people to help colonize Caribbean islands, over which the English were competing with the French, Spanish, and Portuguese. St. Kitts was a new English colony in the Caribbean dedicated to sugar production. The work of clearing the tropical jungle of trees and plants, battling hordes of insects and rats, and planting crops such as tobacco and especially sugar was exhausting, and the more people involved the better. Also, there were conflicts with rival French colonists and the native Carib people.
William and Margaret married in 1634, and within a few years relocated to New England. Emigrating, William and Margaret were among those who in 1638 received lots of land in the new settlement of Providence, founded and headed by Roger Williams. The new town was on the western side of a hill on a broad peninsula bordered by the Seekonk river to the east and Great Salt River, or Providence River, to the west. William’s land, which was allotted to him on December 20, 1638, was at the southern edge of the peninsula, or neck, near Mile End Cove. William in 1640 along with his neighbors signed an agreement to form a government.
It would be nice to know how and why a young immigrant to the sugar colony of St. Kitts had moved north with his wife to a new colony in North America just recently founded by Roger Williams—and became a landowner and one of the original stakeholders of the colony at that! Not only were they original proprietors, but William and Margaret were members of the church in Providence. Thriving, William was able to purchase the lands of his two neighbors to the north in the mid-1640s. He was repeatedly made a freeman—meaning a person of property and legal consequence–of Providence.
William and Margaret arrived at a contested region between Anglo-American newcomers and indigenous tribes. Roger Williams had befriended the Narragansett tribe and negotiated with them, and was for decades a supporter of the rights of freedom of conscience and fair-dealing with the American Indians. After the Pequot War of the 1630s, relations between the English and the Narragansetts were tenuous. War returned to New England in 1675: King Philip’s War. The English attacked the professedly neutral Narragansetts, who joined forces with the Wampanoags and Nipmucs; intense warfare in and about Providence followed. Many of the Rhode Islanders fled, but not William and Margaret Hawkins and family. William helped to man the garrison in Providence, notwithstanding the destruction all around. Because he “stayed and went not away” during the conflict, after the defeat of the Indian tribes, in 1677, the colony awarded Hawkins with land taken from the Narragansetts. Indian captives were treated as prisoners of war, often sold into slavery or bound into servitude. English veterans of the war, such as William Hawkins, earned the right to use Indian servants. William and Margaret were significant landowners with a “considerable estate of lands and livestock” and, it appears, a secure labor force, the consequence of his valiant behavior during King Philip’s War. Along with wealth came political status, as William was elected to represent Providence in the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1677 and 1678.
Bond labor was a phenomenon throughout the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in America. Bondage took many forms: slavery, servitude, apprenticeship. Children and adults, Blacks, Whites, and Indians, were bound to labor for periods of years, sometimes for life. Some colonists were early opponents of slavery in America. Some Rhode Islanders in 1652 requested that slaves serve only a term of years, “as the manner is with the English servants” rather than for life. William Hawkins eventually agreed. He purchased a twenty-year-old slave named Jack from a Barbados plantation owner in 1695. However, four years later he manumitted Jack “to take effect in 26 years from this date” because “he had respect for him.”
The document granting manumission is found in The Early Records of the Town of Providence, vol. 4, pp 71-72:
Be it knowne unto all People by these presents that Whereas I William Hawkins of the Towne of Providence in the Collony of Rhode Island & Providence Plantations, in the Narragansett Bay in New England haveing for Me my heirs & Assignes, Purchased, Procured, bought & obtained of one william Mackcollin of the Island of Barbados, Merchant a certaine Negro man of about twenty yeares of Age, Named Jack to be unto me my heirs & Assignes for Ever, as may appeare by a bill of sale under the sd William Mackcollins his hand & seale, beareing the date the seventh day of June. 1695; But notwithstanding I the sd William Hawkins bought the sd Negro Jack for Ever, yet upon further Consideration & in favour to the said Negro Man Jack (haveing a Respect for him) Doe by these presents: Relinquish, Release, Discharge & for Ever set free from all & all Manner of service or servitude to me, my heirs, Executors, Administrators or Assignes, after he hath by service Compleated the full & just terme of Twenty & six yeares time from & beginning upon the seventeenth day of June last past being in this present 1699; the said Negro Man Jack; And doe injoyne My selfe, my heirs & Assignes after the sd twenty & six yeares as aforesaid be expired never to make any Claime or Demand to the sd negro man Jack by vertue of My said Purchase of him from the said William Mackcollin as abovesd; In wittnes of the Premises I de here-unto set my hand & seale the Eighteenth day of November in the yeare One Thousand six hundred ninety nine. Signed & delivered in the presence of Tho:Olney senr: and John Whipple junior
By this time, Margaret had died, probably in 1687. The couple had five children: John Hawkins, William Hawkins Jr, Edward Hawkins, Mary Hawkins Blackmar and Madeline Hawkins Rhodes. William died sometime near the end of 1699.
Map showing the original proprietors of Providence in 1640. William and Margaret Hawkins’ land is the third plot up from the bottom.
The grinding movement of time toward the end was slow and steady, one day following another, night falling expectantly, darkness ruling the land until the hues of dawn foretold the beginning of a new day like all the others. The beauties of starry nights and rosy dawns were lost amid the suffering and cries of the tortured, ill, and dying. The people could not see that truth and goodness overshadowed the land at dusk and brightened the world with new light. The divine punctuated the sameness of daily toil and disturbed repose. Creation waited expectantly, if humans were blind to the emerging truth surrounding them. The stars appeared ever brighter, the night sky ever clearer, the sounds of night like a choir rejoicing in the arrival of the child. Most people closed their doors and shuttered their windows to the lights and sounds of the night. Some people, however, could not help but see and hear. Shepherds watching over their flocks knew the night sky, watched the progression of stars and constellations, kept track of Orion and the Pleiades, the rising of the Dog Star, Sirius, the strange patterns of the wandering planets. They knew the sounds of night, and the sameness of each night, the constancy of creation from season to season. But there was a change to the unending sameness. The constancy of nature was suspended as the timeless entered time. The lights and songs of the night jarred them from their slumber, and they looked in awe, listened intently, to the message told them by the night. A child is born. God is with you.
Travelers caught on the road took extra care to keep to the path, letting the stars, which shown brightly in the clear desert air, guide them. Gentle zephyrs whispered among the palms, sycamores, and figs. Those still awake resting after the labors of the day awaited sleep and the new day. Everyone, human and beast, anticipated dawn. In the town, a few feeble lights interrupted the overwhelming darkness. Candlelight and oil lamps cast great shadows upon mothers caring for sick children, feeble old men refusing to sleep, and the anxious despairing over deeds of the past and retribution yet to come. Tavern owners had shut the doors and hostelers closed the gates. Those wanderers needing food and rest were left to fend for themselves.
The man and woman, having come from afar to fulfill the requirements of the law, arrived after dark. The man was a native of the town, though not a resident, and had known of neither friends nor family who could host him and the woman for the night. The woman was exhausted and about to give birth. Starlight pointed the way to a rustic barn filled with hay and feeding troughs. The woman tried to stifle her fears and the cries of pain as the baby would wait no longer. The man found a bucket and a well, drew water and wet some clothes, and tended the woman the best he could. After a time she made the final push and the baby emerged in a splash of warm fluid from the womb amid cries of anguish and joy. The man cut the cord and gave the naked child to the mother, who wrapped him in clothes to protect him from the cold and held him to her still heaving breast. Soon the cries were stifled and the child slept. The man put the child in the only object resembling a cradle, a manger that he packed with straw. The woman kneaded her womb to try to stop the ongoing cramps.
In the dead of night the stars shown more brightly, particularly one that seemed to herald for the man the new life brought into the world. Accompanying the apparent brightening of the star were noises caused by the movement of the natural and supernatural. The man heard rapturous singing voices and wondered whence they came. Soon he heard the footsteps and shouts of man, and guardedly asked what they wanted. He could detect trembling in their voices and fear in their faces, glistening from tears. They were shepherds, they said, who were reclining in the surrounding hills, watching over their sheep, when they had been astonished by amazing figures in the sky, glowing ethereally, singing, glorifying God. One of the messengers told them of the miraculous birth of the son of the most high God in this very town of Bethlehem, and that the child would be found lying in a manger in a barn. When the messengers departed, in their wake was the bright starlight that shown upon the town. The men said that though they had been terrified they could not doubt their senses, and knew that God had commanded them to go and find the baby, to worship this child, Immanuel. They looked upon the sleeping infant and continued to weep and shutter excitedly, glorifying God and the great miracle He had deigned to allow them to witness.
The appearance of the shepherds astonished Joseph, the father, who was nevertheless not completely unprepared. He was a descendant of King David, the anointed, and had been taught the Scripture, and knew the prophecies that the Messiah would herald from the house of David, and be born in the City of David, Bethlehem, Joseph’s own birthplace. Although Joseph was a craftsman, not a scholar, he was dutiful in attending the synagogue, following Mosaic Law, and reading the Scriptures. He knew what Isaiah said about the suffering servant who would be born of a virgin. Reality and experience reflected the dream that had informed Joseph that his wife, Mary, was this virgin.
Mary listened to the shepherds and pondered what they had witnessed. All that she had been told was coming true. Nine months before, she had been a young maiden living with her parents in Nazareth in Galilee, betrothed to a good man, Joseph the carpenter. Her dreamlike experience of the messenger who hailed her and proclaimed that she was the mother of God had in due course occurred as predicted: her body had changed and her womb had grown. The birth of a wonderful, healthy child and the words of the shepherds were amazing, if expected.
Joseph and Mary had bound themselves in the acceptance of God’s will. During Mary’s pregnancy they had learned, along with the other inhabitants of Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea, of Caesar’s requirement that all heads of family enroll at the place of their birth. Mary had been in her ninth month when they began the five-day journey to Bethlehem. Jews were taught to obey the Mosaic Law in synagogue and the Roman law by circumstance.
The checkered political history of the Jews, the ongoing political struggle for power by dynasts among the chosen people, combined with the ceaseless aggression directed toward Israel and Judah, later Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea, by outsiders—Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans—had left the Jews a weakened people subject to the whims of outside forces. For several generations the most compelling and dominant force was that of Rome. Like most occupying powers throughout history, Rome required little from its subject peoples as long as they obeyed the laws and paid their taxes. The enrollment that forced Joseph and Mary to journey to Bethlehem was in accord with the latter. Romans governed subject peoples indirectly by means of local rulers, kings and tyrants, and directly, by appointed officials, who were given complete authority subject to the supervision of the Senate, formerly, and at this time, the imperial power, held by Octavian, or Augustus, Caesar. Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, had held power for almost forty years. He along with other tyrants, had destroyed the Republic, substituting the rule of one person. Augustus held power by controlling Rome’s huge military. In the Near East, he preferred to control kingdoms by means of a patron-client relationship with rulers such as Herod and his sons and successors. These men ruled as long as they followed Augustus’ bidding and kept order. Often they worked in cooperation with Roman officials—procurators, propraetors, proconsuls, and governors. Augustus maintained remarkable control by a strong Roman troop presence on the frontiers of an empire that encompassed parts of three continents. The large military was a continual drain on the empire’s resources, for which Augustus paid by taxation. To know what was the proper tax quota for each province and client kingdom required meticulous records of the number of citizens. Hence Augustus ordered the enrollment, or census. Joseph, Mary, and the child stayed in Bethlehem for several days to allow for Mary’s recovery and for Joseph to enroll with the local officials. Joseph was able to find more secure lodgings for his family. He prepared to make the journey home to Nazareth, planning on his way to stop at Jerusalem to accomplish Mary’s purification according to Mosaic Law and for the circumcision of the child according to the Abrahamic Covenant. Meanwhile the shepherds were not silent about their miraculous experience. Word had spread and the devout and curious came from surrounding villages to see the child. Most astonishing of all the visitors were Chaldean stargazers bearing gifts and kneeling before the child.
People throughout the ancient Mediterranean believed that the divine spoke to humans through dreams.
Such was the experience of the young woman, which brought images so vivid, a conversation so easily recalled, that the sights and sounds etched on the mind and memory were never to be forgotten. Whether she was asleep or awake is indeterminable as it was recorded later; the experience was so vivid in her sleep as to be unquestionably real or so dreamlike in her wakefulness as to not be doubted. When the event happened, day or night, winter or summer, month or year, is unknown, unimportant. It was an experience not bound by the normal rules of time. How long it lasted, and whether it was continuous in one or several series of moments, is irrelevant to the experience, to the overwhelming truth that the message contained, both for her and for others. People of her time and of the past had had similar experiences, as she well knew, from hearing stories told or listening to the scriptures being read. She had learned that messengers came and spoke to royalty and commoners alike. So sure were people of her time that such messages were divine, that kings sought out whoever could explain their dreams; some people had that art, soothsayers and prognosticators, experts who could read divine messages in the flights of birds, the arrangements of the stars, the shape of the liver of a sacrificial animal. She had no need for such expertise. Her experience was sufficient to know it was a messenger, one who came from God.
Strangely, in recollecting the experience, she did not describe the messenger save for his name, Gabriel, which means man of God, or strength in God, which was precisely what the girl, Mary, would require to fulfill the requirements of the message. It was an ethereal messenger who spoke to Mary, a messenger without form, merely the spoken word or thoughts, powerful enough to bring about a change in the girl, to cause her body to shutter in the presence of God, to hear more carefully the words spoken, to know for certain what was said to her in her mind.
She was no one in particular, merely a girl, a virgin, daughter of commoners, illiterate and ignorant as were most such people two thousand years ago. At the same time she was exceptional, unique, one favored by God, selected by Him for an important role, a service for all humankind. Her purpose in life, like all girls and women of her time, was to marry and bear children, if she was so fortunate; few women questioned such a role, it was what their mothers and grandmothers had done, and what their daughters and granddaughters would do. To have a mate and have a child was as natural as to sleep and eat, to live and die. And yet the dreamlike message she experienced, which told her that this was her destiny, which was neither exceptional nor out of the ordinary, was forcefully put, a message of an imminent occurrence, something that could not be delayed. She was a virgin. And yet, she was to have a child. Her dream turned out to bear a divine gift.
Modern philosophy and science are uncomfortable with the presence of God in any venue, much less the womb. What should be considered the most inviolable place has been violated and penetrated time and again to destroy the most sacred of all things, life. Great thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud, who saw God as the figment of the collective imagination, the product of psychic yearning for completion and love, are aware of no true unity with the divine, in or outside of the womb. Other great thinkers, such as Karl Marx, believing that biological demands precede consciousness, that before awareness is hunger, subject humans to the overwhelming dominance of time and place. Yet, ironically, now and in the past humans have engaged in an unending search for the divine, the discovery of which, it is thought, will yield answers to the many perplexing questions confronting humankind. Great have been the number of philosophers who ask the questions all humans ask and propose answers fit for their time and place. Rather than finding humility in the elusive search for truth, thinkers wallow in the hubris of knowing. All the while humans face the abyss of ignorance.
Dreams invite acceptance of the unreal, something outside of oneself. Individuals in any culture at any time feel an overwhelming need for completion, sense a pull from a transcendent other. What Rudolph Otto called the numinous was the dazzling light that blinded Paul of Tarsus; the child’s voice that responded to Aurelius Augustine’s agonizing question; the austere, universal presence of the One that so captivated Plotinus and his disciples Porphyry and Julian; the oneness that Siddhartha Gautama experienced in the rushing water of the river of life; and the fear and awe that Moses knew when standing on holy ground before Yahweh. All of these religious experiences involve particular people at particular times seeking, sensing, reaching out for, receiving, and accepting, the transcendent.
The greatest threats to modern society in the third millennium, Anno Domini, are not overpopulation, hunger, disease, terrorism, global warming, and war–although these are pressing problems to be sure. Rather, the modern scientific worldview of purposeful objective thought is destroying the subjective, intuitive awareness of the numinous and transcendent that humans have sensed for countless ages. The individual’s sense of self is a casualty in the secularization of knowledge that has occurred during the past two centuries. Impersonal social and economic forces rather than life are the great agents of change. Reason and science have overwhelmed intuition and art; the subject who intertwines oneself with the object of inquiry is condemned as biased and prejudiced; personal religious beliefs have no place in scholarly endeavors. This secular, objective trend is, perhaps, a mere aberration in time. The period from the structured urban lifestyle that began in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago to today is comparatively brief in the history of humankind. The age of modern science since 1500 is on the human time scale just a fleeting moment. The transcendent and the transient, the subjective and the objective, intuition and reason, have been united from the beginning of humankind.
Mary’s betrothed similarly received a dreamlike visitor, a messenger bearing a gift, who asked of him to accept what he did not understand, to abide by a will larger than himself. Joseph, a simple man who worked with his hands, not a great thinker or exceptional leader, rather a person content to listen and abide, dreamed of God’s messenger telling him to accept a destiny that would have otherwise been abhorrent to him. Betrothal to a virgin implied she would be untouched until marriage, that her womb was reserved for his seed. Joseph dreamed, however, that Mary was pregnant and that her womb was inviolable and sacred and that he must accept the child as his own. He awoke to a new reality that he acted upon with confidence in the truth. He transformed his entire life according to a message he received in a singular, inexact moment of time.
Joseph was a Hebrew, a Semite, a descendant of people who had migrated from ancient Iraq, Mesopotamia, west to the land of Canaan, what in time became Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea. The Book ofGenesis describes the transformation of these Semites into Hebrews by focusing upon the story of a man, Abram, and his wife, Sarai, nomadic herders who followed a divine call to journey to a distant land. Like other Semites, Abraham and Sarah and their people continued to feel the terror of the unknown, but their fear was mitigated by the realization of a God who cared for them, who was Himself Fate, who controlled all things, and who could circumvent the laws of nature should He so desire. This identification of self with God grew more sophisticated with the passing centuries. We find in Exodus Moses discovering a God of law and deliverance called simply, “I Am Who I Am.” Who precisely this God is and what are His powers and interest in humans is made specifically clear in the writings of the Psalmist David, king of the united kingdom of Israel and Judah from 1000 to 961, Ante Christos. David, at the same time a warrior, murderer, adulterer, and conqueror, was also a poet and singer of extraordinary talent and sensitivity, whose Psalms express the epitome of piety and anguish, love and torment.
David’s poems are ironic expressions of faith in an all-powerful God even as evil torments and controls the poet. David discovered the dreamlike existence of continually being seduced by some force, some spirit, something strangely in yet outside himself. It was there to counter whatever felt good, those pleasant feelings of life, when things appear right, more than adequate, and nothing is better than a peaceful smile and soft sensations of contentment. It was a fleeting sensation, this intrusion into constancy and order, this violation of satisfaction and happy thoughts. It pierced well-being. It distracted normalcy. It penetrated into a deep well of abandonment, fear, distrust, envy, selfishness, anger, and lust. It found the weakness of his being, the entrance in time of corruption, the fleeting path to what is not real, the moment when fantasy, indolence, hunger, dissatisfaction, and the corporeal reign. It was not right yet it felt good. It was wrong yet just for a moment it was allowed. Evil triumphed. But only in the passing moments. God triumphed over the timeless, the transcendent feelings and experiences that overwhelmed the singular instance of evil.
God, Yahweh, transcends the moment by speaking in a timeless fashion. Sometimes his words are profound, as to Moses. Usually they are indirect, as to Elijah, when he heard God whispering to him. Sometimes the voice of God is found in the wind. The Hebrews discovered that God often speaks subtly, as through dreams. Elihu, in the ook ofJob, proclaimed that God’s word comes to humans “in a vision of the night,” and He tells them of His plans, and dissuades them from their’s.
Many Hebrew prophets were experts in dream interpretation. Joseph the son of Jacob became the powerful adviser to pharaoh after providing an insightful interpretation of the Egyptian ruler’s dream. After failing to find his own dream prophesiers able to explain his perplexing dreams, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar employed Daniel, who provided the correct interpretation. The Hebrew prophets heard the voice of God in singular and transcendent moments, either when awake or asleep, and responded like Isaiah, who declared, “the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.”
Isaiah, learning of God’s plans, even predicted that at some point in time, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” God is with us.
The world was in need of a savior; then a star appeared, an astral phenomenon seen in the east.
Those who witnessed the rising star on the endless desert horizon were seeking signs of the will of heaven, the becoming—that which is not, yet will be. Each night these sorcerers of the desert, star worshipers known as Chaldeans or magi (μάγος, magŏs), sought in the movement of the stars and planets along the zodiac the signs of the future, information they could employ in their sorcery and charms, their advice to kings, their own achievement of power and wealth. The astral event, unexpected, astonishing, and concerning, impelled the sorcerers to journey in search of its meaning.
Their search led them to the one through whom all of the past as well as the whole of the present and the future are fulfilled.
The sorcerers lived in lands to the east out of reach of the power of Rome and the eastern extremes of the Roman Empire—Anatolia, distant lands of Mesopotamia and Babylon and beyond to the Iranian plateau where the star-worshiper Zoroaster had once come preaching a belief that the multitude of divinities long held in awe by priests and peoples were but two primal forces of good and evil in constant combat for control over the natural and supernatural. The sorcerers devoted themselves to the good rather than the evil, and used their knowledge of the stars to predict events that served the former in opposition to the latter.
The sorcerers of Anatolia followed the star that guided them across the deserts, journeying in the wake of other nomadic travelers who centuries before had set out from Mesopotamia toward the land of Canaan. Unlike the first Hebrews led by Abraham, the sorcerers did not drive sheep and goats before them; but they were sufficiently wealthy to bring rich gifts of their lands: minerals and spices and ointments. They were uncertain of their destination, uncertain for whom the gifts were; they traveled with theirs eyes and ears open to any possibility to which the astral phenomenon might bring them. Passersby might wonder, “what folly is this, that sorcerers follow a strange star bringing rich gifts to where and to whom they know not?” The sorcerers had faith in their reading of the heavens, faith that the astral messenger was not bent on folly; something sensed and intuited informed them of the rectitude and certainty of their mission.
The sorcerers believed that the supernatural could interpose change and movement on the unchanging truths of the natural. The great certainty of the patterns of the heavens had meaning and influence over human events. The number of stars in the sky, the wandering planets, the patterns of the zodiac, held latent power, as did substances of the earth, air, fire, and water. The sorcerers, knowing that the divine and its many manifestations revealed truths to the willing observer, thinker, and listener, hurried them on in the conviction that without doubt the astral phenomena had supernatural origins, and must not be ignored.
The appearance of a star, a new light in the heavens, might signal any of a number of events. Time immemorial had taught prognosticators that stars were manifestations of the divine, even symbols of particular supernatural powers—to impregnate the barrenness of soil and womb with new life and growth, to stir among men the angst to desire power and conquer foes, to will to rise among others as king. This latter possibility, that an astral phenomenon was a supernatural sign of the birth of a king, quickened their step as they journeyed west.
It is not told how long was their journey and precisely from where they came; what were their names and nationalities; how many they were and whether or not they held political power among their respective peoples. The story of the sorcerers’s journey to Palestine is anonymous about such details, but clear about their beliefs and purpose and about what they found when they arrived.
Ancient authorities on the practice of magic, who lived during the many centuries that the Roman Empire provided a unified structure for learning, believed that the magi, the sorcerers of Anatolia who were experts in astrology, divination, and magic, were opportunists. These Asian sorcerers claimed to be able to anticipate the interposition of the supernatural on the natural, to predict, anticipate, the arrival of divine hints of the future and read them when they arrived. Ancient scientists and philosophers were often incredulous about such claims, though they did not doubt the abilities of the sorcerers to use magic, to predict the future, and to gauge the will of heaven from the stars. Hence when the sorcerers from Anatolia crossed the Jordan River, entering into Palestine, following an astral phenomenon, their counterparts at the court of Herod, king of Judaea, sought to discover the magi’s mission. Herod was like most ancient kings insecure in his power, wondering how long fate had decreed his rule, hungry to find out from any source, information about the future. He had court astrologers, to be sure—the strongest, wealthiest kings attracted the most skilled soothsayers, either Chaldean or trained by Chaldeans. Their positions at court, indeed their very lives, depended upon their skill at prognostication. The sorcerers arriving from the east were rivals, but could hardly be ignored.
Upon arriving at Jerusalem, the sorcerers went to the court of the king, whose name was Herod. Whether the king that they met with was Herod or his son and successor Herod Archelaus is unclear from the source, the Gospel of Matthew. The king and his advisers, upon learning of the coming of the magi from the east, following the sign of heaven, inquired of the sorcerers what they had seen and what it could mean. The sorcerers revealed enough of their mission to encourage speculation as to what the star could mean, but they were hesitant to put themselves into the hands of the king or his court astrologers. While the sorcerers stayed in Jerusalem an uncertain amount of time, they continued to see the astral phenomenon, and wondered when its true significance would be revealed.
The sorcerers either had learned beforehand or learned upon their arrival in Jerusalem that Jews were most particularly anxious about one future event, the coming of the anointed one, the Messiah. The Hebrews had for over a thousand years looked for the appearance of the anointed one, who would champion their cause, free them from suffering and political oppression, and lead them to a new age wherein the chosen people of Yahweh would find redemption and peace—and power and glory as well.
The yearning for a savior is common among individuals and peoples throughout time. Some Hebrew writers, such as Isaiah, portrayed the Messiah as a “Prince of Peace,” a humble and loving healer. The author of the Psalms believed the Messiah was Lord, son of God. Other Hebrew writers expected the Messiah to come in a blaze of glory. According to the author of the Old Testament book of Daniel, who wrote two to three hundred years before the reign of Herod, the Messiah would provide a temporal and secular manifestation of what all people seek, what people of the ancient world in particular sought: wealth, power, glory, revenge, martial success. More recently, perhaps only seventy years earlier, the writer Enoch had conceived of the Messiah as God’s agent to avenge His enemies. Hence did the Jews hunger for the appearance of the anointed one.
Even if freed for short periods from the whims of rulers and soldiers, the people of Palestine, like most ancient peoples, were constantly pressured by famine, malnourishment, plague, individual illnesses, disability, insecurity, pain, and eventual death. Lives were short and brutish. Few people were educated, and most lived in fear of the unknown. Ignorance was the great ruler of all people, fed by the deception that life could be lived without pain, hunger, violence, and fear. People responded to their conditions by retreating inward to what was left of self, a dark, dismal region of absence of love and the ubiquity of pain and terror. The only release was death.
Out of the darkness a light shown. Hopeful individuals saw it, reached out to touch it, embrace it. Sin and despair often tried to cover the light, to smother its rays, to hide it though it could not be hidden. Somewhere the light still penetrated the darkness. The magi from Anatolia focused on the light amid the darkness of Herod’s Judaea. As they viewed the suffering and poverty of the people and the lavish wealth and momentary power of the king and court; as they walked among religious leaders, Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes, who puffed themselves up thinking that they knew the will and ways of God; as they listened to astrologers and sorcerers who sought to tell the king what he wanted to hear—the magi still could see the light, the astral messenger that nightly appeared, giving them hope. So they waited. They knew that in time, soon, the astral messenger would reveal what they had journeyed so far to see. They waited in expectation of the supernatural.
Happy is the person who does not walk in the way of sinners. . . .
Happiness comes from acting according to God’s will. This simple truth is so obvious and necessary, it should so drive all human actions and thoughts, that the alternative should appear nonsensical. And yet the alternative is what drives humans forward in time, confronting the everyday with their own actions, their own will, contrary to God’s will, God’s law.
Other living creatures are not like this. Other creatures live according to God’s will and law. Their choices are restricted to nature’s mandates. They eat, sleep, hunt, live, and die, according to what God has willed. They don’t contrive self-devised opposites, of living in an unnatural way, staving off death as long as possible, eating more than what nature mandates, seeking to break from nature by creating as artificial an existence as possible.
Humans are cursed with the ability to choose. They are cursed with apparent free will. They have convinced themselves that they can order their lives, control their destinies, make choices without (or ignoring the) consequences, tempt fate in so many ways, and live almost as gods. When it all comes crashing down, they are shocked, surprised, horrified, feel ill-used, curse God, fate, or the heavens, all the while taking no responsibility for what they themselves contrived.
Meditate on God’s Law day and night. . . .
God’s law, God’s word, comes in so many forms, it is impossible, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Romans, to be unaware, or pretend unawareness, of God’s Creation, God’s actions throughout time in human and natural experience. Nature is filled with the writing of God. Human history is a narrative of God’s will. Each life, human as well as others, are contrived by, designed by, God, and it takes very little thought, from humans who are otherwise so reflective and ruminating, to see the hand of God in each day of our existence.
God’s law is natural law, it is the law of the heart and soul, and we scarcely need to be told what is obvious in our deepest intuitions. As Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian, wrote: “nature teaches men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.”
Hooker said further respecting the laws of God and humans, that God is a law unto Himself, in that He is both the Author of Law and the Doer of Law, both equally in perfection. Human natural and civil laws are learned from nature, learned from God, not original to humans, who perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect.
It follows that all things yearn for what is more perfect, all things therefore yearn for Goodness, and by this yearning, all things are good. All things therefore yearn for God.
God knows the way of the righteous, who thrive next to clear waters, as well as the way of the impious, who will perish like a tree in the desert lacking moisture.
As Hooker wrote, “the general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument. By her from Him we receive whatsoever in such sort we learn.”
By listening to the voice of reason and the authority of teaching over time we know the Good and are able to withstand the temptations inherent in the passing moments of fads and whims.
God is mysterious. God is unknowable. God’s ways are unfathomable. Yet like the wind, the air we breathe, God’s presence is unmistakable. Reasoning, trying to figure out God and His ways, is a dead end. Feeling, intuition, sensing His presence, accepting Him as the guide: these are the ways to know God, that is, feel God. Love is not rational, not logical, cannot be induced and deduced, but is felt, is present, is obvious as it washes over us and cleanses us, gives us an overwhelming peace. Love is not bound by time or place. Love simply is.
The voice is heard, air is breathed, thirst is quenched, the wilderness is watered with life, amid the Love of God.
Love is about feeling, the affective, it is not absolute. God loves us in the moment, because humans live in the moment. We can each and every minute feel God’s love. God is absolute and his knowledge is absolute. But His love is contingent upon time—it is a reaching out to humans living in time. Love is also about desire. Desire to be with someone, extend out to the other, merge with the other, share with the other. God’s love is not just an intellectual love. Love is a feeling. God’s love must be a feeling. Hence God desires us to love him, be with him, be one with him. To be one with a person is to have the same mindset, the same feelings. If God loves us always he is hoping that we will too. But if we don’t respond to God’s love with commensurate love, it is in that sense that we are not conforming to God’s will. Free will is simply one’s decision each moment to love God or reject God, love God or something else, someone else, like oneself. God outside of time knows all things. God acts in time with love, via the Holy Spirit, leaving the response to His desire up to us. The freedom of the will is done in the confines of God’s grace, that is, His love.
Love is not rational but intuitive, feeling, mysterious, transcendent, unconditional, a union, a warmth, an emotional attraction. God rules Creation by Love. God’s will is me, in me. One may access it intuitively and by prayer. Love is the active verb, hence to access God’s love is by loving him, loving all creatures, the whole creation. The is clearly what Jesus did, hence to act in love is to imitate Jesus. So to find love is to find God. To share love is to share God, to form an empathetic communion that is God.
For more on God’s Love, see my newest Kindle Book, God is Love: Reflections on the Psalms, which is an ecumenical, spiritual, meditative, historical reflection on the 150 Psalms of David. The book is meant to inspire reflection on the historical and existential purpose of the Psalms, an active search for and communication with God, a meditative dialogue with God’s words that links the meditative person with so many like seekers and thinkers over the centuries.
My book, “Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap, and the American Revolution,” has been republished by Routledge. Ebenezer Hazard was a surveyor of post roads and scientist during the War for Independence. Jeremy Belknap was a clergyman, scientist, and historian. Their epistles during the war are wonderful examples of graceful writing, sharing scientific, historical, political, and social issues relating to the American Revolution. You can purchase the book through Routledge at https://www.routledge.com/Ebenezer-Hazard-Jeremy-Belknap-and-the-American-Revolution/Lawson/p/book/9780367643416
Harriet E. Jenkins was born in Vermont sometime in 1815, possibly to John and Mary Jenkins. She was a little girl of 12 in 1828 when she worked on a sampler using needle and thread. She sewed white thread on a beige linen background. She included, as samplers typically did at the time, the alphabet in various forms and fonts. Then she included a poem:
Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand,
As the first efforts of an infants hand,
And while her fingers o’er this canvass move,
Engage her tender heart to seek thy love.
Harriet’s family moved to Massachusetts at some point, so that she married Joseph Wiggin April 14, 1836, in Stoneham, MA.
In the 1850 census Joseph and Harriet lived in South Reading, MA; he was a shoemaker, and they had two daughters. He was 37, she was 35, which is in keeping with the sampler indicating that she was 12 in 1828. One daughter, Harriet, was aged 11; another daughter, Mary Frances, was 7 years old, born in 1843.
Little is known about the life of Harriet and her husband. Much is known about her daughter, Mary Frances, who lived a long life, dying in 1931.
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a strange story about a man who awakes one day to find himself transformed, or metamorphosed, into a bug-like creature with many small skinny legs, antennae, and a hard shell. His appetites change and he can no longer communicate intelligibly to his family, who are astonished and horrified. He still thinks like he did when a human, still has the same emotions and intellectual desires. He is disgusting to himself and to others—as though humans might not be disgusting to other creatures. At the time Kafka wrote the book, during World War I, humans were increasingly disgusting, disgusted with themselves, with the rape of the environment and the destruction imposed on other, civilized and “less civilized” human peoples.
Another book of the same title, by the Roman poet Ovid, provides a completely different view of metamorphosis. His poem says that the divine might transform into material things and living creatures. Ovid represents ancient thought on the interaction of the divine with corporeal existence. He says that the Metamorphosis occurs in the beginning of time, when forms are changed into new bodies, such that the Artificer of all things forms humans from a divine seed.
Likewise, the ancient writer Apuleius wrote an account of Metamorphosis; the book was also known as the Golden Ass, and tells of a man transformed by magic into a four-legged ass. But this is not the story of the transformation of a human into an animal and back to a human. Rather, Apuleius tells of a man who goes through such suffering and fear, as a man and as an ass, that he is finally through prayer metamorphosized into a life of peace and contentment. This is by means of the intervention of the transcendent, symbolized by Isis, the Egyptian fertility goddess, into the man’s life. Isis represents the fundamental deity, of which there are many manifestations. Isis is the light and truth, very similar to Christ, the Logos, of ancient Greek and Christian philosophy. The worship of Isis was a chief mystery religion; such mystery religions were similar to Christianity; conversion was a metamorphosis of a person to realize and accept the transcendent.
Another ancient source that describes such a metamorphosis is the New Testament, specifically the synoptic gospels, in describing Jesus’s transfiguration (literally, metamorphosis) on a mountain in front of his choice disciples. Like Ovid, like Apuleius, the gospel writers claim that there is a connection between the transcendent and the transient in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who experiences a connection with the one God during this time of metamorphosis.
The New Testament describes many such experiences of metamorphosis, such as that experienced by the Christian persecutor Saul on the road to Damascus, during which he experienced the transcendent, and became physically blind but spiritually aware. Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, chapter 12, described such an experience as being “transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This form of metamorphosis was akin to the world of Hellenistic philosophy in which Paul lived and wrote, in which thinkers and practitioners of the mystery religions searched for a mystical communion of the transient human with the transcendent deity.
A fourth-century intellectual and spiritual follower of Paul, Aurelius Augustine, described in the Confessions his own metamorphosis on reading a passage from Paul’s epistles during a moment of emotional crisis, in which he heard the divine voice of a child. This one moment metamorphosed Augustine spiritually and physically for a lifetime
There are many examples in human history of a metamorphosis that occurs when a human experiences the divine. Often these experiences occur during moments of trauma, during mental or physical anguish, when healing is needed, and a metamorphosis occurs in mind and body, and time is briefly interrupted by the coming of the divine into transient human affairs.
In today’s day and age of skepticism and incredulity, it is hard to find serious examples of such metamorphosis. But I would argue that they occur all of the time, and are not limited just to humans, but to all life forms. Such metamorphoses have to be sought after, thought about, reflected upon, before they are realized for what they are, moments when the supernatural intervenes, and the presence of God is felt, and fear is transfigured into love.
The American Plutarch 