Courage of Being.
COURAGE OF BEING.
“You are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.â€
‘ There are two hideous monsters living in Boston in New England. One Mrs.Mary Dyer and the other Mrs.Hutchinson both indulging in heresies. The said monsters are without head but with horns like beast, scales like fish, with legs and claws like a fowl; of which Lord declared his detestation.’
The two gentle women were excommunicated and when Mrs.Hutcinson was banished to Rhode Island, Mary followed her to that island. This happened in 1637.
Mrs. Hutchinson was born in Alford. Lincolnshire, England in 1591 as Ann Marbury, daughter of a silenced clergyman and grew up in a household of learning and broad religious sensitivities. She married a merchant William Hutchinson and the couple migrated to Massachusetts, USA.
She started organising weekly meetings of Boston women to discuss sermons and to expressions as to her own theological views with leanings to Quaker faith. Here she stressed that individual intuition was prime means of reaching God directly. Without the need of organised church and clergy, which simply infuriated the orthodox Christian church.
It was alleged that she was preaching against teachings of the new testaments and against Christ by declaring that an individual can communicate with God without the intermediary of Christ. She was put on trial and there were plenty of priests to declare that her teachings were against the teachings of New Testaments. Every one was biased against her, all the religious establishment although in fact she had preached only a sermon of love and respect for all mankind irrespective of any narrow religious concepts one held.
When Mrs.Hutchinson was excommunicated, young Mrs.Dyer walked of the church with her and when Hutchinson was banished, she followed her to the Rhode Island. On her first attempt to return to Boston as a Quaker, she was immediately arrested and put into prison and only by repeated enteritis of her husband that she was released on the condition that she would henceforth immediately be removed from the colony under guards and not being allowed to speak to anybody.
She was alone, utterly alone facing her destruction and tried to find some inner strength.
Any outside sources have gone away, run away from the gatherings of men. The people who pronounced the sermons of friendship and love had vanished too. She was bleeding inside and there was no one to put a bandage around it to stop it. She must plunge into her own self, an unknown country where she had to chalk her way to find a meaning- a meaning for living and then for dying.
Being of passionate nature, all her life she had asked question regarding her being, the ground of something indefinable in which beings are rooted and finding only abstractions in the words of preachers and establishment, she had to move forward finding her way forward instinctively and there she found an abyss of unknown into which she must plunge and find a courage to do that. All the outside sources were impotent to give her that courage.
The Boston Court declared that Quaker doctrine contradicted the fundamental truths of the Christian religion by denying trinity, Christ and the Holy Scriptures. Quaker belief in the ‘ inner light’ ran directly against the religious dogma.
Mrs.Dyer was imprisoned again and told to renounce her beliefs. Despite the entreaties of her family and friends, Mary preferred death to dishonour. The high sheriff exhibited his warrant and called for the prisoner by name and then was lead to the gallows. A great multitude and guards surrounded her.
Mrs Dyer was then hanged by the neck until dead.
Durlabh Singh © 2015.
