Changing the Race Dance in U.S. Religious Pracitce
by Cynthia Winton-Henry
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Audre Lorde
On a trip to Boston my ancestral
lineage rose to haunt me. Perhaps
these ancestors want to haunt us
all, especially that intellectually
strong midwife, mother, teacher
and mystic – my cousin from
hundreds of years back, Anne
Hutchinson.
She and her extended family left
the east coast of England hoping
to create a life that honors the
experience and authority of a
Free Inner Grace. This is the
powerful stuff that caused them
to be excommunicated, exiled,
slandered and disarmed.
May what is great in and around us
rise to love the Mother and to uphold her creation.
1
It was a lovely Autumn
Day when Soyinka
Rahim and I entered the
old Roxbury,
Massachusetts Church
for our second day of the
Changing the Race Dance
Workshop. The evening
before we met at the
Unitarian Church on
Harvard Square.
Soyinka isn’t surprised
at much in white culture. She was raised a black nationalist by an out of
the box vegan mom. The whippings, twitches and games of white
people are alarmingly part of her lineage. But, when we stepped inside
the unheated Federal Meeting House sanctuary founded by Boston
Puritans in 1631 her eyes popped wide and her mouth dropped open in
shock.
Soyinka and I had stepped through a door that led us directly
underneath a soaring pulpit where we looked out at a sea of boxed-in
white pews.1
It was cold. That is
challenge enough for
dancing bodies. For
artists concerned with
healing from white
racism, the colonial
sanctuary felt even more
icy and in disrepair. The
only place for moving
was a tiny space at the
front and in the aisles.
1
Pew boxes were bought by early church members to pay for the building.
2
We’d prepared a workshop that incorporates conversation, movement,
story, and song using the tools and principles of InterPlay. But this
stately architecture takes its cues from the Roman Imperial architecture
established by Constantine when he made Christianity the state religion.
It’s the architecture of those who want to assert postures of control.
This space was not meant for movement, yet here we were.
I’ve danced in sanctuaries since my teens, befriending endless pews,
steps, aisles, pulpits and fonts. I know that “architecture creates an
ethnic domain,”2 and that
the nature of the spaces we
inhabit imprints on our
bodies and psyches on the
deepest levels. Our meeting
spaces tell us who and
whose we are.
For this reason I take
seriously the way that
words, architecture, and
images shape my
worldview. Here in the
“ethnic domain” of the old
Roxbury Church
parishioners were literally
put in boxes. Their eyes
focused UP on a preacher
ensconced in a concealing
box. With nothing else to look at, their ears were trained to receive the
Word sometimes for hours.
Can you guess what they valued? The authority of the preacher. Or did
they?
2
20th century art philosopher Suzanne Langer in Feeling and Form.
3
A booming voice as the representative of God is a classic western God
picture bred from the legacy of white “ethnic domains” found in
churches, “democratic” governmental, educational and other houses of
worship today.
But there is good news!
Located on Putnam Street today’s Roxbury church belongs to the
Unitarian Universalist Center for Urban Ministries, a powerful center for
social change serving a diverse and largely African American area of
Boston! You can take a tour of black Roxbury here.
No wonder CC King, our organizer chose this venue. The sanctuary was
all that was available that morning. In the afternoon we were to move to
a more conducive space.
In hindsight, it was the ultimate object lesson on how white bodies have
been molded by a white supremacist ideology. Most of our workshop
attendees were white people. What better place to investigate
whiteness than within the colonizing architectural forms found in so
many of our mainstream public schools, health care facilities,
courtrooms, businesses, religious centers and in a government that
promotes a puritanical works-based value system.
In this church a tiny group of wealthy businessmen first entranced their
seated “flock” to value external authority; the Holy Word over
experience; doctrine and law over mystical voicings (especially those of
women), and to elect anyone accomplished enough to master or evade
this system. Instead, profit is the underlying value where wealth rules
over our common quality of life.
Such forms and behaviors of whiteness are the ghosts inside of all us
people that keep producing the overarching diseases of consciousness
in our social body, diseases that dismiss anyone and anything that does
not offer a profit. This includes the earth, which the indigenous say,
we’ve given a fever.
In spite of our dismay, Soyinka and I began playing.
4
Thank goodness we can improvise!
Within moments our gaping mouths turned to song. Organizers brought
space heaters. Introducing InterPlay’s dependable, flexible forms we
began moving through the aisles and connecting with one another in
solidarity.
We laughed and found our humor together helping us to feel like friends.
Then, the participants who were therapists, teachers, activists, board
members, and artists told each other brief stories of experiences with
racism as well as good things they’ve learned from family and
community.
Standing to the side, I looked over at a big brass plaque under the pulpit.
It was front and center, not hidden or concealed in any way. When I
read it I had my own shock. It credits Rev. Thomas Weld for being the
founding preacher of this church and key player in the trial and
excommunication of my maternal ancestor Anne Hutchinson for her
belief in Free Grace and her outspokenness as a woman.
History calls this conflict the Antinomian or Free Grace Controversy.3
The plaque names Weld as a “painful preacher” and the founding
overseer of Harvard.
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomian_Controversy
5
At the break I called to my friends, “Come read this plaque!” I saw the
roots of racism and sexism literally written on the wall of the early
American White Church and I felt my ancestors rise up.
I’ve had my own bouts with church in the struggle for a Free Grace.
I grew up singing in choirs and being invited to dance my prayers. I fell
in love with God and then in my early twenties had a powerful
encounter with the Divine Dancer who offers unconditional neutral
regard.
My response was to ask how I could serve. The answer was to hold
dance and religion together. I found a seminary, Pacific School of
Religion that helped me to learn how to do this. Teachers like Doug
Adams, Flora Wuellner and Robert MacAfee Brown inspired and guided
me.
I was 25 when I taught my first adjunct faculty class on dance and
religion. In my early thirties when I needed employment, my husband
and I were called to a Silicon Valley congregation. I was clear with them
that I was also an artist and dancer. Congregants seemed genuinely
excited. But, our second Pentecost after I danced gently down the aisle
to honor the movement of the Spirit, the elders asked that I refrain from
dancing. It disturbed them and hinted at a direction they did not want to
go. Freedom?
Other changes were disruptive as well. Young people were taking more
responsibility. We were talking about gay rights. As most people know,
churches don’t like change. On our third Easter Sunday the cinder block
sanctuary felt more like an empty tomb than a celebration of
resurrection.
It broke my heart. Fostering the freedom of Great love is my dream.
From earliest memory I received blessings from well-respected teachers
and indigenous people that I met on my travels. I’d researched the role
of dance, religion and the workings of body and soul. The Greater
Church blessed and embraced my call and invited me to lead major
conferences.
6
My spiritual evolution led me to the Axis Mundi, the Tree of Life, the
Dance of Life, all things in InterPlay, and the Unbelievable Beauty of
Being Human, the organic organizing principles of my life’s work. All the
while I’ve continued to field the resistances in academia and the church
to an incarnating presence and an artful dancing consciousness.
When Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Dancing in the Streets: A History of
Collective Joy,” critiquing the absence of joy in the West, my wildest hope
surged! She recognized the links I’d made and came to the conclusion
that the resistance of white people to dance, laugh, listen to each other,
to nature and beyond leads to what indigenous people call soul sickness.
Confronting the historic dismemberment of compassionate, intelligent,
feminine, earth-based designs, I knew I was also on a journey to heal my
internalized racism.
Then, Hurricane Katrina hit. I was stunned the Sunday after the
hurricane to see so little emotional response in my predominantly white
congregation. The plight of our African American brothers and sisters
did NOT appear to be a personal issue for them. There was no outcry, no
pouring forth of support. Down the street, Oakland people loaded up
their trucks to carry supplies to New Orleans.
Something snapped. Rage grew. I no longer felt able to uphold my
covenant as Protestant minister. I underwent a process to renounce my
ordination and in doing so to turn my energies toward equipping
leaders with tools that support body and soul. InterPlay became my
primary way to orient to Freedom and a living Grace.
I still attend church and love people who do. I know that the hindrances
of Protestant architecture and practice are not the end story.
Connection with the Divine underscores all worship. People and God
can transcend the limits of any architecture. I also know how hard it is
to change the forms we inherit. This humbles me every day when I think
of brothers and sisters around the world whose religious practices seek
to reassure and offer a sense of the Divine.
7
But this does not stop me from seeing the weed of whiteness in the
forms used by the church. Like Jesus rattling the Pharisaic structures,
then taking big time outs in the
desert, I can tell the difference
between the Tree of Grace and the
weed of control. It’s in my body too.
In any place that uses sexist
language or repressive ideologies, I
work hard in church to stay both
loving and conscious.
If we want to tackle “White
Privilege” and see whiteness
running through the veins of our
history we need to recognize it in
our embodied reality.
I felt waves of anxiety even before I came to Boston.
I forgot the extent to which my people were in trouble for raising their
voices as leaders and thinkers. Anne Hutchinson, her friend and mentee
Mary Dyer a Quaker martyr, her brother-in law Rev. John Wheelwright,
and family members like her cousin, my great grandfather William
Wentworth were early arrivers from England. After only a few years
they were all banished from Massachusetts.
Do you remember Anne’s story? She was the first woman in the U.S.
whose wisdom on freedom of speech, religion, and a divine order was
recorded by both courts of the early government and church. She is the
only woman to found one of the original states, Rhode Island.
Anne initially received a warm welcome. Early Bostonians greatly
appreciated her skill as a midwife. When she began holding prayer
meetings for women to discuss the Sunday sermon in her home, John
Cotton, her mentor, called her well respected and esteemed, doing much
good. 4
4
MassMoments.
8
Midwives know we have powerful body
wisdom. Anne knew well about the body
having birthed fifteen children. She knew
that a woman could directly encounter
divine will directly and receive
revelations. It was evident and in her
nature to be enraptured. So much so that
both she and Mary Dyer were accused by
Puritan Governor John Winthrop to be
“addicted to Divine Revelation.”
As a woman of intelligence and charisma
with a world-changing message her
mentor called her one of the most talented
ministers he’d ever met. For her strength
and integrity, she was put on trial.
Will the real Puritans please stand up?
Governor John Winthrop conducted Anne’s inquisitions first in a civic
trial and then in a church trial. This reminds me of the Presbyterian
minister Rev. Janie Spahr, a Presbyterian minister and friend who was
repeatedly put on trial for performing “unauthorized” marriages of gay
and lesbian couples. Janie never wavers in love and divine inspiration.5
So too, Anne boldly answered each of Winthrop’s questions with
challenging questions of her own. To which he responded angrily, "You
have rather been a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer;
and a Magistrate than a subject.”
Anne’s chief crime was usurping male authority. 6
At the end of the civic trial Anne addressed the court giving them her
judgment. She told them that her source of her knowledge was divine
revelation and ended by stating:
5
6
https://sites.google.com/site/revjaniespahr/
MassMoments.com
9
"and if you go on in this course you will bring a curse upon you
and your posterity and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. “
History says, “The judges were aghast.”
A woman’s curse is powerful. Something of it is truly alive in Roxbury
today. The church burnt down four times. It doesn't look good. On the
other hand it now plays a role in the Black Lives Matter Movement while
the White Liberal Church and its people struggle for an identity and a
future.
I take ancestry seriously.
Ancestry is more than spirit stuff. Trauma and beauty arise through our
lineages. Joy de Gruy names this reality in her book, Post Traumatic
Slave Syndrome.
I believe it is time to similarly diagnose white folks whose ancestral
family trees were clear cut by the Patriarchal Roman Ruling Class
Paradigm that came to be called “Christian” by Constantine in 312.AD.
Our young and old are struggling. Many faithful people live with
constant anxiety. I hear statements like, “Forty percent of students
require medication.” Sleep disorders indicate that we can’t find rest.
Do we know we are bred in a a diseased paradigm that deters the
natural genius of grace and spiritual intelligence in our bodies?
Genealogy is a top pastime of white people today. We are uncovering
admirable and appalling family histories. It is harder to overlook the
ways the white people have perpetuated and fought slavery, war, and
the pursuit of profit over human dignity. But this is a source of hope as
well. When my friend Katrina Browne discovered that her family
provided the shipping for the slave trade from Bristol, Rhode Island to
West Africa and back she created the film Traces of the Trade and
dedicated her life to healing from racism.
All through my young adulthood I knew little about my ancestry. Then
in my 50’s I discovered that my mother is a descendant of Ashkenazi
10
Jews on one side and descends on the other without interruption to the
Doomsday Book written in 1086 as a member of the ruling class.
When these hidden family trees became visible it drastically shifted my
self-image and bodily experience of identity from being the stock of
laundry workers and drunks to include some of the most affluent, welleducated white people in England and America, people like William
Wentworth and his cousin Anne Maybury Hutchinson.
Sarah Vowel in her book The Wordy Shipmates beautifully recounts my
family’s Puritan endeavor with cheeky humor. She tells how the Alford
England rebels pulled up roots with every cent they could muster in a
radical quest for the freedom to think and act. They plunged headlong
into the “new” world.
I visited Alford, Lincolnshire with my sister. At the gate of the old
Anglican stone church just outside of town, I met the caretaker, an
eccentric beekeeper straight out of a BBC mystery. With a bee bonnet
on his head and sputtering concerns about hives around the world he let
us into the small stone sanctuary that has no electricity to this day.
What an uncommon, peaceful beauty within those stone walls! It was
probably a far cry from the Puritan storm that brewed in the heart and
mind of Anne’s father, my great uncle Rev. Maybury who was put under
house arrest for contesting his ecclesiastical higher-ups. Being at home,
he poured his intelligent care into Anne as she grew into a gifted teacher
and student of John Cotton, father of Puritan thought.
But Anne was more than a good student. She was a mystic. She loved to
commune with God and to pray. She had a vital connection to Divine
Grace and felt that it was as authoritative as scripture or any external
authority. When she arrived in Boston she did not hesitate to lead
conversations with women.
The first Governor, Henry Vale, a young man and prior neighbor in
Alford, went eagerly to Anne’s classes. Her teachings were popular, so
popular that controversy brewed. In 1636 Roxbury minister Thomas
11
Weld instituted and oversaw Harvard University so that young male
clergy would be properly trained.7
A group of clergy and men of influence elected John Winthrop, a
powerful lawyer and landholder. Vale was heartbroken.8
The one percent got its foothold.
In a 2012 lecture on women at Harvard Lizabeth Cohen reinforced that
Harvard was “established in 1636 to educate an all-male clergy and
that, Harvard by the 18th century had developed into a college to
educate the “sons of the arriving mercantile elite.” During the industrial
revolution of the 19th century, Boston bluebloods and Harvard, “rose
together.” “The Harvard Graduate School of Education was the first to
admit women in 1920. Harvard Medical School accepted its first female
enrollees in 1945. While women began petitioning Harvard Law
School for admittance in 1871 that school didn’t open its doors until
1950, 20 years behind most law schools in the country.
7
Vale returned to England until the restoration of the monarchy where
he was imprisoned for his role in its rebellion and then hanged.
8
12
Governor Winthrop instituted his vision for nation building over people
building by claiming America as the New Jerusalem, the city upon the
hill that would change the world, an idea invoked again by the Bush
family.
In spite of the fact that Bostonians were resentful of Winthrop's
overbearing manner, Winthrop, Thomas Weld and their followers set in
motion the patterning that we call a Christian nation. They wielded an
authoritative manner that led to adopting a work ethic and the
hierarchy of word over action. They wrapped politics up in the brocade
cloth of aristocratic European male minds that seek to advance material
wealth rather than the greater social good.
Winthrop gave support to the total massacre of local Pequot indigenous
men, women, and children in what was called a “Just War..9 He also
Winthrop and the Pequot peoples
The English conquerors appropriated Pequot lands under claims of a
just war. They essentially declared the Pequot extinct by prohibiting
speaking the name of the people. The few Pequot who managed to
evade death or slavery later recovered from captivity by the Mohegan
and were forced onto reservations in Connecticut Colony.
9
The colonists attributed the success of ending the heroic resistance of
the Pequot tribe at their hands to an act of God:
“
Let the whole Earth be filled with his glory! Thus the lord was
pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us
their Land for an Inheritance.[20]:20
”
This was the first instance wherein Algonquian peoples of what is now
southern New England encountered European-style warfare. The idea of
"total war" was new to them. After the Pequot War, there were no
significant battles between native peoples and colonists for about 38
years. This long period of peace came to an end in 1675 with King
Philip's War.
13
endorsed the enslavement of Indian captives and others as part of the
national norm
Anne’s recorded trials, both civic and religious, tell us what is at stake
when we hide this early history. At her excommunication from the
church her own mentor, Rev. John Cotton, betrayed her. Said, John
Cotton,
"You cannot Evade the Argument...that filthie Sinne of the
Communitie of Woemen; and all promiscuous and filthie cominge
togeather of men and Woemen without Distinction or Relation of
Marriage, will necessarily follow...Though I have not herd, nayther
do I thinke you have bine unfaythfull to your Husband in his
Marriage Covenant, yet that will follow upon it."[82] He concluded,
"Therefor, I doe Admonish you, and alsoe charge you in the name
of Ch[rist] Je[sus], in whose place I stand...that you would sadly
consider the just hand of God agaynst you, the great hurt you have
done to the Churches, the great Dishonour you have brought to
Je[sus] Ch[rist], and the Evell that you have done to many a poore
soule..[83]
Them the Governor happily said, "Thus it pleased the Lord to heare the
prayers of his afflicted people ... and by the care and indevour of the
wise and faithfull ministers of the Churches, assisted by the Civill
authority, to discover this Master-piece of the old Serpent ..." He ended
by noting, "It is the Lords work, and it is marvelous in our eyes."[76]
But, his was not the last word. When Anne Hutchinson walked toward
the door, her friend Mary Dyer, put her arm in Anne's. A man by the
door said, "The Lord sanctifie this unto you.” Hutchinson replied, "Better
to be cast out of the Church than to deny Christ."
Wikipedia commentators conclude that, “With Hutchinson's
departure…religious orthodoxy was secured as the intellectual focus of
the community…[87]Freedom of expression and religious choice were
terminated as personal options. The established church was now the
14
"sole repository of religious truth,” in control of doctrines and
morals.[88]
To stop the Hutchinson family from creating a home in exile in Rhode
Island, Rev. Thomas Weld went on to fabricate a false document that
ordered their removal. While he failed in this, his “painful preaching”
and disrepute followed him back to England where he served until his
death in Gateshead and was known as the “Insultor.”
But the damage was done, not just by Weld and Winthrop but by all the
gentlemen committed to personal gain and social success in a white
landowners’ world. His victory is in the institution of forms. Otherwise
his name is almost completely disregarded.
Anne was a prophet of grace.
If Anne’s understanding of freedom through inner divine connection
had been endorsed we might be striving today for a society whose
physical actions honor each and every divine soul whatever color,
gender or income.
Her dream of cultivating each person’s inner light and particularly that
of women had a different path in mind than that of relentless HARD
WORK, THE NEED TO COMPETE, and to KEEP OURSELVES DECENT
AND IN ORDER as SUBJECTS OF THE GREATEST WHITE HALLMARK –
WORDY SUPERIORITY.
The U.S. would have systems that include heart and soul intelligence as
a part of decision making. Women’s voices, designed to engage empathy
and social regard, would be part of ALL major conversations. Slavery,
racism, education, politics, and health care would not have been granted
authority if women had been offered a place to make a moral
contribution to the early designs of the United States.
When I left the workshop at the end of the day I looked up at the outside
of the Roxbury Church and recalled Anne’s curse on the way the early
leaders disassociated people from Divine Nature and each other. Aren’t
we seeing diminished authority in the White Liberal Church? Very few
15
churched men and women are left to truly profit from this hierarchical
form.
In case we are tempted to think that Anne was a crazed renegade
religious leader, her whole community of farmers and merchants had
their hunting rifles removed. The magistrates considered these faithful
people a threat. Isn’t what happened to these white folk similar to
others who were disarmed, declassified, murdered, raped and
castrated? On the other hand why didn’t people stick up for these
leaders.
The Hope
Grace is still here. It is tree. It is also a vast grass root system extending
around the planet holding our soul soil in place and humbly feeding
people and creatures.
Grace is a magnificently resistant strain born of wild seed that cannot be
eradicated no matter how hard the forces of greed work. It arises from a
tenacious love that lives in the bodies of the global majority, people of
color, and white people awake to its power.
Anne and the “other Puritans” carried that seed. Many a religious
person today, schooled in care for community, social justice, and earth
care who know how to reach beyond the self to the WE plant Grace
seeds wherever two or more gather in body, mind, heart and spirit.
InterPlay is rooted in the physicality of grace—the ability to notice in
our bodies the bits and patterns of ease, goodness and beauty, as well as
the patterns of whatever creates grace. From noticing we practice
orienting to grace to create more of it for our own good and the good of
others. This is what we call body wisdom. Grace is our cornerstone.
Along with Phil Porter, my colleague and cofounder, we know that grace
needn’t be a theological word. Grace is a dance word and a word for
blessing and thanksgiving. Grace points to amazingly mysterious
interventions and ordinary bounty.
16
Grace powerfully rises when we dance with life. As indigenous people
uphold, and as Jesus said in a last supper hymn the night he was
betrayed. “He who does not dance, does not know what comes to pass.”
10
Today’s people are dismantling systems of white authority or seeing
them dismantled by war, hate, and poverty. We know we are connected.
Technology amplifies this fact and is changing our worldview so that we
see ourselves again living in a great web.
We can change the Race Dance.
Based on Audre Lorde’s wisdom, the great African American teacher
who said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,”
the Changing the Race Dance Workshop that Soyinka Rahim and I lead
and workshops led by InterPlayers of color don’t use the master’s tools.
This makes these workshops both wonderful and challenging. Most of
us being “colonized” by these forms are not even aware that the
master’s tools keep us all away from our deepest grace and wisdom.
Dance, song and stories gift us with the ability to be free, to take care of
ourselves, and to notice our experience and have it affirmed. This
creates a body politic that is different than that of the Roxbury
sanctuary.
Racism is a body deal.
Because racism lives in a socialization that harms everyone by
separating and objectifying all bodies, it break with divine love and
injures the soul that of everyone. Let’s wake up to the fact that racism is
not just an ideology or legal issue. Racism is in our dance. Unchallenged,
our stifling, seated, muted and wordy race dances affect our ability to
shift the racist patterns dancing in us.
Art creates the future.
10
Apocryphal Acts of John.
17
These words sum up what I learned in studies at the Graduate
Theological Union and in the work I did at the Western Institute for
Social Research studying Augusta Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed.
I am convinced that to move people to health we need to move in new
ways. We don't want a system based in word alone that continually
demands that its members look outside for validation coming from an
external authority. We need to weave each person’s body, mind, heart,
and soul, no matter who they are, into the vast fabric of social wisdom.
This weaving must include the group wisdom as well.
Simple storytelling, movement, and voice are needed more than ever to
create the hopeful
path that will allow
us to recover from
racism and to find
the group wisdom
and inspiration
that builds people
up. In addition, a
most profound
change happens
when truth is felt
and practiced in
body mind heart
and soul. Some call
this a second birth.
I personally believe that to heal from racism we need a Loving Spiritual
Intelligence. We need to learn from great social and spiritual wisdoms.
We need practices that ennoble people and offer gracious ways to
interrupt patterns that cause disease.
We need to address our overriding reliance on language and spend
more time listening to people. Speeches and ideas that are hierarchically
patterned keep us out of action and apart from our inner authority.
We need to tell our story and enter into different narratives.
18
We need to bridge people and build hope through parables, poetry,
movement, song, food, and stillness.
Changing "thought forms" is slow work. Some think it is impossible. But,
we know that the makers of grace, artists, dancers, and thinkers are
powerful and often the first to be killed in a war. It is not unreasonable
to think that we can accelerate racial healing the through folk art forms
that connect and ignite the broad, empathetic, embodied “WE” nature.
What rituals hook people up to the global web of peace?
What beauty way will create peace?
Can we return to eating, telling our stories, meditating and dancing
our prayers to find our way back to grace?
Wise elders
see and sense
the
mysterious
presence of
the beauty
way. As soon
as they are
able to leave
work they
return to
beauty.
Millennials
also seek this
path. The very
young are always ready.
My 6th grade teacher in 1966, Mr. Laney cast the grace seed over to me
when he said our graduation theme would be "I have a dream." My
school, Normont Elementary was in the “Projects." Mr. Laney was my
one and only African American teacher. I loved him and was thrilled
when he invited me to choreograph and perform "Happy Talk" from the
musical “South Pacific.” He was the first teacher to call out my
kinesthetic intelligence.
19
Happy talk, keep talking happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do,
You gotta have a dream,
If you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
Great dreams can be tasted, felt, and seen. They are carried in the
healthy wisdom of embodied, passionate humans! When there are two
or more carrying the dream, the world changes.
Getting IN THE DANCE is so much easier than resisting it. As Martin
Luther King said, "We must use time creatively, and forever realize
that the time is always right to do right."
20
Additional Notes
Wikipedia: Anne Hutchinson
Anne was drawn to John Cotton's theology of absolute grace, and this
pointed her life in the direction of study and interpretation of God's
word.[13] Taking further Cotton's doctrine of the Holy Ghost dwelling
within a "justified person,” Hutchinson "saw herself as a mystic
participant in the transcendent power of the Almighty."[13] This theology
was empowering to women in a society where the status of a woman
was determined by her husband or father; in Hutchinson's case, it gave
her a voice.[14] The theology of direct personal continuing revelation that
Hutchinson embraced opposed the doctrine of the closed canon of
biblical revelation, which was basic to the Reformed doctrines held by
the majority of English settlers at that time.
While Hutchinson adopted Cotton's minority view of divine grace being
the only means to salvation, as opposed to any assistance through
works, she did share the mainstream view of most Puritans in
emphasizing "the need for an inner experience of God's regenerating
grace as a mark of election."[10] Beyond this, however, she espoused
some views that were more radical, such as devaluing the material
world and submerging herself in the Holy Spirit.[15] She also believed
in mortalism, the belief that when the body dies, the soul dies
also.[15] Another example of her divergence from the mainstream
experience is that she saw herself as a prophetess. Recorded examples
of her making prophetic statements occurred before she left England,
while on the ship bound for New England, and most notably during her
trial when she foresaw her own deliverance.[15] While prophesying
played a small part in the religious culture of Elizabethan England, for a
woman to do this was an open display of defiance toward the authority
that men derived from their gender.[15]
_________________________________________
Anne moved to what is now Brooklyn and died in an attack led by
Wampage I,[1] aka Anhõõke in a 1500 strong retaliation by
Algonquin peoples for the Pavonia Massacre, where 129 Dutch
soldiers descended on the camps and killed 120 Native Americans,
21
including women and children. Having opposed the attack, de Vries
described the events in his journal:
“
Infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to
pieces in the presence of their parents, and pieces thrown into
the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to
small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably
massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were
thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers
endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come
on land but made both parents and children drown...
”
Colonists had lived in peace with the Native Americans for nearly two
decades, becoming friends, business partners, employees, employers,
drinking buddies, and bed partners. The Council was alarmed about the
consequences of their Dutch leader Kieft's proposed crusade. As
importantly, the Native Americans supplied the furs and pelts that were
the economic lifeblood and the raison d'etre of the colony.
The attacks united the Algonquian peoples in the surrounding areas
against the Dutch to an extent not previously seen.
Wampage I,[1] aka Anhõõke was the Sachem of the Siwanoy Indians
of Westchester County, New York.
It is believed that the Siwanoys, under the leadership of Wampage, led
the massacre of the family of Anne. It has been written that Wampage
himself was the murderer of Hutchinson, and that he adopted the name
of Anhõõke (Anne Hoek) due to an Indian tradition of taking the name
of a notable person personally killed. On June 27, 1654, 50,000 acres
(200 km²) of land reaching from what is currently the Bronx, west
along Long Island Sound, to the Hutchinson River, were granted to
Thomas Pell under the Treaty Oak near Bartow Pell Mansion in Pelham,
with Wampage signing. The other Siwanoys who signed the treaty were
Shawanórõckquot, Poquõrúm, Wawhamkus and Mehúmõw. Cockho,
Kamaque and Cockinsecawa were three additional Siwanoys who
22
signed as "Indyan Witnesses" to the "Articles of Agreement" section of
the Treaty.[2]
Sources indicate that Wampage's daughter Ann (or Anna) married Thomas
Pell II, who was the third lord of Pelham Manor.[3][4][5]
The Founder of Concord Peter Bulkley or Bulkeley (January 31, 1583
– March 9, 1659) was an influential early Puritan minister who left
England for greater religious freedom in the American colony
of Massachusetts. He was a founder of Concord,[1] and was named by
descendant Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem about
Concord, Hamatreya.[2] He was one of the ministers who sat during the
church trial of Anne Hutchinson, which resulted in her
excommunication from the Boston church.[8
American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Women
Who Defied the Puritans, by Eve LaPlante (Harper Collins, 2004).
"Anne Hutchinson: Brief Life of Harvard's 'Midwife,'" by Peter
Gomes, Harvard Magazine (November/December, 2002).
Boston Globe, Interview with Eve LaPlante, "Heretic, or Centuries Before
her Time?" May 8, 2004.
Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England, by
Jane Kamensky (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Mary Dyer
In her twenties, Mary was a close friend and student of Anne Marbury
Hutchinson. Mary studied Quaker beliefs in the 1650s, she learned that
they called divine revelation the Inner Light. Evangelical and
Pentecostal Christians today would recognize it as the Holy Spirit
speaking to one’s heart. Secular people would term it a conscience. top10-things-you-may-not-know-about.html
BELLEAU, a village and a parish in Louth district, Lincoln. The village
stands near the Boston and Great Grimsby railway, in the vicinity of
Claythorpe station, 4 miles NW by N of Alford. The parish includes also
the chapelry of Claythorpe; and its Post Town is Alford. The name
Belleau is derived from some fine springs of water arising from chalk
23
rocks. Ruins exist of a monastery, comprising two gateways and part of
a turret. The lands were given, in the time of Cromwell, to Sir Henry
Vane. The living is a rectory, united with Aby, in the diocese of Lincoln.
Value, £300.* Patron, Lord Willoughby d'Eresby. The church is an
ancient edifice, with a small tower; and contains a fine effigy of a
crusader.
Lecture from Eve LaPlante author of American Jezebel
file://localhost/çhttps/::www.youtube.com:watch%3Fv=eRKwdFzINO
24