Rainy day, reading

This was a quiet day. I changed the sheets, I made mayonnaise, I watched my cat sleep. I practiced for a while. I ruffled the pages of my calendar a few times. Talked with my mom on the phone. Mailed a CD to a friend in Canada (that's you, Dan). Thought about art, and writing, and listened to the rain falling, falling. The perfect day. I was going to hop a bus and explore Arthur Avenue, but the rain, and the open book, and a certain ongoing dreaminess kept me home.

So I finished reading Eve LaPlante's American Jezebel. This is a biography of Anne Hutchinson, a woman of great spiritual power who was one of the early settlers of Boston in the mid-1600s. She held the belief that one could receive direct personal revelation from God, and that faith alone was necessary for salvation. Simple obedience of religious laws availed nothing. As I see it, these two tenets knocked out the need for ministers and for a lot of what the church had become. In a theocratic society like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that made her dangerous. For this independent thinking and for the audacity to teach it, she was tried in court, excommunicated, and banished from the colony. You can read a transcript of her trial here. It's riveting. She and some of her followers then settled in Rhode Island; following the death of her husband, she begged permission of the more free-thinking Dutch to settle in New Amsterdam. They said yes, and she moved again, this time to what is now the Pelham Bay area of the Bronx. Does the name "Hutchinson River" ring a bell? She was the Hutchinson.

And does the name "Harvard" ring an even louder bell? LaPlante says that Harvard was founded partly in reaction to Hutchinson's trial, in order to educate ministers of the church to steer their flocks safely away from the ideas of direct divine guidance and antinomianism. That's an awful lot of reaction to one female, yes?

The order of banishment was revoked 350 years later, in 1987, when Gov. Michael Dukakis pardoned Hutchinson. I guess it was time.