"Puritan Ghosts" A letter from the Congregational Library

Puritan Ghosts

Last week a church meeting hit the front page of the Boston Globe. This was no ordinary meeting, of course. Members of the Old South Church, a congregation gathered in 1669, had decided to sell some ancient and valuable treasures: a copy of the Bay Psalm Book and nineteen pieces of rare and beautiful communion silver.

According to the Globe article, the sale of these two items would net the congregation somewhere north of $18 million, money which would allow them to take care of long-deferred maintenance and to expand their already vigorous outreach to the city.

On one level this makes great sense. The Psalm Book and the silver have been in the custody of the Boston Public Library and Museum of Fine Arts for decades; it’s not as if their absence would disrupt the daily round of life at Old South. But the ruckus that got the Globe’s attention was about something far more difficult to define, the nature of the church’s obligation to its founders.

There is certainly something uncomfortable about selling a gift, whether it is from your grandmother or a hallowed band of seventeenth-century Puritans. And I am sure some of the members of Old South Church were imagining an angry buzz in the Puritan ghost world, and the shaking of metaphysical heads over the ingratitude of their spiritual descendants.

But I don’t. I have no problem with Old South’s decision. In fact, I kind of doubt that the Puritan founders would have been all that upset over it either. They definitely would have been alarmed to see their singing book and communion silver—objects they created for use in worship—being treated like sacred objects. If there was anything they disliked, it was the reverence Anglicans and Roman Catholics paid to material things, whether relics or clerical vestments or communion chalices. The piety of those early Puritans was as plain as the simple wooden meetinghouses they built for worship. Anything more, they believed, would become impediments on the path toward God.

What they would have really wanted was for their descendants to take them seriously. They would want them to be curious about who they were and what they believed and how they saw the world. That doesn’t mean that Old South needs to revert to its Puritan roots—it just means the congregation needs to stay in vital conversation with its tradition. It means that members do not drop off the membership rolls and out of sight once they are dead. The congregation’s passion for the voiceless and disenfranchised can extend beyond the living to encompass the entire community of saints gathered at Old South.

That kind of connection with the past is far more challenging than deciding whether to sell books and silver. Maintaining a meaningful connection with the ancestors—in all their strengths and frailties—requires all of the creativity and care we can muster. I hope that this conversation will grow and continue, not just at Old South but in all churches curious about their history. We here at the Congregational Library would like nothing better to help smooth the way.

Peggy Bendroth, Executive Director,
The Congregational Library