Pelicans in the Wilderness

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, pp. 60-63:

Thomas Shepard brought together all these usages of the pilgrim metaphor in one of his most famous sermon series, The Sound Beleever. After elaborating on what saints might look for in the life to come, Shepard assured his auditors that they were approaching the end of the journey. His description of the danger and afflictions, including the common image of the "weary pilgrim," was much like John Bunyan's imaginative vision a little later. We can reappropriate some of the passage's full rhetorical effect -- and therefore its impact for the worshiper -- by resetting Shepard's phrases in poetic form.

This is therefore the great glory
of all those whom God hath called
to the fellowship of his deare Son;

and which is yet more, blessed be God the time is not long,
but that we shall feel what now we doe but heare of,
and see but a little of,
as we use to doe of things afar off:

We are here but strangers, and have no abiding city,
we look for this that hath foundations;

and therefore let sinne presse us downe;
and weary us out with wrastling with it;

let Satan tempt,
and cast his darts at us;

let our drink be our teares day and night,
and our meat gall and wormwood;

let us be shut up in choaking prisons,
and cast out for dead in the streets,
nay upon dung-hils, and none to bury us;

let us live alone as Pelicans in the wildernesse,
and be driven among wild beasts into deserts;

let us be scouraged, and disgraced,
stoned, sawn asunder, and burned;

let us live in sheep-skins, and goat-skins,
destitute, afflicted, tormented
(as who looks not for such days shortly?)

yet oh brethren, the time is not long,
but when we are at the worst,
and death ready to swallow us up;
we shall cry out,
Oh glory, glory,
oh welcome glory.11

The extravagance of this passage, powerful as it is homiletically, seems at first to bear little relationship to the fairly comfortable life New Englanders enjoyed soon after settlement. Shepard's meaning becomes evident, however, when it is understood that these words were no rhetorical flight of his own invention, but a rhapsodic conflation of phrases from the agonized Psalm 102 and the "strangers and pilgrims" passage in Hebrews 11. God's pilgrim people had suffered at the hands of the world in the past; Puritans understood the people of the Bible as ancestors and prototypes. More recently Queen Mary had exiled and executed English reformers. In the days of the Great Migration Archbishop Laud was moving against the Puritans; some were again being "shut up in choaking prisons." If Psalm 102 gave poignant voice to the experience of persecution -- "Mine enemies reproach me all the day...I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping" -- it also expressed hope of divine vindication in the Kingdom, "when the people are gathered together, and kingdoms, to serve the Lord" (vv. 8-9, 22).

Shepard exhorted the saints to continue on the painful journey to the Kingdom. They must not stop, contented, before reaching the goal. Shepard, it seems, almost longed for the day when suffering would once again descend upon the saints. His words ring as a call to asceticism and strife. His repetition of "let," meaning "no matter that," was also an exhortation: "Let our drink be teares day and night...Let us live alone as Pelicans in the wildernesse." Even when conditions were relatively comfortable and stable, as they were in New England, saints must not define their homes in earthly terms.

The terrors Shepard enumerated were not outlandish when applied to events in Europe, and he prophesied that the wars of religion would shortly spread to engulf New England. The conflict, Shepard believed, would ultimately escalate into the complete destruction that was to precede the Second Coming of Christ. He again anticipated Bunyan and echoed Genesis 19 and Revelation 6-9 as he cried:

Away to the mountaines,
and hasten from the towns and cities of your habitation,
where the grace of Christ is published, but universally despised,
you blessed called ones of the Lord Jesus;

for the dayes are coming,
wherein for this sin, the heavens and earth shall shake,
the sunne shall be turned into darknesse,
and the moone into blood,
and mens hearts failing for feare of the horrible plagues
which are comming upon the face of the earth.

Dreame not of faire weather,
expect not better days,
till you heare men say,
Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.12

The Puritan spiritual pilgrimage was the journey from the city of sin through the wilderness of humiliation and mortification to the heavenly city of God's Kingdom.

11. Shepard, Sound Beleever, 316-317.
12. Ibid., 318-319.

To See Things As They Really Are

Jonathan Mitchell, "A Letter...to His Friend" (1649), quoted in Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, p. 91:

And truly when I am most near God,
I have no greater request than this
for my self and you, that God would use
any means to make us see things really as they are,
and pound our hearts all to pieces,
and make indeed sin most bitter,
and Christ most sweet, that we might be
both humbled and Comforted to purpose!

Robert Burns, To a Louse (1786):

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

[O would some Power the gift to give us
To see ourselves as others see us!]

God's Plot

Thomas Shepard wrote in his Journal of meditations in the night. One such concerned his own end, along with "God's main plot and end of all." This particular Journal entry is recorded in, for example, Thomas Shepard, Meditations and Spiritual Experiences (1847), pp. 98-99; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (1982), p. 231; and in Michael McGiffert, ed., God's Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard's Cambridge (1972, 1994), pp. 99-100:

September 13 [1641]. In my meditations at night I found my heart desirous to live in this world and do good here and not to die. Hence I asked my heart the reason why I should not be desirous to die. And in musing on it I saw that Christ was ascended up to heaven that not here, but there, all his elect might one day behold his glory and love him and glorify him forever. And I saw that this was God's main plot and the end of all, to make Christ very glorious and so beloved in heaven forever, where that which I desired most in this world (viz., that Christ might not only be precious but very dear and precious) should be perfectly accomplished. And hereupon I secretly desired this mercy and desired it for my children and brethren and all the churches, that though we were blind here and knew him not, loved him little, yet that this might be our portion at last. And I did feel my desires stirred up after this out of a secret love to Christ Jesus. It would do me good if he might be at last magnified thus. Then I inquired, What is the great thing I should desire in this world? And I saw that it was the beginning of that which shall be perfected in heaven, viz., (1) to see and know Christ, though obscurely; (2) to take Christ and receive him and possess him; (3) to love him; (4) to bless him in my heart, with my mouth, by my life. And in this last clause I saw that I should study and stand for discipline and all the ways of worship, out of love to Christ, viz., to show my thankfulness.