Can you picture the passengers of the Mayflower, crowding the deck in the bright cold air after two months of dark, stinking closeness, looking for the first time upon the wild coast of a New World that they hoped to make their home? Can you imagine their excitement, their weariness, their great apprehension? Their existence was so precarious, their course being dictated as much by the direction of the wind and the strength of the tides as by human intention.
Perhaps the native people who lived in the area where the interlopers would settle watched from the trees as the ship anchored and the newcomers loaded their shallop with cargo and rowed it toward the shore.
The coast would seem uninhabited to the newcomers. All along the southern New England coast and the Cape, indigenous tribes had been decimated by plague brought by earlier European explorers or settlers. The area had once been as densely populated as Europe, with communities that were centuries old, but by 1620—just three or four years since infection had struck—only about 10% of the population remained. Whole settlements had been wiped out, leaving no one to burry the dead. And now conflicts were erupting between neighboring tribes as they struggled to establish a new power structure along the emptied coast.
For both the native inhabitants and the European intruders, the whole world was new. The forces that would shape their lives were unprecedented, the future nakedly unpredictable, insecure, and presenting bewildering dilemmas and risks at every turn.
We know something—not enough—about how the story unfolded. Our nation is culpable for having shaped what one-sided information we have from the Europeans into a neat, self-serving myth of national origin. And that myth has been repeated so often that everything that happens in the story seems inevitable, if not divinely ordained.
More recently, this myth of national origin has been confronted by the Native American telling. Far from being the forward march of Divine Providence, theirs is a story of genocide, displacement, and cultural disintegration. Rather than making history, they were subjected to it.
And yet, in some ways, all the various peoples and characters involved did make this history together by their fateful choices. Standing on the front edge of time, leaning into a void of unknowing with so little to base their choices on, they sometimes chose well and other times disastrously.
Perhaps we should consider the possibility that what happened was not all inevitable—but that some things might have been different. Some of the choices honored human bonds, some choices destroyed them; some choices kept the future open to constructive possibilities, while other choices narrowed the future by creating permanent hatreds.
If we can imagine that the events which unfolded were not all inevitable, it reminds us to recognize the power and responsibility of our own freedom, our own choices, now, as we too lean into an unknown future.
One of the recurring themes in Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, Mayflower, is the forming of the compact, or covenant, or treaty, or agreement—a reciprocal promise made between parties. Recognizing their vulnerability, interdependence and mutual need, some of the players in this story knew they would benefit from cooperating with each other, and suffer if there was conflict between them. They knew—the local tribes and the English—that, like it or not, their fates were tangled up with each other. Some knew that they would only survive if they accepted that interdependence willingly and consciously.
Philbrick’s book chronicles the first 50 years of the Plymouth Colony, and unpacks the very complicated political history that interweaves the fates of various English settlements, European groups, and native tribes. In the early years, they were all on more equal footing.
He follows that history through King Philip's War, which brought a permanent failure of the relations between the Native Americans and the settlers in the region. But it didn’t start out so hostile, and there were periods of real friendship and alliance between the Plymouth settlers and the Pokanoket tribe especially.
According to Philbrick, as long as they recognized that they needed each other, there was peace. But when they imagined they no longer did, when they rejected the bonds of friendship and interdependence, war was not far off.
So I want to share a couple examples of covenants made between our predecessors in the region that allowed them to progress in peace in ways they would not have been able to otherwise. And from there, I will say a bit about how the covenant remains the central unifying power for our own religious community, and for Unitarian Universalist congregations in general.
One of the first and most famous of these agreements was between the passengers of the Mayflower itself. The passengers comprised two very different groups—the Leideners and the Strangers. The Leideners were the Puritan Pilgrims we know from our early schooling. They had left England a few years earlier and settled briefly in Leiden, Holland, where they could worship according to their convictions. They were a deeply bonded congregation of believers, and found the other passengers crude and threatening—thus their reference to them as “Strangers.”
The Strangers were fortune seekers, many with ties to the shipping company that had sponsored the Mayflower’s journey in hopes it would eventually prove fruitful for ongoing trade. The Strangers had no interest in having their activities directed or limited by a bunch of pious religious radicals. Several threatened mutiny as soon as they hit land.
But the wiser ones among both groups knew that the entire endeavor of the colony, and the survival of every person, would rest on whether they could work constructively together. So as they approached Provincetown Harbor, they hammered out a basic agreement for civil community known as the Mayflower Compact:
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England…1620.
This compact served them well, as did their willingness to elect and follow the strong leadership first of John Carver and then William Bradford. In spite of their differences, they found security in a disciplined and cooperative way of life.
Other settlements, those that came before such as Jamestown, and those that came later such as the Wessagusset settlment 20 miles to the north of Plymouth, had a much harder time of it. Being comprised mostly of unattached men who had little in common, they had no explicit agreements about how they would progress together, or toward what they were striving. They fell into listless disorder, then malnutrition and despair. They did not prepare for winter and were generally unable to meet the harsh conditions of the New World.
The Wessagusset colonists took to thieving from the native communities because they had not the wherewithal to plan or plant or provide for themselves. Their misconduct introduced early corrosions into the cautious peace that had been established between the English and the local tribes, and thus they caused much suffering and discord in the end.
But before getting to that point, it’s worth visiting an earlier agreement that was made between the Plymouth settlers and the Pokanoket people through the negotiations of their king, or sachem, Massasoit. The Pokanokets had been devastated by the plague that swept through their communities and now were vulnerable to their neighbors, who would have them as subjects.
Initially Massasoit only hated the fact of the settlers' presence, and he called upon his shamans to deliver curses upon them to drive them out. But when it was clear they weren’t going anywhere, he changed tactics and decided it was in the interest of his people to seek an alliance.
When word came that Massasoit was coming to visit the camp, the Plymouth folks put on quite a formal reception for the “Indian King.” They recognized him as a great dignitary, not only because of his position among his own people, but because of his physical beauty and impressive self-presentation and the dignity and nobility with which he carried and conducted himself.
After various formalities, they made an agreement:
• They would not injure or steal from each other, and if members of either
party did so, they would be sent to the offended group for punishment.
• If either was attacked by a third party, each would aid the other.
• The Pokanokets would notify the other tribes in the area of the agreement,
and the English would notify their peers, that all might work together to maintain
peace.
• And when they would come together for dialogue, each group would
lay down its arms, and they would meet in a spirit of goodwill.
This formed the foundation of what became a deep alliance and friendship between the people of Plymouth and the Pokanokets, but especially between Massasoit and the leaders of Plymouth.
There’s an account of how Massasoit was, at one point, on the verge of death with typhus. All fearfully expected the great leader to die and his village was crowded with people paying their last respects. Edward Winslow was sent from Plymouth, recognized the particular illness with which he was suffering, applied the right interventions and nursed him back to health, along with several others in the village who had also been struck with the illness. Winslow’s writings about this incident indicate a strong mutual affection and respect between the two men.
This act of kindness was soon reciprocated by the Pokanokets through their allegiance to the Plymouth colonists when they came under attack by the Massachusetts tribe—a conflict that erupted when the Massachusetts became exasperated by the transgressions of the wayward Wessagusset colonists and retaliated on both English colonies.
As I mentioned, the overall history of relations between the colonists and the indigenous people is varied and complicated, and it gradually and tragically deteriorates into increasing conflict, sweeping mutual bigotry, and eventual catastrophe. There is no way to escape the fact that, in the end, it is a history of annihilation of the native peoples of this land, and the unchecked plundering of the New World's resources.
And yet there are messages in the midst of this history—regarding what makes for right relations and what destroys them, what actions protect the coexistence of diverse peoples and what actions will corrode that peace.
In this history, you can see the effect of particular players. Some were peacemakers and leaders who sought the common good. They wove people together. Some were blinded by personal agendas and grudges, or were directed by rash temperaments. They generated strife.
But the wise ones, acknowledging the insecurity of their situation and the potential for human impulsiveness, sought to safeguard against those injurious forces by creating behavioral covenants. The covenant seeks, at a moment of clarity and concord, to bind members of a community in an agreement, not only with one another, but with their best selves and their highest intentions—in the sight of their God. Moments of weakness will come, and good intentions will falter. But when a covenant has been established that calls upon the honor of all involved, and there is a rational will to follow it, it can provide the collective moorings needed to protect the community through the shifting winds of circumstance or when the tug of personal temperaments wrench the whole.
Throughout the early history of New England, both civil compacts and religious covenants shaped our national character and created the foundation that allowed fledgling communities to survive. The tradition of covenant, which binds a religious body together, is an unbroken tradition, and we are among its inheritors.
Unitarian Universalists congregations manage to shelter under one roof some surprising theological differences: We have here in our pews agnostics, mystics, people who do Buddhist practice, committed atheists, people who are Jewish by heritage and identity, folks who were raised Catholic or Protestant and still find the person of Jesus to be central in their spiritual seeking, and people who were raised Catholic or Protestant who do not retain any commitment to their religion of origin. And this list doesn’t cover it! It seems inconceivable to some onlookers that such differences could coexist harmoniously. What binds us? What keeps us from flying apart?
What binds us is the spirit of covenant.
Creeds dictate what a community of believers will believe. But we are a non-creedal faith. Rather than a creed, it is the covenant that holds us together, behaviorally, by naming how we seek to be with each other and how we seek to be with the world, and by setting before us an ideal of right relationship. Covenant allows us to be different in spiritual belief, different in social origin, different in circumstances, yet united in purpose. Covenant allows us to speak our diverging views and to wrestle out issues when we do not all see things the same way, while yet agreeing in the ultimate purposes of peace, connection, and service.
UU minister Tom Owen-Towle writes about this in his wonderful little primer on Unitarian Universalism, Freethinking Mystics With Hands:
Our congregations constitute the joining of hearts and heads, souls and arms, and they depend on us stakeholder pledging our troth. We don’t need trust if we never seek permanent bonds while wandering this earth. But trust is necessary for those who choose the joint of path of creative insecurity. We [too] are pilgrims—who pledge our troth to uphold a beloved community of personal growth, social justice, and spiritual awakening—for better, for worse, forever. Troth is all we have to offer, but it should prove sufficient adhesive to bind us together for the length of our shared journey. A sense of unshakable trust in the universe and in humanity makes love achievable, and death endurable.
Our predecessors, both the English and Native Americans, were fatefully called into a journey of “creative insecurity.” They needed a covenant of mutual trust as intensely as it could possibly be needed, and sometimes they acted from that, and sometimes they did not. We can see in retrospect what was possible when they pledged their troth, and we can see what ensued when they abandon, or never formed, such covenants.
We can keep this history alive, now, in our own choices. This history need not be totally sealed in the past, but can breathe into our current endeavors, and the immediate challenges we face: the challenges to peace, the challenges to the environment, and the challenges to civil society.
This little community here at Theodore Parker Church offers a small laboratory, a training ground, for those who wish to walk a “joint of path of creative insecurity.” Let us walk that path in mindfulness, in covenant, in hope, expressing our faith in the greater potentials of our humanity.
May it be so.
GRACE
(Shared before leaving the sanctuary to enjoy our community Thanksgiving feast)
This food that we are about to enjoy.
is a gift of the universe –
the earth, the sky, much hard work,
and much joyful fellowship.
May we live in a way that is worthy of this food.
Let it help us to transform our unwholesome states,
strengthen us in our truest purposes as a community of love,
and give us a vehicle to share our bounty,
as we seek to express the ways of friendship, understanding and peace.