“The Serpent says to Eve, ‘You see things and you say why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say why not?”
– from play, “Back to Methuselah” by George Bernard Shaw
When I was a child, I had a vision that not all old Puritans were all hard-hearted. I was sitting at the dinner table with 4 younger siblings, my mother trying to feed us all amid ongoing chaos and my father more successfully trying to ignore us all. My brother, just a year younger than I kept teasing me knowing that he could not be heard above the din. He must have hit a sore spot because I threw a fork at him. My mother immediately sent me up to bed with no supper, she did not even ask my side of the story. I may have protested but didn’t even consider not obeying. I was sitting in bed fuming about how unfair life was when a woman came into the room and lovingly tucked me in. My anger dissolved and I fell asleep. I knew it was not my mother, but who in the world could it have been? The scientist in me tried to check it out the next morning. I asked my mother if she had come up to tuck me into bed. She looked perplexed but curtly answered ‘no’. I had absolutely no idea what had happened, except to wonder if I was crazy. I decided to would be safer to say no more about it.
Years later I was studying to be a chaplain in a big city hospital in a predominately Catholic
neighborhood. More than once, patients described visions similar to my own. They all believed that their comforter was Mary, Mother of Jesus. They practiced a religion surrounded by pictures of holy visions as I did not. The earliest Protestants vigorously removed all visual art from their religious spaces, so we had no way to think about visions. The patients’ stories made me wonder if my vision had religious meaning.
I was not sure what that meaning was, but I knew from studying myths and non-scriptural religions that many people throughout time would have interpreted my vision as a visit from an ancestor, a great-grandmother. If so, it was possible that my Puritan ancestors did not all have hearts of stone. Some may have been loving. If that was so, maybe suffering was not a punishment and maybe snakes were not evil. This converted New Puritan started to follow the snakes all the way down.
Years later, I found a framed print of ‘the Sistine Madonna’ stored at my grandparent's house. I realized that I had seen that picture, which hung on a wall amongst prints of cows in their farmhouse before I had my vision. I was given a way to think about vision by those harsh puritans, but it was through art, not religion.
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