Redemption by Faith in Mary Rowlandson’s “Captivity Narrative”

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

In the Captivity Narrative, Mary Rowlandson detailed her experiences and recounted her spiritual struggles during her ordeal as well as the realities of her psychological state. The Narrative relates one woman’s courage under horrendous conditions, its depiction of the people as savages and monsters typical of Puritan representations of a race that they never acknowledged as equals.

Redemption of faith is a core theme in Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative reflecting Puritan religion values and traditions, and a social conflict between Indian population and new comers.

Main body

In the Captivity Narrative Mary Rowlandson portrays various elements of religious life and the Puritan order of redemption. From the very beginning, Rowlandson depicts that throughout the nineteenth century, accounts depicting American Indians as savage barbarians were becoming a well-developed art. These chronicles of brutal treatment inflicted upon white captives by Indians at once appealed to and reinforced the anti-native prejudices. The Captivity Narrative clearly manifested the fear and hatred of colonists toward the native peoples of North America. In the Captivity Narrative Rowlandson described her captors as “murderous wretches” and a “barbarous enemy” (Rowlandson).

Mary Rowlandson depicts that Puritan divines put forth many elaborations of the order of redemption, all greatly resembling one another. Such consensus was possible because all writers drew from the biblical pattern of bondage and redemption, wilderness and promised land, death and resurrection. The pattern was, in fact, as old as Christianity, mediated by centuries of devotional tradition. “Penance and mortification” first freed the person from sin, making possible the awakening of the soul and advancement toward union with God. Almost every version of the regenerative experience included a dynamic two-part cycle of emptying and filling. Mary Rowlandson summarizes that ttis cycle was ubiquitous in Puritan spirituality. It was the rhythm dominating first conversion, the pattern of devotional activity after conversion, the preaching of the ministers, and the tenor of public ritual. The cycle played a formative role in the life of every man and woman in New England. The psychological stages of the pilgrimage of conversion and of progression in the spiritual life were described in detail by Mary Rowlandson, two of the greatest New England preachers of the first generation. In the writings of these men the order of redemption set forth is the same, both in general thrust and in most details. That preparation within the conversion experience was understood as preparation of and not by the sinner is clear from the horticultural metaphor that many Puritans used to describe the process. The spiritual pilgrimage through established stages was not simply an invention based on spiritual ideals. It described inner movements that many New Englanders experienced directly. The scheme the ministers preached was a map based on biblical principles and the tradition of centuries of devotional practice and religious experience. It was a scheme both evoked by and, in turn, evoking deep spirituality. The scheme presented in sermons and manuals was an accurate representation, first of all, because it described the experience of the ministers themselves (Holladay 22).

In order to portray redemption of faith, Mary Rowlandson included descriptions of savage and brutal scenes. Mary Rowlandson watched as Indians attacked her village and killed many inhabitants, including relatives, before her eyes. She was forced to accompany her captors into the wilderness. She lacked adequate food but gradually adapted remarkably well to Indian ways and the hardships of the journey. Her narrative is significant at the spiritual level, and Mrs. Rowlandson’s reflections on the personal meaning of her trial are what make it an exceptional piece of writing. Mrs. Rowlandson was not undergoing first conversion. She was a praying Christian, a saint of the church, before and throughout her captivity. The journey was one of trial and refinement, of reexperiencing the redemptive drama as growth in grace. God stripped away all the supports in her life, all the relationships and comforts that had led her into spiritual complacency. In this preparatory stage of humiliation.

All was gone; my husband gone (at least separated from me my children gone, my relations and friends gone, our house and home and all our comforts within doors and without. All was gone except my life, and I knew not but the next moment that might go too” (Rowlandson).

The town had represented security, first in the positive sense of assurance through the means of grace but also in the sinful sense of carnal security and the delusion of self-security. Humiliation at the hands of Indians brought her once more into absolute dependency on God. The wilderness was literally for her the chaos of life without God’s order, the place of temptation, and the place of trial. Two days after her capture the full realization of the journey ahead crashed upon her. “I must turn my back upon the town and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither:” The successive removes represented for her not simply the passage of time and distance, but movement farther and farther into the chaos of the wilderness. And, each remove took her more deeply out of her former self and into a new self. In fact, the very word “remove” denoted far more in the seventeenth century than simply transfer from one location to another. It also meant progress through a series of advancing grades, as in school, and, most significant, through stages in the soul’s ascent to God. Mrs. Rowlandson used a traditional devotional form as her interpretive framework.

As she advanced through the first removes Mrs. Rowlandson became disoriented about the meaning and rhythms of white Christian life. Initially, the thought of herself at home humbled her. Mrs. Rowlandson was prepared for salvation, but it did not come. She knew she could do or attempt nothing to bring about her own redemption. She discouraged a pregnant woman who desperately wanted to run away, considering the practical matter that the nearest town was twenty miles away. But she was more strongly guided by Psalm 27: “Wait on the Lord.” Redemption must be spiritual redemption and not the mere saving of her flesh. In her period of waiting Mary Rowlandson found that Scripture greatly increased her patience in suffering. She also began adapting to life around her. Food that had been “filthy trash” became “sweet and savory.” Instead of wholly detesting Indians she began to wonder about them and to appreciate.

Mary Rowlandson portrays that when a New England militia company came near, she waited with her captors. “We were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance if we had been, God would have found out a way for the English to have passed this river” (Rowlandson). She demonstrated no anxiety about escape or rescue but relied entirely on God’s timetable. Perhaps her greatest discovery was that God’s hand reached even into the wilderness. Indeed, it is doubtful that by the end of her journey Mrs. Rowlandson thought of the land beyond the towns as wilderness at all. It was no longer the place of the devil, but another place of God, as the psalmist had written.

The peacefulness of Rowlandson’s redemption testified to her that it was God’s doing. “Oh, the wonderful power of God that I have seen and the experience that I have had. I have been in the midst of those roaring lions and savage bears” (Rowlandson). She gave thanks that she was one “whom He hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy, especially that I should come away in the midst of so many hundreds of enemies quietly and peaceably, and not a dog moving his tongue” (Rowlandson). Mrs. Rowlandson’s redemption was an experience of salvation from the bondage of sin; she was a child of Israel, one of the chosen. As patient as she had been in waiting on the Lord, when she walked into freedom she was all but ecstatic. “In coming along my heart melted into tears, more than all the while I was with them; and I was almost swallowed up with the thoughts that ever I should go home again” (Rowlandson). Return to the freedom of Boston had a surprising effect on her. She was incapable of feeling simple joy in her reborn life. She had seen too much; the thought of her child’s slow death in the wilderness plagued her.

I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly, without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together; but now it is otherwise with me. When all are fast [asleep] about me, and no eye open but His who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things. past, upon the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us, upon His wonderful power and might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning us in safety, and [in] suffering none to hurt us. I remember, in the night season, how the other day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before me. It is then hard work to persuade myself that ever I should be satisfied with bread again (Rowlandson).

The stages of the redemption by faith found expression for Puritans in conversion and in the theological order of redemption. Just as God continually dealt with His people in Scripture — He did not simply on one occasion bring them out of Egypt — so He continually dealt with His saints in New England. Just as the Exodus was part of a larger journey for the people of Israel, a journey that repeatedly required God’s aid to bring them out of bondage, so the individual repeatedly required God’s aid.

Even at the superficial level, Rowlandson continued to experiment and develop his methods, albeit along traditional lines. More important, however, Rowlandson’s ideas were, in the manner of contemplatives throughout religious history, a lifelong and habitual activity that led to an ever-deeper relationship with God. The unfathomable depths of his God prevented the “routine” from running dry. Rowlandson continually moved far beyond the awareness of sin that marked not only Puritan but early modern European sensibilities in general by channeling it into the constructive exercises of meditation and prayer. The order of redemption to which Rowlandson and New Englanders submitted was a dynamic spiritual drama capable of filling the soul with delight and elevating it to ecstatic heights. The contemplative is distinguished from the common practicing believer by the regularity, protractedness, and continuing intensity of the exercises. Puritan theology and much of the preaching was rational in nature. The devotional exercises, when pursued by the contemplative, led to experiences quite beyond the realm of reason. This ultimate nonrationality of religious experience linked Rowlandson to Puritan contemplatives of the first half of the century.

Rowlandson portrays that the cycle of anxiety and assurance and the availability of perfect union with Christ only after death, which some scholars have seen as signs of the limitation and neurosis of Puritanism, spawned the contemplative side of the Puritan religious character. The cycle of anxiety and assurance was the mirror image of Christ’s death and resurrection. Puritan theology translated into devotional disciplines of repentance for sin and meditation on the glory of heaven, which, over months and years of continual practice, intensified into a higher contemplation of the Divine. It would be a mistake to underestimate the number of men — perhaps most of the clergy -and women who might be described by the phrase “Puritan contemplative.” At the same time, the most advanced level of devotional practice was not generically different from the devotions of men and women of common piety. The Puritan contemplative demonstrates the rigorous culmination of a pervasive spirituality in which the entire populace participated. These biases resulted in images of white and Indian women that were derived, like so many other European judgments regarding the frontier, from what they wished to see rather than from what they actually saw. This is not to suggest that European comments upon white and native American women amounted to nothing more than pure fantasy. They were indeed based on a certain amount of factual observation, but the results were shaded, colored, and limned until the portrait of white women became slightly larger than life while that of American Indian women grew slightly less so. Observing the irresistible white progress westward, most writers assumed that the Indian was declining into extinction and felt free enough from Indian threats to give some attention to the greater issues of which captivity was only one manifestation. Armed with an idea of white superiority vindicated by history, but able at the same time to understand the Indians’ resistance to white conquest, the authors of the frontier romance felt themselves able to portray a historical truth which went beyond the individual experiences of captivity narratives. In doing so they could celebrate their race and satisfy the nationalistic demand for art created out of native materials. That preparation within the conversion experience was understood as preparation of and not by the sinner is clear from the horticultural metaphor that many Puritans used to describe the process. Rowlandson writes:

“He told me he himself was wounded in the leg at Captain Beer’s fight; and was not able some time to go, but as they carried him, and as he took oaken leaves and laid to his wound, and through the blessing of God he was able to travel again Then I took oaken leaves and laid to my side, and with the blessing of God it cured me also; yet before the cure was wrought, I may say, as it is in Psalm 38.5-6” (Rowlandson).

These lines depict that population was engaged in acts of devotion at new spiritual depths.

The spiritual pilgrimage through established stages was not simply an invention based on spiritual ideals. It described inner movements that many New Englanders experienced directly. The scheme the ministers preached was a map based on biblical soteriology and the tradition of centuries of devotional practice and religious experience. It was a scheme both evoked by and, in turn, evoking deep spirituality. It would be more accurate to point out that this was a system capable of producing as well as interpreting the growth of faith. The vividness with which preachers and printed word related the conversions and faith of the ministers themselves continually reinforced its availability. The stages of redemption were preached in New England because they came together as a good map of what actually happened. The scheme presented in sermons and manuals was an accurate representation, first of all, because it described the experience of the ministers themselves (Holladay 13).

The Narrative portrays that Mary Rowlandson and Puritans saw the work of redemption in their lives and the move to New England as two aspects of the same divine handiwork. The believed that it was God who caused New England to prosper and wrought conversion in his soul. The Sabbath was solemnly kept by adding to the former preaching twice and catechizing Through the danger of the voyage God worked on his soul. The Puritan spiritual development was preeminently biblical. At the end of the Narrative Rowlandson writes:

The thoughts of these things in the particulars of them, and of the love and goodness of God towards us, make it true of me, what David said of himself, “I watered my Couch with my tears” (Psalm 6.6). Oh! the wonderful power of God that mine eyes have seen, affording matter enough for my thoughts to run in, that when others are sleeping mine eyes are weeping” (Rowlandson).

The impact of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative upon the New England religious consciousness was so great that the clergy began to capitalize on the theme of captivity and redemption (Holladay 17). It was emotionally compelling because of the horror of King Philip’s War and because a large number of persons, especially women and children, were actually taken captive. Since it played on an elemental fear of the wilderness and of Indians, the narrative could be generalized and applied to the entire population. Judgments against New England pierced her own heart. The Indians prayed more than she had, she confessed, and she came to see her captivity as God’s judgment for her land hunger and Sabbath neglect. The tremendous popularity of the captivity narrative furnished New England with a suitable geographical correlate for the spiritual pilgrimage. The journey into the wilderness at the hands of Indians and the safe return was an actual experience that contained within it all the elements of the redemptive drama.

Conclusion

In sum, Mary Rowlandson Narrative points to a single moment of conversion. It reveals the spiritual life to be an ongoing journey from sin, through the ups and downs of temptation, assurance and new doubts, toward a gradually increased knowledge of being in God. The cycle of mortification and vivification is repeated many times. Membership in the church signified that one was truly on the road, not that one had already arrived at the destination. The criterion for membership that comes out in most of the confessions is full repentance for sin. The Narrative tends to reach climax at this point, and hope for future growth in the joy of grace was founded on such preparation. The pattern of spiritual stages first established in conversion continued to mark the journey to heaven. The devotional life of the saints, the means by which they progressed on the pilgrimage, was a system of ritual self-emptying in preparation for the renewed experience of being filled by God with His grace. Rowlandson depicts that the redemptive cycle of Christ’s death and resurrection was translated into a set of spiritual exercises, devotional acts that became the path of renewed repentance and fulfillment.

Works Cited

Holladay, H. Dreams of Mary Rowlandson. Loom Press; 1 edition, 2006.

Rowlandson, M. 2005. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Web.

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Redemption by Faith in Mary Rowlandson’s “Captivity Narrative”

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