Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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      Figure 3.4. Roger Wood beaker, bequeathed 1654, Devonshire Christ Church, Bermuda. The floral design links the beaker to its domestic counterparts. (Courtesy of Anglican Christ Church, Bermuda. Photograph by alugophoto.)

      “Till all have eaten”

      The puritan practice of the Lord’s Supper contained countervailing elements of equality and hierarchy as did the nickómmo and other feastings of the common pot, the ritual events examined in the previous chapter. In the Narragansett nickómmo, elites controlled the redistribution of resources by giving away goods and food. Puritan performances of the Lord’s Supper commemorated and enacted God’s gift of grace to a fraction of humanity. Those who had not made a public declaration of how the divine had touched their souls could not partake. They were dismissed from the service so that their presence might not compromise the constitution of the body of Christ. While not all participants in the Lord’s Supper might be actual recipients of God’s grace, they hoped they were. And among recipients of that gift, there were no degrees of salvation. Members of this invisible church of the saved were equal to one another in salvation.

      In the human institution of the visible church, however, rules and customs governing all services expressed many gradations of social status. The practice of assigning seats to members of congregations according to complicated and finely articulated degrees of social rank was a spatial manifestation of the incongruity between the visible and invisible corporate bodies. In its privileging of military rank, age, property, and familial ties but not an individual’s admission to the Lord’s Supper, “seating the congregation” produced a physical expression of the body politic in the organization of the gathered body of Christ. It served as a constant reminder of the tensions between human understandings of the body politic and what was meant to be the divinely infused corporate body. The seats adjacent to the pulpit were the most desirable, reserved for magistrates and other civil dignitaries, while those distant or with views obstructed by columns or stairwells were the least desirable, set aside for English children over the age of thirteen, Natives, Africans, and English servants. Men and women sat separately and men probably predominated; on any given sabbath celebration, many women who lived in the community would have been absent since nursing mothers rarely attended church. Peter Benes has estimated that half of the residents attended an average service.⁷

      Puritan ministers expended much ink and time on individual preparation for the Lord’s Supper and on the theology of the sacrament, particularly in terms of the relationship between the bread and wine of the meal and divine action or presence, but their words are not the only basis for investigating puritan theologies of the body.⁸ In puritan inflections of this experientially central ritual, the actions of passing the bread and wine to one another and their corporate consumption were what created sacred space, not any physical transformation in the substances used.⁹ As scholars of material religion have pointed out, puritans’ performance of ritual and their use of material objects reveals that the feeling, sounding, looking, and tasting of physical bodies moving through corporeal space created as well as reflected spiritual knowledge. While the objects were not sacred in and of themselves, the emphasis on performances using them meant that they served as a conduit for devotions and taught puritans how to perceive and interact with the divine.¹⁰ We can use these embodied, object-centered experiences to look over the shoulders of those thousands of English individuals who did not leave much of an individual imprint on the written record in order to discern the many-layered process of place-making and the creation of corporate bodies of the faithful. At the same time that the communion vessels and the bread and wine they served were meant to direct participants to the overwhelming action of divine salvation, they also enacted human-made hierarchy through variations of practice in the distribution and consumption of the meal.

      Much of this hierarchy of the table had been inherited from English society prior to the development of a puritan movement. Those with the highest rank ate first and took the best available option. Hosts had to provide food for all, including the poor, but it did not have to be of the same quality. Eating the same food was a mark of at least temporarily sharing the same rank, which is why during the early months of the faltering Jamestown colony yeoman John Smith bristled when Edward Wingfield, a minor noble, refused to eat from the literal “common kettle” of worm-infested grain ingested by the other council members. Another early English colony, Plymouth, attempted to mandate a common kettle among all inhabitants, cultivating and preparing food communally rather than familially. Even though many were dedicated to the idea of establishing a society based on being members of one body, they objected to the erasure of deeply established modes of labor distribution and quickly returned to household-based production.¹¹

      While the bread served as part of the Lord’s Supper was the same for all, participants found other ways to express hierarchy. One of the more detailed accounts of the conduct of the meal, while written by someone unsympathetic to puritan practice, corroborates with a prescriptive explanation of church practice by the unmistakably puritan John Cotton. As described by the lawyer Thomas Lechford, whose shift from dissenting to conforming beliefs about the scriptural warrant for bishops kept him barred from the ritual meal in New England, the first step was for those not partaking to leave the meetinghouse. Then “the Ministers and ruling Elders sitting at the Table, the rest” sitting “in their seats, or upon forms,” a type of backless bench, a “Teaching Elder” blessed and consecrated the bread. Depending on the size and configuration of the church, the table at which the minister and deacons sat might have been a relatively small hinged surface attached to the seating for the deacons or the front of the pulpit, or a larger freestanding one that strongly resembled its strictly domestic counterparts. After the prayer, “the ministers deliver the Bread in a Charger to some of the chiefe, and peradventure gives to a few the Bread into their hands, and they deliver the charger from one to another, till all have eaten.” The same process was repeated “in like manner” with the wine: “the cup, till all have dranke, goes from one to another.” John Cotton specified that after the minister partook of the bread and passed it to “all that sit at Table with him,” he remained “sitting in his place at the Table” while the deacons distributed it to the rest of the congregation. Cotton explained that the sitting СКАЧАТЬ