My poetic homeboy, J-Edwards
Or, that time I turned the wrathful words of Jonathan Edwards into a thing of beauty
Once upon a time I was a high school English teacher. Actually, let’s clarify that point: straight out of college, at the ripe age of twenty-two, I was a high school English teacher to sixteen and seventeen-year olds.
My principal at the time believed it wasn’t in the best interest of the students, the parents and me to realize my actual youth. So, while I made personal efforts to ensure no student ever stole a glance at my license, she and I extended my age by a handful of years.
As such, I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed “twenty-six year old” who thought she knew everything, including everything there was to know about American Literature, — a class I’d taken half a dozen years before as a junior in high school myself and once before in college. I was now, apparently, qualified to teach because I came equipped with a teaching degree.
A week or two into the school year, after unpacking the niceties of summer reading (The Crucible) and establishing expectations for the next nine months, we cracked open our textbooks to dissect the words of 18th century American revivalist Jonathan Edwards.
Now, I’m sure there were a handful of essays we read before stumbling our way through “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but his was one I’ll never forget.
Edwards, of course, is famous for his fire and brimstone theology: a revivalist preacher whose role was critical in the First Great Awakening, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is not only one of the most famous essays from the colonial era, but is also considered a classic of the American literature canon.
The essay, of course, is also terribly problematic: the hand of an all-powerful God dangles “a terrified believer over a fiery pit, ready on a moment’s notice to drop him into the flames of eternal damnation.”1
True to revivalist form, Edwards hoped his words would “wake up the faithful and remind them of the terrible fate that awaited them if they failed to confess their sins and to seek God’s mercy.”2 A Puritan, he held tight to a belief that we are all, first and foremost, sinners, and because of this status as sinners, we humans deserve nothing more than eternal damnation.
This is rhetoric many of us can repeat, verbatim. Whatever our belief system now, if we were raised with any ounce of Calvinist theology or ran across its influence at some point in our lives, it’s a version of Christianity we can’t soon shake.
It’s a version of religion that stays with us long after the fiery preachers lay their heads down to sleep — a version of an angry and dictator deity who thinks little of his helpless little worms.3
It’s a version of Christianity that I didn’t agree with but felt I had to teach, maybe because I didn’t know any better.
It’s a version of Christianity that I loathed but whose influence I continued to see when, upon going into ministry full-time, the organization I worked for felt it right to make teenagers "sit in their sin" for 12 - 24 hours before "getting right with God." If I'm honest, the scare tactics we employed weren’t all that different from a man who urged wormy sinners to consider their own “fearful danger” over the “great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath.”4
And it’s a version of Christianity that’s continued to stay with me, even on the other side of a spiritual evolution, or of what some might call deconstruction.
So, when my friend
and I decided to offer a writing workshop called "Upcycling Words that No Longer Fit,"5 while there are certainly many, many words I’ve written that could stand a little upcycling of their own, I also wanted to experiment with upcycling some of Jonathan Edwards’ words.This particular poem came from an exercise in cut-up poetry, in which you literally cut up a pre-existing piece of writing and rearrange the pieces to create something new.
From part of this…
The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them.6
Came this…
And I couldn’t be happier. Who knew J-Edwards could turn into my poetic homeboy?
“His” in the latter half of the sentence is purposeful: even if I don’t ascribe God a gender now, Edwards most definitely believed in a patriarchal version of God. “Worms” is also quite purposeful, for Edwards refers to humans as “worm” or “worms” four times in the essay.
Beautiful. I needed this J.Edwards remix today.