Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  But even if Sarah never received “comfortable evidence” of Samuel’s salvation, and even if, Susa implied, he died unconverted, God’s will could not be questioned. “O do not fall out, with your Father!” Susa urged. “Kiss the hand, though it have a rod in it—it is the hand of your God still.” While Susa knew that the hiddenness of God was frightening, she reminded Sarah that because he was ultimately in control, they had no choice but to submit to his punishments. “O my dear,” Susa implored her, “you and I may, yea, must love him, because he is a Sovereign God!” There was nothing to do except to trust “the Father of Mercies, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”40

  Many Christians at the time would have recoiled at the image of God standing above Sarah with a rod in his hand, or of Sarah kissing his hand in meek submission. But Sarah claimed to have been comforted by Susa’s letter, which she described as “a cordial to my drooping spirits.”41 Confronted with the awful possibility of Samuel’s damnation, she tried to do as Susa told her. She turned her gaze away from God’s hiddenness toward his revelation in Christ, desperately praying for mercy.

  Sarah spent Samuel’s last hours in an agony of fear and prayer. “In his dying moments,” she remembered later, “I had an awful sense of his deplorable condition, if his naked soul should launch into a boundless eternity, without a God to go to.” She felt as though the two of them were utterly helpless and defenseless—two small specks in a vast universe. “I had also a view and sense of his and my utter inability to help ourselves, and utter unworthiness that God should help us,” she confessed. But strengthened by Susa’s words, she prayed that Christ would heal Samuel’s soul just as he had once healed the sick during his time on earth. Three biblical stories in particular gave her hope. When the woman of Canaan had begged Jesus to heal her afflicted daughter, he had at first refused: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” But when the woman persisted, saying, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” Jesus had praised her for her faith and healed her child. Comparing herself to the Canaanite woman, Sarah confessed that she was “unworthy as a dog,” but still she “pleaded for the crumbs that fell, one of which would be sufficient for me and mine. I had a clear discovery of the fullness and sufficiency of Christ to make satisfaction.” Sarah was also comforted by the story of the thief who had been crucified next to Jesus. “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,” the thief had pleaded. And a merciful Jesus had replied, “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Recalling this story, Sarah wrote, “I pleaded that he would have mercy, as on the thief on the cross, then at the eleventh hour; apply but one drop of his precious blood, and it was enough.” Finally, Sarah once again compared herself to Jacob, one of her favorite biblical characters. “I was enabled to fill my mouth with arguments, and in bitter agony of soul I wrestled with God for him. Surely the pangs I then endured for his soul far exceeded those that brought him into the world.”42 Like Jacob, she refused to stop wrestling until God gave his blessing. Perhaps if she prayed with all her might, Samuel’s defenseless, “naked soul” might go to heaven.

  Up to this point in her narrative, Sarah seemed to be preparing to affirm that God had saved her son. From the first sentence, she had interspersed her narrative with allusions to biblical figures whose prayers had been answered or who had been healed: Epaphroditus, Hezekiah, the Canaanite woman, the thief on the cross, Jacob. In her last sentences before recording Samuel’s death, she described being “enabled” to pray for him, suggesting that God had been helping her. By comparing her “pangs” in prayer to labor pains, she implied that she had helped give birth to him again, this time in Christ.

  But when the moment finally came to describe Samuel’s death, she shrank back, afraid to affirm a mercy that God might not have bestowed. Without concrete “evidence” of Samuel’s conversion, she did not dare claim that he had gone to heaven. She was afraid of sounding presumptuous, afraid of angering God. Humbled by God’s awful power, the power to save or damn, she seemed fearful of speaking in her own voice. Her brief sentences describing Samuel’s death were rephrasings of biblical verses. Echoing one of the Psalms, “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee,” she wrote, “As soon as the soul had taken its flight, I was eased of my burden. I immediately cast myself, and my burden too, on God.”43 Then, repeating the words of Job, she added, “I adored him as a sovereign God, and blessed his name; for he had given, and it was he who had taken.” She concluded with a heartbreaking reference to the story of Hannah and Samuel, which had always been deeply meaningful to her. In the past, Sarah had always reflected on this story from Hannah’s viewpoint. Like Hannah, she had rejoiced at the birth of a son whom she had dedicated to God. This time, however, she remembered the words of Hannah’s husband, Elkanah. When Hannah had been praying for a child, he had urged her to stop weeping and grieving, asking her, “Am not I better to thee than ten sons?” As Sarah remembered the sight of Samuel’s lifeless body, she could no longer hope that Hannah’s story would be her own. She would never see God bless her son; he would never grow into a great spiritual leader. Bereft, she clung to Jesus, her spiritual husband, for comfort. “Surely,” she wrote, “he was better to me than ten sons.”44

  A Covenant God

  In the great Christian story, darkness is always followed by light, suffering by redemption, death by resurrection. When ministers preached funeral sermons, they almost always concluded by imagining the dead exulting with Christ. In 1732, for example, after the death of a seventeen-year-old who had been “eminently pious,” the Reverend Charles Chauncy assured her grieving parents that she was in “heavenly happiness.”45 God always saved those in covenant with him.

  This was the kind of story that Sarah had longed to tell. When she had begun writing about Samuel’s death, she seems to have hoped to find a way to narrate it as a parable about divine mercy. Perhaps she thought that if she relived his last days, she might find some overlooked “evidence” of his salvation. Tragically, she failed.

  Yet rather than face the horrifying possibility that all her “wrestling” with God had been for naught, Sarah reframed her narrative into a story about God’s mercy to her, not to her son. Ultimately the story she decided to tell in her diary, probably unconsciously and intuitively, was not about Samuel at all, but about her own covenant with God. Struggling with feelings of anxiety and grief, she seems to have tried to comfort herself by turning her gaze inward. Having failed to find “evidence” of Samuel’s salvation, she remembered how God had upheld her during her sorrow. By writing about herself, she could still find a way to turn the story of Samuel’s death into a tale of God’s goodness.

  If Sarah felt any of the emotions that one might expect in the wake of such a devastating loss—anger at God for taking away her only child, despair, hopelessness—she never admitted it. Instead, she claimed that as soon as Samuel died she calmly accepted God’s will, renewing her trust in him despite her suffering. “I then arose from my dead child, and was quieted,” she explained, “for the will of God was done, and my work was done, as it respected my child.” Her model was David, who fasted and wept until his son’s death but then “arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped.”46 Since Samuel’s fate had been sealed at his death, there was nothing more for her to do.

  Yet Sarah remembered that it was at this moment, when she seemed to be most alone, that God finally ceased to hide his face. In a startling sentence that marked a pivotal point in her narrative, she claimed that after she quietly arose from Samuel’s deathbed, “God was pleased to give such evidence of his love that my mouth was filled with praises.” (Here she was alluding to the uplifting words of Psalm 71: “I am as a wonder unto many; but thou art my strong refuge. Let my mouth be filled with thy praise and with thy honor all the day.”)47 Even though God had not sent
the kind of evidence she had so desperately prayed for only minutes earlier—evidence of Samuel’s salvation—she finally felt that he was present with her. As Susanna Anthony had assured her, the God who had taken away Samuel was still her God. He had not forgotten or abandoned her. He loved her still.

  After exhorting Samuel’s friends, “who stood round lamenting him,” “to take warning, and make their speedy flight to the blessed Jesus, before sickness and death overtook them,” Sarah went for a solitary walk in the autumn fields. Not even Henry went with her. Leaving others to prepare Samuel’s body for burial, she sought a quiet place to commune with God. “And the sweetness of that season I cannot express,” she wrote. After all the distress of the preceding week, she finally found peace. Like Julian of Norwich, the medieval visionary who had heard Christ assuring her that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” she suddenly saw the smallness of her suffering in comparison to God’s boundless love.48 In an almost mystical encounter, “God discovered himself to be my God, my covenant God, my Father, my Friend, my only portion and happiness, my sovereign, my all in all, my infinite fountain of all fullness.” Everything else seemed to fade into nothingness, leaving her alone with God. “And these were some of the breathings of my soul after him,” she remembered: “Lord, I adore thee as my all. I rejoice in thee as my only portion. Lord, if I have thee, I have enough. Though all the streams were cut off, yet the fountain remains; I cannot be poor. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none on earth I desire besides thee. Though my flesh and my heart fail; yet God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Blessed God, though death separate from all things here below, It cannot separate between thee and me.” She had lost her child, yet she still had a “Father” and “Friend” who would never forsake her. Drawing closer to God, she renewed the covenant she had first made with him seven years earlier. “O, here I rejoiced again, chose my God again, and again renewed the dedication of myself to him, my whole soul and body, with all I have, am, or can do.”49

  In this ineffable moment of unity with God, Sarah could even accept her grief as a reflection of his goodness. Affirming her belief that God held the world in his hands, ordering everything for the best, she claimed that her anguish was for her own good. “O, his word comforted, his rod comforted me,” she remembered. “I saw no frown in it: No, but the kind chastisement of my indulgent Father.” It was a refrain that she had repeated many times in her life: she, not God, was to blame for her suffering. Without explaining why she thought she deserved chastisement, she comforted herself by remembering a favorite verse from Hebrews. “This portion of scripture was very sweet,” she wrote, “‘If ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons. For whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.’” Samuel’s death was a sign not that God had deserted her but, on the contrary, that he loved her. Echoing Psalm 19, she “cried out” to him, “I know, O Lord, thy judgments are right, and in very faithfulness thou hast afflicted me.”50

  Sarah’s language in these passages was densely biblical. Struggling to express herself, she seems to have been flooded by memories of relevant biblical texts. (Since her quotations were not exact, she probably did not have a Bible open in front of her but cited verses from memory.) As always, her experiences seemed less confusing and less random when she placed them within a biblical framework. When she remembered her sense of closeness to God, for example, and asked “Whom have I in heaven but thee?” she was repeating the words of Psalm 73. She had absorbed so much of the Bible that any one of her sentences could refer to several different texts at once. Indeed, when she rejoiced that God had “discovered himself to be my God, my covenant God, my Father, my Friend, my only portion and happiness, my sovereign, my all in all, my infinite fountain of all fullness,” she was weaving together references from Genesis (“I will establish my covenant between me and thee”), Hebrews (“I will make a new covenant”), Romans and Galatians (“Abba, Father”), Matthew (“a friend of publicans and sinners”), the Song of Solomon (“this is my beloved, and this is my friend”), Lamentations and the Psalms (“The Lord is my portion”), and Revelation (“I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely”).51 By grafting her personal story onto the Bible, she reassured herself that her experiences were not singular. Many others before her—including David and Job—had walked the same path.

  If Sarah shared her narrative with Christian friends during her life (which seems likely), they may have been particularly moved by her description of God as her “portion.” Modern readers (who tend not to be as biblically literate) might miss the significance of her imagery, but Sarah’s friends would have known that she was echoing several biblical texts that captured her complicated emotions. Perhaps she had in mind the comforting language of Psalm 16, “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup. . . . Therefore my heart is glad,” but she may have also been referring to the lonely words of Psalm 142: “refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.” Given her grief, she also may have been repeating Jeremiah’s heartrending description of being afflicted by God:

  I AM the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. . . . He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out: he hath made my chain heavy. Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer. He hath inclosed my ways with hewn stone, he hath made my paths crooked. He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places. He hath turned aside my ways, and pulled me in pieces: he hath made me desolate. . . . He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered me with ashes. . . . It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore I will hope in him. [Lamentations 3:1, 5–11, 15–16, 22–24]

  Although it is impossible to recapture Sarah’s intentions when she described God as her portion, she may have been drawn to this evocative image because of its multiple meanings. Her words gestured toward both despair and hope. Reading her narrative, her friends would have understood that these small words encapsulated both her sense of desolation and her enduring faith.

  Sarah was particularly drawn to biblical descriptions of God’s covenant with his chosen people. Following the advice of ministers like Cotton Mather, who urged the afflicted to put their faith in God’s covenant, she consoled herself by remembering God’s promise to Abraham in the book of Genesis: “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.” Although she applied this language only to herself, avowing that “God discovered himself to be my God, my covenant God,” she may have been quietly thinking of Samuel as well.52 By asserting her own covenant with God, she implicitly raised the possibility that Samuel had shared it. Hadn’t God promised that his covenant would extend to her “seed,” her son?

  Yet Sarah never dared ask this question openly, and a darker fear pulsed beneath her words. Perhaps unconsciously, she alluded to several biblical texts that pointed in alarming directions. When she remembered feeling “bowels of compassion” for Samuel’s friends and exhorting them to “take warning, and make their speedy flight to the blessed Jesus,” for example, she mixed an allusion to 1 John about keeping God’s commandments with a more frightening reference to Ezekiel 33: whoever “taketh not warning” would die “in iniquity.” Thirty years earlier, the Reverend Samuel Moodey, a Massachusetts minister, had used this text to warn the children in his congregation to repent. “Why will ye die, O children of New England?” he asked. “Poor Hearts; you are going to Hell indeed; but will it not be a dreadful thing to go to Hell from New England, from this Land of Light to that Dungeon of Eternal Darkness?”53 G
iven Sarah’s knowledge of the Bible, she may have known, on some level, that she was citing a passage that threatened “the death of the wicked,” but she quickly moved away from this frightening possibility to emphasize her trust in Christ.

  Several other passages in Sarah’s joyful description of divine grace also hinted at God’s wrath. When she remembered the beautiful words of Psalm 73, “Though my flesh and my heart fail; yet God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever,” she neglected to cite the verses that followed: “For, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee.” Giving her allusion to the Psalm a new, more comforting ending, she paraphrased Romans 8: “Blessed God, though death separate from all things here below, it cannot separate between thee and me.” Similarly, when she described God as a “fountain,” she may have been referring to the comforting words of Revelation, “I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely,” but the next verses were more ominous: “He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”54 All these elisions suggest that despite her description of her rapturous feeling of God’s presence in the fields, Sarah was still deeply troubled about her son.