I visited the church at Leyden, in which our forefathers worshipped when they fled from hierarchical tyranny and oppression. I felt a respect and veneration upon entering.  

Abigail Adams

Pieterskerk

In celebration of my country’s Semiquincentinnial, I am visiting sites in the Netherlands important to its history. One site is the very old Pieterskerk of Leiden, which John and Abigail Adams explored in the late 1700’s. This Church is also where the exiled Pilgrims worshipped, and where their pastor John Robinson is buried beneath the floor. As Mrs. Adams remarked the Church brings one to veneration and a deep respect for those who fled oppression to its doors.

While touring the Pilgrim Museum that is in the Pieterskerk, I thought about William Bradford who also worshipped there. He would later set sail on the Mayflower to Plymouth, and be elected thirty times to serve as the Colony’s governor. Yet, in his later years he witnessed a decay. A decline that made him worry for the place he helped to build.

Plymouth

The decay that grieved Bradford was young people losing faith. The Puritan roots that had anchored him in the Netherlands and the New World. Younger men and women had failed to grasp their Elders’ story, which gave their freedom meaning and showed its costs and worth. They needed context for the things they wished to leave, so, Bradford wrote a booklet that could help them understand.

Stephen’s Tompkins mentions Bradford’s work in “Journey To the Mayflower”, which is a conservation between the ancient English and the English of his day. The ancients tell of trials like the Marian persecution, and the voyage of the Pilgrims who left home for better shores. Bradford fostered understanding for the younger generations, an act that many feel my country needs within this time.

Present

At present the United States continues on a path of tensions and conflicts that have eroded friendly bonds among compatriots. Instead of Americans we are a host of different labels and look upon each other more as foes rather than neighbours. Like Bradford’s Plymouth we have come to a decay; a decline that makes our younger ones begin to, religious or otherwise, lose faith. Worst of all they fail to get the context of their freedom. The liberties that they enjoy despite the current tensions.

To halt the decay I think that Bradford gives the answer. We must resolve as best we can to rightly tell the American story. From the Pilgrims in Leiden to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, we must be good stewards of our past navigating the present. And should we do this we will foster understanding, and help our young, as well as our old, to flourish in the future.