Sweetbrier
Sweetbrier
The last day of May. Too early for the sweetbrier to bloom. Susanna strolled down the lane beyond Westley and Patty’s little vicarage to admire this clump of sweetbrier growing along a mossy stone wall. Sam had died three years ago plus a month. Susanna still wasn’t quite prepared for his death. Strange how the man had captured her spirit, despite all the separations and bitter disagreements, all the debts and neglect. Here she was nearly seventy, and she still had no idea of the strength and depth of true love.
The post was coming. Here the carrier came up off the glen and around the bend. He drew nigh and stopped.
“Mrs. Wesley, g’day! Letter for ye.” He riffled in a sack draped across his saddle. “Some’eres.” He grinned. The man truly delighted in mail. “Y’r son Jackie, mum.”
“Thank you. Care to save me the trouble of opening it by telling me his news?”
“Nae, mum, I’d never read mail. ‘Tis agin’ the crown’s rules.” He reined his horse away, then drew it in again. “Who’s the Moravians or whatever, mum?”
“The modern version of John Huss’s Brethren, stressing Scripture and simplicity in worship. Their headquarters is Herrnhut in Saxony.”
“Mm. You and y’r boys—y’r daughter here, too—y’re all so marvelous smart. Ye know so much.”
“I know about the Moravians because Jackie was associated with them on his trip to America.”
“Y’r son went to the colonies?” The man’s eyes spread wide with wonder. “Coo, mum!”
“Two sons, Jackie and Charles. Missionaries to the Indians. They left within weeks of—” her voice caught “—of my husband’s death. They said they were afraid to leave me so soon after—that, but I was fine with Emilia. As I told them, if I had twenty sons I’d rejoice they were so employed, even if I never saw them again. I did, of course. Charles stayed in the New World a year and John two years. Oglethorpe’s Georgia.”
“Come back here to preach to us British heathens instead of them Indianish heathens.” The man cackled.
“Exactly so. Do you still care to say we’re all smart?”
“Eh, yea, mum.” The grin soared again. “I appreciates smart people who sends lots of mail.” Away he went.
A letter from Jackie. Delightful. She would read it now, on her ambling walk back to the vicarage, with the sweet smell of the damp meadow grass hovering around her.
In his measured prose, so stilted compared to the way he naturally spoke, he was describing a Moravian meeting he attended in Aldersgate Street. He even gave the exact time, 8:45 on the evening of May 24. Less than a week ago—he must have written her immediately thereafter.
“I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away MY sins, even MINE, and saved ME from the law of sin and death.”
Her feet stopped walking as her muddled head sorted this out. Of course Christ is responsible for salvation. Scripture said so. He knew she knew, and he knew she knew he knew. This must mean far more than just the theological truth everyone knew. He felt he trusted Christ. Felt. Felt. Not just head knowledge. Her Jackie was talking about an emotional experience of some sort, an aspect of the faith beyond the strictly rational.
This couldn’t be the inner witness Sam used to talk about. Jackie surely would have used that term. She read happily that he would be stopping by on his way to Germany in early June.
Happily? That was relative. She was, true, finally getting over the numbing loss. Still she suffered the depths of melancholia that tended to hit her hard every couple of years. But then grief and shock—something concerning Sam or the children—tended to hit her hard every couple of years, too.
Countering the melancholia was her new freedom from debt. How she basked in her freedom from debt! God had made good His part in her vow made years ago. Now how could she give herself over to Him more completely?
By the time Jackie was due to arrive, the sweetbrier had cautiously offered forth its first buds. Susanna had to press very close to smell anything yet, though, for its overwhelming redolence was still several weeks away. She happened to be out walking along the lane when Jackie came in.
He still rode that sorry bay cob, and his appearance hadn’t changed for years. Whereas most men, including Sammy, now wore carefully powdered wigs, those elaborate coats called fracs, and the new sort of britches, Jackie shunned fashion and parted his dark hair in the middle to let it tumble down over each ear. At thirty-five he still sported his mama’s thin features and slim build.
With a happy grin Jackie slid off his plug and engulfed Susanna in a warm and satisfying hug. Her feet left the ground. “Hello, dear Mama.”
“Put me down, please. How is my favorite son?”
“Doing well in Westminster. He sends his love.”
She poked him. “You know what I mean.”
His eyes danced. Was there a special air about him, a new enthusiasm? “Mama, we all know Sammy’s your apple. Charles and I are happy and honored to be pears.”
“Get on now!” She started slowly back the lane, relishing this moment alone with him. His arm encircled her shoulder as Sam’s once had and drew her in close.
“Actually, you boys are perceptive. Sammy has been favored, I admit it. Sam treated him as the male firstborn, and his namesake. But I’m guilty, too. I love Sammy too well.”
“Love too well? Can’t be done.”
“But I love you and Charles equally, in a different way. You are my brand plucked from the fire, my studious one, the one who appreciates method and order as I do. Charles is my little Sam, with so much of his father in him. You’ve all three served God faithfully. I’m so proud of you.”
“You’d be surprised how much Charles enjoys method, too. Did he ever tell you about the Holy Club?”
“He doesn’t write much. You’ve mentioned it.”
“That prayer-and-study club Charles started at Oxford. I was in it for years, too. Some of the less reverent got to calling us methodists, because we ordered our life according to a method.” His warm arm squeezed her. “Guess where we got that.”
Susanna chuckled. “Years and years ago Emilia and I read an account of two Danish missionaries in—now where was that? Trans—no, Tranquebar. Thinking about that account got me wondering how I might serve God better, and one of the first-fruits was the hour each I spent with you children. I pondered then how a person’s life causes ripples in others’ lives in ways and at times that person could hardly imagine.”
“Amazing when you think about it. Moravians a continent away go to another continent an ocean away and there influence me to greater piety here in London. Charles and I’ve had great success evangelizing in the country over this last summer.”
“I heard. England’s a better place for you two—and heaven richer in souls.” How should she ask this? “You mentioned a special experience in your letter. Has Charles experienced it also?”
“Three days before me. He read Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians and underwent exactly the same sort of thing—a knowledge of salvation beyond reason.”
“Indeed!” She stopped and turned to him. “That’s the very same treatise that led to John Bunyan’s saving insight; I read an account of the man’s life some time ago, about the same time I read his Pilgrim’s Progress.” She turned and resumed walking. “You said in your letter your heart was strangely warmed.”
“Inadequately phrased, but the closest I could come.”
In all her sixty-nine years of service to her unseen God, Susanna’s heart had never been warmed. It crouched chilled in her breast right now, victimized by her persistent melancholia. And since Sam’s death it seemed to be getting colder.
“Mama, are you ready for eternity?”
“I believe so. I’ve reconciled myself to the past, all of it. I’ve even made peace with Hetty finally, after all those years. Forgave her and was forgiven by her.”
“There is more, Mama, so much more. Here’s the house. We’ll talk again later.”
Over the next few months Susanna became involved in a blizzard of letter-writing. Jackie read her a paper he had prepared about his new experience. It sounded good.
Sammy sent a paper to her he claimed was “brother John’s” latest theology. The doctrinal errors so horrified her that she wrote to Jackie at Herrnhut asking him to come back and redress his wrongs—at any rate to set Sammy’s heart at ease in the matter.
She wrote to Charles about her joy that he had found a deeper and renewed faith. He wrote a rare letter suggesting that he had had no spiritual life before this latest experience. She wrote back setting him straight on that matter; of course he had a spiritual life before this year—and a fruitful one!
By March of the next year Sammy had sent her enough material about Jackie’s claims and his new friends that she was absolutely certain Jackie was subverting sound doctrine. She studied and fretted for weeks trying to sort out this swirl of theology that conflicted so with her mother-instinct and her native trust in Jackie’s wisdom. Surely the boy couldn’t be that far off the track, and yet Sammy was more mature in the faith, a good solid churchman with a good solid position.
Jackie and Charles had no positions, no livings, no churches to call their own, and that bothered Susanna. If their preaching in London and about was so good, as she heard, why didn’t they work out of a church? It was the way things were done.
A gentleman named George Whitefield, an associate of Jackie’s, was coming through Devon. He stopped by to meet Susanna and talk for a short while about Jackie’s ministry.
George Whitefield had hardly left her presence before she began a letter to Sammy. “I told him I did not like their way of living, wished them in some place of their own, wherein they might regularly preach. He said I could not conceive the good they were doing in London, that the greater part of the clergy were asleep and there was never a greater need for itinerant preachers. Upon which a gentleman who came with him said my son Charles had converted him and that my sons spent all their time doing good. Then I asked him if my sons were not for making innovations in the church, which I fear. He assured me they were far from it.”
She knew Sammy severely disapproved of the way his little brothers were approaching religion. The rift between brothers was a rift within the mother. Why could a woman not simply fledge her nestlings and put them behind her, the way rooks do? Sammy and Jackie and Charles were as much in her now, in a sense, as when she carried them. She would never be free, never be her own person as she was in her youth, before Sam and marriage.
Jackie came to Devon before the sweetbrier bloomed and took Susanna with him to London. “Great things to show you, Mama!”
Great things? “I know this place, yes.” She stood studying a ruin on the edge of an abandoned field in by London’s Windmill Hill. The foundry. “You know, Jackie, that blew up around the time you left home. There’s no roof on it. I certainly hope you got it cheap”
An anthill of workmen ambled about. Stacks of lumber and piles of undressed stone lay haphazardly around the foundry ruin.
The Great London Fire had leveled this particular area, and it had not been rebuilt—yet. True, it was a lovely sort of park, this open hillside on the edge of Moorfields, complete with robust elms. But theaters and bawdyhouses and their attendant base elements were encroaching rapidly on three sides. Open space in this teeming city was becoming a premium. The loveliness was doomed.
“Cheap?” Jackie nodded as he watched the proceedings with a happy satisfaction. “Yes, I got it cheap. Perfect for us; perfect location.”
“And how much is the renovation? I think perhaps you were penny wise and pound foolish.”
“My estimate says six hundred pounds will build what we want from the ruin. Maybe six fifty. Not a bad price.”
“Oh? And what do we want exactly?”
“Charles and I need a headquarters, a base of operations, and the closer the center of town the better. We’re fixing an apartment for you upstairs, a place of your own. You can study, write letters, sleep, stare out the window at the elms—whatever your heart desires.”
Susanna mulled over the notion. She hadn’t really planned beyond living with one daughter or another, perhaps helping out a little with the children. To have rooms just her own sounded appealing. To have them in London more appealing. She ciphered mentally. “Forty-two years.”
“What?” Jackie looked at her.
“Forty-two years since I lived in London, and only that one visit back in ‘twenty-four. It would be so nice to come back.”
She doubted Sammy would approve her living in Charles’s and Jackie’s headquarters, and she was right. Sammy fussed and fumed and in his pedantic letters called Moorfields a nest of schismatics. Susanna watched her sons at work and kept finding herself with eyebrows raised, secretly wondering if Sammy wasn’t right. Jackie and Charles might be ministers in the Church of England, but they certainly weren’t conducting either themselves or their services like the average ordained man.
And then in August her life turned around. Perhaps, as she looked back to that moment, it was not her life that turned around, for outwardly she had served God every day she lived. It was the inside of her life.
Her body and thoughts had long put Christ at the beginning and end of each day. Her behavior had paid homage to the God of the universe. But all that—even the thoughts—were in a way simply the outside of her.
She was accepting Communion on a pleasant August afternoon, as she had at least weekly ever since her childhood when she left behind her father’s dissenting beliefs and joined the Anglican Church. She knelt as usual, accepted the host as usual, awaited the cup. The familiar priestly intonement came droning along the rail: “The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for thee, and be thankful.”
The cup reached her, she sipped, the cup passed on. Christ, Christ alone, died for ME. The familiar words she had heard for fifty-seven years, the liturgy she had memorized, leaped afire and warmed her heart.
Jackie’s experience and Charles’s flooded her. Her thoughts and actions had always belonged to God. Now for this first time her heart did also. Her warmed heart sang, in this season of the sweetbrier’s richest glory, a song to last through the depths of winter.
Suddenly she wanted Sammy to have this wonderful enrichment, this spiritual fulfillment, this inner witness. But he resisted anything not based on rational Scripture study, and, as Sam had always done, when he was certain his position was the right one he would countenance no others. She must phrase her letters carefully, perhaps call in person.
No, letters were the way. Ever since Sammy had left home she had been writing letters to him. Pages and pages. She and Sammy thought alike in many ways. She had never trusted her feelings, not ever; Sam, also. Still, she would try to convey the glory of this experience by letter, although, as Jackie had said, words were inadequate.
But she didn’t really have the chance. The son she loved too well died unexpectedly in November at the age of forty-nine.
Jackie’s notions were unpopular with a lot of clergy, not just Sammy. The preacher who had adopted itinerant ways found himself preaching to thousands in the open fields, with his mother at his side—and Susanna was proud of it!
She still had to fight those searing bouts with melancholia that weighed her down frequently, but her days saw a constant and satisfying cycle of reading, writing, and listening. She loved the routine, the order, and perhaps most of all the lack of want. No more debt, no more haggling, no more privation.
In March of 1741 Kezzy died in the clergy home Jackie had provided for her. Later Emilia’s wandering husband Bob Harper died, making her a widow in fact as well as function.
The spring of 1742 came late, giving a late start to all the blooming and leafing out that makes spring the season of hope. Susanna was seventy-three now. She could feel herself wane, become more frail with each season.
She rarely left her apartment now, but she didn’t really have to. Some of the sharpest wits and minds in England came knocking at her door. She enjoyed the company immensely, and she listened with pride to tales of Charles’s and Jackie’s itinerant preaching.
Sam had dreamed for years of a spiritual revival to come out of Epworth. It was coming—but by the roundabout way of his sons via Oxford and London. They were turning England upside down to the glory of Christ, and Susanna sat happily in the very eye of the storm.
By July, the season of the sweetbrier’s full bloom, she was again bedridden, a condition familiar to her. She knew what it was this time, and she asked Nancy to come, and Patty, and Emilia. Charles was here now.
She knew Jackie was in Bristol preaching. Susanna resigned herself to die without his hand in hers. That was all right; his work was important, more important than the passing of an old lady from glory to glory.
Her powers of speech were failing. This servant who always had a word, sharp or soft, would soon be bereft of them. While she could still get words out she asked, “Please, my children, as soon as I’m released, sing a psalm of praise to God.”
Strange, this. She could feel life dribbling away, unit by unit—whatever the units of life might be. She had had such difficulty accepting Sam’s death, and here she was accepting her own so comfortably. And why not? Her beloved Jesus was taking care of everything.
She recognized the faces keeping watch beside her bed, and her heart sang when she saw Jackie’s among them. But her voice and mouth sang no more. She could no longer move at all, but then she felt no need to. Her body was relaxed, her mind serene. Christ could come now anytime. She was ready.
The room opened wide. Wider. The soft light brightened and spread to brilliance. It filled her vision and her soul.
She was home.