Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England

Abstract

different ways. Because they imposed upon their world an ideology that denied the special sanctity of certain days and places, they created in New England a time and space of homogeneous sanctity. But even as they did so, the Puritans set off particular areas of the time and space they occupied in New England as especially holy. They did this by accepting what seemed to them the given, natural order, the reality of things. Although the Puritans therefore held concepts of time and space that were opposite, they felt no sense of contradiction. Their ideology, though consistent and pervasive, never completely encompassed their thought. Beyond ideology lay the truth of everyday reality, so self-evident and so trivial that it was never analyzed and its implications were never drawn.' The New England Puritans, like Reformed Protestants elsewhere, rejected traditional Catholic and Anglican beliefs and practices that organized time around consecrated churches, railed-off altars, holy shrines, and miraculous wells, and that supposed the flow of time to be an irregular succession of holy days and sacred seasons. Reformed Protestants conceded that regularly scheduled religious services might serve as an aid to the spiritually infirm and that the Jews had been obliged to worship at set times in special places. But, the Reformers argued, what was intended as a crutch for others had become a cast for Christians who willingly accepted the obligation of constant worship. They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday. To a Christian, no time or place could ever be more appropriate for prayer than another.2