Image credit: Quaker artist Maggie Nelson - https://maggienelsonstudio.com/quaker-prints

Mary Dyer - Who Opened the Way

by Khyber

Ten years ago, Ben Pink Dandelion asked a few of us at a retreat to choose a rule, which meant in Quaker terms, to find something that spoke to us alone to guide us to our inner light. This fall, I found my guide in the answer Mary Dyer gave when she was interrogated about feeling shame to hold the hands of two young men, also Quakers, as they walked to the gallows to be hanged for repeated violations of the Puritan magistrates’ prohibition against the very presence of Quakers in Massachusetts.

“This is to me the hour of greatest joy I ever had in this world. No ear can hear, no tongue can utter, and no heart can understand the sweet incomes and the refreshings of the spirit of the Lord, which I now feel.”

Mary Dyer had become convinced of the radical reinterpretation of the Christian message she heard from Quakers in England and she had followed the Puritan heretic, Ann Hutchinson, out of a Boston church when the older woman was expelled. About the same time she was given the epithet “The woman that bore the monster.” Mary and her husband William had had a still-born and unusually shaped baby, which was concealed from the authorities until the secret was revealed. In those times, natural and human occurrences like this were bound up in the spiritual and political and a birth that deviated from the norm was seen as an omen of evil and a symbol of corruption. Quakers, like Mary Dyer, saw not a monstrosity, but the inner light revealing the second coming of the Christ Spirit into the world. Mary Dyer looked like a heretic to the Puritans not just for her beliefs, but for a misfortune of biology.

The light of her words in the face of wrong-headed judgement and tyranny speaks to me as I try to be a Quaker in a society that, if not anti-Quaker, is not always very Quakerly. I admire the spirt and beauty of her stance which was so strong that she felt led to make a public statement in word and deed despite the certainty of losing life and situation. She had, after all, been removed twice before from the colony under threat of death. Yet the impact of her martyrdom in 1660, she correctly felt, would open the way for the practice of Quakerism in the colonies. Her cause speaks to my condition. As Anne Myles says in her poem in the voice of Mary Dyer, showing the power of her human agency:

It seems I was born a woman / To be written about.

Drawn from Anne Myles, What Woman that Was: Poems for Mary Dyer and a biography by Johan Winsser, Mary and William Dyer: Quaker Light and Puritan Ambition in Early New England.