Dreaming A Garland of Flowers for a Truth Teller

I find myself thinking of Daniel Defoe.

I’m one of those who like to celebrate co-religionists. For me that means a couple of things. Buddhists and Zen Buddhists, of course. But also Unitarians and especially Universalists.

So, yes, Defoe was a Presbyterian. But this was in a time when the Unitarians had not yet institutionally differentiated from that body in England. In North America it was a bit different. There Unitarianism the institutional movement derived principally out of Congregationalism.

While this was during a time of repression so a lot details are uncertain. But it appears he attended the Newington Green Unitarian chapel. And certainly his broad liberalism mirrored the more advanced perspectives found among the Unitarians of his day. And it seems fair enough to claim him.

But more to the point.

Turns out it was on the 31st of July in 1703 that Daniel Defoe was put into the stocks for, once again, offending those in authority and the culture that supported them with about the worst weapon of all. Satire. As it turns out it wouldn’t be the last, either. But, not to get ahead of the story.

He was already famous, or, I guess the real word is infamous for offending English sensibilities around xenophobia and its accompanying evil the idea of some racial purity. He knew how to use a pamphlet to good effect.

But it was in this year that one of those, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church, where anticipating by nearly thirty years Jonathan Swift’s devastating “modest proposal” for the Irish, he suggested religious dissent could best be dealt with by simply killing all the dissenters.

In writing this pamphlet, his using the voice of one in authority seemed to annoy those in authority.

He was dragged before one of the hanging judges, Salathiel Lovell, today mainly recalled for this single incident, who found Defoe guilty of seditious libel. The judge ordered the writer to spend three days in the stocks to be followed by a substantial fine and imprisonment until that fine was paid.

Here’s where we get to the good part. Okay, the details are in fact in dispute. But the version I’m going with is the one that shows the better side of the human heart.

The general practice of the day for someone in stocks was to pelt them with noxious things. If you can imagine it, that’s one of the things people would throw at folk in stocks.

Instead. However. It appears that Defoe was pelted with flowers.

Yes. We aren’t sure. But, possibly. He certainly should have been. And, he might have been.

Would that all satirists and artists and poets and writers who are driven to present reality as best they see it as best they can, were similarly treated.

Instead of the world that the prophet Mohammed was living in when he advised those who would speak truths to have one foot in the stirrup of a very fast horse.

But this is a moment where the harsh of our world and the possible of our lives meet.

Dreaming of pelting a truth teller with flowers.

Garlands of flowers for those who think freely and in doing so offer new directions, new hope…