Anne Taylor Robertson 3

Landscapes- The Jeremiad
“The Jeremiad, in short, was an endeavor to restore the ambiguity of landscape, to see in earth, sky and sea the terror-fraught and over-awing beauty of a loving God,” (Lane 148).
In his book, Belden C. Lane talks about a Pilgrim tradition. When the Pilgrims settled in the New England area, they had an undiscovered world ahead of them. They had to trust that the God that got them there was going to take care of them. The Jeremiad was a tradition that remembered how the ‘benefits of covenant rested on the obligations of covenant’. Basically, the Pilgrims felt that God had allowed them to get safely to the new world in order to do what He wanted them to do. It was a deal of sorts, and they were expected to uphold their end of it. The Jeremiad was a reminder that if God gives, he can also take away. While a lot of people see this as just a threat, Lane makes sense of the idea that the Jeremiad actually expresses a deep longing for God. When they had gone off and chose to do their own thing away from God, He was no longer in their presence. Essentially, they missed God. They missed the wonder and mystery that came with being in His presence. They wanted to meet Him where they had seen Him before- “on the flint rocks at Newport, by the driving sleet carried on winter winds over the Chatham lighthouse (…) and on the path west toward Mount Katahdin… no measured, house broken deity was this, but the God of all ages bursting onto their staid horizon with glory uncontained,” (Lane 148).