June 15

Margaret Jones, Josiah Henson, and Evelyn Underhill

Author

David Barnhart
June 15, 2025

This Tulip Poplar, knocked over forty years ago, has continue to grow with this long double trunk. Alabama, 2025. Own photo.

Today in 1648, Margaret Jones, a midwife who practiced natural medicine, was hanged in the Massachusetts Bay colony for witchcraft. She was the second woman murdered in a moral panic by Christians in the American colonies. 

Today marks the day, in 1789, that Rev. Josiah Henson was born and enslaved in Maryland. He would escape slavery forty years later into Canada with his family, and would go on to write an autobiography that became the basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  He and his community of formerly enslaved persons created a self-sufficient intentional community called Dawn Settlement. 

Today is also a feast day, in the Episcopal Church, for Evelyn Underhill, author, mystic, and pacifist, who died on this day in 1941. She helped popularize many Roman Catholic mystics for her Protestant audience.

Reflection: 

Josiah Henson’s autobiography is available here. He wrote: 

O, my God! how my heart sang jubilees of praise to Thee, as the steamboat swung loose from the levee and breasted the mighty tide of the Mississippi! Away from this land of bondage and death! Away from misery and despair! Once more exulting hope possessed me. This time if I do not open my way to freedom, may God never give me chance again!

Although Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped advance the cause of abolition, some doubted the accounts inhumanity. In response, Josiah Henson said, 

“The truth has never been half-told; the story would be too horrible to hear. I could fill this book with cases that have come under my own experience and observation, by which I could prove that the slaveholder could and did break every one of the ten commandments with impunity.”

Using the words of Rev. Henson, Edward E. Baptist titled his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. 

Evelyn Underhill wrote, in her book Practical Mysticism: 

“The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, he has not entered into possession of all his powers.”

and

“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they represent.”

Prayer: God of All, we intuit an entire universe beyond our sensing and knowing, pressing on our thoughts and desires and in which we are all one. This is Your Kingdom, and we long to see the love and justice of your world right all that is wrong in ours. Amen.