Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

just as for the woman baking bread above or for the Narragansett ritual specialist discussed in chapter 2, their experiences of moving hand, foot, head, and torso helped them comprehend the divine body and its relation to its constituent parts.⁴³ The relation of one body part to another also helped them to articulate their vision of a proper visible church in which members were bound to one another with indissoluble bonds. In this language of physical or “natural” bodies and body parts, puritans struggled to balance an understanding of a hierarchy of importance among those parts against the transformative nature of Christ and the divine gift of salvation.

      The parts of the body were all necessary to the whole because they had varying forms and functions, but their contributions were not all of the same significance. In the letter of instruction that opened this chapter, dissenting ministers exhorted their younger coreligionists to “Let every one Design and Aim to be serviceable in his Place and Relation” because “every little Member of our natural Body profits the whole; the Eye is the light of all the Body; the Tongue pleads for the whole, or for any part; the Hand receives and labours as much as for the Foot, or the Head, as for it self.” The phrase “serviceable in his Place and Relation” is important here because it signaled the hierarchy among body parts. While “[e]very part must be useful to the Whole,” some were “little” ones that played a lesser role. The head relied on the other body parts, but its authority was meant to reign supreme.⁴⁴