about. Job knows the earth, the weather, its cycles.
We are gifted with free will, my father tells me, which includes the choice of sin. But I don’t know what he connects that thought to.
1701—In a time of prayer my parents argued. My brothers and sisters looked at them startled. She would not say amen to his prayer for King James. The parents were doing what the children could not. We all left the room. I sat on the top stair and listened. My sisters hid in the bed. Finally, the strain broke and my father left the house. The mother sent all the children to bed where we cried softly into our worn blankets.
The following year, my father returned. He was visiting a sick parishioner when the parsonage caught fire, burning all but a third of the house, including his work on the book of Job.
1702—The Fire Number One. Possibilities—[I heard my father say].
Sparks from a neighbor’s chimney on our thatch.
Sparks from our own chimney.
A broken chimney tile.
A cracked stove pipe.
A stray ember from the fireplace onto a frayed rug.
The Epworth Rectory had three stories. Made of timber and plaster. Covered with straw thatch. There were seven rooms, kitchen and parlor, hall and buttery. Three large upper rooms where we slept. The house was dim even in the day. At night, a candle hardly made a difference. Outside there was a garden with a stone wall. A barn of timber and clay walls covered with thatch. Three acres beyond the barn that bordered wildness and boredom.
Whatever the cause, the roof, on fire, fell on our bed. The sisters ran from the room. A servant came and led Hetty and me downstairs and pushed us from a window. Why didn’t she leave me upstairs? She could have let me die. I would have gone to the Lord that couldn’t possibly be worse than the Wesley house.
Our mother was burned on her hands, neck and arms, rushing through the house, trying to find what she could save until the flames would have roasted her. And she fled.
Some of us were sent to live with an uncle while the rectory was rebuilt.
When we were together again, my father took up his work on Job. My mother took up our lessons.
1705—Now our father in debtor’s prison. How could we be in debt? We had bought nothing. I never will marry a clergyman. Probably I never will marry.
My mother is overwhelmed with work. When she gives birth, she sends the infant to a neighbor to care for. In the night, the woman rolls over and smothers it. I hear the woman weeping as she comes to my mother with the dead infant in her arms.
My father was a Tory. All Wesley’s were conservatives from birth. We had no choice. We were against democratization and reform. My father’s politics did not go well. They irritated his parishioners who were illiterate. They were mainly Whigs. They opposed the succession of James, the Duke of York. The congregation also resented my father’s prayers for James.
At one point, neighbors burned our flax fields. Later, when my father continued to irritate them, they stabbed our milk cows and called us devils.
The poor pitiful beasts. What had they done?
My Letters to Paradise—
I write to You from this world where poor dumb animals are stabbed. I am haunted by the noise they made. My mother would have told them to be quiet. But I heard their helpless cries. Their misunderstanding of what was happening. The pain of the knife stabbing their thick bodies. How long it took for them to die. I am sure You are out in the universe holding the formations of the stars. Keeping them in order. But meanwhile on Your earth, there are happenings that need Your attention.
I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eat, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me, and I think to have bread on such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.
—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley
A Letter from the Wesley Cows in the Field—
It was us who died for them.
My Letters to Paradise—
I am sorry, O Lord, I grieve more for cows than my mother’s infants.
In church there was a girl, the only child of her parents. I often saw her walk into the church between them. She sat between her parents also. I looked at her sometimes, unless we sat in the front row, where my father sometimes put us. If I was behind her, I watched her. Once, she turned and looked at me. I didn’t look away. I still was wondering what it was like to be the only child in a house.
Once, in despair, thinking the Lord too was an only child—how could he know how I felt in the crowded house where I had to live? But in the night, my arms held tightly to my chest to make room for my sisters, the Lord said to me, you are an only child with me.
1709—The Fire Number Two
We fled the rectory again in the night. Clattering down the stairs. John cried from an upstairs window in the rectory, Help me! Our father, Samuel tried to climb the burning stairs, but could not. He gathered some of us in the garden to pray for our brother’s soul, but neighbors made a ladder of hands and shoulders, climbed up and brought him down.
The Dispersement of Children after the Fire.
Once again, we lost nearly everything except the nightclothes we wore. I was thirteen years old. Our mother walked through the flames, this time singeing her hair that stood up in jagged wisps from her head. Afterwards, Uncle Matthew Wesley, my father’s brother, a doctor in London, took Sukey and Hetty when we had no place to live. Emily stayed with our mother in the nearby house of a neighbor. I was sent to the neighbor who had smothered my infant brother. Did my mother want her to smother me?
The fire was a blessing. Afterwards, we were scattered to families and friends and talked to servants and ran and played with children.
The woman did not want to smother me after all. She let me sit warmly by the fire. She gave me an old umbrella I patched. I stood in the rain at the backdoor and listened to the clumping of the drops.
Someone showed me a picture of a rolling chair, Spain, 1595. I dreamed I had a little chair with wheels and could spin here and there. But how would it get up the stairs to the girls’ room where I slept, and sat sometimes during the day?
When the house was rebuilt after the fire, the custom of singing psalms morning and evening resumed. My mother also read a psalm for the day, and chapters in the New Testament and the Old Testament, after which we said our private prayers.
The harsh discipline returned in the rectory once again. I welcomed it. I sanctioned it. I longed for it. I hated it.
Not one child after a year old was heard to cry aloud.
—From the Writings of Susanna Wesley
Mother’s lesson.
Ahaz was a wicked king. He made his sons pass through the fire—II Kings 16:3. What did that mean? We asked our mother. Was it like our own father who prayed for John after being unable to rescue him? Did it mean we all passed through the fire when our house burned?
