Father of the Man Written by Peter L Colman

The sole of the foot teaches us all things.
(Bambara proverb)

Be strong and courageous…for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go…

Like the sturdy oaks and elms that had kept a quiet, strong vigil over the storm-ridden coastal paradise of New England, Thomas Colman, rugged patriarch and progenitor of the Colman clan, was not one to boast of spiritual strength. He would have been in good company in his thinking, and may have very well shared a similar view of the world, with the likes of the infamous Romanticist and mystical poet-painter-engraver, William Blake, who penned in The Four Zoas, “It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements…To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast…”

Like Blake, Thomas was not inclined to laugh at adversity. Neither could he afford the simple luxury of languishing in some transient state of religious ecstasy. He was a wiser man than that. If the religious upheavals in Europe had splintered and sifted a hundred thousand pilgrim souls, and broken the heavy chains of ecclesiastical bondage and repression, and were sufficient to fuel a biblical exodus to the New World, then he, at least, would guard whatever fiber of fervor and faith he possessed safely preserved in the bowels of his heart. He would need the rugged, realistic edge of pragmatism to survive in this new, precarious wilderness of promise and prosperity. He was not a man to quibble or speculate about his prospect for success. Neither did he believe that he could just relax in the hope of Canaan and the promises of the God of Abraham, Moses and Joshua. He had left the relative luxury of the ‘leeks and onions’ in his native land, and had crossed Jordan. But there would be mountains to conquer and dark valleys to traverse before the proverbial ‘promised land’ would become a home, a safe haven. There were strange and unfamiliar acres to plow, and enemies to subdue. Little did the itinerant patriarch know that there would be obstacles to surmount, even among his own circle of friends and pilgrim companions.








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