Diary-keeping as a spiritual discipline especially developed among the Puritans, and we possess a good number of these texts that help to open up the inner world of their authors.
A good example is the diary left by the third daughter of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, Esther Edwards Burr (1732–1758), as she is known now.
Converted at 15
Samuel Hopkins remembered Esther as possessing ‘a lively, sprightly imagination, a quick and penetrating thought’. She was converted when she was ‘about 15’.
And at the age of 20, Esther married Aaron Burr, Senior, an Evangelical minister who was held in high regard by her father. Aaron was the second President of the newly-formed College of New Jersey in Newark, New Jersey (later to be moved to Princeton).
Starved of friendship
Though Esther and Aaron enjoyed a very happy marriage, Esther’s move to Newark made her homesick for her family, especially her sisters. Starved for friendship and fellowship, she began to write letters in the form of an extended diary to a close friend, Sarah Prince, who was the daughter of Thomas Prince, a Boston pastor and friend of her father.
Wholehearted housewife
Her diary is a marvellous window on the attempt of a young New England housewife to live wholeheartedly for God. Among the things that she prized was spiritual friendship with women like Sarah Prince.
Writing in her diary on 20 April 1755, for instance, she told Sarah: ‘I should highly value (as you, my dear, do) such charming friends as you have about you – friends that one might unbosom their whole soul too. … I esteem religious conversation one of the best helps to keep up religion in the soul, excepting secret devotion, I don’t know but the very best’.
Sharing the deepest things
For Esther, true friends were those with whom one could share the deepest things of one’s life. They were people with whom one could be transparent and open. In Esther’s words, they were people to whom one can ‘unbosom [one’s] whole soul’. And in the course of conversation about spiritual things the believer could find strength and encouragement for living the Christian life.
The importance of friends
In referring to spiritual conversation with friends as ‘one of the best helps to keep up religion in the soul’, Esther obviously views it as a means of grace, one of the ways that God the Holy Spirit uses to keep Christians in fellowship with the Saviour. As another New England Christian, Nathanael Emmons, a theologian who was mentored by close followers of Jonathan Edwards, put it in one of his favourite maxims: ‘A man is made by his friends.’
