It’s a warm July Sunday in 1745. You’re sitting in your pew at the First Church of York, Maine, waiting for the service to begin. It is a quiet time, a time for reflection and prayer. Today will offer something different though and try as you will to focus on more spiritual matters, you can’t help but wonder at what is to come. Your pastor, old Samuel Moody,has gone with William Pepperrell’s colonial militia to lay siege to Louisbourg at Cape Breton. Old Moody is the army’s spiritual advisor and knowing him as you do, you have no doubt that his long-winded prayers and cutting commentary alone might be enough to force the French from Quebec. You admit that the new pastor might be a breath of fresh air, considering that old Samuel Moody seemed to know everything about everybody in the church and had no qualms exposing the private lives and sins of his congregation from the pulpit. The new pastor, though, has some issues of his own. He stands in front of the crowd and begins to speak, quietly, almost silently. He is well-known to you. But in the past few years, he has isolated himself more and more from people, sent his own children to live with relatives, for his wife has passed, and is only seen outside rarely, at night, walking among the headstones or along the beach. Stranger still is the man’s appearance and that’s what you have been wondering about as you sit there quietly. Will he remove it? Will he preach without it? Apparently not. He’s wearing it now as he speaks, the fabric fluttering with his breath as he forms the words. Then, when he must read from the Scriptures, he takes the Bible in his hands and turns his back on the congregation and only then does he remove it. Reading to the wall, so no one can see his face, only then is he free from it. When he turns back around, it is there. You suspected as much. His sermon is as long as his father’s and you sit there, sweating and listening intently. He certainly doesn’t seem demented but he does seem clouded or depressed. This is Joseph Moody, the son of your own pastor.  Everyone in York knows that he wears a veil to cover his face, is never seen in public without it, and with no explanation why. The minister’s black veil is in place this morning as it has been for the past seven years.  It wasn’t always this way for Joseph Moody. There was a time when he was one of the most popular and influential men in the village of York. Old Samuel Moody’s son grew up with his father’s tutelage and was highly educated. He was the school master of the settlement, helping to prepare young men for Harvard. He was the Register of Deeds and the Town Clerk, not to mention being his father’s assistant minister. There was hardly a more social, community-minded man in the village. He married and had a family and in all ways seemed destined to continue in the footsteps of his father, that is, until something happened, something that he never shared with anyone and made him cover his face from all except the eyes of God for the remainder of his life. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about him, although he changed the minister's name, in one of his earliest stories, “The Minister’s Black Veil.”  Women wore black veils when they mourned, but for a man to cover his face with a veil was unheard of. It was strange. But the people of York grew used to his bizarre habit because he was one of their own, because he could still perform the functions of a minister, even though he was the preferred choice for funerals over christenings. Except for the veil, he seemed mostly normal. He spent most of his time in his own rooms, bothering no one, and to avoid contact when he was with others, he often sat facing a wall. Some people think his strange behavior is a result of the death of his wife, but the wearing of the veil did not coincide with the time of her death. What could cause an educated socially-minded man of God to cover his face, as though he was ashamed o