Pope Sixtus V established the position to question the qualifications of a person being considered for canonization or beatification, so that the process didn’t progress carelessly or easily. The job of devil’s advocate was to be skeptical, to look for problems in the evidence presented of a candidate’s character and saintliness, even to make the case against the miracles attributed to the individual. The office was abolished in 1983 by Pope John Paul II. The number of canonizations and beatifications has soared ever since.13
Sometimes we may owe it to our friends, especially those who are unaccustomed to thinking critically about their beliefs—those who are cocksure, dogmatic and intolerant of those who see things differently—opportunity to see things from another point of view. Oliver Cromwell wrote to the Church of Scotland, urging them to repudiate their mule-headed allegiance to King Charles II: “I beseech you, by the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
January 23
Anabaptists by the thousands were executed by Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century. Their crime? They did not believe in infant baptism or war. Holding such unfamiliar, heretical notions on baptism and pacifism, they were punished by death.
Dirk Willems, an Anabaptist awaiting death in a prison near his home in Holland, made a rope from clothes and rappelled down the prison walls. The moat around the prison was covered with ice. Willems dashed across it and made it to the other side. A guard pursuing him fell through the ice. Hearing the guard scream for help, Willems, obeying the commandment of Jesus to love enemies, stopped, turned around, ran back, and pulled the guard to safety. The guard placed Willems under arrest and returned him to prison. On May 16, 1569, Dirk Willems was condemned to death. They burned him at the stake.14
Our culture recently finished that once-a-year pageantry where we pivot away from getting ahead, for a few moments, to indulge in a few deferential thoughts and words about a silent baby lying sweetly in a manger. Now done with that, we return to the real world of religious strife and shooting wars of drones, assault rifles, and improvised explosive devices.
The Amish and Mennonites of the sixteenth century, descendants of the Anabaptists, marched to a different drummer. They marched in a dark and bloody time to the disturbing drumming of Jesus’s words: “Love your enemies.”15 Many of them like Dirk Willems, because of their peacemaking, lost their lives.
My obedience to Jesus is made of thinner stuff. I am more comfortable with the haloed baby Jesus lying in a manger surrounded by gentle animals making child-friendly sounds than with the grownup Jesus making the centerpiece of his Sermon on the Mount a seemingly absurd mandate to love enemies.
Is loving enemies totally irrelevant and impractical anymore? Twenty-first century middle-earth Christians like me want to know.
January 24
The first convention for women’s rights was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Men were free to attend but were asked to remain silent.
After conventioneers drafted a document demanding women’s right to vote, many newspapers weighed in. A Lowell (Massachusetts) Courier editorial warned that, with women’s equality, “the lords must wash the dishes, scour up, be put to the tub, handle the broom, darn stockings.” Philadelphia’s Public Ledger and Daily Transcript declared: “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything. The ladies of Philadelphia are resolved to maintain their rights as Wives, Belles, Virgins and Mothers.” The Oneida (New York) Whig declared: “This bolt is the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanhood. If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentlemen, will be our dinners and our elbows? Where our domestic firesides and the holes in our stockings?”
Only one of the more than one hundred signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was still alive in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote finally passed.16
It is hard to exaggerate how far the movement to include women in the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” dictum has come since the Nineteenth Amendment passed. The female college seniors in a class I teach are unable to appreciate how hard and long the struggle to free women from millennia of patriarchal rule has been. They take with a yawn, as a given, as something obvious to any numbskull, that women are equal to men: “Who would question that?”
Our granddaughter will begin elementary school this year with no doubt in her mind that she is as free as any boy in the class to become a nuclear scientist or a neurosurgeon. Someday she will study history and learn to credit her freedom-fighting foremothers.
January 25
Dr. Kimberly Allison, a young pathologist whose specialty is studying breast cells under a microscope, got breast cancer. The unkindest cut of all was that the diagnosis came while she was still nursing her second child. Dr. Allison wrote the book Red Sunshine about her experience. One thing she covers is how becoming a cancer patient changed the way she relates to patients. They can never again be just cells on a slide.
An excellent movie on how becoming the cancer patient can transform the way a physician relates to patients is The Doctor starring William Hurt. Hurt plays Dr. Jack McKee, a highly successful, self-absorbed, swashbuckling surgeon who cannot wait to cut into the next patient. He taught one star-struck resident: “Get in. Fix it. Get out. I’d rather you cut straight, and care less. The surgeon’s job is to cut.”
Then the great physician McKee got a malignant throat tumor. Part of his larynx had to be removed.
Dr. McKee changed the way he trained residents and visited patients. The most influential event in his transformation came after a dying young woman told him a parable about a farmer who kept all the birds and creatures away from his crops with traps and fences. The farmer was very successful, but he was also very lonely. So one day he stood in the middle of his fields from dawn to dusk, his arms outstretched, to welcome the animals. Not a single creature came. They were terrified, you see, of the farmer’s new scarecrow.
Then the young woman set the dagger: “Dear Jack, just let down your scarecrow arms and we’ll all come to you.”17
Power may be the great aphrodisiac, but vulnerable love is still life’s most effective counter to loneliness and death.
January 26
A goat resides at Kinderdijk in The Netherlands.
Kinderdijk is home to the largest concentration of windmills in the world, some of them 250 years old. Industrious, courageous Dutch men and women created a system of dikes, windmills, and canals that successfully reclaimed land from the North Sea, enabling their families to live safely—of all places—below sea level.
At the entrance to this quaint village now stands a brass goat. It balances on one hoof atop a haystack rising out of a canal. The village people chose that sculpture to symbolize their forebears’ victory over the cold and threatening North Sea.
Why a goat? I am told by people who raise sheep and goats that three characteristics of a goat make that symbol make sense. One, goats tend to be independent and headstrong. Goats have a mind of their own while sheep, by contrast, do not like separation from their flock. Two, goats like to take the high ground and move uphill in search of food, while sheep are content to graze, heads down, in a pasture. Three, a goat’s tail turns up, while a sheep’s tail turns down.
Our time is out of joint. Many Americans have mortgages that are “under water”—they owe more on their house than the house is worth.
