I am trying to understand what good it does to apologize for something someone else did generations ago. Could it be mainly to make ourselves feel and look good for not having done what they did? Let me give it a try.
My grandfather’s grandfather, Joseph Willis, in his Tennessee will dated May 9, 1843, bequeathed to his wife “all the land belonging to me with all my negroes, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, and farming utensils.”
The 1810 census showed that Joseph’s father, Peter Willis, had thirteen slaves. The slaves were listed right next to “100 yards of homespun fabric made annually by the family (value $50).” In the 1820 census, Peter’s plantation was up to sixteen slaves.
In 1833, a slave belonging to Peter’s neighbor was hanged. Many slaveholders in the area, including Peter Willis, signed a petition requesting the government to reimburse Peter’s neighbor for the value of this slave. The petition does not identify the slave’s crime or name or estimated monetary value.
There! I did it. I feel better now, having apologized for the sins of my fathers.
Not really. I assume that my ancestors were just doing what those in their time and culture did, possibly never questioning whether regarding another human being as a piece of property—like a hog or a piece of fabric—was right or wrong.
There is one thing more important than apologizing for the actions of our ancestors. It should move us to ask which people our descendants will wonder how we, in our time and culture, could so blindly and ignorantly mistreat.
January 21
Seated, waiting for the announcement to begin boarding the plane, I noticed for the first time the sign. It had two arrows. One pointed the way for Elite Access, the other for General Boarding. I cracked a slight smile and made a slight groan. I would rather lie down on a bed of nails than stand in a line marked “Elite.” I confess that may reveal something deficient about me.
This economy ticket holder, seated in General Boarding three rows behind the plane’s Elite, got to observe the pampering going on up there. First, their own private steward whispered with a smile to those of us seated in the cheap seats not to use their bathroom, located just inside the elite section, but to utilize the bathroom in the back of the plane. Then she pulled a thin veil to separate them from us, and latched a rope across the entrance to their section, just in case we forgot. The elite had paid much more for their seats, procuring not just perks of wine and leg room and fluffed pillows, but separation from the riff-raff.
I have since learned that two hundred years ago the French traveled long distances in a covered vehicle called a diligence, which was a glorified stagecoach pulled by five horses. It could carry up to eighteen people. There was room for three elite in the front seat, six middle class in, of course, the middle seat, and six poor people in the back of the coach. An additional two or three— the poorest poor—could be piled on top with the baggage.
Elitism gone to seed is self-righteous arrogance, based on the fiction that money or education or power or bloodline makes us organically different from the proletariat.
I am going to stick with the old proverb that, after the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.
January 22
Some of us relish playing a game called “devil’s advocate.” Over lunch, a friend told me about an epiphany he had many years ago. A mysterious person appeared to him and charged him with a mission, the meaning of which my friend still ponders. Trading on the strength of our relationship, after listening and asking questions for a while, I ventured: “Okay, I’m going to play devil’s advocate. Couldn’t that very potent, very personal, very real visitation possibly have been a dream fabricated by your unconscious mind?”
A devil’s advocate takes a position to test the strength of someone else’s position, probing for weaknesses that might help the other person think about it more critically and clarify things more accurately, or at least consider alternative interpretations.
The Roman Catholic Church created the office of devil’s advocate in 1587. 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