Recklessness And Rage: Examples Of Courage For A Needy United States And A Needy World
On January 6, 2021, braggadocios Californian Evan Neumann was captured on footage wearing a red [we’ll just say it’s a four-letter acronym with two As] hat, using a barricade as a battering ram and shouting at Capitol Police, “I am willing to die, are you?” When he was indicted on fourteen charges, including assaulting police officers, he fled – and begged for refugee status in Belarus.
“Our analysis reveals that the members of the Capitol riot
were far from consistent in their reasons and goals,
although most seemed to share a fear of sociocultural status loss.
Some defendants describe a desire for ‘revolution’ or ‘civil war,’
while others describe the attack as a simple ‘flexing of muscles,’
or a demonstration of their frustration with the status quo.
We find that the largest fraction of defendants were motivated
to come to Washington DC on January 6 by either
their desire to support [the 45th president],
their concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election,
or some combination of both.”
Harvard Kennedy School
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy
July 18, 2022
"[The 45th president] and I, we had a hell of a journey.
I hate it being this way … all I can say is count me out.
Enough is enough…"
Lyndsey Graham
"We love you. You're very special."
The 45th president of the United States
January 6, 2021
Perhaps we can find grace and hope in heroes.
Karl Friedrich Stellbrink
Born in Germany in 1894, Karl Friedrich Stellbrink was ordained in the Evangelical Church of Prussia in 1921 and served as a foreign vicar in Brazil between 1921 and 1929. Appointed pastor of the Lutheran Church in Lubeck, Germany in 1934, he initially identified with Hitler’s National Socialist movement and, like many German evangelical pastors, adhered to an anti-Jewish/anti-Catholic theology – “Against Rome and Juda!”
His objections to the Nazi kirchendkampf campaign, an attempt to take theological/ideological and leadership control of Germany’s Protestant churches, resulted in his expulsion from the party.
Repeatedly accused of helping Jews, he developed a close working relationship with three Catholic priests who spoke publicly against the Nazis. On Palm Sunday 1943, he delivered a sermon attributing the Royal Air Force bombing the city of Lubeck to divine punishment - “God has spoken in a loud voice and the people of Lübeck will once again learn to pray.” Together with the priests, he was charged with “defeatism, malice, favoring the enemy and listening to enemy broadcasts,” arrested, sentenced, and executed in Hamburg. Following his death, his widow was billed for his court costs, imprisonment, and execution.
Stellbrink shared death row with Father Hermann Lange. “We are like brothers,” Lange wrote, describing the relationship between the clergymen.
In the hours before their executions, the priests wrote to their families and bishop.
Father Johannes Prassek to his family: “Do not be sad! What is waiting for me is joy and good fortune, with which all the happiness and good fortune here on earth cannot compare.” It is reported that at the conclusion of his trial and sentencing Prassek exclaimed, “Thank God that farce is over!”
Father Eduard Muller addressed his bishop: “Whole-heartedly, I thank you first of all for the greatest gift which you gave me as a successor of the apostles, when you placed your hands on me and ordained me as God’s priest. But now we must embark upon this – in human terms difficult - final walk, which is to lead us to Him, whom we served as priests.”
Muller’s Fellow prisoner Stephan Pfurtner and cell-neighbor later wrote:
“I think I shall never forget his calm gentle eyes: How they would wink me a ‘Good Morning’ in the early hours and in the evening a ‘Good Night’, I guess he was unable to even hurt a fly.”
Marianna Biernacka
Marianna Biernacka’s was a hard life. Wife of a Polish farmer, she had six children only two of whom survived infancy. In 1943, German soldiers arrested her son Stanislaw and his wife Anna. In retaliation for the death of a German soldier killed by the Resistance in a nearby village, the two were singled out to be shot. Marianna offered to take the place of her pregnant daughter-in-law, who already had a two-year-old daughter, Genija. As long as they met their quota of ten-deaths-to-one, the soldiers didn’t care. She was murdered on July 13, 1943 in Naumowicze, Belarus. Her last request was to hold her rosary as she was murdered.
Stanislaw Kostka Starowieyski was born into the life of privilege of pre-World War I Polish landed nobility. His law studies at the famed Krakow Jagiellonian University were interrupted by the War I and distinguished service on the Russian front. During the inter-Word Wars period, he continued to earn honors as an officer in the Polish-Soviet War, the Kiev Offensive of 1920, and the Battle of Warsaw. The long-term effects of dysentery and blood clots in his legs eventually ended his military career and he returned to a civilian life marked by service. Starowieyski and his wife Maria had six children and, in the aftermath of the “War to End All Wars,” used their wealth to sustain others. With the German and Russian invasions of Poland during World War II, their home became a waystation for Polish refugees. He was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1940 and incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, where, despite being repeatedly tortured, he continued to distinguish himself with acts of simple kindness toward his fellow prisoners. He died in the first hours of Easter Sunday 1941.
Maria Antonina Kratochwii was born in what is today part of the Czech Republic; she entered the Congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in 1901 and made her final profession in 1906. Assigned to teach in SSND schools in today’s Poland, she distinguished herself as an educator. With the Soviet invasion of Poland, her convent and schools were nationalized and the sisters were expelled and prohibited from wearing their religious habits. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Poland in 1941, resulted in the arrest of Maria Antonia and six other sisters. Imprisoned in Stanislawow (western Ukrane), where a large population of Jews were entrapped in the Stanislawow Ghetto, Sister Kratochwii protested the brutal treatment of Jewish female prisoners by the notorious SS-Hauptsurmfuhrer Hans Krueger. As punishment for defying the Gestapo murderer, she was subjected to torture and died from typhus and her injuries on October 2, 1942 – six days after the sisters were released.
More than one-hundred years after her birth in Dunscore, southern Scotland (1897), Jane Haining was recognized as a “Hero of the Holocaust” by the British government (2010) and named as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” in Jerusalem’s sacred Yad Vashem.
In 1932, while working as a secretary at the huge JP Coats factor in Paisley, she spied an advertisement for a “matron” or mother for boarding students at the school of the Scottish Mission to the Jews in Budapest, Hungary, dubbed “Jewdapest” because of its burgeoning Jewish population - sixty-percent of the doctors and half the lawyers in the city were Jewish.
With the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Hungarian officials began a slow but effective attack on the Jewish community – a desperate but futile attempt to assuage Hitler.
Anticipating the worst, Church of Scotland officials attempted to convince Jane to abandon her students. She responded, “If these children needed me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in these days of darkness?”
After Germany’s invasion of Hungary, when she scolded the son-in-law of the school’s cook for pilfering food intended for the girls, he informed on her. The Gestapo arrested her the next day on suspicion of “espionage on behalf of England.” She was shipped to the labor camps of Auschwitz and died two months after her arrival. She was 67 years-old.
"What is therefore our task today? Shall I answer: "Faith, hope, and love"?
That sounds beautiful. But I would say - courage… Our task today is recklessness.
For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature...
we lack a holy rage - the recklessness which comes from the knowledge
of God and humanity.
The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets,
and when the lie rages across the face of the earth...
a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world.
To rage against the ravaging of God's earth, and the destruction of God's world.
To rage when little children must die of hunger,
when the tables of the rich are sagging with food.
To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries.
To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace.
To rage against complacency.
To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge
and seek to change human history
until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God.
And remember the signs of the Christian Church
have been the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish...but never the chamelon."
Danish playwright and Lutheran minister Kaj Munk
Kaj Munk was a playwright and Lutheran minister in Western Jutand, Denmark from 1924 until his death twenty years later. Enraged by Germany’s treatment of Jews and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, he wrote and directed anti-Nazi plays and, during Advent 1944, delivered an anti-Nazi sermon in Copenhagen’s national cathedral. Munk was arrested on January 4, 1944; his body was found in a ditch the next morning.
The funeral of Rev. Kaj Munk was attended by more than 4,000 Danes.
French mother Anne-Marie Epaud was arrested on suspicion of working with the underground and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Claude Epaud remembered his mother as a “generous woman, very resourceful, loyal to her friends, and perpetually driven to help the needy.” Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Marie Claude Vaillant-Couterier testified during the Nuremburg trials:
“One day, Annette Epaud [her assigned name in the concentration camp], one of our companions, a young, beautiful woman of thirty, passed near Block 25 and felt pity for those women, who screamed from morning to evening in all languages: ‘A drink, a drink; water, water…’ She entered our bloc to take a bit of herbal tea, but the moment she slipped it through the bars on the window, the Aufseherin (guard) saw it, took her by the neck, and threw her into Block 25…Two days later, on the truck that was taking her to the gas chambers, she held another Frenchwoman close to her and when the truck began to move, she called out, ‘Think of my little boy if you return to France,’ and the two of them began to sing La Marseillaise.”
That was the last that was seen of Anne-Marie Epaud before she was murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers on February 20, 1943, with prisoners from Block 25, most of whom were Jewish.
Anne-Marie Epaud
In the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, Dutch teacher Johan Benders hid Jewish children in the underground cellar of his home and urged his students to create false identification cards for Jews in hiding. He and his wife sheltered Jews in their home. Brutally tortured following his arrest with two Jewish girls, who subsequently escaped and were welcomed, again, into the family’s secret shelter, Johan attempted suicide twice before leaping from a third-floor window of his prison to avoid the risk that he might – under torture – disclose the location of Jewish refugees. In solidarity with their teacher, Johan’s students whistled their school song as they marched past his prison. He is credited with saving 3,000 Jewish children.
As our nation continues to be roiled by the events before and after January 6, 2021, we pray – together with German Confessing Church martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer
May God lead us kindly through these times,
but above all,
may God lead us to himself.
Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945 – two weeks before American forces liberated his Flossenburg concentration camp. His final recorded words were:
This is the end – for me the beginning of life.