Four days ago, it seemed like a good idea to think about Martin Luther, and what he might have meant by that phrase, “Sin Boldly.” Four days ago, I had pulled out the telescope far enough so that I could look at our troubled world dispassionately, from a very great distance. Four days ago, an exploration into the thinking of Martin Luther did not seem like an indulgence.
It seemed normal.
I’m getting through this period of Trump’s eternal presence by pulling that telescope out. I bind books because I need to get out of my mind and into my fingers. I bind books because other guys have done it, in worse situations than I am in. I tell myself that the barbarians are tearing down the walls of the monastery, but that is not my affair. I am in the scriptorium and they are outside, at least for the present.
In fact, most monks working at their desks were dealing with a lot more than I have to deal with, and they probably did it with more grace and humility than I can muster. For no reason at all, I’m trying to remember if it was Luther who had to be “kidnapped” by the duke or the elector or whatever feudal overlord ruled his part of Germany. Luther had pissed off the wrong people, and they were on the roads, disguised as footpads or whatever. The riches they wanted to steal (or at least prevent Luther from enjoying and spreading about) were solely intellectual. So the burgermeeister, or whoever-he-was, kidnapped Luther, shut him up in a room in his castle, and gave him quill and parchment.
As I remember it, Luther used the enforced captivity (or hospitality) to translate the Bible from Latin or Greek into German. To us, that seems like an interesting intellectual exercise. But to Luther, it was putting his soul to the test. A hailstorm hurled ice balls onto the metal roof of the room where Luther was working. He thought the devil was throwing rocks at him, for his grievous sins.
It's a difficult story, for me, at least. I want to believe what they never told me in Midvale Elementary School, since the most important things always go unsaid. Men like Luther were made of finer stuff than the rest of us. They got up, thought deep thoughts, wrote them down, and then retired to bed, assured that posterity would revere them as sages. They were not anxious, violent men who feared the dark and the devil.
I don’t have any connection to Luther, beyond having spent lots of time in the basements of plain-timbered Lutheran churches in my childhood. They all smell the same, by the way, and that was as endlessly reassuring as the inevitability of the service taking place above me. These were not places that could have spawned from a brilliant, terrified, terrible madman.
Which Luther probably was.
So—no connection to Luther, and the stones-throwing devil that tormented him.
But I do have a connection to a guy named Henry Herrick, who was a magistrate and a juror in the trial of Rebecca Nurse in Salem, 1692. The devil, for Herrick, was not throwing stones at his roof but stalking the pious homes of Colonial (or rather Pilgrim) Massachusetts. Herrick sent Nurse to her death, for being afflicted with (or perhaps cozening to) the devil. He was slightly more lenient to himself and his fellow jurors, when he confessed that he had himself been as afflicted by the devil as had been Rebecca Nurse. The same devil that had possessed Nurse so badly had also caused him to fall into the sin of believing that the devil…
…had possessed Nurse.
You will say that’s crazy, and I’ll agree. In fact, that’s the whole point. I am crazy, since I believed both that the men and women who had gone thinking and writing before me were doing it far better than I or we ever could, AND that human history was a rosy ascent into rationality and clear-thinking.
Luther was not a terrified man committing a disgusting sin. Henry Herrick could not have condemned Nurse (as well, apparently, as Sarah Good) to her death for being ensnared by the devil, and then excused himself for…being ensnared by the devil.
They were giants in the earth, who by definition had dealt better with worse shit than I would ever have to cope with. Herrick gets a pass in my mind because he was living in the 17th century, and somehow that gives him a patina of respectability and probity. But he was also 21 years old at the time of his deposition, and even in a society that had no real adolescence and in which adulthood started very early, that’s still young. I’m 68, and shudder at what I might have done in Herrick’s situation at Herrick’s age.
I thought of history, if I thought of it at all, as something that Luther and Henry Herrick had done and taken care of. I was born 11 years after World War II, and I grew up thinking that we had taken on fascism and won. The horrors of anti-Semitism would never be repeated. I would not see white men carrying torches through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” All of that was over, having been ended by the giants in the earth.
I didn’t think of history as a burden, something that I would have to get up every morning and do something about. I would skate by, taking the bus to work every morning, and coming home to comfort and ease at the end of the day.
History was over—obviously, since it was in the past, and I was living in the untroubled (might I suggest complacent?) present. History was violent and brutal, as well as terminally unforgiving, but it was over. That was the point. I was not supposed to have to get up each morning, and make history (in whatever tiny way it was my lot to endure). I was never going to be the bystander standing next to Rabbi Swarsensky, watching with quiet satisfaction as the synagogue burned down.
Indeed, Swarsensky and Herrick and Luther were all safely in the past, making no claims on me. I could go tonight to a poetry slam two blocks from my house and bind Thomas Mann, whom I’m currently interested in. I wouldn’t have to ask myself if I had the moral courage at least to offer comfort to the rabbi as we watched his synagogue burn down. I wouldn’t have to wonder if I, at age 21 in Salem in 1692, would be any less confused and hypocritical about my affairs with the devil. And nothing I did would ever amount to much—certainly nothing that would warrant the devil throwing stones at the roof of the room in which I had had to be kidnapped.
I could write a scathing letter to a judge—a guy named John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and let it lie in obscurity in a blog that I write. I wouldn’t have to read it, aloud, and in front of a camera. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about wondering what list of “domestic terrorists” I might find myself on, or where on that list I might fall.
History was over, so I was Scot-free. I could look with detachment on my ancestors and owed no explanation to my descendants.
We were done with that, and we would never have to answer that hypothetical and kind of stupid rhetorical question—what would I have done, as a decent German living in the 1930’s? Would I have spoken out?
We weren’t done with that—not by a long shot. So now, on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, I have to answer the question.
Will I speak out?
If I say yes, then I’ll walk to the poetry slam and read the letter to Roberts. It won’t matter that raising my voice won’t make a difference, that the venue is too small and utterly insignificant, that poetry slams rarely turn violent.
None of that will matter.
It will only matter if I don’t do it.
