Sunday Morning Meds--Righteous Anger

Giles Tilleman, arrested for his religious views in 16th century Brussels, had a chance to flee prison, but stayed instead in his cell. "I would not do the keepers so much injury, as they must have answered for my absence, had I gone away," he said. When he stood at the stake where he would be burned and noted the mass of wood for the fire, he told the guards to distribute that fuel to the poor instead of wasting so much on his execution. A guard offered to strangle him, to kill him before he burned, but Tilleman refused, and, as John Foxe writes in his Book of Martyrs, “he gave up the ghost with such composure amidst them, that he hardly seemed sensible of their effects.”

I don’t know why exactly, but I’ve been drawn back to reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs once more, a book I read as a kid. In fact, I’m not even sure I read the book when I was a boy, but I am eerily familiar with it, a story book Published first in 1563, the Book of Martyrs created, somehow, 400 years later, an significant impression on me, its gruesome stories carring, unforgettably, equal measures of horror and transcendence.

Even though the martyrdom recounted gloriously in that book is part of the grand narrative of redemption, I doubt that elementary school teachers in Christian schools like the one I attended as a boy talk much at all about 16th century martyrdom, as they did a half century ago. I doubt anyone commends that old book any more, even though it stood, for years, beside only the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress in the homes of multitudes of good Christian folk. Really, by today’s standards, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is, well, gauche, to the pluralistic temper of our age, quite tasteless therefore, and embarrassing, in a way, as are the nightmarish visions of hell of Hieronymus Bosch.

All of that helps me understand my own chills when approaching imprecatory psalms like this one, songs that cry longingly for revenge. Even though the fury is muted in 129, far less distasteful here than in other psalms (no bashed heads of children as in 137, for instance), I find it difficult to empathize with the psalmist’s rage.

But then my back has never been plowed. I own no scars for my profession. My family is intact. Giles Tilleman, John Huss, hundreds of thousands of other martyrs (their list continues to grow) are, at best, nightmarish memories from an ancient book no one reads anymore anyway.

And I wonder sometime whether my own attitude toward Roman Catholics didn’t have to undergo some significant therapy in order to entertain even the possibility of acceptance as a result of an imagination overloaded with Christians burned at stakes or mauled by lions. As a child, I wonder whether I would have had more empathy for the imprecatory psalms, simply because my imagination created, even joyfully, the mawkish smell of burning skin.

Was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs good for me, way back when? I’m not sure, but I’m happy I know it, happy I felt the terror and the glory of those martyrs. I’m glad those stories are a part of me; they may be my only link to imprecatory psalms like 129.

Reading the psalms has taught believers about God for centuries, but I continue to believe that even those that make us shutter teach us just as much, and maybe more, about ourselves, our humanness before God’s transcendent divinity.