On the Moral Purpose of Guillotines

The mechanism for human beheading that got its name from Joseph Ignace Guillotin is quite good at doing the job for which it was designed.  

Dr. Guillotin was an Enlightenment reformer, a progressive, eager to eliminate the brutality of public executions.  Hangings and other unpleasantnesses inflicted on the condemned among the lower classes were ugly, but so too were the choppy choppy sword and axe executions inflicted on the rich.  It being the enlightened, modern era, Guillotin argued that the purpose of executions was not egregious suffering, but swiftly dispatching a soul to their maker. Oddly enough, he personally opposed the death penalty, and the naming of this machine after him is one of the peculiarities of history.  

It is, as mechanisms go, quite simple.

A grooved wooden frame, into which a weighted blade is set at a height.  Below, a pillory, into which the person about to meet the Deity of their Choice is secured.  Activate the mechanism, and ssssshunk.  Off goes the head.  Instakill.  Neat, precise, swift.

Guillotines were pressed into service most famously during the French Revolution, when they were used to remove the heads of the aristocracy from their bodies.  Kings and queens, lords and ladies, lined up and slaughtered, their heads piling up, as mobs of Jacobins and peasants cheered.  Jacobins were, of course, the primordial leftists who gave the Left its name, as they sat on the left side of the French National Assembly at the dawn of that popular uprising.

That, I think, is the image that for some reason strikes a chord with left-leaning folk, every time some new capitalist depredation is noted.  "Time for the guillotines!  Nothing a guillotine wouldn't solve!"  Memes get memed.  This is meant only kind of in jest, the sort of joking-not-joking that defines so much of our life on social media.

The problem is, of course, that the guillotine isn't progressive.  It's simply a machine designed to allow the powerful to swiftly kill the powerless.  

The French Revolution quickly descended into the Reign of Terror, and started taking the heads of any who stood against the most radical of the Jacobins.  Calls for moderation were met with more beheadings, including those of the Jacobins themselves.  Does the name Danton ring a bell?  No?  It should.  Here.  Watch this entire classic movie.  In the end, even Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, ended up decapitated. 

And also...y'all were paying attention in history class, right?  What the guillotine accomplished politically was a transition from an autocrat to an autocrat, from Louis XVI to Napoleon, from a king to an emperor.  

It's not an instrument of positive change.  If anything, the guillotine is the symbol of self-annihilating progressive overreach.

But perhaps you're still grumbling and doubling down about guillotines as a tool of the People's Revolution.  

Here.  Let me raise the blade.  Let me set the mechanism.  Let me separate you from your childish notions of redemptive violence.

Who else, in history, used guillotines on the regular?  

One guess.  You know it.

Nazis. 

By the 1930s, that system of execution had been improved by German engineering.  Same mechanism, but made of metal, with a much heavier weight bearing down on the much sharper blade.  Neat.  Compact. Efficient.  You could fit them indoors, in an execution chamber, for ease of processing and quietly eliminating those who opposed the Reich's fascism.

The Nazis executed over sixteen thousand "enemies of the state" with their guillotines.  

The communist charged with setting the Reichstag fire.  The Dutch Christian students who circulated anti-Nazi pamphlets as the White Rose.  Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler.  

It's a tool used by Power to kill the powerless.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Morally speaking, there's a word for that.

Care to guess?

The Pastoral Anxiety Dream

"So," I said, over my cup of coffee.  "Here's a question.  Do you have a pastoral anxiety dream?  You know, one that keeps coming back to you at night?"

I was chatting with the rector of a neighboring Episcopal church, dishing and talking shop and sharing about our ministries.  She thought for a moment, and then told me her dream.

That dream that recurred, popping up like a bad penny in the churn of her subconscious mind?  It was essentially the same as mine.  

As it happened, the evolution of our dreaming was the same, too.   Her specific dreams were hers, so I ain't gonna share what ain't mine to share.  My dreams, though?  

When I started in ministry, my dreams were essentially a riff on the "I'm-back-in-school-and-haven't-prepared-for-the-test-and-I'm-not-wearing-pants" dream.

I'd be up in the dream-pulpit, but couldn't find my sermon.  Or my printed dream-sermon would be in disarray, sheaves of numberless pages, with no evident start or finish.  It was "printed," so you know I'm "old."  Or there was no musician or music.  Or the service was starting to fall apart, because I didn't know the order of worship.  I'd be failing, publicly, in front of an increasingly impatient and muttering throng of strangers.

Fear of crowds, fear of judgement, fear that I lacked competence, all woven up together into one tidy little package, wrapped about with the bitter bow of anxiety.  That dream showed up a whole bunch in the first five or six years of pastoring.

But as the years passed, that changed.  Discipline in practicing public speaking in all of its forms changed me.  In my actual ministries, I preached with a text, with a deck, with only an outline, with nothing but my memory and a timer to keep me on track...and the hold of that fear was broken.  The dream would surface, and even in that dream state I could spin up an impromptu riff on the heart of the Gospel.  The daimons of anxiousness beat a tactical retreat. 

Anxiety, once defeated, regrouped and returned in another form.  

In the new dream, it wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing.   Instead, it was that no matter how well I did, no-one cared.  

I'd preach with passion to a room where my voice was of less interest than the music playing in the background at Harris Teeter.  People would chatter over me.  Get up and wander about.  I'd call for the worship to begin, and people would just muck around on their phones.  And then, eventually, everyone would just...leave.  

I would be speaking to no-one, because the message I shared meant nothing to them.

For my Episcopal colleague, that was her anxiety dream, too.  

That the message of Jesus...of grace, of selfless love, of mercy, of justice...just wasn't something that mattered at all to anyone any more.  That the purpose we'd devoted our lives towards was irrelevant and meaningless to those around us, and by extension, so were we.  

And I got to wondering...does anyone else have this dream?

Spark and Current

The world is full of souls

Who spark

That spark, spark, spark

They flicker bright

Dancing wild

With the energy

Of the ephemeral instant

And there are also souls

Who are

Current

That flow, flow, flow

They turn the wheels

That light the darkness

With the energy

That sustains

Deep Red

Deep Red are the Lips that kissed me

Deep Red are the Lips that sighed

Deep Red are the Lips of the one who hurt me

Deep Red are the Lips that lied

Deep Red is the blood of innocents

Deep Red is Hell's rising light

Deep Red are the Lips of the Whore of Babylon

Deep Red are the Lips that lied

On Becoming What You Hate

Back in 1997, Paul Verhoeven made Starship Troopers, a peculiar satire nominally grounded in Robert Heinlein's novel.

The film was, or intended to be, a sly critique of fascism, of the casual brutality and belief in redemptive violence that defines fascism as an aesthetic.  In that, it diverged from Heinlein, whose originally work was both brilliant and uncritically expressed the military-corporate ethos of Franco, Mussolini and National Socialism.

Verhoeven's work plays like a hoo-hah celebration of martial prowess, in which the only human beings of value are soldiers, and the enemy are simply alien horrors to be slaughtered. Lead actors were selected, explicitly, because they fit the fascist aesthetic found in Leni Reifenstahl's brilliant, horrific Nazi propaganda. They were beautiful, perfect specimens, and if not, used for comic relief. In that, it's not much different from many action movies, only our heroes are the ones wearing the Nazi uniforms. 

I mean, actually Nazi uniforms, as the dapper officer uniform worn by the psychic intelligence officer played Neil Patrick Harris is entirely and intentionally designed after the uniforms of the Nazi SS and the Gestapo.

Human beings aren't the heroes of this film, because the human beings in this film are fascist.

No scene makes that more clear than one near the end of the film, where Harris's character psychically interrogates a captured "bug."  There's a pause as he probes its alien mind, after which he announces, to the gathered troops:  "It's Afraid!"  There's a great cheer from the gathered soldiers....but...why?

Because they're not the heroes.  The whole premise of the film is overturned.  These "bugs" aren't soulless horrors.  They're capable of recognizable emotions, are sentient, are aware, and are fighting for their lives.  Now they're being slaughtered, interrogated and tortured, and they are afraid.  It's a cause of rejoicing!  It means we're winning!  

The film sneaks that in there, and it's part of Verhoeven's effort to subtly whisper the cruelty and brutality of the fascist ethos into the viewer.  If we cheer along, we share their joy at dominance and power.  That's the whole point.

Which is why seeing that very scene "memed" recently as part of a dark celebration of a very public murder is so peculiar.  Seeing progressives embracing overtly fascist values and iconography is on point for our confused and benighted era.  Because nothing is more definingly fascist than the belief in the power and moral virtue of violence.

It's a reminder of two things:  First, satire can sometimes be too subtle for its own good.  And secondly, vitally: we become what we most hate.

The Terrible Honor of Small Church Pastoring

Midway through this past Friday, I was pretty much done with my sermon.  It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I was puttering around the house.  As I often will, I stopped by my laptop to check social media.

There, in Messenger, was a brief note from the wife of a member of my congregation.  It informed me that a young woman who grew up in my church, a college student home for Thanksgiving, had died in a horrific car accident early that morning.

I've been at my little church for thirteen years, and one of the things about sticking around at a small church is that you must abandon the idea that you're there to be "the professional Christian."  In a little Jesus tribe, effective pastoral leadership requires the development of intimacy.   Authority is far less formal in small churches, not a question of degrees and ordination certificates, but of being there to walk side by side with other disciples.  It takes time and presence.  If you stand at an emotional and spiritual remove, either high up on a leadershippy balcony like you're Rev. Dr. Musk or fenced off behind a razorwire thicket of professional self-care boundaries, you're not serving the small church effectively.  You aren't the Transformative Disruptor, or the Professional Counselor, or the Political Activist, or the Management Specialist.  Competent pastors of small churches can be those things, but they aren't primarily any of those things.  You are a Friend among Friends.  

That can be a place of great joy, as baptisms and weddings aren't just duties, but part of your own story.  It is a place of regular sustaining grace, as small church worship is not a chore, or a place of performance, or a platform for theological posturing.  It's where you worship.  When folks are in a place of rejoicing, you rejoice and delight with them.

But Christ have mercy, does it hurt when the people you love are hurt.

I'd known A since she was a bright-eyed little girl.  Known her father and mother and stepmom and her little clatch of newly found sisters.  She'd drifted away from attendance in late adolescence, as activities and work schedules and the energies of young life became more of a focus.  I would still see her regularly, and we'd talk, enough that I knew the smart, driven woman she was becoming.  Her death hit hard, because her life mattered to me personally.  As do the deep wounds in the souls of her family.  You feel their pain in your bones, literally physically aching in sympathetic resonance with the agony of friends enduring an seemingly impossible loss.  

After I sent that email to my church leadership, and the other to the whole church, I had to go take a hot shower, because I was so shaken that I felt chilled, my blood running cold.  

Were I the senior pastor of a sprawling megachurch, such a tragedy in my flock would be more of an abstraction, less visceral.  It'd be hard, sure, but at a remove.  It wouldn't hurt as much. 

I wouldn't want that.  

I don't want life lived in numbness, with my attentions absorbed in organizational dynamics and the sterile processes of polity.  Small church pastoring demands patience, and it demands resilience, and it requires your faith to be a rock beneath your feet, because it also requires that you feel.