As autumn wanes into winter, the voice of the greatest of poets comes again to me. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.”
It’s not just the coming of winter, but also the accumulation of years. I will soon turn 79. William Shakespeare must have felt a similar melancholy when he wrote Sonnet 73.
Wonderfully crafted, Sonnet 73 is an appeal to the poet’s beloved, written in his later years. Setting the stage, so to speak, Shakespeare creates three scenes, one quatrain for each. The first is late fall. Most of the leaves are gone. Trees, where once birds sang, are “bare ruined choirs.”
The second is the sky just after the sun has gone down. A faint wash of color remains. For the third scene, the poet brings us indoors. He is now sitting by the hearth, before the “glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.”
This is what you see in me, he tells his beloved–the last fall colors, the fading sunset, the low flames of an almost-spent fire. Perceiving all this, the poet closes in a couplet, “makes thy love more strong.”
The sonnet ends with a call to his beloved “to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
So are we all called, as we turn the clocks back, as we approach yet another New England winter, to love well those around us, young and old.
Here, now, is Sonnet 73, a poem for the ages:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
They couldn’t vote, and they had been told to keep quiet in church.
The year was 1837 and they were women of Stoneham. Passionate about their cause, however, they found a way to make their voices heard. Led by the widow, Sarah Gerry, they wrote a letter.
There were 14 of them—married, single, mothers, grandmothers, wives of prominent men and workers in shoe factories. When they signed their names, addressed to the elders of the Congregational Church, they used their own first names, not their husbands, bucking the current custom. Sarah Buck, Mary Bryant, Abigail Green, Sally Richardson, Nabby Richardson, Mary Newhall and others.
Friends Freedman Association teachers in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1863.
What they were so upset about was slavery, practiced in the South and supported by many in the North. What particularly galled them was the fact that so many Christians supported it.
We are “deeply aggrieved,” they wrote, “that such an utter abomination in the sight of Heaven . . . is now sustained and defended by almost the entire Christian church in the South, with whom we are in fellowship.”
They continued. “By refusing to rebuke and remonstrate,” they wrote, “we do in fact participate in their guilt.”
Silence is complicity, the women were saying, and if we do not speak, we, too, are guilty.
The women closed with an appeal to church leaders: “We entreat you to take such action … that will show plainly that our influence is on the side of justice and humanity.”
For the church and the town, the letter was the start of something. Although it took years of conflict and violence, the abolitionist movement took root and bore fruit in Stoneham.
In 1838 twenty-seven women, again led by Sarah Gerry, formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men formed a chapter a year later.
In 1840, church members passed a resolution calling on their pastor “to bear faithful pulpit testimony against the sin of slavery.”
Then in 1850, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the new minister, the Rev. William Whitcomb, gave a fiery sermon calling on parishioners to ignore the federal law mandating the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Instead, Whitman urged, “Hide the outcast or help him on his journey to a safer place, even though you may risk personal security, property and life.”
Recalling the brave men and women of Stoneham is fitting as we celebrate the Tricentennial of our town. It reminds us that those who came before us were faced with daunting challenges to what they believe and how they should act.
As in the decades before the Civil War, Christians today are also divided. Some believe that our President was saved by God to “make America great again.” Others cringe at the threats and actions harming vulnerable people among us. Like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde in her sermon last week at the National Cathedral, they call for mercy and tolerance and justice—for immigrants, for LGBTQ+, for all those on the margins of our society.
Now it’s our turn. How and where will we make our stand?
Post-election analysis has included a lot of finger-pointing about why Kamala Harris lost. Yet the simple truth is that Donald Trump won because white people, the demographic majority, voted for him. About 60 percent of whites went for Trump. And a huge portion of these came from Christians. People like me.
“White Christians made Donald Trump president—again,” headlined the Religion News Service.
“Trump’s Path to Victory Still Runs through the Church,” proclaimed Christianity Today.
CNN exit polls revealed that 72 percent of white Protestants and 61 percent of white Catholics voted for Trump. Among white Christians who identified as evangelical or “born again,” the percentage was 81.
Among Christians of all races, Trump still won a clear majority: 63 percent of Protestants and 53 of Catholics. A significant boost in the Catholic vote, especially in swing states, helped put Trump over the top. “Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate,” ran an Associated Press headline.
But not all Christians voted for Trump, and a sizable minority has reacted with shock that someone known for racist and misogynistic behavior, vulgar language and threats of violence could win the support of those claiming to be followers of Jesus?
An answer may be found in the release in theaters this month of the movie, “Bonhoeffer.” The film is based on the life of the German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis in 1945. While the film highlights the dissident’s role in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the real lessons for us can be found in the years leading up to World War II.
By 1933, when Hitler was elected chancellor, Germans were well aware of his hatred of Jews. As early as 1920 he had labeled them an “alien race” and called for their “irrevocable removal.” Once in control, Hitler began the progressive persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Soon after his inauguration, he released the Aryan Paragraph, barring Jews from civil service and multiple professions. In 1935 the Nuremburg Laws stripped them of citizenship.
In November of 1938 state-sanctioned mobs brutally attacked Jews throughout Germany and its territories, destroying businesses, homes and synagogues. Ten thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. By the time World War II started, the “final solution” of six million Jews throughout Europe was well underway.
From the German population, 95 percent Christian, the Nazis drew wide support, playing on anti-Semitic and nationalistic themes, heightened by propaganda and misinformation. Following Hitler’s election, one church leader wrote: ‘A fresh, enlivening and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands….The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor.”
In 1933 Hitler appointed Ludwig Müller, an openly anti-Semitic Lutheran cleric, as Reichbishof. In this role, he was to proclaim “positive Christianity.” Mueller presided over the consolidation of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Churches of Germany, representing a majority of German Christians.
In a revision of history, the bishop claimed that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a statement clarifying church policy, he wrote that Jews posed a threat by bringing “foreign blood into our nation.”
One of the Mueller’s early acts was to demand that churches fire any pastors of Jewish ancestry or those married to a Jew. He also ordered all pastors to sign a loyalty oath to the Führer.
Not everyone, however, submitted to the nazification of the German Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other dissidents, refused to submit to church control. In 1933 they formed the Confessing Church.
Throughout Bonhoeffer’s years as pastor, teacher, author and seminary director, he struggled to find his role in the Third Reich. While his early protests centered on preserving church autonomy, he increasingly spoke out against the Reich’s treatment of Jews. He wrote: “Only the person who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
In time Bonhoeffer understood his mission as going beyond protest to political action. In 1939 he returned from the United States, where a position had been created at Union Theological Seminary expressly for his safety. Back in Germany, he joined the Abwehr, the German Intelligence agency. He was hired by his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, on the pretense that the cleric’s many ecumenical contacts would make him an asset. Unknown to the Nazis was his brother-in-law’s role in the Resistance.
In 1943, after the Gestapo found incriminating papers, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned. On April 9, 1945, just days before American troops liberated the prison camp, he was hanged.
Bonhoeffer was not the only Christian leader to stand against Hitler. The number, however, was small. Most church leaders, including those of smaller denominations, found it expedient to accommodate Nazi ideology. Years later, Harold Alomia, a Protestant pastor and historian, would write: “God’s bride danced with the Devil.”
As we begin life under a second Trump presidency, enabled largely by the votes of white Christians, Bonhoeffer’s story is a warning of what can happen when race hatred and Christian nationalism are joined. American voters, Christian voters, please pay attention.
Ben Jacques Stories 