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Medieval
Europe
Thankful not to “be” there
By:
Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut
Although
I might have existed in Medieval Europe in a past life, thankfully, I don’t
remember it now. I do know that I sometimes suffer in my mind, and in that
suffering I often have not the faintest notion of where it comes from.
Perhaps
its origins are from my collective past, where memories of the Black Death of
1347 are partially making their way back to me…
This
could not have been a very pleasant time for anyone. With people falling like
flies (and flies descending all over people) it was a horrific time in recorded
human history, and a particularly grotesque chapter in the “oft-ugly”
history of the Christian church.
In
that time, since “this life” was so bad, the “next world” became a
shinier, more pleasing matter for consideration. Thus, a very
“other-worldly” shadow was cast over much of the European continent, and the
church, wishing to continue in the tracks of St. Peter, led the charge.
Now,
I really can’t imagine a society where some of the most prized possessions in
it would be considered the dead, dried bones of past saints, but imagine how
these relics could wield so much power and influence during this time.
Steeped in their superstitions, there became a general clamoring as to which
churches would get which dead saints bones to hang up and sport. Along with this
emphasis, the doctrine of limbo even emerged, where the parted soul was
considered to be in some sort of a state of spiritual suspension, while God
Himself, perhaps, was busy settling deeper matters.
Enter
strongly the church-sanctioned concept of indulgences. Essentially, this
is where it became possible to purchase redemption from personal sin when the
person died, and essentially opt out, with the right amount of cash (done
usually on some kind of “sliding fee scale”) from the ordeal of purgatory
(a “bus stop” of suffering where we go before it is actually decided just
where we will finally spend eternity).
The
95 thesis of Martin Luther (1517) included countless concerns about the practice
of indulgences, and a few decades later, during the Council of Trent, it was
essentially banished.
This
does not account, however, for the fact that in my own time in history my own
eyes have previewed a personal will that bequeathed a couple of million dollars
to the Catholic Church in a small Indiana city in exchange for blessings and
purgatory releases for husbands, fathers and other various loved ones and family
members. I remember how it infuriated me, and made me wonder how any religious
body could agree to accept gifts on these terms.
What
choice is there but to consider it being some kind of “dirty” money?
At
any rate, its “easy come – easy go,” and in the fluidity of the
accountants books as some churches take in such types of payments, they are
starting to pay them out again, this time for the abuses some of their leaders
have doled out on the young.
…Crusaders
were also granted indulgences, so as they went off to kill in the name of God,
if they were actually themselves killed, things were said to go easier on them.
This is quite similar to dying in the name of Allah (in this present age) but
getting a chance to go and be with a dozen or more virgins, if, that is, the
death was “holy” enough, and martyrdom was clearly clinched.
Enough
already? Our minds are sometimes so puny when we contemplate God and Justice.
But it’s still hard to downplay John Tetzel’s jingle concerning purgatory
and indulgences.
You
might remember him suggesting, “As soon as coin in the coffer rings, a soul
from purgatory springs.”
Can
it really become more piteous than that?
…But
these times, in Europe and the rest of the West, are now gone from us. Of
course, cousins of the Black Death continue to plague our world in other parts
of it, and more often than not, “crazy” and ridiculous people, albeit in the
minority, are still around to prey/pray upon the sufferers.
Little
help comes from the survivors of five hundred year ago Europe, because they
(we?) are busy cashing in on our Capitalistic ventures.
In
the mix of this remains a plethora of institutional businesses that have found
ways still to turn suspicion, guilt and sickness into profits. They are the
talented individuals who find no other way to earn an honest living than to
chase the ideal of “saving” people from their varied forms of sin.
This,
in reality, is more of a shrouded attempt to preserve the self than anything. We
should all hope that the whole of these modern charlatans would “get real
jobs.”
Higher
spiritual evolution brings us above all of that, but as of yet, the Western
religious movements have on the whole not tuned into this prospect. So we
continue to be trapped in a “Middle Ages” mindset, far from those distant
and illusive mountain peeks, where no amount of advanced technology or religious
rigidity has any hope of changing that for us.
While
I can be thankful that I don’t remember specifically being there, back in
those times, per se, the remnants from the Dark Ages still float around in this
modern, and Dark Age, and rear themselves up from time to time.
(Excerpted from MOUNTAIN PEAKS, Volume 2, written last year)
Postscript
from this morning:
I
sometimes choose Sunday articles that highlight abuses in religious
organizations because it is obvious that everywhere you go, abuse flourishes in
the midst of these orders.
This
past week, in Managua, Nicaragua, it was evident very evident to me. Immaculate
churches rising up in an otherwise ran shackled and decayed city, where
poverty-crushed human hands extended out everywhere.
All
this played out alongside new and impressive religious and political fortresses,
well sealed and barricaded, glistening mightily in the hot Managua sun, making
me feel that some priorities had been distinctly overlooked.
It
grieved me to see the desperation, made ever so more acute by those who held
some sort of power, brought about by some manner of authority from a “higher
source.”
Pathetic
humans that we are, we really have not escaped so far from those times when
ignorance and poverty and injustice ruled, and the few governed with
insensitivity, the lives of the many.
…So,
in other ways, while I am thankful not be have “been there,” it is also
“here” that bothers me – here in this place here – where I must exist to
face a modern darkened time.
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