499 years ago, your life changed

October 31 will be Halloween. All Hallows Eve. The night before the Christian holy day of All Hallows’ Day or All Saints’ Day. On this day in 1517, Martin Luther strode up to the wooden doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany and nailed up a list of 95 questions.

He was a nobody outside his own town, and he didn’t ask anything that others had not been saying for centuries. And yet, for a number of political and economic and social reasons and because printing presses were now common in many cities, those questions sparked the Protestant Reformation, a big brouhaha that turned into the Thirty Years War and a lot of other mayhem.

Many of us assume that was just a dust-up within the Christian church, so it has nothing to do with us if we’re not Christian and perhaps, very little if we are because, after all, that was long, long ago. 

The truth is that Luther’s act changed the political face of the new world and popularized a way of thinking that still has us in its grip today. Like many things in history, the impact was at both the macro level and at the micro level of individual thought.

Macro: If the Emperor Charles V, who ruled Spain and all the German lands, had not been so bogged down in the religious fighting within his own lands, he could have easily out-colonized the English and the French, since those two countries didn’t even get interested in the New World for another century. We wouldn’t be debating whether or not Spanish should be a second language in the U.S. because it would be the first one. And would the separation of church and state have been in the forefront of our founders’ thinking without the background of centuries of religious persecution and executions?

Micro: The thing Luther brought into the popular collective consciousness is the approach to life based on identifying and opposing error. The whole idea of “reformation” presupposes that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. The problem the early reformers faced was agreeing on what exactly was wrong and how exactly to fix it. Their various approaches form the foundations of the Protestant denominations many of us grew up in. And whether or not we still embrace that faith exactly, we still think in those patterns. As if all of life were a big quiz to which we must find the right answer or flunk. Or as if we were a teacher with a big red pen to mark everyone’s wrong answers.

Certainly there is a place for reformation. In government. In the environment. In so many of our societal ills. But the tendency in “reformation” thinking is to weigh all issues the same. The early reformers poured the same amount of passion into every debate, unable to differentiate between the ones that mattered and the ones that didn’t. People were burned at the stake over a word. Often, it seems to me, we do that same thing, allowing ourselves to sweat the small stuff which distracts us from the big issues we should be addressing.

October 31 marks the beginning of the global, year-long celebration of the Reformation. The Pope will be in Sweden to join Lutheran leaders for an ecumenical service marking the start of a jubilee commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. 

I think a great way to spend the year would be to undertake a reformation within ourselves, seeking to identify where we approach life and others with criticism and judgment and where we are focusing on the nonessentials to the detriment of our great calling to live a joyful, compassionate life. 

As is said about the Church, so it should be at the personal level. Semper reformans, semper reformanda. Always reforming, always in need of reform.