Are We Safe as the Fire Rages?
Are We Safe as the Fire Rages?
Ashley Lande
On Spiritual Safety & Martyrdom
The first real pain comes in the night, a livid fist tightening in my gut. It scatters my dreams and snaps my eyes open, and I know—it’s here, finally, real labor, two weeks late. I sit up and a gush of warm waters corroborates: yes, soon. The contractions build and build, a fearful waxing, until finally they become a single unrelenting thrall. I cry, I whine, I complain, despite waiting for this, my third baby, for a decade: Dear God, not this again.
The ache becomes something cataclysmic, something beyond thought, beyond reason, beyond bearing. I’m sitting up with my hands braced on my knees, a low bovine dirge sounding from my throat, rank fluid spilling from me with every pulse of my womb. Maybe I could reach down and feel my baby’s head if I had the presence of mind, but I don’t. I’m an animal, a vegetable, a hostage to the pain. In fact, my body is nothing but pain now and will soon explode into a thousand million points of burning white-hot light and fizzle out into ash. A woman has sorrow because her time has come, Jesus said.
You’re at 10, time to push, they cheerfully tell me, as if I didn’t know. Someone asks if I want the lights turned down and I struggle to comprehend the question. I point accusingly at the observing medical resident in the corner standing there placidly and unmoved in his fleece pullover, both of us pulled into this strange, holy, bloody crucible of instant intimacy that is childbirth, and whine “Who IS that guy?!” But I start to push because I must. The only way out is through. I heave, I strain, I grab my knees and scream. I can’t, I won’t, I can’t. But my body betrays me, again. The biological compulsion to get the baby out subsumes me and I heave once more, lurching forward with my entire being, ceding my entire self again to the impossible miracle as I will myself to let it hurt even more because I know—the only way out is through.
There is a terrible burning beyond description, a furious fire, and then he’s plunked on my chest: my prize, wet and writhing and angry and perfect. And I’m sobbing big howling sobs, sobs so real they almost sound phony when I watch and rewatch the video my friend took. My baby is red and screaming in outrage and he’s beautiful, every inch, every fold, every contortion of his little squished features. “A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.” (John 16:21, NKJV)
But in the dark of the night as my baby boy nurses sweetly, his eyes shut tight in total surrender, total trust, the thought haunts me: I can’t perfectly protect him. I can’t absolutely stave off pain and suffering or even horrible tragedy and disaster. And twined within the joy of a human being born into this world is the inevitability of death. The remembrance brings a sting, a dark bass note of dread in my gut. And despite my professed Christian faith, despite the hymns I obediently sing in church every Sunday, despite my recitation of creeds and my memorization of Scripture alongside my children, death’s somber inevitability looms like a black cloud on the far horizon. This derelict man on the cross, this Savior whose rumored resurrection casts an inescapable, Christ-haunted shadow on all of history, on all of life—I can trust for myself, perhaps. Sometimes. Mostly. But for my children? Here he seems to ask too much of me, too much of my feeble faith, more fallible than Peter’s, burning red-hot for a time and then cursorily abandoned to save face before a bunch of strangers.
Can I really trust him, this mysterious triune God? The question slides into my consciousness, sibilant, taunting, in whispers threaded with skepticism. The burden of knowing I cannot absolutely protect them rests neither easy nor light on my soul’s mantle, nor can I shrug it away toward a God who seems to drop the ball all too frequently. Paul speaks rhapsodically about a future reckoning which unfurls backward, gilding all it touches, folding all things into a prismatic glory. But what if, I think. What if there is something beyond redemption, some sorrow whose ugliness can’t be undone? Doesn’t God go too far when he has his excitable scribe, his once-murderous apostle emphatically write, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18). I file through heinous news stories in my head as I consider whether I should let my young teenage son walk to the local school, whether I should let him and my daughter walk to the store a block away. And now I look at my infant son and alongside unbearable tenderness—indeed perhaps stemming from it—I feel the cold stab of fear. What a terrible thing, this broken world. What a precious and astonishing gift, this child.
The former trails the latter like a shadow, its dimensions waxing and waning, a skulking hex, covert but tenacious, that can never be outrun. I am inevitable, my 13-year-old son growls, dropping his voice in an imitation of the supervillain Thanos to make a joke about his dirty laundry. But don’t I feel it, too? In the relentless encroachment of the world’s danger, in the nightmares I sometimes have about being trailed by a nebulous evil something that cannot be outrun or hidden from. Can what’s been done, and what is yet to be done, ever be undone? God promises yes: death is swallowed up in victory (1 Cor. 15:54). But sometimes, in the still dark of night, I’m prone to cynicism, prone to side-eye the promise that claims to supersede all else: death has been swallowed up—erased, subsumed, transformed—in victory.
*
In Rilla Askew’s novel, Prize for the Fire, a fictionalized account of the life of the Protestant martyr Anne Askew, a like sense of inevitability haunts the pages that hasten Anne toward her end. Rilla Askew writes with such immersive vivacity and vigor that Anne comes utterly alive, a young woman of deep dimension, doubts, peccadilloes, and much early wavering in her faith. At the opening of the story, she’s caught in the tension of her sister Maddie’s sudden illness and death, and a church which tells her that her dear Maddie, so full of the goodness and gentleness and piety that Anne herself can’t seem to summon, may be “in that other place where the priests say we must suffer until we are burned pure enough to enter Heaven, our souls scoured by fire to be made fit for God’s presence.” Anne is also adrift in the oscillating turbulence of Henry VIII’s reign, when the volatile king’s sympathies volleyed unpredictably between the Reformers and the traditional Catholic church.
Anne’s moment of conversion comes stealthily and suddenly as she prays for her brother Thom, who is struck with an illness much in the same manner Maddie was. She murmurs her prayers as she was taught, the words coming mechanically, automatically, but her heart is far from the sibilant, consonant Latin syllables issuing from her mouth. But then, in the silence of the room, in the desolation of her utter helplessness, help comes. “A warmth settles upon her like a mantle, a sense of calmness, peace . . . the peace assures her all will be well, all is love, all is forgiveness, the fires of Hell will not touch her, will not touch her little brother, her sister.”
Her brother recovers, against all odds and almost against Anne’s own conflicted conscience: “I prayed for him. I prayed so hard. And he is better. But I prayed even harder for Maddie. And she died. Why?” She reflects that acceptance is much harder than obedience.
But something soon shifts in Anne, despite her doubt, despite her desperate questioning: a hunger for God’s very words roots in her like a seed, a heavy ravening need like the appetite of Jeremiah—“When your words came, I ate them” (Jer. 15:16)—or Ezekiel eating the honeyed scroll (Ezek. 3:3).
Despite her tyrant of a husband, despite the priests who gather in tight clusters to scold her temerity in low voices, she reads the Word of God and commits as much as possible to memory. Henry’s rules for who may read the Bible change again and again in his temperamental vies for power, but again and again Anne treks to the church where the Great Bible is chained to a wooden lectern near the chancel. The frontispiece of the Coverdale translation, blessed by the king himself, is a woodcut illustration of Henry seated on his throne, handing the Verbum Dei—the Word of God made available at last in the common people’s language due to Henry’s towering magnanimity—to his chief minister Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, with Christ looking beatifically down upon him from the parting clouds. A panoply of scrolls which unfurl from the mouths and hands of gentlefolk and commoners milling below the throne read “Vivat Rex” and “God Save the Kynge.”
*
When Anne is martyred, it won’t even be by Henry’s hand—not really. By that point he is too bloated and sick and ulcerated and has delegated his authority to wolfish men who skulk around the king’s ailing flesh like vultures. But now, for Anne, God’s Word is not chained, despite the heavy links that fetter it within the village church, nor is it owned by Henry or anyone else.
Rilla Askew magisterially builds her narrative tension as the cogs of the machine which will bring about Anne’s death click into place. But as Anne moves toward her death, both marching boldly forward and carried along by forces beyond her command—perhaps even beyond human command—a surging, recalcitrant hope twines upward, a rebellious flowering thing pushing hard against the heavy drag of terrible inevitability, growing upward and around it.
For a week, Anne is savagely racked by Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich, her joints dislocated and her tendons and muscles torn in a “brutal intimacy” heretofore unfathomable: the torture of a woman in the Tower of London. In Anne’s own writings, she says that she fainted from pain. Her torturers lowered and revived her only to repeat the process. It is claimed that her cries of torment could be heard from the neighboring gardens.
“Each day Mistress Anne seems more peaceful,” wonders a baffled Beatrice. “How can she? Where does she get the strength, not merely to withstand, or endure, but to keep the sharpness to her tongue?” As Anne is made a final offer of clemency, Rilla Askew quotes directly from Anne’s own documented words: “I would rather die than break my faith.” And so it goes. The inevitable locks irrevocably into place.
*
Does God promise safety? My older children and I recite Psalm 91 together: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust” (vv. 1–2, KJV). But Satan uses these verses to taunt Jesus in the wilderness, tempting him to apply them so literally and perversely that he would test whether God would still preserve him bodily were Jesus to jump from a cliff. What does God really promise? I want an itemized list, a contract, a meeting of terms on which we can both agree. But God doesn’t provide that. He only provides his Word—prismatic, confounding, multifarious, singing with poetry and steadily beating with prose, both impenetrable and razor-sharp, impossibly heavy with the weight of glory.
“It is written,” Jesus answers Satan in the wilderness, when Satan tempts him to turn a rock into bread, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). This is our food: the Word of God. The body and blood of Christ. This has to be enough.
Anne Askew endured torture and burning, I scold myself. She subsisted on God’s Word, she relied on God’s promises of ultimate victory, of never forsaking her, of helping her endure until the end. And I can’t seem to endure one day without questioning the will of God, without wondering whether he is really good, without skeptically weighing his promises against seen reality.
But slowly, surely, steadily, God’s promises take root, often almost against my own will. I piggyback on my children’s capacious ability to memorize as we recite Scripture together. They correct me as I fumble in Isaiah 53: “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (v. 7). But my 11-year-old daughter waves me away as I begin to prompt her on a forgotten word: her blue eyes search the ceiling and her skinny legs shift back and forth until the word comes. And it always does.
The work of the Spirit goes about humbly: underground, unseen. It is less that we tend the garden of faith and more that the Spirit tends it as we read and pray—as it did in Anne Askew, coming to bloom in its time, in his time, the perfect time. It is less a kind of inevitability than it is a promise in itself, delighting in surprise, borne aloft by grace. Maybe God hasn’t dropped the ball after all. Maybe the terrible inevitability of death will truly be eclipsed by the blinding light of glory. Maybe all that has been done and is yet to be done can be undone, or better—can be redeemed. And maybe that is the promise which can finally make me yield my trust: all the evil in the world, in all its seeming inevitability, will be burned away with glorious light. The worst thing is never the last thing, as Frederick Buechner said. Future-echoes of salvation and redemption flitter backward toward the present. Hope, as the apostle Paul said, will never put us to shame.
*
“Faith is that weapon strong / which will not fail at need,” Anne Askew wrote in a poem, posthumously dubbed “The Ballad of Anne Askew.” Prize for the Fire chronicles that she has to be carried to the stake, set up in front of St. Bartholomew in London, because she cannot walk—her injuries from the racking far too grievous to allow tendon, bone, muscle, joint to work in concert ever again, as God designed them, as he crafted them in her mother’s womb. Every pock in the road sends seismic waves of agony through her ruined body. In the novel, her friends have purchased a satchel of gunpowder which Beatrice secures at her neck—Anne directs her to make sure the satchel is located at her heart rather than at her bowels, in the hopes death will come more quickly as the flames lick upward and ignite it. While we don’t know for certain that this was the case, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs confirms that a number of Christians burned that day were wearing gunpowder satchels.
But I think that we can be confident that the Holy Spirit, God the Father, and Christ the Son have done their work in Anne, as has God’s Word, his Verbum Dei, supplied by the capricious Henry, whose chosen officials now prepare to burn her alive. Perhaps she recites Scripture to herself as she remembers all the impossible, fantastic promises which fly in the face of seen reality. The comfort of God comes like a mantle, like a veil, like a covering. She knows God has not lost control. He is working all for her good and his glory. And the brilliance of the hope of glory shines before her, surpassing all the suffering, subsuming it.
The masked men hold their torches to the straw. One last chance is given to her and her friends to recant: the offer of pardon is extended. The price is just a few paltry words, but Anne has not come this far to deny her faith in the one who does not forsake her now. She says I can, I will, I can—by faith, through the grace of God. There is a terrible burning beyond description, a furious fire. And then there is glory beyond imagining.
Ashley Lande
Artist & Writer
Ashley’s memoir on leaving psychedelic drugs to follow Jesus Christ will be published by Lexham Press in 2024. Find her work here: ashleylande.com
Photography by Ricardo Braz
