Sabre of Boldness Nominees Sought
The Sabre ceremony, with which regular Gottesdienst subscribers are familiar, is in its twenty-second
year. Nominations are hereby invited and encouraged THIS WEEK (ASAP) in anticipation of the Symposia in Fort Wayne January 16th-19th.
Please submit your nominations via email: full name of nominee, reason for nomination, with as many details as you can, nominee's address, phone number if you have it, and your own name.
The award is given “For conspicuous
gallantry and intrepidity on behalf of the Holy Church of Christ while engaged
in the confession of His pure Gospel in the face of hostile forces and at the
greatest personal risk.” The degree of the adversity,
steadfast resistance to pressures to compromise, heedlessness of threats, and a
clear confession of faith are considered.
The slate will close on Tuesday, January 17th.
What
is the Sabre of Boldness? – an excerpt from
Fr. Eckardt’s Sabre speech in 2003:
The Sabre of Boldness is a venture which has been undertaken
annually since 1996 by the editors of Gottesdienst as a gesture, however
inadequate, toward the acknowledgment of unsung heroism which sometimes defines
the deeds springing from Christian faith.
Maybe you aren’t supposed to know this, but the original idea was not
quite so earnest. If you haven’t already
guessed it, the Sabre of Boldness was conceived in a bit of jest. There was a fully intended and not-too-subtle
double-entendre in the awarding of the S. O. B.: the recipient
was on the one hand bold in the faith indeed, so much so that for his boldness,
on the other hand, he had certainly gained recognition, of the kind not
generally sought after, a page in someone’s Who’s Who among the
Infamous. But the Geist of
the award very quickly changed, when it became evident that there were not a
few readers who had a genuine and very serious desire to stand in solidarity
with unsung heroes of the faith; heroes such as we seek to note, ordinary
people whose boldness of confession, we imagine, must be recognizable as
extraordinary at least to the angels, however unnoticed or even disdained by
the masses who prefer to recognize status or reputation in accord with the
norms of the world.
Those norms, we hasten to add, are often
and routinely used to judge honor not only in the world, but also by people who
like to go to church, and even in the judging of churchly matters. Wherever they see compromise, call it virtue;
whenever they find people willing to back down a bit from their principles,
they call them wise. Conversely when
they see fidelity and dedication to one’s ideals they call it stubbornness, and
when they find someone delaying the whole train just for the sake of conscience
they call him a fool. And since their
kind of wisdom resonates well with the wisdom of the world, they sometimes even
get lucky enough to find themselves in the world’s craved limelight, where the
world in turn calls them wise, honorable, and even holy men.
So it is really no wonder, in retrospect,
that this award began to take on such an aura of dignity among our readers, who
have always been hungry for things which resonate well with the mind of our
holy Christ. After all, He certainly did not fare well according to the wisdom
of this world. The world certainly did not account Him virtuous or wise, at
least not until after it saw that it would be advantageous to do so.
Before that they easily scoffed, and reckoned that His stubborn fidelity to His
Father’s ideals brought Him nothing but grief, crucifixion and death. Whoever
has the mind of Christ must also acknowledge that what is lovely to the world
is an abomination to God, and the world’s rejection or acceptance ought never
be the allowed to determine the difference between a fool and a hero of the
faith. As it is written, He is despised and rejected of men; a Man of sorrows,
and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was
despised, and we esteemed Him not.
Thus the Sabre of Boldness has
become our own meager way of saluting not merely its bearer, but anyone who, in
however otherwise unnoticed a way, did the very kind of bold deeds that we saw
in other heroes of the faith: Moses before Pharaoh, Joshua against the kings of
Canaan, or Jael in the tent against Sisera.
The Sabre is fittingly a sword, reminiscent of Gideon’s against
the Midianites, Ehud’s against Eglon, or even Goliath’s, against himself in the
hands of our David. It signifies most of all the Sword of the Spirit, which is
the Word of God against our greatest foe, running him through by the stubborn,
unbending, and fierce resolve of our Lord Jesus Christ to endure crucifixion
and so to redeem us all. That Sword, in the hands of the Christian
warrior, is what produces the kind of spirit which the world and its minions
find so annoying, since it is ever so intractable and unyielding. Therefore we
salute herewith every Christian who has such a spirit: first of all, those
saints in glory for whom martyrdom was preferable to compromise, and after them
also any who gave up some claim for worldly adulation, because they deigned
instead to do the right thing for conscience’ sake, and closed their ears to
the clamor of the world’s folly.
The Sabre certainly does not get
any legitimacy from us clumsy louts at Gottesdienst who now find
ourselves annually in this awkward position of being a kind of judges’ panel
for something which, though we don’t quite feel qualified to judge, we really
do consider a very highly honorable and salutary thing to recognize. The
highest honor is the honor of suffering for the name of Jesus. He who suffers
for Christ is honored already. The Sabre only seeks to emphasize this
truth.