Last call

Last Call
By Os Guinness

The name Moltke had resounded proudly through two centuries of Prussian and German history. Count Helmuth Carl Bernhard von Moltke had been Chancellor Bismarck's field marshal and the terrible, swift sword wielded in his crushing German victories over the Danes, the Austrians, and the French. The field marshal's greatest est triumph, the destruction of the French Imperial Army at Sedan in 1871, had led to the capture of Paris and the creation of the German Empire.

So Helmuth James von Moltke, great-great nephew to the field marshal, was the scion of a famous Teuton clan and privileged to live at Kreisau, the grand Silesian estate given to his illustrious forebear by a grateful nation. But though brave and like his forebear a man of deep faith in Christ, his calling and future fame lay in a very different direction. His great-great uncle had been nineteenth-century Germany's greatest military strategist. Despite his illustrious name, the younger Moltke was to be one of twentieth-century Germany's most famous martyrs-under Hitler.

The gathering political storm clouds of the 1930s confronted the best Germans with a painful decision-to flee or to stay. Many like scientist Albert Einstein, novelist Thomas Mann, and architect Mies van der Rohe took refuge abroad. Others stayed and wondered how much tyranny they would accept and how much they would resist. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, James von Moltke, who was twenty-six when Hitler came to power, could easily have gone abroad. He nearly did. ("I even picked out the curtains" in London, his wife Freya said.) But when war broke out in September 1939, he knew, like Bonhoeffer, that his place was in his homeland. His name and character made him a natural rallying point for resisters to the regime.

Trained in international law, Moltke was drafted into the Abwehr or German military intelligence, little realizing that it was to be the center of anti-Nazi resistance. He used his job overtly to try and curb the Nazis with the restraints of international law. Covertly, he dedicated himself to two main tasks: countering the deportation and murder of Jews and the execution of captured soldiers (his alert in 1943 helped save the lives of thousands of Jews in Denmark), and bringing the most brilliant resisters to his estate at Kreisau to plan the shape of a democratic Germany that would follow the collapse of the Third Reich. In his Memoirs, American diplomat George F. Kerman called Moltke "the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the battle-lines lines in the Second World War."

But not even Moltke's famous name could hold the Nazis at bay forever. Inevitably, he was betrayed and on January 19, 1944, he was arrested. He had refused to join Bonhoeffer in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and had been in prison six months when the attempt on July 20, 1944, failed. In spite of six attempts on his life in the last quarter of that year, the "Lord of all Vermin" seemed to have a charmed life and escaped. Admiral Canaris and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were among the 4,500 slaughtered after the July attempt, and the circle of revenge slowly broadened to all known opponents of the regime, including Moltke.

Moltke and seven friends from his Kreisau Circle went on trial in January 1945 in the notorious "People's Court," presided over by the vicious prosecutor Roland Freisler. Moltke described the travesty of the secret trial in a profoundly moving letter to his wife Freya. It was the last of 1,600 letters written to her between their courtship in 1929 and his death in 1945, all hidden in beehives on the family estate until the war was over and published in 1990 as Letters to Freya.

The presence of God is very close in Moltke's last letter to his wife. The letter is partly a love letter, beautiful because of his final message to her. "You are not a means God employed to make me who I am, rather you are myself. You are my 13th chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians. Without this chapter no human being is human."

The letter is also Moltke's testament as a resister. He was braced by a reminder in the Nazi prosecutor's tirade that "only in one respect are we and Christianity alike: We demand the whole man!" He was therefore proud to stand before the prosecutor "not as a Protestant, not as a big landowner, not as a nobleman, not as a Prussian, not as a German ... but as a Christian and nothing else."

But Moltke's letter is also the final word of a human being in the departure lounge for eternity. "I always imagined that one would only feel shock," he wrote, "that one would say to oneself now the sun sets for the last time for you, now the clock only goes to twelve twice more, now you go to bed for the last time. None of that is the case. I wonder if I am a bit high for I can't deny that my mood is positively elated. I only beg the Lord in Heaven that he will keep me in it, for it is surely easier for the flesh to die like that."

Facing death at the age of thirty-seven, Moltke does acknowledge, edge, "Now there is still a hard bit of the road ahead of me." But from the beginning to end the letter's theme is gratitude and its tone is trusting. "For what a mighty task your husband was chosen: all the trouble the Lord took with him, the infinite detours, the intricate zigzag curves, all suddenly find their explanation in one hour.... Everything acquires its meaning in retrospect, which was hidden. Mami and Papi, the brothers and sisters, the little sons, Kreisau and its troubles ... it has all at last become comprehensible in a single hour."

"Dear heart, my life is finished . . ." Moltke concluded. "This doesn't alter the fact that I would gladly go on living and that I would gladly accompany you a bit further on this earth. But then I would need a new task for God. The task for which God made me is done."

One of ten executed at Plotenzee prison just months before the end of the war, Count Helmuth James von Moltke died unshadowed. "Right to the end," a fellow conspirator recorded, "he was completely free in soul, friendly, helpful, considerate, a truly free and noble man amid all the trappings of horror." His wife Freya later said from her home in Vermont, "It was much more bitter, in my opinion, to lose one's husband as a soldier for Hitler than losing him as a soldier against Hitler."

Finishing Well

The bright but poignant courage of Helmuth James von Moltke's dying underscores one last aspect of the many-splendored truth of calling: Calling is central to the challenge and privilege of finishing well in life.

There have been different times and different societies where "dying well" was a high ideal. For example, when Michelangelo was eighty-eight, a medal was struck in his honor. On one side was his profile. On the other was a blind pilgrim with a staff, led by a dog, and an inscription from Psalm 51: "Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee." The artist himself self had chosen the psalm, wishing to picture himself as old and frail but submissive to the will of God. In one of his famous last "Sonnets of Renunciation" Michelangelo the sculptor-painter-architect-turned-poet poet had written with deep devotion:

The voyage of my life at has has reached,
across temptestuous sea, in fragile boat
the common port all must pass through to give
cause and account of every evil deed, every pious deed.

Such an attitude is rare today and not simply because of our modern denial of death. For such obvious reasons as greater life expectancy, the larger number of older people in our families, and the greatly expanded opportunities and services offered to senior citizens, our modern stress is on finishing well rather than dying well. The trouble is that for many people the "golden years" are not all they are cracked up to be.

The truth of calling is as vital to our ending as to our beginning. It is an important key to finishing well because it helps us with three of the greatest challenges of our last years of life.

First, calling is the spur that keeps us journeying purposefully-and and thus growing and maturing-to the very end of our lives. People make two equal but opposite errors about life as a journey and faith as the Way. On one side, usually at the less educated level, are those who prematurely speak as if they have arrived. Such people properly emphasize the certainties and triumphs of faith but minimize the uncertainties, tragedies, and incompletenesses. Having come to faith, they speak and live as if they have nothing more to learn. All truths are clear-cut, all mysteries solved, all hopes materialized, all conclusion foregone-and all sense of journeying is reduced to the vanishing point. There are seemingly no risks, trials, dangers, setbacks, or disasters on the horizon. Or so they seem to talk.

On the other side, usually at the more educated level, are those who are so conscious of the journey that journey without end becomes their passion and their way of life. To such people it is unthinkable ever to arrive, and the ultimate gaffe is the claim of finding a way or reaching a conclusion. Like the perennial seekers we met earlier, for them the journey itself is all. Questions, inquiry, searching, and conquering become an end in themselves. Ambiguity is everything.

Yet the Christian faith has an extraordinary balance between these extremes. As those responding to God's call, we are followers of Christ and followers of the Way. So we are on a journey and we are truly travelers, with all the attendant costs, risks, and dangers of the journey. Never in this life can we say we have arrived. But we know why we have lost our original home and, more importantly, we know the home to which we are going.

So we who are followers of Christ are wayfarers, and though we have found the Way, we have not yet come to our destination. We may retire from our jobs, but there is no retiring from our individual callings. We may cut back from our public responsibilities, but there is no cutting back from our corporate calling as the people of God. Above all, we may reach the place where we can see the end of the road, but our eyes are then to be fixed more closely on the one at the end of the road who is Father and home. As Henri Nouwen wrote, "He who thinks that he has finished is finished. Those who think they have arrived have lost their way."

Second, calling helps us to finish well because it prevents us from confusing the termination of our occupations with the termination of our vocations. This is where the "Protestant distortion" of equating calling with jobs rears its ugly head for the last time. If we ever limit our calling to what we do, and that task is taken away from us-we suddenly find ourselves unemployed, fired, retired, or pronounced terminally ill-then we are tempted to depression or doubt. What has happened? We have let our occupation become so intertwined twined with our vocation that losing the occupation means losing the sense of vocation too.

"When a man knows how to do something," Pablo Picasso told a friend, "he ceases being a man when he stops doing it." The result was drivenness. Picasso's gift, once idolized, held him in thrall. Every empty canvas was an affront to his creativity. Like an addict, he made work his source of satisfaction only to find himself dissatisfied. "I have only one thought: work," Picasso said toward the end of his life, when neither his family nor his friends could help him to relax. "I paint just as I breathe. When I work, I relax; not doing anything or entertaining visitors makes me tired."

William Wilberforce, by contrast, was called, not driven. He was on his deathbed in June 1833 in Cadogan Place, London, when he heard news of the great victory in abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. Three days later he died. "It is a singular fact," said Thomas Fowell Buxton, his chosen successor in leading the cause, "that on the very night on which we were successfully engaged in the House of Commons, in passing the clause of the Act of Emancipation-one one of the most important clauses ever enacted ... the spirit of our friend left the world. The day which was the termination of his labours was the termination of his life."

Such symmetry is very rare. Very few people have the privilege of ending their "labors" and their "life" at the same time. In a world marred and broken by sin, our lives are often terminated before our tasks or our tasks are taken away from us long before the ending of our lives. This means we must be sure that our sense of calling is deeper, wider, higher, and longer than the best and highest of the tasks we undertake.

Put differently, most human lives are an incomplete story if not a story of incompletion. As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

John Cotton's famous sermon rises magnificently to a central consequence of calling in the face of death. "The last work which faith puts forth about a man's calling is this: faith with boldness resigns up his calling into the hands of God or man; whenever God calls a man to lay down his calling when his work is finished, herein the sons of God far exceed the sons of men. Another man when his calling comes to be removed from him, he is much ashamed and much afraid; but if a Christian man is to forego his calling, he lays it down with comfort and boldness in the sight of God."

A friend once said to Winston Churchill that there was something to be said for being a retired Roman Emperor. "Why retired?" Churchill growled. "There's nothing to be said for retiring from anything." As followers of Christ we are called to be before we are called to do and our calling both to be and do is fulfilled only in being called to him. So calling should not only precede career but outlast it too. Vocations never end, even when occupations do. We may retire from our jobs but never from our calling. We may at times be unemployed, but no one ever becomes uncalled.

Most important of all, the Last Call of death is a termination from the secular perspective, but from the spiritual perspective it is the culmination of life. After a lifetime of journeying, we are arriving home. After all the years of hearing only the voice, we are about to see the face and feel the arms. The Caller is our Father and the Last Call is the call home.

Until that day comes, our task is to keep on and to keep on keeping on. In the words of the famous Anglican prayer adapted from the writings of the great Elizabethan sailor and adventurer Sir Francis Drake, "O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same to the end, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory; through him who for the finishing of thy work laid down his life, our Redeemer, Jesus Christ."

Third, calling helps us finish well because it encourages us to leave the entire outcome of our lives to God. In his masterwork Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton wrote: "To the question, `What are you?' I could only answer, `God knows."' But such reticence is rare today. Blithely, glibly, with no sense of the ridiculousness of our arrogance, we modern people talk of "discovering our identities," specifying our callings in a single sentence, and pronouncing about our life accomplishments as if they were things we could pile on a little red wagon and trundle in to God to solicit his approval and add to our pride of achievement.

Other people, bearing the entire burden of sustaining their own significance, go to the other extreme-weariness and despair. In his autobiography, nineteenth-century writer Van Wyck Brooks surveyed his life and concluded that his efforts had been sown in an environment where they could not grow and not even the furrow would remain. He had "ploughed the sea." The great Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote similarly in his memoir Reveries: "All life weighed in the scale of my own life seems a preparation for something that never happens."

Both the arrogant and the despairing overlook what God alone must do. They forget the mystery at the heart of calling as well as identity. God calls and, just as we hear him but don't see him on this earth, so we grow to become what he calls, even though we don't see until heaven what he is calling us to become.

No one has captured this more profoundly than George Macdonald in his sermon "The New Name" from Unspoken Sermons. In his message sage in Revelation to the Church in Pergamum, Jesus promised "a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it." Macdonald pointed out in good biblical fashion that "the true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol-his soul's picture, in a word-the sign which belongs to him and no one else. Who can give a man this, his own nature? God alone. For no one but God sees what a man is."

But then, in a hauntingly suggestive passage, Macdonald went further and gave the lie to all who think that "discovering our giftedness and calling" and "fulfilling the real you" is a simple and straightforward forward matter.

It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God's name for the man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom He keeps in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success-to say "In thee also I am well pleased."

Perhaps you are frustrated by the gap that still remains between your vision and your accomplishment. Or you may be depressed by the pages of your life that are blotched with compromises, failures, betrayals, and sin. You have had your say. Other may have had their say. But make no judgments and draw no conclusions until the scaffolding of history is stripped away and you see what it means for God to have had his say-and made you what you are called to be.

We are "called to be." Who dares set against this sublime vision the crude insult of being "constrained to be," the puny audacity of "the courage to be" or the pedestrian fatalism of being "constituted to be"? From its awesome beginning, when a voice was heard but no figure seen, to its soaring climax, when God will unveil his design for all his children at our Last Call, the character and purpose of calling beggar the imagination and thrill the heart and soul of all but the most deaf and unresponsive.

Ponder these things well. When the Last Call comes to each of us, may it be found that we have all answered the call, followed the way, and finished well-and are able to respond to the final summons like Mr. Valiant-for-Truth in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress:

After this, it was noised abroad, that Mr. Valiant-for-Truth was taken with a summons by the same post as the other; and had this for a token that the summons was true, That his pitcher was broken at the fountain. When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told them of it. Then, said he, I am going to my Father's, and tho' with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My Sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and Skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought His battles, who now will be my Rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompany'd him to the River-side, into which as he went, he said Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper, he said, Grave, where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and all the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.