Hans Calmeyer Righteous Gentile 1903-1972

“Dutch Schindler”

 Lawyer for Life

WHY  SAVE  LIVES ? 

Among Calmeyer’s legacies is his own declaration before death that “he was now finally joyful and complete” ... he was able to escape his despair about human atrocity for at least a last evening. But if the disposition of death is merely a personal choice about how to feel while being carried over to an uncertain afterlife, what manner of consolation is that? Blessed are the poor in spirit. Matthew 5:3. Calmeyer knew he was poor in Spirit, and he agonized in despair. Perhaps that despair was finally an opening:

If Jesus Christ is a Teacher only, then all He can do is to tantalize me by erecting a standard I cannot attain. What is the use of presenting me with an ideal I cannot possibly come near? I am happier without knowing it. What is the good of telling me to be what I never can be—to be pure in heart, to do more than my duty, to be perfectly devoted to God? I must know Jesus Christ as Saviour before His teaching has any meaning for me other than that of an ideal which leads to despair. But when I am born again of the Spirit of God, I know that Jesus Christ did not come to teach only: He came to make me what He teaches I should be.

The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the natural man—the very thing Jesus means it to do. As long as we have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out Our Lord’s teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are willing to come to Him as paupers and receive from Him. ‘Blessed are the paupers in spirit,’ that is the first principle in the kingdom of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility -‘I cannot begin to do it.’ Then Jesus says—‘Blessed are you.’ That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor! The knowledge of our own poverty brings us on to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works.                                  Oswald Chambers, “Utmost for His Highest”

Spiritualists are an alternative religion to the major Abrahamic religions, not generally concerned about a God or organized intelligence behind it all, but consciously or unconsciously incorporating many of the beliefs of the major scriptures. Simply existing within other cutures and legal systems inspired by religion in most cases, makes intermingling of beliefs virtually unavoidable. Does that bring lasting spiritual peace?

Spiritualists are by definition undisciplined by scriptures per se, (and are not likely to be right in their ultimate beliefs if there is a God that would leave a trace of himself), but that is beside the point we want to make: the seeking for spirituality, and for reconciliation with the existence and opposition of evil and good, is nearly universal, and not wrong-headed in and of itself. Different lifestyles are different choices. Ultimate consequences are unknowable, but immediate consequences on others are knowable, and evil systems develop from spiritual believers as well as unspiritual believers.

Hitler thought himself spiritual, not Christian, as Christ played no part in any of his many pronouncements of his beliefs, and we now regard his spiritualism as on the bad side. Calmeyer may have thought himself Christian or not, he never mentioned Christ as far as we can tell, but he was spiritual on the good side. Hitler wanted to please a sense of eternal destiny, not God, but he sometimes couched this desire in terms of God in his unending propaganda. Calmeyer had an expressed desire to be God-pleasing, and this was a deeply personal desire to have a relationship with a just and merciful God.

A “fake” Propagandistic Spirituality is just manipulation:

Spiritualists with their lack of disciplined scriptures may ultimately be right, for all we really know, but we may choose to believe otherwise, and we are given guideposts and inspiration to believe as we do.

Calmeyer was an anthropologist by self-training, somehow having sired two archaeologist sons neither of whom really sensed that as a common legacy, as if it were some cosmic coincidence. Perhaps it indeed was some spiritual coincidence.

Calmeyer, in his last year and a half (according to him the night before his death) had studied the history and pre-history of the Magi, a mysterious astronomy-aware group of kings and scientists we are told visited both Jesus as a child and Herod the  governor of the Jewish lands of Palestine. Why was he so interested?

Calmeyer was interested in a great many things, a sponge of knowledge, but this was something of a late-life obsession. We cannot know exactly why, but his son Michael proceeded to study the topic rather intensively, the thought had taken hold like a seed, and it is indeed a deep topic that occasionally crosses over into spiritual indications and perhaps truth. The “Magi” appear on the scenes of history and pre-history and myth as often as the “Watchers” ... which is to say not often, but tantalizingly so, representing ancient wisdom, science, and even foreknowledge in ways that inspire.

Whether such inspiration is historical truth or mysticism, there is a spiritual tie to believers in prophesy and even “seers” of the past like Edgar Cayce and others, a link to deeply held but forgotten beliefs in the pre-cursor civilization of Noah, before the flood.

This necessary yet unknown precursor civilization to the Sumerians and Egyptians was as enticing to Calmeyer as the Aryan Civilization was to Hitler. One had an academic interest, the other had a driven interest in replicating a past civilization through the use of raw power. But apart from objectives, each sought a historical (real) basis for the explanation of creation’s antecedents, civilization, beliefs in God, and spiritual adherence to some absolute truth.

Calmeyer wanted to complete his personal understanding. Hitler wanted a tool to capture and hold the imagination of others.