The Cloak

The man pulls his cloak up over his head and lies down, and a whole country goes quiet and waits. Outside the booth the two sides are still armed. Christian men on one rock, heathen men on another, both of them a short walk from killing each other over which god Iceland would keep. And they have handed the whole thing to him. One man, under a cloak, on his back, for as long as it takes. He does not speak. He does not eat. A day passes. Then a night. The country waits on a man who will not come out.

His name was Þorgeirr, and he was the lawspeaker, the one voice everyone had agreed to obey. And he was a heathen.

This was the year 1000, at the Althing, the great assembly on the plain where Iceland made its law. The island had been filling with Christians, pushed by missionaries and by the king of Norway leaning in from across the sea, and the old believers had had enough. Both sides declared they would no longer share one law with the other. That is another way of saying war. A small country, everyone related to everyone, about to cut itself in half over the gods.

So they did something almost wise. Instead of fighting, both sides swore to accept the ruling of one man, and they chose the heathen lawspeaker to make it, and trusted him to be fair to a faith that was not his.

He went under the cloak to think. A day and a night. Nobody knows what happened under there and the old book does not guess. When he came out, he stood at the Law Rock and he ruled.

All Iceland would be baptized. Every person, into the new faith. That was the law now.

But.

And it is a large but. In private, a man could still sacrifice to the old gods, if no witnesses told. He could still eat horse meat. He could still expose an unwanted infant on the hillside to die, the old way. Those would stay legal. Christian in public. The old life, quietly, at home.

Give the man his due, because this series has not been kind to these men and he earned something the kings never did. He counted the cost honestly. He did not pretend the division was small. He looked straight at what a clean, total conversion would cost his country, and he judged the country could not pay it without blood, and he found a peace that held. That is more than Hákon managed at his own table. More than the Olafs managed with all their fire.

And it worked, in a way. Iceland did not go to war that summer. The old book says the concessions were quietly dropped a few years on, the horse-meat and the exposure of infants made illegal after all, once the new faith had settled and the country could bear it. So you can even argue Þorgeirr was wise, that he bought time the faith needed, that a slower conversion with a private clause beat a fast one paid for in blood. Maybe. That is the honest case for the cloak, and I am not going to pretend it has nothing to it.

But hold onto what the clause actually was while it lasted. A country of men baptized in the daylight and slipping out to the old altars after dark, and it was legal, and everyone knew.

But look at the peace he bought. It had a clause in it. A country baptized on the outside with the old altars still warm in the back rooms. The public man went under the water. The private man kept the knife.

This is where it stops being about an island a thousand years ago.

"For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it?"

Luke 14:28, NASB 1995

Jesus says count the cost. Þorgeirr did count it. That is the honor in him.

But the tower he built had a room he left off the plans on purpose. A private room. And Jesus, five verses later, is not talking about a tower with a hidden room. He is talking about a man who gives up everything, or does not really follow at all.

Brother, you have an exception clause.

Most of us do. It is the thing you agreed to in public and reserved in private. You signed the whole life over, out loud, in front of people. And then there is the one room. The one area where you quietly kept the old law. Where, if no witnesses tell, you still do it the way you always did.

You know the room. Everybody can see the baptized house you live in. Only you know about the clause.

It might be the thing you look at when you are alone. The way you do business when the deal is off the books. The temper you keep leashed everywhere but home. The private appetite you have made peace with, decided is just yours, decided God will overlook. You made the public conversion complete and you carved out one legal exception and you have been living in it for years, and calling the whole arrangement your faith.

Þorgeirr at least did it for a country on the edge of war. You did it for you.

Here is the one thing. One.

Write down the private clause. On paper, in your own hand. The one exception you have kept. Do not show it to anyone. Do not post it, do not confess it to a group, do not make it a whole production.

Just write it down where you have to look at it, in plain words, and by writing it stop pretending it is not there. You cannot bring a thing into the light that you will not even admit exists in the dark. The clause survives on being unnamed. Name it, on paper, to yourself. That is the whole assignment, and it is harder than it sounds.

He took the mark. He never took the knee. Brother, don't die half-signed.

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Previous: The Sword That Made Christians. Next: He Still Raided.

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Source note. The conversion of Iceland at the Althing around the year 1000, the lawspeaker Þorgeirr Ljósvetningagoði lying under his cloak, and his ruling that mandated baptism while leaving private sacrifice, horse-meat eating, and infant exposure legal for a time, are recorded in Íslendingabók, the short history written by the Icelandic priest Ari Þorgilsson in the early twelfth century. It is among the earliest and most sober of the Norse Christian sources.