A thunderstorm and a vow
Luther becomes a monk
Luther is twenty-one years old, returning to law school after a visit home, when the storm hits.
It is not a gentle summer shower. It is the kind of storm that feels like the end of the world — the kind that medieval people understood as the immediate presence of divine power, unpredictable, potentially lethal. A bolt of lightning strikes close enough to knock him to the ground.
He cries out to the patron saint of miners — his father's trade, his childhood protector: Help me, Saint Anna! I will become a monk!
The storm passes. He gets up. He continues to law school.
And then he keeps the vow.
Two weeks later, over the protests of his father — who has invested everything in his son's legal career and is furious — Luther enters the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. He sells his law books. He puts on the habit.
His father does not speak to him for years.
Luther will later say he made the vow in terror and that God trapped him in it. But he also says the monastery gave him something he could not have found anywhere else: the full weight of the Augustinian theological tradition, which is also the tradition of Augustine of Hippo, which is also the tradition of grace.
The thunderstorm that knocked him down put him in the place where he would eventually find what he was looking for.
He didn't know that yet. He just knew he had made a vow.
“Against my will I became a monk. God trapped me with a thunderstorm.”
— Martin Luther, Table Talk, c. 1530s AD
“The LORD prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”
Luther made his vow in terror and God honored it.
This is not the way we usually think conversion ought to work — the reasoned decision, the calm weighing of options, the dignified commitment. Luther was knocked down by lightning and promised his life to God to make the lightning stop.
And yet the vow held. And the monastery it led to was the place where everything he needed was waiting.
God works through fear and crisis and desperate bargains made in rainstorms. He is not confined to the dignified and deliberate.
Look back at your own story. Where did God use something that felt like coercion — a crisis, a loss, a moment of terror — to put you exactly where you needed to be? And did you recognize it at the time, or only later?