Richard Jenne was the last known person killed in the T4 Program. Richard was the son of Freida Jenne and lived a short and painful life. He was born on March 10, 1941 in Germany. He was born with an intellectual disability. In late 1944, Richard’s mother was advised to send him Kaufbeuren-Irsee Mental Institution. She did not know what would happen there.
Richard was treated horribly in the facility, as were all disabled children there. Nazi ideology believed that people with disabilities did not deserve life- they believed them to be unworthy and “useless eaters”. They were treated as such.
Little Richard, who was described as a “feebleminded idiot” was only three years old when he was sent to the institution. During his time there, he was subjected to starvation to weaken his body. One can only imagine how hungry the poor little boy must have been, not understanding where his mother was or why he was in this horrible place.
In April of 1945, American forces captured the town. The Americans did not know of the atrocities that happened in the institution for at least five more weeks. The “nurses” of the hospital continued to operate.
On May 29, 1945, Richard Jenne was murdered by lethal injection in his hospital bed by Sister Wörle. She had previously killed 211 minors in the hospital. Richard was only four years old. He is often considered the last victim of the Holocaust and is the last known victim of the T4 program.
I watched the woman steal three dozen eggs and a sack of potatoes while my shotgun sat loaded behind the door, untouched. It wasn’t the theft that froze me; it was the way she wiped her eyes before she ran.
My father built this farm stand in 1958. It’s nothing more than a weathered oak lean-to with a tin roof, sitting at the end of a gravel driveway that used to be surrounded by cornfields. Now, it’s surrounded by subdivisions with names like “Oak Creek” and “Willow Run,” where the only oaks and willows were cut down to pour the concrete foundations.
For sixty years, there has been a metal lockbox nailed to the center post. Written on it in fading white paint are two words: THE HONOR SYSTEM.
You take what you need. You put the cash in the slot. Simple. That box put me through college. It paid for my mother’s hip surgery. It was a testament to a time when a man’s word was his bond and a neighbor was just family you hadn’t met yet.
But times have changed.
I hear it on the radio in my tractor. Inflation. Supply chains. The price of diesel is up. Fertilizer costs have tripled. And out here, where the factories closed down a decade ago and the new service jobs don’t pay enough to cover the rent, people are hurting. Really hurting.
I’d noticed the light pilfering for months. A missing tomato here, a jar of honey there. I ignored it. If you’re desperate enough to steal a tomato, you probably need the vitamins. But last Tuesday was different.
It was a gray, biting afternoon. The woman drove a sedan that sounded like it was coughing up a lung. She didn’t look like a criminal. She looked like a nurse, or maybe a teacher—tired, wearing scrubs that had seen too many shifts. I watched from the kitchen window, sipping lukewarm coffee.
She stood in front of the stand for a long time. She opened her purse and counted coins. She counted them again. I could see her shoulders slump. She looked at the prices written on the little chalkboard—prices I had already lowered twice, even though I was barely breaking even.
Then, she did it. She grabbed the eggs. She grabbed the potatoes. She moved fast, terrified, looking over her shoulder. She didn’t check the lockbox. She just threw the food into her passenger seat and sped off, gravel spraying against the “Honor System” sign.
My neighbor, frank, a transplant from the city who likes to give me unsolicited advice about liability insurance, was pulling into my drive just as she left.
“You see that, Beau?” Frank yelled, leaning out of his shiny truck. “I told you! You gotta get cameras. Or shut it down. People today? No morals. They’ll bleed you dry.”
I looked at the dust settling on the road. “Maybe,” I said.
“It’s the economy,” Frank grumbled. “Makes wolves out of sheep. Lock it up, Beau.”
I went inside. I looked at my ledger. I was in the red. Again. The logical thing to do was to close the stand. Or put a padlock on the cooler. Frank was right. You can’t run a business on good vibes and nostalgia.
But I couldn’t get the image of that woman’s slumped shoulders out of my head. That wasn’t the posture of a thief. That was the posture of a mother who had to choose between gas for the car and dinner for the table.
The next morning, at 4:00 AM, I went out to the barn.
I collected the eggs. I sorted the vegetables. Usually, I wash the potatoes until they shine. I polish the peppers. I make sure everything looks supermarket-perfect because that’s what the new people in the subdivisions expect.
Today, I did the opposite.
I took the biggest, most beautiful Russet potatoes—the ones that would bake up fluffy and perfect—and I rubbed a little wet dirt back onto them. I took the eggs that were slightly different shades of brown, the ones that were perfectly fresh but didn’t look uniform in a carton, and set them aside. I took the prize-winning heirloom tomatoes and found the ones that were shaped a little weird, the ones that looked like kidneys or hearts instead of perfect spheres.
I walked down to the stand and nailed up a new wooden crate right next to the Honor System box. I grabbed a piece of cardboard and a thick marker.
“SECONDS & BLEMISHED,” I wrote. “UGLY PRODUCE. CAN’T SELL TO STORES. 90% OFF OR TAKE FOR FREE IF YOU HELP ME CLEAR THE INVENTORY.”
I filled that crate with the best food I had. The “dirty” potatoes. The “mismatched” eggs. The “weird” tomatoes.
Then I retreated to the porch and waited.
She came back three days later. Same coughing car. Same tired scrubs.
She froze when she saw the new sign. She looked at the pristine, full-price vegetables on the main shelf, and then at the overflowing crate of “ugly” food. She approached it cautiously, like it was a trap.
She picked up a potato. She wiped a thumb over the smudge of dirt I’d carefully applied, revealing the perfect skin underneath. She paused. She looked at the house. I stayed back in the shadows of the curtains.
She didn’t run this time. She took a grocery bag and filled it. She took two dozen eggs. She took a bag of apples I had marked as “bruised” (they weren’t).
Then, she stood in front of the Honor System box. She didn’t have much, but I saw her put a crumpled bill in. It wasn’t the full price of the premium stuff, but it was something. She walked back to her car, not looking over her shoulder, but walking with her head up.
Over the next month, a strange thing happened.
The “Seconds” bin became the most popular spot in the county. It wasn’t just her. It was the old man from the trailer park down the road. It was the young couple who had just moved into the rental property. They’d pull up, read the sign, and load up.
And the Honor System box? It started getting heavy.
They weren’t paying market price. They were paying what they could. Sometimes it was quarters. Sometimes it was a five-dollar bill for a haul that was worth twenty. But nobody was stealing. Nobody was running.
One afternoon, Frank stopped by. He looked at the nearly empty “Seconds” bin and the few remaining items on the main shelf.
“You’re losing your shirt, Beau,” Frank laughed, shaking his head. “I did the math. You’re selling Grade A stock as garbage. I saw you put those peppers in there. Nothing wrong with them. You’re running a charity, not a business.”
“I’m not running a charity,” I said, leaning on my truck.
“Then what do you call it? You’re letting them take advantage of you.”
“No, Frank,” I said. “I’m letting them keep their pride.”
Frank went silent.
“If I give it away,” I explained, looking out at the cornstalks swaying in the wind, “they feel like beggars. If I let them ‘buy’ the ugly stuff for cheap, or help me out by ‘clearing inventory,’ they’re customers. They’re helping me out. It’s a transaction between equals. They get to feed their families without feeling small.”
Frank looked at the box, then at me. He didn’t say anything else about cameras.
Yesterday evening, I went down to close up the stand. The “Seconds” crate was empty, swept clean. The lockbox felt heavy. I opened it to collect the day’s take.
Amidst the dollar bills and coins, there was a small, sealed white envelope. No stamp. Just my name, “Beau,” written in neat cursive.
I opened it. Inside was a twenty-dollar bill—crisp, new. And a note.
“To the farmer, I know the potatoes aren’t bad. I know the eggs are fresh. I know what you’re doing. My husband got a job today. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We made a pot roast tonight with your ‘ugly’ vegetables. It was the best meal we’ve had in six months. Thank you for feeding us. But mostly, thank you for not making us ask. We will never forget this.”
I stood there in the fading twilight, the fireflies starting to blink over the fields. I held that twenty-dollar bill like it was a winning lottery ticket.
The economists will tell you that the Honor System is dead. They’ll tell you that in a dog-eat-dog world, you have to lock your doors and guard your hoard. They’ll tell you that kindness is a liability on a balance sheet.
But standing there, listening to the crickets and feeling the cool evening air, I realized they’re wrong. The Honor System isn’t about trusting people not to steal. It’s about trusting that if you treat people like people, they’ll rise to meet you.
I pocketed the note and walked back to the house. Tomorrow is another day. I need to wake up early. I’ve got a lot of perfectly good vegetables to go ruin.
Because hard times don’t create thieves; sometimes, they just reveal who is hungry. And true community isn’t about watching your neighbor through a lens; it’s about making sure their plate isn’t empty so they don’t have to steal to fill it.
Ada Morrison was committed to Connecticut asylum in 1893, age thirty, by husband who wanted younger wife. Commitment reason: “excessive reading and intellectual pretensions unsuitable for woman.” Ada had taught school before marriage, read constantly, discussed politics. Husband said this proved mental instability. Two doctors examined her for ten minutes, agreed intelligent woman was clearly insane. Ada was locked in asylum for four years, labeled insane for being educated. She escaped eight times. Caught seven times. Succeeded once. Took four years of attempts—climbing windows, picking locks, bribing guards, hiding in laundry carts. Ada’s intelligence that got her committed was same intelligence that freed her.
This tintype from 1897 shows Ada after final successful escape, age thirty-four, displaying scars from previous attempts—broken arm from second-floor fall, burn marks from climbing hot steam pipes, lash marks from punishment after failed escapes. She holds commitment papers declaring her “mentally deficient with delusions of intellectual capability.” Ada had graduated college. Taught school for six years. Read Latin and Greek. Asylum declared this insanity. Her husband declared it embarrassing. Her intelligence declared it crime. Ada spent four years proving she was sane enough to escape place she was imprisoned for being smart.
Ada reached New York after escape, changed name to Sarah Bennett, worked as clerk hiding education level to avoid suspicion. Never contacted family—they’d supported commitment. Never remarried—couldn’t trust man with legal power over her freedom. Lived quietly for thirty-eight years, died in 1935, age seventy-two, having spent thirty-eight years hiding intelligence that had nearly destroyed her. Ada had been imprisoned for reading. Spent rest of life pretending she barely could. That was survival in world that called educated women insane.
After her death, landlady found Ada’s room filled with books—hundreds of volumes hidden behind false wall. Ada had kept reading despite risk, kept learning despite having been punished for it, kept thinking despite it being dangerous for woman in her era. Also found: diary documenting eight escape attempts with detailed notes about asylum security, guard rotations, lock mechanisms. Ada had been brilliant enough to escape asylum that imprisoned brilliant women.
Her commitment papers are now in women’s history museum: “Ada Morrison was committed for reading too much. Escaped asylum eight times before succeeding. Spent 38 years hiding intelligence that prison couldn’t contain. She was insane for being smart. World was insane for calling that illness.”
In the year 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was led to a stake in the heart of Paris, surrounded by a crowd of thousands. She had been condemned as a heretic—the first person the Paris Inquisition would burn for refusing to recant.
Her crime was writing a book.
Marguerite Porete was born around 1250 in the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. She was highly educated, likely from an aristocratic family, and she joined the Beguines—a movement of women who devoted themselves to spiritual life without taking formal vows or submitting to male religious authority.
The Beguines lived by their own rules. They worked among the poor, prayed in their own communities, and sought God on their own terms. This freedom made Church authorities nervous. Women living outside male control, speaking about God without clerical permission, threatened the very foundations of institutional power.
Marguerite took this freedom further than most. Sometime in the 1290s, she wrote a mystical text called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It was a conversation between allegorical figures—Love, Reason, and the Soul—describing seven stages of spiritual transformation. At its heart was a radical idea: that a soul could become so completely united with divine love that it no longer needed the Church’s rituals, rules, or intermediaries. In the highest states of union, the soul surrendered its will entirely to God—and in that surrender, found perfect freedom.
“Love is God,” she wrote, “and God is Love.”
She did not write her book in Latin, the language of clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French—the language ordinary people spoke. This meant her dangerous ideas could spread beyond monastery walls, beyond the control of priests and bishops.
And spread they did.
Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes, forcing Marguerite to watch her words turn to ash. He commanded her never to circulate her ideas again.
She refused.
Marguerite believed her book had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. She had consulted three respected theologians before publishing it, including the esteemed Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines, and they had approved. She would not let one bishop’s condemnation silence what she believed to be divine truth.
She continued sharing her book. She continued teaching. She continued insisting that the soul’s relationship with God belonged to no earthly institution.
In 1308, she was arrested and handed over to the Inquisitor of France, a Dominican friar named William of Paris—the same man who served as confessor to King Philip IV, the monarch who was simultaneously destroying the Knights Templar. It was a busy time for burning heretics.
Marguerite was imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. During that entire time, she refused to speak to her inquisitors. She would not take the oath required to proceed with her trial. She would not answer questions. She maintained absolute silence—an act of defiance that infuriated the authorities.
A commission of twenty-one theologians from the University of Paris examined her book. They extracted fifteen propositions they deemed heretical. Among the most dangerous: the idea that an annihilated soul, fully united with God, could give nature what it desires without sin—because such a soul was no longer capable of sin.
To the Church, this suggested moral chaos. To Marguerite, it described the ultimate freedom of perfect surrender.
She was given every chance to recant. Others in similar positions saved their lives by confessing error. A man arrested alongside her, Guiard de Cressonessart, who had declared himself her defender, eventually broke under pressure and confessed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Marguerite held firm.
On May 31, 1310, William of Paris formally declared her a relapsed heretic—meaning she had returned to condemned beliefs after being warned—and turned her over to secular authorities. The next day, June 1, she was led to the Place de Grève, the public square where executions took place.
The Inquisitor denounced her as a “pseudo-mulier”—a fake woman—as if her gender itself had been a lie, as if no real woman could defy the Church so completely.
They burned her alive.
But something unexpected happened in that crowd of thousands. According to the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis—a monk who had no sympathy for her ideas—the crowd was moved to tears by the calmness with which she faced her death.
She displayed, the chronicle noted, many signs of penitence “both noble and pious.” Her serenity unnerved those who expected a screaming heretic. Instead, they witnessed a woman who seemed to have already transcended the fire that consumed her body.
The Church ordered every copy of The Mirror of Simple Souls destroyed. They wanted her words erased from history along with her life.
They failed.
Her book survived. Copies circulated secretly, passed from hand to hand across Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English. For centuries, it was read anonymously—no one knew who had written it. The text was too powerful to disappear, even without a name attached.
It was not until 1946—more than six hundred years after her death—that a scholar named Romana Guarnieri, researching manuscripts in the Vatican Library, finally connected The Mirror of Simple Souls to its author. The woman the Church had tried to erase was finally given back her name.
Today, Marguerite Porete is recognized as one of the most important mystics of the medieval period. Scholars compare her ideas to those of Meister Eckhart, one of the most celebrated theologians of the era—and some believe Eckhart may have been influenced by her work. The book that was burned as heresy is now studied in universities as a masterpiece of spiritual literature.
Her ideas about love transcending institutional control, about the soul finding God directly without intermediaries, about surrender leading to freedom—these are not the ravings of a dangerous heretic. They are the insights of a woman centuries ahead of her time.
The Church that killed her eventually softened its stance on mystical experience. The Council of Vienne in 1312 condemned eight errors from her book, but the broader current of Christian mysticism she represented would continue flowing through figures like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, and countless others who sought direct encounter with the divine.
What the flames could not destroy was the truth she had grasped: that love, in its purest form, is greater than fear. That no institution can ultimately control the relationship between a soul and its source. That words born from genuine spiritual insight have a way of surviving every attempt to silence them.
Marguerite Porete spent her final years in silence—refusing to speak to those who demanded she deny her truth. But her book has been speaking for seven centuries.
There is a reason Scripture uses marriage language when speaking of God and humanity.
Because marriage reveals love most clearly — and abuse most obviously.
Scripture says: “No one ever hated his own body, but nourishes and cherishes it.” 💍
That statement alone exposes a massive distortion.
Because if God truly hates, tortures, or eternally punishes His creation, then God would be doing what no healthy husband ever does.
So let me tell this as a parable.
📖 THE PARABLE 📖
There was a man who married a woman and told her he loved her.
At first, everything seemed fine.
But soon, he began to find fault.
She didn’t wash the dishes correctly. She didn’t cook the food the way he liked. She didn’t fold the clothes the way he expected.
He told her, “If you really loved me, you’d do better.”
Over time, his love became conditional.
“You’re still my wife,” he said, “but you disappoint me constantly.”
Eventually, he told her:
“Because you didn’t live up to my standards, I will now torture you forever — and this will prove how much I loved you.”
When people recoiled in horror, he replied:
“You just don’t understand love. I warned her. She chose this.”
No one would call that love.
No one would call that justice.
They would call it abuse.
Yet this is precisely how God is portrayed in much of church culture.
🧠 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FRACTURE 🧠
When people are taught that:
love includes torture
justice requires endless punishment
forgiveness still demands payment
the psyche splits.
The mind is forced to hold two opposing ideas: “God is love” and “God will torture you forever.”
That contradiction cannot be integrated.
So the soul fractures.
Some become fearful. Some become cruel. Some become numb.
Many begin defending abuse as righteousness.
This is what happens when the carnal mind governs theology.
The carnal mind only understands control, reward, and punishment.
It cannot comprehend restorative love.
🔥 WHAT JESUS ACTUALLY REVEALED 🔥
Jesus did not reveal a God who punishes His bride.
He revealed a God who lays His life down for her.
He did not say, “I will destroy you until you comply.”
He said, “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.”
A God who tortures His own body would be less loving than a human husband.
And Scripture never presents God as less loving than we are.
⚠️ WHY THIS MATTERS ⚠️
When the church teaches people to worship an abusive image of God, it doesn’t just distort theology.
It damages the nervous system. It fractures the psyche. It normalizes domination. It trains people to tolerate harm.
People begin to believe:
abuse is love
fear is obedience
silence is holiness
This is not the gospel.
It is trauma wearing religious language.
✨ THE TRUE MEASURE ✨
Love does not torture. Love restores.
Justice does not destroy. Justice heals.
And a husband who hates his own body is not a reflection of God — he is a warning.
Spirits Whisper 🕊️ Love never needs cruelty to prove itself. What terror demands, love freely gives. God does not punish His bride — He heals her memory of who she is. Anything less is not holiness, but harm.
opensenseme 