A Christmas Carol

Re-reading Charles' Dickens A Christmas Carol at the moment.  I've been reflecting on what sort of Christianity it reveals.  In the basic 'moral' of the story, Scrooge's Zacchaeus-like (see Luke 19) conversion from "the love of money [which] is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6:10) to open-handed generosity, the narrator demonstrates a high regard for the New Testament's ethical teaching. 

Elsewhere, there is a degree of scepticism towards some of the manifestations of institutional Christianity, as in this conversation between Scrooge and the second of the Three Spirits (the ghost of Christmas Present):

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
      ‘Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘There is. My own.’
      ‘Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘To any kindly given. To a poor one most.’
      ‘Why to a poor one most?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘Because it needs it most.’
      ‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, ‘I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.’
      ‘I!’ cried the Spirit.
      ‘You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,’ said Scrooge. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
      ‘I!’ cried the Spirit.
      ‘You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?’ said Scrooge. ‘And it comes to the same thing.’
      ‘I seek!’ exclaimed the Spirit.
      ‘Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,’ said Scrooge.
      ‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’
      Scrooge promised that he would;

True Christianity, within A Christmas Carol, is found in an everyday practical care for the poor and not pious legalism, perhaps reflecting Jesus' comment: "The poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26:11).  Sunday is not kept sacred by taking away the possibility of a hot meal from the deprived.  Elsewhere, there's an echo of Jesus' identification of being a Christian with care for the poor: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:40):

‘And how did little Tim behave?’ asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.
      ‘As good as gold,’ said Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’
      Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.

So, for me, Dickens' morality tale portrays a Christianity strongly rooted in practical ethical action towards an ever-present poor - heaven in ordinary once more.

Life, Interrupted

Historical studies of the life of Jesus leave us with the enigma of the end of his life - that his followers believed that he had risen from the dead:

Much about the historical Jesus will remain a mystery.  Nothing is more mysterious than the stories of his resurrection, which attempt to portray an experience that the authors could not themselves comprehend.  But in the midst of mystery and uncertainty, we should remember that we know a lot about Jesus.  We know that he started under John the Baptist, that he had disciples, that he expected the 'kingdom', that he went from Galilee to Jerusalem, that he did something hostile against the Temple, that he was tried and crucified.  Finally we know that after his death his followers experienced what they described as the 'resurrection': the appearance of a living but transformed person who had actually died.  They believe this, they lived it, and they died for it.  In the process they created a movement, a movement that in many ways went far beyond Jesus' message.  Their movement grew and spread geographically.

E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus

The early Christian communities soon began to ask their leaders how they would share in the resurrection experience of Jesus; Paul writes:  'But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?”' (1 Corinthians 15:35).

The artist Stanley Spencer, in paintings such as The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter or The Resurrection, Cookham, pictured this resurrection experience in terms of the every day.  The dead clamber out of their tombs in much the same condition as they entered them, dressed in contemporary clothes.  Life, interrupted, appears to continue on much the same terms.  For Spencer, resurrection seems to be less transcendental and more part of our present, lived experience.

Meeting God in the pub

As I mention in 'About Me' inspiration for this blog comes from George Herbert's poem:

¶    Prayer. (I)
PRayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
     Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinners towre,
     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
     The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and  blisse,
     Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
     Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
 
  Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
     The land of spices; something understood.

Relevant definitions of 'ordinarie' from the Oxford English Dictionary below for those who like that sort of thing.  For me the point is in the potential play on words and definitions.  God might be met within the fixed and unchanging worship of the Church (the ordinary of the Mass), or in the pub; eating, drinking and all the activities of daily life can also be numinous or transcendent.

I. Rule or ordinance.
3. Christian Church. A rule prescribing, or book containing, the order of divine service, esp. that of the Mass; the established order or form for saying mass; the service of the Mass, or that part preceding and following the canon. In the Roman Catholic Church (usu. with capital initial): those parts of a service, esp. the Mass, which do not vary from day to day; spec. those unvarying parts which form the mass as a musical setting (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei). Also in extended use.

III. Something ordinary, regular, or usual.
12. a. Customary fare; a regular daily meal or allowance of food; (hence, by extension) a fixed portion, an allowance of anything. Obs
c. An inn, public house, tavern, etc., where meals are provided at a fixed price; the room in such a building where this type of meal is provided.

Revelation

Thinking about Revelation today. 

The images from John's vision echo in all sorts of contexts: from the enigmatic preacher/gun-slinger in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider  - 'And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death' (Revelation 6:8) to the rather less mysterious appearance of Death and the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pollution (Pestilence having retired in 1936 following the discovery of penicillin) in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's novel Good Omens.

David Miles' Apocalyptic Images* draw on the present and everyday - including images of people he knows, such as in the picture 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' - to create representations of John's vision.  Heaven is found, or represented, in ordinary things.  As David Miles' writes:

Whether the reader of the Book of Revelation has, or has not, a specific understanding of this enigmatic book is, to some extent, of little importance. What is compelling is that all believers who, through subsequent generations, have encountered the book, have discovered that that which John ‘saw’ has a resonance with the times in which they themselves live.

* Further brought to life with music and words in the presentation Approaching Apocalypse.

Heaven in ordinarie

One of the pictures above my desk is Clive Hicks-Jenkins' The Prophet Fed by a Raven. 



The prophet's clothes might be yours or mine, drinking from the brook helped by a chunky mug; Elijah has become present in our time.  His eyes might be closed in prayer - or is that a sideways glance down (modesty?) or inwards (reflection?) and away both from the food and the supportive raven.  No black-feathered raven this: red and fiery with tail feathers which might be tongues of flame - a premonition of the chariot of fire and horses of fire which separated Elisha from Elijah, separating present from past?

So, for me, the painting brings the spiritual into our present: heaven in ordinary.  Which is what I hope this blog will be about.

Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, "As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word."

Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah: "Leave here, turn eastward and hide in the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan.  You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there."

So he did what the LORD had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there.  The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. (1 Kings 17:1-6)