Our Little Sphere

The morning after the Newtown massacre, I heard a fire engine coming from behind as I drove along Rancho Santa Margarita Parkway toward the church I serve in south Orange County, California. I pulled over and watched it roar past, a blur of Christmas red.

At such moments, does your mind work like mine? If I’m near home, at first I think, “Maybe they’re going to our house!” If I’m near work, I think, “I hope there’s nothing wrong at St. John's!” Once these brief visions of incendiary toasters or Advent wreaths recede, I pray that everyone is okay wherever the firefighters are headed and give thanks for all the people in the world who make a vocation out of rushing toward danger.

We’re usually not the victims when horror strikes – until we are. On the Monday after Newtown, I tried to imagine what St. John’s School parents were feeling at drop-off. Their heads probably assured them that their children would be safe on our campus. Their hearts warned that the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School had made the same assumption.

To the extent that safety is a state of mind, we’re in more a dangerous state this Advent and Christmas. That same Monday at least enabled St. John’s School to thank some of those who risk their lives on our behalf. U.S. Marines and their families visited campus for a chapel service and meetings with our students. Kristen Lanham, Cindy Farnum, and other organizers of our annual Operation Christmas Spirit sent our guests back to Camp Pendleton with presents, food, and clothing.

Preaching in a church packed with students, colleagues, and our guests, I told my fire engine story in the hope of reassuring children who had been hearing about Newtown all weekend. While bad things do happen, we’re pretty safe. If we’re still worried or scared, it helps us feel better when we count our blessings, care for someone else who’s suffering, and give thanks for those from Afghanistan to the neighborhood firehouse who pledge themselves to safety and service.

Worry and fear won’t keep tragedy away, but planning and preparation may. At St. John’s School, we have regular fire and lock-down drills. At the national level, an urgent conversation is underway about the gun violence that marred this year more than any in recent memory. What can we do as one nation under God to deter such acts? It won’t be a thorough conversation unless everything’s on the table, including mental health education and treatment, the prevalence of semiautomatic weapons, and the way video game and television violence influences troubled people.

What might help most of all would be paying more and better attention to one another in our fractious, individuated society. Faith communities such as St. John’s can contribute by modeling how to conduct civil dialogue on difficult issues, build and sustain mutually supportive communities, and care for the lonely, despondent, and marginalized.

Thinking there’s nothing we can do after a moment like Newtown would inflict tragedy on tragedy. As Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, “Any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.” Every one of us is part of the solution, capable of accomplishing far more of God’s just and righteous purposes than we usually imagine. But how could it be otherwise at Christmas, as we prepare to celebrate our enlightenment and empowerment in Emmanuel, God with us?  

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the St. John's Episcopal Church newsletter.

Those Who Claim To Know God

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge delicately asks the ghost of Christmas present why, purportedly by his command, the authorities had ordered restaurants and public houses closed on Sundays, denying their comforts to working people on their one day off. Taking umbrage, the ghost seems to speak for the whole household of heaven, where, I suspect, there's still considerable impatience and anger about much of what we do in God's name:

"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 out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

God Rest Ye

We church friends were in a Rancho Santa Margarita, California Starbucks the other evening, in the midst of our weekly "Tuesday Tuneup." We do lectio divina at 5:30, break for a cup of joe, and return to St. John's for an hour of Bible study. During the coffee break I felt that, in the light of the season, I was discoursing too insistently on the sorts of matters that Marley's ghost describes as belonging to the worldly mind. High time for a home-town random act of culture as a troop of Girl Scouts (two wearing reindeer antlers) stood up and started belting out Christmas carols without so much as a howdy-do.

As Good As God

Turning to Charles Dickens in middle age and as a relatively recently minted priest (we call ourselves "midlife vocations"), I've been especially curious about his many references to God, faith, and the church.

As for his denominational status, the Unitarians make this apparently reliable claim:

Although Dickens was baptized and reared in the Church of England and was a nominal Anglican for most of his life, he turned to Unitarianism in the 1840s as a Broad Church alternative. He associated with Unitarians until the end of his life. Early experience with Dissenters gave him a lifelong aversion to evangelical zeal, doctrinal disputation and sectarianism. Equally unsympathetic with High Church Anglicanism, he feared that the Oxford Movement might lead the English back to Roman Catholicism.

That adds up. In Bleak House he makes several references to the beautiful language in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer but evinces no regard for its underlying doctrines (such as the pretty thoroughly Calvinist 39 Articles). A Christmas Carol stresses fellowship and compassion as the virtues of true religion. According to his father, Bob Cratchitt, Tiny Tim offers a bit of Christ talk pertaining exclusively to the Savior and his healing work:

Somehow [Tim] 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 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.

In my current read, The Old Curiosity Shop, a unnamed London passerby serving as narrator in the first few chapters says this on encountering the central character, little Nell:

I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

I wrote earlier in the week about Dickens as liberation theologian because he says the poor are especially close to God. So too in chapter 41, when young Christopher Nubbles, called Kit, goes looking for his mother to help in a scheme to persuade his beloved Nell and her grandfather to return to London. Kit, getting ahead in the world by virtue of his honesty, industry, and decency, had taken his mother, siblings, and friends to the theater and an oyster dinner the night before. When he arrives home the next evening to collect her for her mission, she's apparently gone to church -- not an Anglican one, mind you, but what we would call an urban evangelical storefront called Little Bethel where the pastor thinks he knows (as some also insist today) who the real Christians are:

Little Bethel might have been nearer, and might have been in a straighter road, though in that case the reverend gentleman who presided over its congregation would have lost his favorite allusion to the crooked ways by which it was approached, and which enabled him to liken it to Paradise itself, in contradistinction to the parish church and the broad thoroughfare leading thereunto.

Kit finds the preacher in full voice and his mother and most of the congregation fast asleep. Rousing her and propelling her into the street, the usually equable and kindly young man waxes prophetic. He thinks the evangelist is exploiting her misguided shame over the prior evening's innocent indulgences:

"What was there in the little bit of pleasure you took last night that made it necessary for you to be low-spirited and sorrowful tonight? That's the way you do. If you're happy or merry ever, you come here to say, along with that chap, that you're sorry for it. More shame for you, mother, I was going to say."

"Hush, dear!" said Mrs. Nubbles; "you don't mean what you say I know, but you're talking sinfulness."

"Don't mean it? But I do mean it!" retorted Kit. "I don't believe, mother, that harmless cheerfulness and good humour are thought greater sins in Heaven than shirt-collars are, and I do believe that those chaps are just about as right and sensible in putting down the one as in leaving off the other -- that's my belief."

Kit seems to mention shirt collars to signify the kind of well-off people he's now working for -- decent and honorable, as it happens, but just as likely not, as in the case of Scrooge and especially Nell and Kit's bete noire, the odious Quilp. Here Dickens' straightforward gospel is that being rich won't necessarily get you into heaven and indulging in simple human pleasures won't keep you out.

What does get us in? Dickens knew it when he saw it, as in the case of his sister-in-law, Mary, who died a few years before he wrote The Old Curiosity Shop. As we approach All Saints Day, Dickens seems to be teaching us to find divine inspiration in the recollection and emulation of those who have made our lives and world better. I don't like to think about it, but little Nell will die at the end of the novel, and as she does, a kindly friend will say:

There is nothing . . . no nothing innocent and good, that dies and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith or none. . . There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work in those that loved it here.

Christmas And "The Redemption Of Time"

Charles Moore on the lessons of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:

When Scrooge is shown his own name, unmourned, on his tombstone by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he repents and exclaims, "I shall honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year". And when he awakes on Christmas morning in a state of joyful commotion, he realises that "Best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own, to make amends in!"

It is a great psychological insight that after you have done something terribly wrong, and acknowledged it, you feel that you can regain your ownership of time. You feel free. In a recent newspaper interview with a nun who had emerged after 50 years in an enclosed convent to do a course as an art student, her strongest impression was that "People in London are rushing, always rushing – as if time were a tyrant rather than a gift." This Christmas would be a particularly good moment to throw off the tyranny and accept the gift. The doctrine of Christmas is that it is the redemption of time.

Hat tip to Larry Seigel