A Compassion That Can Change Everything

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth. The Prince of Wales laid a wreath at his grave in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, and the Archbishop of Canterbury summed up:

A man...who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly. A man who portrays human beings in hell. And yet when we read him, it does not read like bad news. Because what does he have to say at the end of the day about redemption?

In some ways not a great deal. Or rather there is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved happy ending, and an immense burden of recognized, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering. He achieves the balance of those two most perfectly, for one reader, in Bleak House, where the past tense of Esther’s narrative is balanced by the present tense of unhealed suffering, the rain still falling on the Lincolnshire wolds.

But in that book, which one reader at least thinks is perhaps his most profoundly theological – though he wouldn’t thank me for that – in that book, we have one of the strangest, most shocking images that he ever gives us of compassion and mercy, and that is the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock. At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration, “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favor,” says Sir Leicester, with his typical dryness about his wife who has fled from him in guilt and terror. And in that appallingly stiff phrase we hear something of the hope of mercy. Almost silent, powerless, Sir Leicester after his stroke, dying slowly in loneliness, and stubbornly holding open the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony.

“We may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace,” says Dickens for his children. And perhaps for us as grownups, or people who might quite like to be grownups one day, that image of the hope of God’s forgiveness is shockingly, startlingly, expressed in that lonely figure stubbornly holding the door open, revoking no dispositions made in our favor. Powerless to enforce love or justice, and yet indestructibly, even extravagantly, offering the only kind of love that is appropriate – the extravagant and excessive nature of human beings. An utterly unreasonable compassion, which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.

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.

Hawking, Dickens, And Spontaneous Combustion

Stephen Hawking now says that the laws of gravity were enough to bring the universe into being -- which would have been the first instance of spontaneous combustion. For us old-earth Bible-interpreters, this is big news. Since the publication of his A Brief History of Time, Christian adult education teachers who found no essential conflict between the big bang and Genesis have been able to say that the great British astrophysicist himself was willing to concede the possibility of Someone throwing the great switch.

That Hawking has changed his mind, as disconcerting as it may be at first to the Bible study teachers, just means that he has chosen to insist that "science is on his side in order to make his case for the imagination." Oops. Sorry, that's what Brooke D. Taylor says about Charles Dickens in the September 2010 issue of Dickens Quarterly.

See, the 19th century's greatest English writer believed in spontaneous combustion, too, and used it in his novel Bleak House to dispose of a character named Krook. Krook had been hoarding papers which held the key to a legal case that has been grinding along for decades. Two characters who come looking for him find -- well, you could say that they find evidence of a sacramental reenactment of the scientist's vision of the beginning of the universe, a mass for rationalists:

Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he IS here!

That's Krook's burnt remains that are "here," not God. As Hawking now insists about the universe, no one had to light the fuse in Krook's grubby little room. It just happened. Really, it happens all the time. As he assured his readers in the preface of Bleak House, Dickens had studied the literature.

All these years everyone has thought him a bit daft on this narrow point. Seeking to rescue him, Brooke Taylor concludes:

In the end, most of us agree that, for literary purposes, the scientific accuracy of Spontaneous Combustion doesn't matter. But Dickens argues for the scientific authenticity of this manner of death because a world in which fact and feeling are irreparably divided is a tragic and frightening place.

Maybe that kind of fear helps us understand why the mystery of God can be such a challenge or an affront to the rational mind. For Hawking and those who are most pleased by his latest assertion, it actually seems less preposterous, or perhaps less frightening, to say that they know what occurred 14 billion years ago at a point in-- well, somewhere, than to accept the possibility that a living but persistently invisible source of ultimate meaning and benevolence is present right now, right here. The very idea of a power they can't fully explain must make them want to explode.