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O'Malley's Best Guest House Departure In Hard Times, Dickens shows a little girl named Sissy Jupe being indoctrinated into a factory school taught by a teacher named Mr. McChoakumchild and run by the town's principal employer and benefactor, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind. Gradgrind's no air-head altruist but a hard-nosed utilitarian, a flinty man of the world interested only in plain, hard, incontrovertible facts. And his school's not for pointless fripperies like stories and poetry but to detect who'll be the managers and who the workers in his mill. In an early scene, Gradgrind asks Sissy to explain the Law of National Prosperity, but the poor girl was brought up in the circus, a world-and-further away from the black brick of Gradgrind's factories and the black ink of his sacred ledgers and the black certitude of his viewpoints. So she gets the whole business discombobulated. Gradgrind expects her to reply that the Law of National Prosperity is the Law of Supply and Demand. Sissy mishears, thinking he asked for the Law of Natural Prosperity, so she answers, "To do unto others what you'd have others do unto you." Oh, no, no. That simply will not do. Real men of the world do not hang samplers needle-pointed by their maiden sisters asserting such illusory sentiments to their workers. Not if they want a profit. Not if they're practical. You do the other before he does you. Poor Sissy. So ludicrously innocent. When I was a boy, when the dinosaurs were keeling over in providential preparation for OPEC, I struggled to learn what was deemed "The Faith" in a place not unlike McChoakumchild school. My then less cluttered mind became assured God was as into supply and demand, profit and loss, as ol' Gradgrind, only like cosmically. His principal focus seemed to be on the all-encompassing reality of sin and the limitless ways our God-given imaginations and freedom could screw up God's supposedly incontrovertible plans. He was very concerned with numbers- much more than Einstein or Hitler or even Alan Greenspan, and sin-spotting seemed the major employment of all his minions: angels, archangels, principalities, powers, cherubim and seraphim-along with the Seven Dwarfs and Santa's elves, when they weren't aggressively engaged in greasing the rails on all express routes to hell. In fact, at the time, all conveyances to hell were express-no waiting, no transfers, no return trips. It was difficult at the time for one whose rational powers were so naturally poisoned by imagination, to separate this Loving God from the Other Power who seemed equally obsessed with sin and with making our lives miserably confused. (Not to mention our eternities.) Later, when I groped my way into what then passed for adulthood, I'd been so well trained I committed myself to become a very skinny lifeguard on the Celestial Baywatch, vigilant as Holden Caulfield to catch people (especially children) romping ignorantly through the rye, utterly heedless of the uncountable horrors God had invented to make them wise up. Some of the instructors taught courses called moral and canon law (interesting because they were not only about people but about evil people, which outsells virtue hands down, even in seminaries). The other professors were a lot windier, trying to screw such inscrutable questions as how the Trinity handle their family affairs. These moral people were really into Graduate Level Sinning. Their texts clutched within their bosoms more sins than there are objects in the universe- including each individual neutrino, gluon and quark. Much of their attention seemed to be on discovering ways a confessor might be obliged to withhold forgiveness because of some arcane canon law, unknowingly fractured in blind pursuit of self-deification and destruction. Then along came this funny little Italian dumpling in a white cassock (surprisingly like Sissy Jupe) whose radical lack of complexity shook us down to our boots. He made us suspect that he might be closer to an embodiment of what Christ meant than the Pius XII who had filled that role ever since we could remember. Along with some neglected aspect of God called "The Holy Spirit," he uncorked this really dangerous invention called Vatican II which said some really Protestant-sounding things like about Catholics being old enough to think for themselves. That led to all kinds of confusion. Ordinary folks began to discover other parts of Sacred Scripture, fresh ideas that seemed to have poked their heads up into the landscape like crocuses after a saturation bombing. Things like today' gospel that shows Jesus looking at his audience "with anger and grieving" not at their sexual depredations but at their Gradgrind "hardness of heart." Because the pharisees were so well-educated but so stubbornly ignorant. There were other exhilarating scripture spots, too, like "much has been forgiven her because she has loved much," and "Whoever is without sin, cast the first stone," and "Forgive seventy times seven times," and "My son who was dead is alive again!" And the more you pawed through the pages, the more often you found namby-pamby, unmarketable insights like that. In World War II, England's Coventry Cathedral was bombed to gravel by the Germans. But right next to a new modern basilica, the parish built a chapel out of the rubble, and the altar frontal is a burned beam with one of Jesus' last sayings carved into it, simply: "Father, forgive." And at the core of the Mass, when the celebrant consecrates the wine, he says, "This is a cup of my blood...it will be shed...so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me." Not just drink Christ's blood but forgive in memory of his forgiving. One might be tempted to begin believing that, if you distilled Jesus' message into a single word, it just might be: "Forgive." That's what we've learned in this house of hope: forgiveness. Our fourth-steps list those who've implanted life-long resentments in our hearts. Father, we forgive them as you forgive us. You, the God who cursed us with complete freedom and incomplete understanding. Father, we forgive you as you forgive us. Ourselves, for being-like Adam and Eve-too gullible by half. Father, we forgive ourselves as you forgive us. In Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a new mother asks the weird hero, an eccentric heir to a fortune, to give her child just one commandment to live by. Eliot Rosewater ponders that a bit, and finally he says, "All right, I'll give your child a commandment. There's only one commandment: Goddammit, you've got to be kind." Amen. Et procedamus in pace. |
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Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit |
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