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Reflection for February 27th

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"And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green? / And was the holy Lamb of God / On England's pleasant pastures seen? (Wm. Blake)

In the The Old Curiosity Shop (by Charles Dickens) little Nell and her grandfather awake early to escape the city of London. "The town was glad with morning light." But not for long, for as the couple passed from the inner city to the outskirts, the darkness of a now industrialized and avaricious Britain (already become an insatiable empire) began to usurp the place of the sun. It was a moral darkness already evident in the "long, deserted streets, from which like bodies without souls all character had departed, leaving but one dead uniform repose, that made them all look alike." The city become a maze! a gridiron devoid of nature; the green gone absolutely gray and grimy!

Then began the traffic, forcing the old man and Nell to take to back streets to make any progress, the way I often do to bypass the gridlock of Highway 12 through Boyes Hot Springs. Out beyond the haunts of commerce they went and then through a seedier region of tenements and shops which "sold goods that only poverty could buy . . . Here were poor streets where faded gentility essayed to make its last feeble stand" against becoming a slum. But to no avail. The poor, made so by the ups and downs of trade and industry, inhabited a wide circuit around the city - an expanse of "damp rotten houses, many to let, many mouldering away - children scantily fed and clothed, - shabby fathers hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more." With poetic eloquence Dickens establishes himself as the most devastating critic of the unenlightened laissez faire economics of the 19th century. And if you could sum up in one word the nature of that system it would be "gambling".

Indeed little Nell and her grandfather were fleeing town because the grandfather (to leave Nell a legacy that would insure her security after his death) had taken to borrowing large sums from a man named Quilp in hopes of hitting the jackpot at the gaming table. (And isn't that what goes on in all the stock markets of the world to this very day?) But he never won and so Quilp, who gambled on the grandfather's losing, came to own and sell the grandfather's shop and evict him and Nell to boot. Why even their escape to greener pastures, the pleasant and hospitable English countryside, didn't spare them mercenary risks. There they met Misters Trotter and Codlin who ran a Punch and Judy show. Have you ever seen one? It's pure violence; Punch being hit and hitting others with a stick - until they're dead! Talk about ruthless competition. And what do these friendly entertainers see in Nell and her companion but a chance to cash in on any reward offered in London for two obvious fugitives?

Greed in its manifold ways constitutes the darkness from which Nell and her grandfather flee to find the green and gracious countryside of a not yet modern England. Will such a quest prove to be only an illusion? Will the tentacles of a new age in which God and even the Devil are irrelevant entangle them after all? (I think even of star baseball players who, already making millions with one team, can't resist the urge to make more with another year after year - concluding no doubt that loyalty to a community or to anything but oneself is old-fashioned. And we pedestal such people!)

From greed to grace, from avarice to generosity! That's why we, who know what a gamble it is to survive in this world, come to Church on Sundays. For despite its failings, its own injustices, the Church remains a community constituted upon Christ, upon the conviction that grace, hospitality and a sense of family are essential to the maintenance of any truly human and humane civilization. This gathering place, its words, hymns and sacraments constitute for us that green countryside little Nell sought and found if not in this world then in the Church Triumphant to come.

-- Geoff Wood