Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for January 29 2006

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

The story says Jesus took her hand and the fever left her. That's the Gospel truth!

When Nell and her grandfather reached the rural English village that promised them peace and safety from the rapacious Daniel Quill, who himself symbolized the godless greed of "modern" industrial, imperial and dingy London, they were welcomed by the pastor of the ancient village church and his elderly friend, a retired, old fashioned scholar who helped manage the parish. This old scholar was also referred to as the bachelor either because of his college credentials or simply because he was "an unmarried, unencumbered gentleman".

Among his various services to the parish he gave tours of the old gothic church. He had made its "goodly store of tale and legend" his study. But he was not one of those scholars who feel it their duty to dismantle the old stories - to sort out the "mythical" stuff from the underlying "facts". Indeed, even though probably trained in such analytical scholarship, he seems at some point to have become a bit perverse! Or as Dickens puts it in The Old Curiosity Shop, "He was not one of those rough spirits who would strip fair Truth of every little shadowy vestment in which time and teeming fancies love to array her - . . . he loved to see the goddess crowned with those garlands of wild flowers which tradition wreathes for her gentle wearing." A story embellished by tradition was of more worth to him than unembellished fact, if such embellishment could arouse "one good feeling or affection of the human heart".

And so when he showed visitors the ancient tomb of a baron whom tradition remembered as a violent crusader who, after ravaging foreign lands, came back a true penitent to die at home, he was well aware that modern scholars argued the opposite: that the baron had actually remained a scoundrel his whole life through. Not so, said the bachelor! The edifying story was the true story!

And when he showed them the secret tomb of an old woman who was hung, drawn and quartered by glorious Queen Bess for having sheltered a fugitive priest, "the bachelor did solemnly maintain against all comers that the church was hallowed by the said poor lady's ashes; that her remains had been collected in the night from four of the city's gates, and thither in secret brought, and there deposited: and the bachelor did further (being highly excited at such times) deny the glory of Queen Bess, and assert the immeasurably greater glory of the meanest woman in her realm who had a merciful and tender heart." In other words, he refused to let a faithless scholarship that defined truth as "just the facts, ma'am" usurp the role of faith and poetic imagination as our surest access to the truth that really matters.

This old scholar became Nell's tutor and soon turned the ancient edifice into so resonant a symphony of truths that matter that "sometimes, when she woke at night from dreams of those old times, and rising from her bed looked out at the dark church, she almost hoped to see the windows lighted up, and hear the organ's swell, and sound of voices on the rushing wind."

I myself was educated to analyze, to dismantle old legends, indeed the Bible itself; to sort out the embellishments of later tradition from the original facts of biblical history - and I found it an exciting, clarifying experience. But after awhile the hubbub of all that discovery passes away and in these twilight years I find myself wanting to put Humpty Dumpty back together again (not naively of course) and swallow - as in communion - all those Bible stories whole - like that old bachelor of whom Charles Dickens so obviously approved.

-- Geoff Wood