It is not hard to imagine how scared, mad, and abandoned Jesus’s eager followers felt when he announced his plans to turn and head to Jerusalem, leaving them to continue the mission. They went from followers to leaders, just like that!
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A Tale of Two Cities begins, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …"
This is why I love, loved and still love the world of the crotchedy old master, Charles Dickens. I was hesitant, critical, not impulsive—yet deeply, shyly, compassionately in love with every morsel of Life, no matter its status.
This was why Mr. Adams, my favorite English teacher in high school, challenged us to think and write true/new thoughts. To every senior who made it into his English class, he assigned a writer for our final research paper. Mine was Charles Dickens. Did he want me to write about Ebenezer Scrooge or Tiny Tim or both at once? I wrote about myself, my own great expectations as a girl, about Miss Havisham raging and raving in her torn wedding dress, and, accidentally, about God or Jesus or some such. How did Mr. Adams know?
Contemporary theologian, the Rev. Brian McLaren, writes: ”Before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society.”
I bet it was as hard for Dickens to write his cranky critiques as it was for me to listen to the God/Holy Spirit buried deeply in my own soul. Dickens died in 1870. I’m still alive and writing in 2014, my latest upcoming book is: “My Racisms in Snapshots”. There are saving solutions and hope, despair and ruin all at once.
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When the novelist Charles Dickens died, he had a stroke and fell off his chair at the dinner table. Dickens asked to be buried "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," so even though he was buried in Westminster Abbey, it was a secret funeral, early in the morning, with only 12 mourners. But the grave was left open for a week and thousands of people, all types of people, came to throw in flowers for the man whose tomb is inscribed with these words: "He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.”
AMEN.
