In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.
Welcome back. Since I am a school teacher, I tend to take school teacher breaks. I am ready for a new year of writing.
I spent a lot of my break reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and enjoying my annual reading of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
Writers do not write like Hugo and Dickens, today. Most writers, whom are considered the best of our time, emulate the lean prose of Hemmingway.
Hugo and Dickens write wonderfully long sentences. They also commit a big no-no in their writings. They insert their own opinions or observations into their stories.
However, for my purposes here, I would like to share a little of what both Hugo and Dickens write about God.
Without being explicitly evangelical, in the sense of trying to convert their readers, and without being explicitly Christian, in the sense of writing about Christ, both writers represent well our God of love.
For example, if you go to the movies and watch a cinematic version of Les Miserables, you would miss the more extensive treatment of the bishop, Monsieur Bienvenu.
The movies show us Jean Valjean stealing the church silverware and running away with it. The gendarmes, French police, capture him and drag him back to the bishop who tells Jean Valjean that he forgot the silver candlesticks that he had given him with the silverware.
It’s quite the scene in the movies when Bishop Bienvenu gives Jean Valjean those candlesticks while the befuddled police watch.
Jean Valjean is set free from more than just incarceration. The bishop tells him that his soul has been purchased from evil with that silver, and he must henceforth live a good life.
You can’t show what God’s love looks like much better than that.
That’s the movies. In the book, the first 83 pages tell the story of Bishop Bienvenu.
Of him, Hugo says, “He did not try to study God. He was dazzled by Him.”
There are many places in the novel where Hugo could be describing Pope Francis. Below is one:
“We feel obliged to note that…beyond his faith, the bishop had an excess of love….What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence, going beyond humans, as we have already indicated, and, on occasion, extending to inanimate things. He lived without disdain.”
I, however, am eaten up with disdain. When a certain political party votes to take away food stamps from hungry children, my mind becomes a conflagration burning with scorn.
When members of that same party invoke God while they speak of budget cuts, guns, abortion, and gay folks, the words that form in my heart about them are derisive.
I was thinking this morning how nice it would be to live a monastic life. Bishop Bienvenu found it easy to give up the church silver that Jean Valjean stole because he was not possessed by it.
I wonder how easy it was for him to give up disdain.
Most of us live in the world. We neither desire nor value a monastic existence beyond the occasional retreat.
We often find ourselves being possessed so much by what we possess that the idea of theft weighs heavily upon us. It would be nearly impossible for us to think of Jean Valjean as someone taking what God intended him to have since it did not belong to us in the first place.
I imagine a certain political party believes tax dollars belong to them and should not go to poor people, not even to working poor people.
To them, it’s stealing to give money to poor people (especially, I suspect, black poor people) even when they often work for companies too possessed by the profit motive to pay their workers enough to live well.
It’s not stealing in our society if companies pilfer labor, right? But it is stealing if we do not give those companies huge tax breaks. It’s downright embezzlement if our government cuts into their vast profits and redistributes all those riches in order to alleviate poverty.
I wonder what Bishop Bienvenu would think about food stamps. I know Pope Francis descries the mammon infested, profit motivated society we live in today.
By the way, when I took French in high school, our textbook’s title was Bienvenu. It means “Welcome.”
Blessings…
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