Oakham, Oakham! The grey murk of the winter evenings in that garret where seven or eight of us moiled around in the gaslight, among the tuck-boxes, noisy, greedy, foul-mouthed, fighting and shouting! There was one who had a ukulele which he did not know how to play. And Pop used to send me the brown rotogravure sections of the New York Sunday papers, and we would cut out the pictures of the actresses and paste them up on the walls.
And I toiled with Greek verbs. And we drank raisin wine and ate potato chips until we fell silent and sat apart, stupefied and nauseated. And under the gaslight I would write letters to Father in the hospital, letters on cream-colored notepaper, stamped with the school crest in blue.
After three months it was better. I was moved up into the Upper Fifth, and changed to a new study downstairs, with more light, though just as crowded and just as much of a mess. And we had Cicero and European history--all about the nineteenth century, with a certain amount of cold scorn poured on Pio Nono. In the English class we read The Tempest and the Nun's Priest's Tale and the Pardoner's Tale and Buggy Jerwood , the school chaplain, tried to teach us trigonometry. With me, he failed. Sometimes he would try to teach us something about religion. But in this he also failed.
In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.
There was no rowing at Oakham, since there was no water. But the chaplain had been a rowing "blue" at Cambridge, in his time. He was a tall, powerful, handsome man, with hair greying at the temples, and a big English chin, and a broad, uncreased brow, with sentences like "I stand for fair-play and good sportsmanship" written all over it.
His greatest sermon was on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians--and a wonderful chapter indeed. But his exegesis was a bit strange. However, it was typical of him and, in a way, of his whole church. "Buggy's" interpretation of the word "charity" in this passage (and in the whole Bible) was that it simply stood for "all that we mean when we call a chap a 'gentleman.'" In other words, charity meant good-sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right kind of clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad or a bounder.
There he stood, in the plain pulpit, and raised his chin above the heads of all the rows of boys in black coats, and said: "One might go through this chapter of St. Paul and simply substitute the word 'gentleman' for 'charity' wherever it occurs. 'If I talk with the tongues of men and of angels, and be not a gentleman, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal . . . A gentleman is patient, is kind, a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely, is not puffed up . . . A gentleman never falleth away.' . . ."
And so it went. I will not accuse him of finishing the chapter with "Now there remain faith, hope, and gentlemanliness, and the greatest of these is gentlemanliness . . ." although it was the logical term of his reasoning.
The boys listened tolerantly to these thoughts. But I think St. Peter and the twelve apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.
Merton is pretty good at skewering the pretentious stuffed shirts of English (and French) society. But he is able to do it without being mean. He simply reports the facts and then follows them to their natural, absurd conclusions. So, the passage from First Corinthians becomes an endorsement of English gentlemanliness instead of an exhortation to love and charity.
Of course, this also proves something else: people have been using the Bible and Christian teachings for their own agendas since Christ was put in the tomb. These days in the United States, you don't have to look too far to find people doing terrible things and justifying their actions by labeling them "Christian." Frankly, I'm surprised that some "religious" group hasn't used the current pandemic as an excuse to say that the Lord hath loosed this plague upon us in punishment for allowing illegal immigrants to live within our borders or for sanctioning gay marriage. Don't laugh. It may happen.
Being a life-long Christian, I get a little tired of this kind of perversion of the teachings of Christ. The Jesus I learned about in catechism told everyone to feed the hungry, take care of the poor and sick, shelter the homeless. He was kind of a sandal-wearing, itinerant hippie/socialist rebel. Peace and love. Not war and hate. Share what you have. Distribute your wealth. Because you can't buy your way into heaven. If you've gone to Sunday school for any length of time, all of this should sound pretty familiar.
So, we have a world right now in crisis, brought to its knees by a microscopic organism. Millions of people out of work. Hundreds of thousands of people sick and dying. Yet, the thing foremost on people's minds at the moment is being forced to wear masks in public, and, in conjunction with that, not being able to go to T. J. Maxx or Cracker Barrel. I went to a Zoom meeting a few nights ago where someone said, "I just want things to go back to normal."
I want to consider that comment for a moment. The normal that we had before this pandemic hit was a world on the brink of climate disaster. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing oppressive governments because of (among other things) genocide. In the United States, we had young people living under crushing student debt, and a healthcare system more concerned with profit than healing. Rampant racism and homophobia and misogyny and Islamophobia. All normal pre-pandemic.
I think we have an opportunity here to reconsider normal. Maybe establish something closer to what the sandal-wearing hippie had in mind. A normal based on love and charity instead of greed and power. Where people realize that wearing a mask isn't an infringement on their rights, but an act of caring and respect. Perhaps it will be a normal where wealth isn't accumulated and hoarded but distributed to the unemployed and under-employed. Think of that--everyone watching out for each other, loving each other. If you've gone to Sunday school for any length of time, that should sound pretty familiar.
I went for a long walk today with my son and puppy. We hiked what's called the Iron Ore Heritage Trail, which is a 47-mile trail that stretches across the Marquette Iron Range in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We only hiked about four miles of it, from our hometown to the neighboring town. It was a 70-degree day, and there was birdsong and insect song and wind song. And we ran into other hikers, as well as bikers and picnickers. Every person had a smile and kind word. We all kept our six-foot distances out of respect and love, and the world felt right. Kind. Good.
This is a normal I wouldn't mind maintaining. A miraculous, new one. One that hippie from Nazareth would be proud of.
For that Saint Marty gives thanks today.
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