This is the first of a two-part Advent Programme. The second part, presented on 16 December, is posted here. Both parts have been combined into a single pdf document which can be downloaded here.
Advent Programme at Christ Church – 2014
The Themes of Nativity and Resurrection in P.D.James’ The Children of Men
Part I
“What saith the Scripture”
Last week, a much celebrated English writer, Dame P.D. James passed away (Nov 27th, 2014). An accomplished novelist in the genre of detective mysteries, she also tried her hand at writing in the style of Jane Austen in a late novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, with mixed results, perhaps, though laudably so, I think. But it is another novel outside her detective fiction that warrants our attention in Advent. It is The Children of Men which had the fortune or misfortune of being made into a movie which, as the culture critic Mark Steyn notes, managed to miss the point of her novel almost completely. As he quips, the Baroness was the first to write on barrenness. It serves as a metaphor for the culture of our world and day. It is about a kind of spiritual barrenness, the counter to which can only be found in the Word of God coming to us which is what Advent is all about.
Her 1992 novel The Children of Men is, in many ways, a contemporary mystery play, at once of the Nativity, but also of the Resurrection. Medieval mystery plays were important vehicles for conveying the teachings of the Christian Faith, especially to a largely illiterate world. Perhaps they should be revived. One of the last things that Dame James published relates as well to the ways in which the Christian Faith is communicated to the world.
Deeply appreciative of The Book of Common Prayer, she wrote an essay in 2011 for a volume entitled The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present, & Future upon the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother book of the Prayer Books of the Anglican Communion. Her essay, “Through all the Changing Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book,” provides a wonderful witness to the formative nature of the spirituality of the Prayer Book conveyed principally through the power of words. Here is a writer acknowledging one of the most powerful influences on her own thinking and writing and reminding us, too, of the power and nature of words.
“In the beginning was the Word,” we hear at Christmas Eve and yet that sensibility about God’s Word carries over into every aspect of Christian Life. As she observes, “the words of our public liturgy, in their beauty, their truth, their numinous power, should be capable of so entering our consciousness that we do not need to search for them, but can release the mind to enter into stillness which is the heart of prayer and worship.” It is a wonderful observation about the language of the liturgy, the language of Scriptural prayer by which we are drawn into the mystery of Christ.
In a way, the words of Scripture gather us into the mystery of the Word made flesh. They have a kind of power that can bring us to Christ, like Andrew finding Simon Peter and bringing him to Christ. In the empty barrenness of contemporary culture, dark and fearful, uncertain and confused, we need the clarity of the Word of God to help us think more hopefully and more prayerfully.
The Children of Men takes its title from a number of places in the Psalter which repeatedly uses this phrase. It is itself a loaded Scriptural and spiritual concept, “the children of men.” It speaks profoundly to one aspect of our spiritual identity that at once contrasts, complements or contradicts the idea of our being “the children of God.” What happens when we forget that latter identity? Then the concept of “the children of men” appears as something disturbing and even destructive; literally and spiritually barren or empty, we might say, without the grace of God.
On the surface, her novel might seem a far remove from her highly successful writing of detective fiction; yet there are many, many carry-overs from her previous novels, both in terms of character and theme.
The Children of Men is set in the future, the rather near future. It is set in an England and a world that finds itself barren and barren in ways that strike at some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary culture. The fruitlessness of lives bent on fulfilling every desire finds eloquent expression in the impotence of the human race. There are, literally, no births and there haven’t been for about twenty-five years. The action of the novel takes place after the last generation of human beings – called the Omegas – were born.
In her detective novels, the “devices and desires of our hearts” (to use one of her own titles, the origin of which should be clear – so much so that she refused to provide an explanation of the origins of the term from the General Confession of the Prayer Book offices of Morning and Evening Prayer!) form the story through which the contemporary content of those desires in their social setting are described. Here the future is the present. The novel explores something of the barrenness of our world through the contradictions and conflicts of a world bent on having its own way. The barrenness is at once the consequence and the cause.
“Western science has been our God”, writes one of the main characters in his diary. The inability to discover the cause of “this apparent universal infertility” not only creates the greater unease but also reveals the real barrenness of our souls. The impotence of the human race is an humiliation “at the very heart of our faith in ourselves”. Confidence in science and belief in the endless progress of humanity is shattered by its encounter with the stark reality of an absolute limit; mortality in the form of the empty womb. The womb has become a tomb. Such is the “fruit” of “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” of our faith in ourselves, of our refusals to accept the grace-given limits of our creation. The question of the novel is whether this humiliation will lead to the humility of Mary and, hence, to the possibilities of new birth through grace.
The tone of the novel, however, is not that of the preacher upon his or her soapbox; you may be greatly relieved. Lady James deals with our contemporary confusions and obsessions with real sympathy and deep understanding. If description is judgment, then it is, at least, gently done.
Much of the delight of the novel lies in the way she describes a world that knows itself to be terminally ill, but doesn’t know why. She ranges over a whole field of emotions and responses to the recognition of this barrenness: the frustrated maternal instinct that precipitates a pram-and-doll craze where dolls are changed every six months in an illusion of child development – for there are no children; the absence of certain customary rituals of religious, social and family life, such as baptism, sparks an ecclesiastical controversy over the baptism of kittens – for there are no infants; the worship and the resentment of animals who will soon have it all anyway once the human race has become extinct – for we “can no longer do what the animals do without thought”; the narcissism and nihilism that spawns ritual and random violence, whether by individuals or the state – in any event, brutal; the tyranny of regulated and regimented care for a population that is simply dying – for “the world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead”. The world is terminally ill. Palliative care is, at best, ambiguous when there is no reason to care, but only cause for rage and regret. Or observation. She describes this world – our world – well.
What vitiates all forms of contemporary care in the care-giving society is any relation to an infinite good and any real comprehension of evil. “It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future when, all too soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air”. Yet the novel shows how there can be love in the barrenness of death precisely because it is not for the sake of a future of our devising. It is reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, not for a more just, a more compassionate society, but for the love, dare one say? of God, in whom all loves find their meaning. The novel stands on the threshold of such possibilities. And therein lies its power and its worth. It can serve as an opening to the necessities of the Advent of Christ, the light that comes to our dark and despairing world.
Dame James ends her essay in that collection of essays with one of her favourite prayers:
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking; We beseech thee to have compassion upon our infirmities; and those things, which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, vouchsafe to give us for the worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Through such a sensibility there are the possibilities of new birth and new life in us.
What saith the Scripture?
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Andrew (transf.)
December 2nd, 2014