Mrs. Clennam's disease
This morning I thanked God for the righteous people in
the world and especially the righteous people who make righteousness
warm and attractive as well as those who show its strength and
single-mindedness. Judging from my own experience (which I do
recognize as limited and therefore to be used with caution) that balance
isn't common. I see the "pendulum syndrome" in myself when at times I'm
governed by a flinty uprightness and at other times (virtually) a
weak-kneed indulgence.
Having recently dipped again into older authors (and
being frozen out by a couple of people who are old enough to know
better), right now my mind is on those unlike Billy G. Moore (click here);
people whose undoubted uprightness makes us think of a cold wind
whipping in from the north. Children don't play around the doors of such
people and whatever else their faith is there's not much in it that
we'd call "infectious".
Their warmth, such as it is, is reserved for a very few
and even then we tend to think the "very few" are kept somewhat at arm's
length in case they have to be subjected to the bone-chilling draught
that's said to be "fresh air". The entire issue is too complex for
anyone to think they can get to the bottom of it but we all have our
opinions about the various things that shape people that way. Some of
our guesses are better than others, some are way too convoluted when a
simpler explanation is at hand and some are applied to the wrong person
though they might be correct if applied to somebody else.
Mrs. Clennam had no doubt what made her hard in her
righteousness. In self-justification she says to one of her enemies:
"You do not know what it is to be brought up strictly and straitly. I
was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and
pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment and fear.
The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is
upon us, the terrors that surround us—these were the themes of my
childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of
evil-doers." There it is, "and filled me with an abhorrence of
evil-doers."
So when she was sinned against—and she was!—she worked
an awful and prolonged judgment against the transgressors because she
was filled with an abhorrence of evil-doers. Her enemy was not to
misunderstand her; what she refused to forget was not that she was wronged but that the Lord
was wronged. "Was it my own wrong I remembered? Mine! I was but a
servant and a minister. What power could I have over them, but that they
were in the bonds of their sin, and delivered to me!"
So for forty years she had held against them their wrong
and Dickens describing her tells us that all that time she still held
on to her impiety, "still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed
her own breath into a clay image of her Creator…travellers have seen
many monstrous idols in many countries; but no human eyes have ever seen
more daring, gross, and shocking images of the Divine nature, than we
creatures of dust make in our own likenesses, of our own bad passions."
What troubles me most about Mrs. Clennam is not that she
took sin seriously (for Jesus did not live and die and live again to
make it easier for us to sin and to sin with a shrug) but that she took herself too seriously.
Driven by the conviction that God had appointed her (and all like her)
to her task with such fierce uprightness she says, "Those who were
appointed of old to go to wicked kings and accuse them—were they not
ministers and servants? And had not I, unworthy, and far removed from
them, sin to denounce?...I was appointed to be the instrument of their
punishment…was it my enemy that became my footstool, were they the words of my
wrath that made her shrink and quiver! Not unto me the strength be
ascribed: not unto me the wringing [out of her] the expiation."
This she said though she rehearses the sinner's
confession and sobbing pleas for mercy. Though she acknowledges her own
unworthiness she is able to give good reasons why she should
wring out of the sinner the last drop of grief until she finally drives
her quite mad and then called what she did "the just dispensation of
Jehovah."
Very dramatic. Yes. Overly dramatic, the kind of thing
one expects in novels. Hmmm. While there are times when I tend to think
the pendulum has swung way too far to the other side and we "understand"
too easily our own sin and the sins of others, I know there
are those who live in agony under "Mrs. Clennams". They won't end up in
an insane asylum but due to the "appointed ones" doors are slammed shut
against them, growth in joy and usefulness is thwarted—a phone call
here, a written note there, a "I think you need to know this because…"
somewhere else and genuinely remorseful and repentant sinners remain a
lifetime on the fringes of the church, miserable and unused in service.
That's something of the disease—what can be done as a cure?
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.