Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men

Various things have conspired to make me almost depressed about the state of the world. (I don't get depressed, but I have been rather discouraged.) I hear about things in the news, read it online, pray about it in class. We've got on to current events in my Christian History class, and we read a slightly depressing book about the state of the world and Christianity for the same class. I think about Iraq and my brother being there, and the Middle East in general, and the many places where people are causing trouble over stupid things, and the Sudan, and the secular antipathy to Christians in the U.S. and Europe, and both Iran and North Korea flexing their muscles. The world's in a very sorry state. I suppose it always has been--I've just never experienced it. You grow up an innocent child, expecting the world to be as nice as your childhood (at least I did), and then suddenly your ancestors hand you a world they've helped screw up and say, "Here, this is your problem now." As Theoden says in the movie The Lord of the Rings, "What can men do against such reckless hate?"
And then I started thinking about an old Christmas song I love, and the writer's question in it suddenly rang very true:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of "Peace on earth, good will to men."

I thought how as the day had come
The belfries of all Christendom
Had run along the unbroken song
Of "Peace on earth, good will to men."

Then in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of 'Peace on earth, good will to men.'"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead nor doth He sleep!
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Then ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day.
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of "Peace on earth, good will to men!"

Continuation of An Assessment of Sydney Carton

A friend at work said an interesting thing to me a few days ago. She said I am the most happy and contented person she knows. Interesting. I am quite happy and contented, and many people aren’t, even normal Christians. I overheard a guy at school asking a girl recently how she felt about life, and she answered that at the moment she didn’t like it very well. Well, I do. It’s not thrilling or anything—I don’t even have what most people call a love-life. But I enjoy myself while walking and reading, or going to class and having theological wrangles, or going to class and writing my books, or coming home and talking about life with my house-mates, or hanging out with my good friends, or going ice skating, or sitting still in the mornings and reading the Bible in Greek. I enjoy doing what I do, even work, and if I didn’t enjoy work, there would still be other things to enjoy.

I believe there are a variety of factors to this: I think I am where God has placed me, I’m doing things I intensely enjoy, I have a natural character for optimism and content, God has taught me to see beauty and joy wherever I am, and life is going very well for me. What if life weren’t going so well? Obviously one can’t be happy all the time. But what about that general sense of well-being and content? I would hope that would remain. I don’t know whether or not it would. But I know God has been kind to me and has taught me to be happy and content with what I have and am now.

Perhaps the largest part of it is that I’m content with myself. I asked God to help me become so about a year ago, and I am. The things of life outside the self are often bad enough, but when you hate, dislike, or are dissatisfied with who you are…there’s no contentment to be had there. How can you believe in a God of love if you don’t believe yourself lovable? How can you believe He would accept you as you are if you don’t believe yourself acceptable? Even with all your faults and ways of displeasing Him, of which I have many. And how can you love others if you are discontented and unhappy inside your own self? But if you see how God loves you in spite of everything and how He values your life and personhood and character, your own attitude can change.

Perhaps that’s what I mean when I say Sydney Carton redeemed himself by his sacrifice. When he began to love the despised Darnay and offered his own life in his place, he understood the immense value that sacrifice places on the one sacrificed for. I think he understood the value that his own worthless life had because Jesus sacrificed himself for it. Like Boromir and the hobbits. When the great Man of Gondor gave up his life to save two little unimportant Hobbits, he gave them great value. Isn’t that enough to give anyone a sense of worth and well-being, to know someone considered you valuable enough to save, valuable enough to interpose his own life for?

An Assessment of Sydney Carton

Warning: If you have never read A Tale of Two Cities or watched a movie version and don't want to know how it ends, don't read this.
Reading A Tale of Two Cities never fails to make me weep with a sort of despair and true compassion for Sydney Carton, rather as Lucie Manette does in chapter 3. And also for the heart-rending beauty of the sacrifice with which he redeemed himself in his own eyes. This is one of the most wonderful characters in literature, I think. Here is a man who might, under different circumstances, have made a name for himself and done wonderful work, a brilliant man with an amazing mind for his work and a true sense of delicacy and honor and heroism. If Dickens had written him differently, he would have been one of those characters who worked strongly through the law or other means for the rights of the poor, something Dickens was very concerned with. But instead Dickens chose to make him hide his real character under apathy, drunkenness, sarcasm. What brought him to where he was for most of the story, his genius hidden and unacknowledged even by the friend who unashamedly used him for his own advancement? And even worse than the waste of his genius, his true nobility of character hidden, unacknowledged even by himself. Lucie says to Darnay, “Believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals and that there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.” I wonder if he was manic-depressive. Probably just depressive—melancholic and too phlegmatic to bestir himself and make something of his life. Here’s a man to whom life has been a complete waste. He’s done nothing with his God-given intellect and nobility of character, and he knows it, and he’s man enough to regret it but too phlegmatic to do anything about it. Perhaps believing he’s too far gone to change and feeling the pain and regret of it is easier and more enjoyable than doing something about it.
And yet here’s what he says to Lucie that makes me first begin to feel the unutterable tragedy of his wasted potential: “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything […] I would embrace any sacrifice for you and those dear to you. […] There is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!” And this when he has realized that he loves her and that she will probably marry his noble look-alike, Charles Darnay, and that even if she returned his love, he would never marry her, for he would only make her life miserable. “It was sad to think how much he had thrown away and how much he every day kept down and perverted.”
And then the end, the glorious end! When Darnay, now married to Lucie some years, is condemned to death at the guillotine, Sydney acts, seemingly without hesitation, sneaking himself into Darnay’s place and Darnay out to safety. And it’s as if he redeems himself—not necessarily in a spiritual sense, though perhaps partly. But suddenly the life he’s always seen as worthless now has worth only as it is interposed in another’s place. He suddenly understands what sacrifice is, the gloriousness of self-sacrifice. And only then does he understand the sacrifice Christ made and the way to God that is open to him that he always thought closed to such a prolifigate. For he goes to his death thinking, “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die!” And perhaps it was only his sacrifice that could have led to his redemption, for without it he would never have turned toward God. He goes to his death—Darnay’s death—with far greater peace than he ever would have faced his own death. “They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic.” And his last thoughts are, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever had.” He was dead all his life, and it was only in his death that he lived.