What I Have Been Reading…. The Canterbury Tales and Choosing Community

Here are a couple of reviews of books I have read fairly recently. As always please feel free to leave comments at the bottom.

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The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of tales that are told under the premise that a group of 30 medieval travelers are on pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas Becket, who had been the Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket had been at odds with King Henry II and was ultimately murdered by knights loyal to Henry. The nature of his death made him a martyr and his tomb a site of pilgrimage during the medieval era. The Tales begin with the host of the Inn the pilgrims are staying at issuing a challenge that if each pilgrim will tell 4 stories, 2 on the way there and 2 on the way back from Canterbury, the one with the best story with have their way paid by everyone else. The pilgrims agree to the contest and to abide by the judgement of the host as to which story is the best. They soon set off and begin telling their stories. Chaucer’s original intention turned out to be a monumental task of writing over 120 stories to complete the collection, and he was only able to complete 24 stories before he died on October 25, 1400. The Tales were almost immediately considered with high regard and have continued to be appraised among the finest pieces of literature ever written.

The stories themselves are varied and cover many of the themes that will likely come to the popular imagination regarding the middle ages. Knights, fair maidens, medieval romance and church clergy figure prominently into many stories, with a strong dash of Greek and Roman mythology thrown in the mix. Prior to reading this book I was vaguely aware of the premise behind the Tales, and I began reading the book with expectations of encountering something much more pious than what I actually came upon. The Tales are much more comparable to Shakespeare than to the Imitation of Christ (a work written around 25 or so years after the Tales). Like Shakespeare, the Tales are excellent literature that are engaging, thought provoking and often lighthearted. They are also rather bawdy with many stories revolving around creative conspiracies of people trying to sleep with someone else’s spouse; some of which involve descriptions of what I would describe as rape that were portrayed humorously. There were a couple of stories involving people farting on anther person as part of a joke. A part of human experience, yes, but not what I was expecting to encounter when I was embarking on reading the Tales.

The clergy are almost never portrayed as having what I would consider true Christian virtues and were often viewed cynically. The most virtuous characters were the ‘fair maidens’ who would never comprise their character despite deliberate mistreatment. Through out the book nearly every character made frequent references to God or Christ regardless of whether or not they actually cared about either. When a young clergy member is plotting to essentially rape a miller’s daughter to repay the miller for stealing his grain, he cries out, “Since we are not going to be repaid for our loss, I will arrange my own compensation. By God’s soul, it shall not be otherwise.” What raping a man’s daughter in order to retaliate for a wrong committed has to do with God’s soul, I have no idea. As I read the Tales I kept thinking back to my reading of The Imitation of Christ, realizing that they were written at nearly the same point in history, and in much the same culture. The difference between the two, from a faith perspective, was stark. One was a popular work that embraced many things in the name of God that I find very inconsistent with serious Christian understanding of the character of God. The other embraces that character in such a way that I can, despite 600 years of historical separation, genuinely connect with and recognize as a shared faith. This contrast made me contemplate how different our modern Western culture really is from our roots 600 years ago. Christianity does not have the hold on popular culture that it did at the time, but the difference between those who truly wish to imitate Christ’s character and those who use Christianity as a tool for personal or political gain is still stark.

The Canterbury Tales is well worth reading for anyone looking to broaden their perspective outside of modern literature, and is certainly worthwhile to contrast Christianity’s impact on the broader society at different points in history.

Choosing Community by Christine A. Colon

Choosing Community’ is a part of the excellent Hansen Lectureship series put on by Wheaton College focusing on the works of 7 Christian British authors: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and George Macdonald. I have been an avid fan of several of these authors for years and discovering this series has rekindled my enthusiasm for their existing works, introduced me to additional works I was unaware of, and allowed be to become acquainted with several new authors. Dorothy L. Sayers is one of these. I first heard of her while conducting online research for my posts on vocation. Her essay titled “Why Work” was cited numerous times on various internet cites, and after reading it myself, I quickly appreciated her intelligence, spiritual depth, and the clarity of writing that was exhibited in the piece. When I saw that the Hansen series had book focusing on Sayers’ works, it certainly piqued my interest. Add to this that the book was focused on the theme of community in Sayers’ works, and I was definitely looking forward to reading this book. I was not disappointed.

Christine Colon, a professor of English at Wheaton, focused on three aspects of community she found prominent in Sayers’ writings: communities of action, communities of faith, and communities of joy. She explored these themes primarily through Sayers detective books (Lord Peter Wimsey), her stage plays, and some of her theological works. As I learned more about Sayers work through Prof. Colon’s eyes, I was struck by an emphasis of Sayers that seems lacking in the protestant evangelical Christianity as I have experienced it. The Sayers had a strong belief in the value of quality work done -for it’s own sake- as an act of worship, and that only when each of us fulfills our calling can we live in healthy community. “But Sayers, like Venables, seems confident that if we focus on serving God through the proper work for which he has designed us, he will ultimately bring order to the community.”

The work we are designed to do is rarely ‘spiritual’, and by placing this work on a level playing field with ‘spiritual’ work such as official ministry that Sayers broadens the community of faith beyond the church walls. Colon notes that Sayers seems to find a deeper, healthier sense of community in her theatrical community rather than her church community. At first I thought this was an indictment against the church, and in some ways it is, but as I thought it through more I wondered if we expect too much from church community because we have lost our sense of vocational calling in all areas of life. I reflected upon the fact that I too, like Sayers, find greater connection with my those in my education community than my church community; especially with those in the education community who share my faith perspective. But it is my church community that has helped me discover my calling as a teacher after I returned to church after nearly a decade of nominal involvement. I find in my educational community people who are more like minded in how they desire to serve the community through impacting and loving our students; they are people who also value learning, knowledge and a more academic perspective on life much more so than those in my church. There are times I grow very frustrated with this feeling of alienation with people in my church but now I wonder if I was expecting too much from my church? That I have missed out on seeing God’s hand in all the various communities I am a part of, with each one contributing something to my life that the others cannot? Francis Schaeffer’s emphasis in his writings that Jesus “is Lord not just in religious things and not just in cultural things such as art and music, but in our intellectual lives and in business” has always been a concept I have agreed with but have found it an uphill battle to implement consistently into my life. It seems nearly every aspect of our society encourages compartmentalization of our thinking and living. Colons’s study of Dorothy Sayers works have brought me back to reexamine how I see my faith in relation to the various communities I am a part of and see each one as a part of a greater whole. This is a book I would highly recommend.

P.S. For those interested here is my review of the Hansen Lectureship book focusing on Art, G.K Chesterton and the First Nations of the America’s

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