Dear Jack,
The other day, after tearing my gaze away from the headlines for the umpty-umpth time and trying to sort through the tangled syntax on my computer screen, I couldn’t help but think what a tiny, unobtrusive job I have, in the grand scheme of things. Here I sit, in the comfort, beauty, and (relative) quiet of my own home, pushing words about on a page, while elsewhere men and women are having to make decisions that could mean life or death to thousands of people—including themselves.
And I put commas in, take them out, tell someone how many z’s I prefer a certain word to be spelled with. In moments like these, my work almost feels like a joke.
And yet, it is my work.
Writer Jonathan Rogers often talks (and has written) about the idea of “tending your patch of ground”; that is, making the world around you “look a little bit more like the world you want to live in,” caring for the part of the world that’s your responsibility because God gave it to you as your responsibility. It also reminded me of two other things—C.S. Lewis’s “Learning in War-Time,” and the character of Christopher Foyle in Anthony Horowitz’s brilliant TV show Foyle’s War.
It’s 1940, and when we first meet him, Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle (played by the superb Michael Kitchen) of the Hastings Constabulary is in London, asking to be transferred. “I just feel that in the circumstances I could be doing something a little more relevant to the war effort,” he tells Assistant Commissioner Summers. “It’s not even as if I’m doing my actual job anymore.”
“Request denied,” Summers says matter-of-factly. It’s the fourth such request that Foyle has made.
“I’m wasting my time on the South Coast; I want to be transferred,” Foyle repeats, after explaining with restrained frustration that his sergeant and most of the other policemen have been called up, crime has dropped significantly, and he’s stuck pencil-pushing to make sure things like blackout regulations are followed.
“Look, I need you where you are, Foyle,” Summers says later in their conversation. “You’re a first-class police officer. … You do a good job. No telling where you might be once the war’s over.”
“It’ll depend on who wins, I suppose,” Foyle says on his way out the door.
“At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!”
—Dorothy L. Sayers, “Why Work?”
Foyle didn’t want to transfer out of Hastings for the sake of personal glory, fame, or power; he had no desire to profit from the evil of the war or the misery of others. He had fought in the Great War; he knew what war was like. I imagine he just looked around at the relative peace Hastings was still experiencing at that point and felt an overwhelming desire to do something that mattered … something other than making sure people dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s.
Something that didn’t feel, in the sober face of war, like a joke.
And he then spends the rest of that first episode—and, really, the entirety of the nine-season show—quietly doing a good job. That is, he does his job and does it well, with dedication, thoroughness, honesty and decency. He does his job, despite others’ attempts to bribe him, silence him, slander him, cover up scandals, pervert the course of justice; despite losing friends to the war and making powerful enemies through his commitment to doing what he believes to be right.
Throughout the war he remains in Hastings, doing his job; throughout the war he remains a DCIS, until the point comes at which he can no longer do his job and remain in his job.
Throughout the war, and beyond it, he remains an honorable man.
As it happens, I read “Learning in War-Time” for the first time only a week ago. It’s a sermon that C.S. Lewis preached at Oxford in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on October 22, 1939 (exactly ten years before my mother was born); World War II had begun about seven weeks earlier. Lewis opens thusly:
A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?
Goodness knows I’m no Oxford scholar, but Lewis’s reference to “these placid occupations” resonates, even eighty-seven years later and in a much different context. How can I sit calmly at home (or uncalmly, as the case may be) finessing semicolons when, on the other side of the world, people and jets alike are scrambling, fighting toward varying ideas of a hope of a better future? It feels ridiculous.
And yet, as Lewis goes on to say, “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” There is nothing new about the position that we find ourselves in, although each successive generation has to discover—and come to terms with it—for themselves.
As with much of what Lewis writes, he packs a lot of profound truth into a short number of pages. If you’re new to this particular sermon, too, put it on your list and read it post-haste, lest I quote the entire thing to you here.
But of what significance or value is the work of a small editor done in a homely house on a quiet street somewhere in the middle of flyover country? How is it relevant in a time like this? What does it matter?
Later on in “Learning in War-Time,” Lewis addresses the notion that some types of work—scholars and poets, in his example—are inherently more pleasing to God than others, such as that of “scavengers and bootblacks.” On the contrary:
“The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord.’ … A mole must dig to the glory of God, and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation.”
My work matters, therefore, because it is the work that I have been given to do. I can only do my job; I cannot do anyone else’s. But my work, done as an offering to God, done the best that I know how, becomes significant in ways that I cannot conceive of. For, as Dorothy Sayers says (in her essay “Why Work?”), “The only Christian work is good work well done.”
My work may have no relevance at all to the current concerns of the world, but, in the end, it doesn’t have to. It’s my job to do. So I’d better do a good one—and, in so doing, somehow it will bless the world, after all.
On a lighter note—recently, as so often happens, a snatch of a song floated up from my memory banks and suddenly became a very emphatic (and very unwelcome) ear-worm. “Ice-cold Katie, won’t you marry the solider?” the lyric went. “Ice-cold Katie” … something something something something … “soon he’s off to war.”
I heard this song in my childhood while listening to cassette tapes of old-time radio shows, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember which show it was on. Nor could I remember any more of the lyrics. I sought the advice of the oracle on the matter but only discovered that the song was not the one played during Fibber McGee and Molly’s infamous Ol’ Closet Routine (that was the strangely-named “Kaboomzalum the Daughter of the Barber,” which also appears on my mental turntable from time to time).
I did, however, learn that the song “Ice-Cold Katie” premiered in the 1943 musical comedy Thank Your Lucky Stars, aptly named because it was stuffed full of the day’s top talent, who donated their salaries for the picture to the Hollywood Canteen (and raised about $2 million). It was not a particularly cerebral film, as films go, but I think highbrow entertainment was about the last thing anybody wanted at the time. Who can blame them?
“Ice-Cold Katie” is a jazzy, glamorous, somewhat slapstick number featuring the incomparable Hattie McDaniel, who razzes “Ice-cold Katie Brown” for stringing her enlisted boyfriend along when the poor fish is about to get shipped out “over there.” In the nick of time, though, Katie relents, and … well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Incidentally, “Ice-Cold Katy” was also the name of a B-17 with the 447th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force (or, depending on which source you read, the 401st Bomb Group of the 612th Bomb Squadron. Ice-Cold Katy must’ve been a popular gal). One of my great-great uncles, who went to the Chicago Art Institute, painted mascots on planes during the war; perhaps he painted an Ice-Cold Katy of his own.
How’s the view from where you are?
Yrs,
Meli
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