1) Helicopters don't really fly. They're so ugly the ground repels them.
2) The helicopter's main blades are just a big fan keeping the pilot cool. If you don't believe that, just turn it off and watch the pilot sweat.
Safer than planes? Well, they can autorotate if the engine quits -- floating down on a pinwheel, essentially -- using the energy of the fall to spin the blades fast, and then using that energy to slow the descent just before it lands. Planes must keep a significant forward momentum (glide) to land if the engine goes out.
pteron emerges from the Indo-European root "-pet" "to rush, to fly," as seen in Latin petere, "to go toward, seek"
The IE root emerges in suffixed form, pet-rā-, "feather" in Old English fether, "feather"; from Germanic fethrō, feather
Helis are as beautiful as airplanes, but beautiful in a different way. It's the difference between a dragonfly and a bird. The technology in helis is absolutely profound, given their axes, each with various torques wanting to turn it into a mechanical squirrel. These days they can essentially fly themselves: an EC135, frequently used for life-flight organizations, has auto take-off and landing capabilities, as do other helicopters.
Two friends fly these things: there's Shawn, who flew Blackhawks and now flies an EC135 for a medical service.
EC135: Shawn's Speedy Delivery!
And there's Don, who also flew Blackhawks and now Chinooks for the military. What lucky blokes to have such toys to play with and be paid for doing so!
Don Flying the Chinook: Hold the Hover.... Great Slow-Mo with the Blades!
In the '70s I flew in what was then called a "Hughes" 500D -- also 369D -- (a "Loach" or "little bird"); it was one hot little sports car, flown by Vietnam Vet Andy Anderson. You will probably recall this type of heli from the TV show Magnum P.I. That was a 500D: [Link].
The Hughes 500D in Magnum PI
Among other antics, we took a high-speed trip across a corn field with runners inches above the stalks, then climbed for a return-to-target turn -- that moment at the top, sideways, with the headphone cables floating in the zero G. Beautiful. Tail turns, nose points down, a long dive, then levels again at speed, across the corn.... Now these little birds are called "McDonnell Douglas" (MD) 500Es, sporting a more streamlined nose. There's a NOTAR version ("no tail rotor," with, instead, a big, barrel of a tail through which forced air travels and controls the yaw -- turns the tail left or right. The NOTAR tail, really, ruins the look of the thing. No picture of that here.
MD 500E Numbered Appropriately: G-RISK Indeed!
Like the MD 500s, the Chinook was also used in Vietnam and is still used today. These are remarkable in their size and lift -- apparently the only helicopter that can lift not only its own weight (which means it flies), but can also lift another Chinook while flying -- twice its weight. It's a hefty bird with two sets of rotors intermeshing. At a military function, I was allowed to fly in one over the Davenport, Iowa, area sitting between the pilots on the little jump seat.
It was brilliant to see the new glass cockpit and the nav systems. You don't realize just how big this helicopter is while sitting up front: turn around and look through the rest of the house behind you and the immense back door that can open in flight for unloading. Reminds me of a song: "Our house, in the middle of the...sky. Our house --."
A Chinook, Balancing on Its Tail, Rescues Climbers from Mt. Hood
I mentioned above that the torques and axes can make a helicopter a mechanical squirrel. Well, there is a squirrel among these helis, the AS350 -- Aerospatiale Ecureuil (French for "squirrel") (nowdays called a "H125"). These are used for anything from mountain rescue and sling loads for construction, to heli-skiing and sight seeing. What a beauty. It's nickname, A-Star, is fitting: it is a star.
One of Air Zermatt's AS350s (now, modified, an H125) by the Matterhorn
Here's one showing off for crowds in Chamonix: [Link].
It's the versatility that makes a helicopter an amazing aircraft. It's ability to hover over an object -- astounding, not least with a heavy sling load. And it all hangs on a big fan made of incredible composite blades. The UH-60, Blackhawk, has blades with a strip of titanium on their leading edges. The Huey has a brass leading edge. The rest of the blades are a mixture of air and honeycombed aluminum covered by a metal skin. Light, strong, flexible, and shaped like a wing -- it is your wing.
Shawn says this about flying EMS instead of military:
I...miss the wider margins of flight I could do in the military. Flying just above the trees and ground was fun and exciting. We could bank the aircraft more aggressively. Flying EMS is much more tamed. We are limited to 30 degree bank angles and flight profiles that are much more limited compared to the military.
And then...there's this pilot who doesn't have grandma in the back [Link]. On the other hand, it just may be that one cool grandma is flying this bird.
The most remarkable thing about helis, though, is just how many lives have been saved by them. So many different models are used today for rescues during floods, fires, medivac during wartime ("Dustoff," which means Dedicated Unhesitating Service To Our Fighting Forces) and rescues in mountain areas, including ski resorts as well as wilderness and high-cliffs -- countless operations since the creation of a stable heli platform. And then there's rescue at sea: the Coast Guard. This is not to mention the invaluable (but dangerous) service in fighting fires. Helis are astounding birds. Since I was a lad, I always thought of their kinship with the dragonfly, which amazes with its abilities to hover and then dart away in a flicker.
Among the trophies, the one bird that must have rescued more people than any other heli type is the Huey. Many are still flying. Others have been consigned atop a post at a military...post.
Huey, UH-1. The Stories This Could Tell! (Source: Don)
The development of that stable platform was largely the doing of Igor Sikorsky, who liked to fly in his suit and hat -- just as any good business person would do.
Igor Sikorsky: "You Can Keep Your Hat On"
What he started: here's a UH-60 Blackhawk (yes, a Sikorsky) performing a rescue -- planting one wheel on the mountain (one of Colorado's Maroon Bells), holding the hover, while a person is loaded in [Link].
As a tribute to some of these friends and pilots, I put some UH-60s in bottles.
Blackhawks in Bottles: The Trick? Flying Them in There!
One last story from a former chair of my department, Frank. He flew during the Korean War era; afterwards, he flew DC-6s for an airline, but then decided to do a Ph.D. while flying for the military reserves. During the '60s -- with their anti-war (Vietnam) protests on university campuses -- Frank taught in Iowa; there he flew a Huey UH-1 out of the local airport as a reservist.
And? One day rumors circulated that the university students were planning a massive anti-war protest for that afternoon. So Frank's CO at the airport instructed him to attach tear-gas canisters to the runners of the Huey, wiring them into the cockpit so he could release the gas while flying: "when the students are protesting, fly low over them, release the gas, and the rotor-wash will take the tear gas down into the crowds and disperse them." Frank went into his office, wrote his letter of resignation from the reserves, effective immediately, and put it on his CO's desk.
[Frank's CO, incredulous]: What's the deal, Frank?
[Frank]: "I can't teach them in the morning and gas them in the afternoon, sir."
Last July I was supposed to be in Switzerland again, but the flight? Nope. It was Covid-canceled. So travels for me, not least by air, have since then been vicarious and virtual.
A Husky on Doughnuts (Source: Plane and Pilot)
But flight! It's always magic. One "news" writer a few years back announced his disappointment with people who "still looked up at a plane flying by," as if it were an unusual sight. I think that writer must have ceased to wonder at anything in life -- at least being unable to marvel specifically at the astounding phenomenon of flight, to say nothing of what it means to be intrigued by the haunting beauty of many (not all...let's face it) aircraft.
Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by planes. I think the first plane that caught my attention was a little model (albeit missing a few pieces) of Mr. Mulligan, a racing plane of the 1930s. It was built specifically to win the Bendix Trophy (a race from the west coast of America to Cleveland, Ohio, where the National Air Races were held). That is a brilliant idea: race to the races.
Mr. Mulligan was built in 1934, but due to a mishap it only entered the Bendix in 1935. That year it won not only the Bendix but also the National Air Races' Thompson Trophy.
Mr. Mulligan (Source: Howard Aircraft)
How fast? 238.70 mph for the Bendix (Wiki). Formula 1 cars go just that fast on the ground these days. And today, if you fly on a passenger jet, you'll travel a wee bit below three times that speed. But 238 mph -- that's pretty fast for a plane having plywood wings, a metal-tube fuselage frame with wood runners (longerons), and ceconite (doped fabric) covering. Essentially, it was a big kite with an engine.
But it's not the speed of aircraft that grabs me. Planes going low and slow are the most beautiful to watch, how some of them can literally hang in the air.
Beyond Mr. Mulligan, another very fond memory is from the late 60s and early 70s -- the Beech D-18s from my home town hauling mail: they'd go out, over my house in the morning, north -- probably to Minneapolis -- and return in the afternoon. Two throaty radials. What a sound! In the afternoon, when the summer sun was still high as the planes returned, I could often go out to the driveway and their shadow would pass over me.
Beech D-18 (C-45 in Military Parlance)
Cecil Lewis, a pilot in WWI, recounted this fabulous experience while flying with his squadron:
The wing-tips of the planes, ten feet away, suddenly caught my eye, and for a second the amazing adventure of flight overwhelmed me. Nothing between me and oblivion but a pair of light linen-covered wings and the roar of a 200-h.p. engine! There was a the fabric, bellying up slightly in the suction above the plane, the streamlined wire, taut and quivering, holding the wing structure together, the three-ply body, the array of instruments, and the slight tremor of the whole aeroplane. (Lewis, 181-182)
In another passage, he remembers flying a Sopwith triplane, with the middle of its three wings crossing the fuselage right at the open cockpit. Lewis saw, again, the slightly bellying linen over the ribs. As the middle wing was right there by him, he put out his hand, touching and pushing down on the fabric that was lifting in the negative pressure atop the wing. The moment must have been magic. When the plane is on the ground, the fabric sags (albeit stretched tightly) between the ribs. When flying, that slightly sagging fabric balloons up in the suction.
Fabric and Ribs on My Old (RC) Tiger Moth, Dehavilland DH.82
Flying: the canvas shows you the actual lift that occurs on the top of a wing. You can see the suction's effect in these two photos.
Fabric Bellying Up between the Ribs on the Wing. Tiger Moth (Top); Cub (Bottom)
Once when I was flying with a friend in a Piper Saratoga, I looked out the window to see one of the wing rivets sticking up from the aluminum (not fabric) skin into the airflow: the lift had raised the broken rivet in its hole, but the stream of air over the wing pushed its top back at an angle, so it could not lift completely out of the rivet hole and disappear. When we landed, it had slipped back down into its hole, the suction gone. We found which rivet was broken and had a mechanic replace it.
But there is just something about running your hand along the leading edge of a wing and seeing the curve of an airfoil. It is all science, but, as with a bird, the "science" of the thing is not what we love about the bird. Its beauty in flight or the way it alights on the grass...the intelligence of and in the design: that's the appeal.
And the sound. I'm not talking about jets here, which are more rockets with fins than planes with engines. In high school, I used to go to a little grass strip where I'd sit on a bench outside the line shack (in this case, literally -- a little shack with a radio and table, maps, switch for runway lights, key for the gas pump, and the torn T-shirts of those who had newly soloed -- none of our current, glitzy electronics in those days). And I'd sit there on a summer evening, watching planes do touch-and-goes just 40 or so feet from the shack. The slight whistle, the prop spinning at idle as the plane glided in, an uncanny sound -- then beautiful as she flares, stalls, a little bump on the grass, and then throttle going up, a hesitation as it gains speed, then rotate to lift the nose -- up she goes again and around.
Here's the sound of one, if you want to hear it (all the better for throaty idle of the P&W radial):
The Sound of Landing-- a DH Beaver
Low and Slow? Yes: there is a contest every year in Alaska for STOL aircraft (Short Take-Off and Landing). World record: 14 feet 7 inches, shortest take off. 10 feet 5 inches, shortest landing [Link]. Admittedly, this purely STOL-contest bird isn't for travel from the US to Switzerland.
Among the fabulous aircraft made to actually haul goods and people about while maintaining (relatively) short take off and landing characteristics is the Dehavilland Beaver -- as in the landing video link, just above. This is an amazing plane, having a very short cord (distance from leading edge of the wing to the trailing edge -- front to back), but having a 48-feet wing span, and all with a big, chunky body (fuselage). And yet...it has incredible lift. Oh, look! Here's one now: [Link]
Dehavilland Beaver DHC-2
A Beaver I Worked on in High School, Now in Alaska and Highly Modified Inside and Out [LINK]
The thing about it is the startup and the low growl of the Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr. engine. Not convinced? Harrison Ford is: he bought and flies one -- incredible video here [Link]. Katheryn's Report offers this little canonization of the plane: [Link].
But undeniably the most beautiful airplane yet made -- the Spitfire. Absolutely uncanny, the aesthetics of its lines. Not merely the airfoil, but the curve of its leading edge, opposite to the curve of the trailing edge and mirrored in the curves of the horizontal stabilizer and elevator. The long nose, hiding the V12. Its sound. And when it starts? Fire.
What's in a Name?
The Beauty of an English Swallow
The Anatomy
The landing gear, unlike most other planes of the time, fold up from the center, toward the wingtips -- the tires folding outward -- and not together, one just slightly before the other. The beauty of it: running straight, lifting off slightly, wingtips staying level, the gear drawing up, then the plane climbing out steeply with a bank that lets you see her lines. Sheer grace.
Here is one of the best clips to show its beauty:
Pilots who flew (and still fly) the Spitfire comment on not so much getting into the plane to fly it, but putting it on, becoming part of it -- or it becoming a part of you. Because of the long nose that you can't see over, you land in a long, descending curve, looking just out the left or right/front windscreen. As they land -- elevator working and quick touches on the rudder -- most Spits have a nice little bounce (yes, it's OK!) upon touching down, just like a real bird taking a wee hop after touching earth. If you want to read a remarkable account of flying Spitfires, try Geoffrey Wellum's book First Light [Link].
While I have long loved the Spitfire, years ago I was given the opportunity to sit in the first one I had ever seen -- that in Manston, England, an airbase where these birds nested during WWII. It was a tight fit -- like the proverbial glove. Even the stick was modified to accommodate the narrow cockpit -- a spade handle hinged just above the knee for aileron control. I could not imagine flying it, let alone being shot at while doing so.
My Other Car is a Spitfire
Flight is one of the most beautiful things I know. And during this age of Covid, dreaming of flying and looking at aircraft have been one of my most peaceful pastimes.
All this talk of planes? There's a great deal more to it. It's a part of you...if you're able to see it. Maybe this will help explain:
The "Dream-Vision" motif goes back to some of the earliest literatures. With this literary device, a character has a dream or a vision (it’s often not clear which it is) that imparts some understanding, knowledge, or wisdom — or it simply allows the dreamer to act as an observer of events while detached from the action.
A number of Dream-Visions occur, for instance, in the Bible when Jacob sees a ladder extending to the sky, with the angels going up and down the ladder. Another is in the book of Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Chaucer uses the Dream-Vision in his Parliament of Fowls and House of Fame. One fabulous work from the Victorian era uses it for almost the entire novel: George DuMaurier's Peter Ibbetson. And C. S. Lewis uses it in his short (but not thin) novel The Great Divorce.
In most cases, the Dream-Vision has the same "feel" to it: the "dreamer" cannot tell if it is an actual vision or an ordinary dream. Keats shows this precisely in his "Ode to Psyche":
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
In such events, the Dream-Vision is indistinguishable from reality.
There's yet another type of dream: a "Visitation." Think of Mary and the angel's Visitation. The book of Daniel also records such visitations: the angel Gabriel says to Daniel, "Do not be afraid, Daniel, for from the first day that
you purposed to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your
words were heard, and I have come in response to them." And elsewhere there are similar visitations.
Sheldon Vanauken, in his memoir A Severe Mercy, records that he dreamt of his deceased wife, Davy, on various occasions.
One such dream he recounts:
I went to sleep in the grass and dreamt of Davy. The dream harked back to a summer afternoon in England when she and I, travelling [sic] to a nearby village on a doubledecker bus, had yielded to a shared and wordless impulse to get off the bus and walk. But the dream seemed to me so much future and present as well as past that I wrote a poem of it:
The last quatrain of that poem is,
Yet was it but a dream? Or my dream only? Somewhere are you remembering, too? Or is it only I, remembering, lonely, And waiting still for you?
While this dream is not a "Visitation" dream, and despite Vanauken questioning its reality, he does recount one dream that is definitively a "Visitation":
"But now I had a dream — the "Oxford-Vision Dream" — so detailed, so significant, so completely unlike anything I ever dreamt before or after, that the great question was whether to believe that it represented a reality. I was as aware of its significance during the dream as I was afterwards. When I dreamed it, there at Mole End [their house in America], I was about to sail for England; but in the dream I was already there, in Oxford. If the dream did represent truth — if I was dreaming true — then it was of God."
He then recounts the dream-vision. It is too long to reproduce here: you'll have to read it for yourself in A Severe Mercy. But: Vision or Reality? The astounding reality of it leaves Vanauken (and his readers) asking "What was I to make of this extraordinary dream? Was it just a dream? Or something more? [....] It left me with a serene, peaceful happiness that lasted a long time."
Many will no doubt say this is merely another form of regular dream. Either way, a Visitation dream, such as Vanauken's — and such as I have so often had — carries immense significance.
Occasionally, throughout my decades to today, I have Visitation dreams in which I see old friends. We talk. And then I wake as if I had actually met with them. This sounds perfectly ordinary. But the person's tone of voice, the person's look of the eye, the person's laugh, expressions — all aspects are astoundingly singular to that person, just as the person actually is. Absolutely nothing that occurs in these dreams is strange or disoriented. They only carry some sense of importance, of significance, and of deeply shared connection. But the events in them are completely normal, as in actual life. And so the reality and significance of them lingers throughout not merely one day but often for several days afterwards.
While I have a spiritual outlook on life as a Christian, I am definitely not one for "spiritualist" bunk or for messing about with a variety of spirits along New-Agey lines — nor the sort of spiritualism that Conan Doyle, for instance, messed with and which was common after the First World War as people tried to contact their dead who were lost in the war. None of that. And whereas people write about dreams and visitations by the dead and by spirits, my dreams have been only about about people who are living. None of this takes away from Vanauken's account: as he and C. S. Lewis agreed about the above "Oxford-Vision Dream," "if the dead do stay with us for a time, it might be allowed partly so that we may hold on to something of their reality." If that is true, the significance here is just what is said in the Bible: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living — and the "departed" are, for Christians, not dead. It's why Lewis said to Vanauken as they parted at their last meeting, "I shan't say goodbye — Christians never say goodbye."
What strikes me most is what Vanauken said about the Visitation dream:
"It seemed to correspond to some actuality, some real spiritual event."
This is precisely and keenly what I have experienced each time I had one of these Visitation dreams, and, although I've read his book, I do not recall reading Van's sentence before today — before writing this post.
For me, these Visitation dreams have occurred periodically through four decades and have astounded me. There, sitting on a dock — a friend (again, a person who is living today, not someone who has passed away), and — knowing it is a dream — we nevertheless talk about our current lives, just as we would if we actually ran into each other.
It is, frankly, like resuming an on-going conversation that has continued in the background of life through the years. And the meeting is not in any respect a surprise; there is no sudden "Oh! You're here!" Not in the least. It is simply a calm resuming of a conversation. There we are, sitting on a bench, and again, along a walk, there, in the path is the friend. And again, along the ocean shore. And again elsewhere, always the same, is the easily resumed talk, and one might bring up a long-ago, agreed upon word that both know but is now decades away. And so it goes: completely unremarkable in the events of the dream, all very, very real, and...then awake.
During some of these dreams, I have wakened, then gone back to sleep, only for the dream and conversation to continue. And in waking from one of these Visitation dreams, there is a depth of calm, a very focused quietness I experience, and thoughtfulness — and not for merely brief moments afterward. These senses last a long time as I ponder not what the dream "means" — I never try to puzzle a meaning out of it — but only reconsider what was said, what was felt, what happened, how the person talked, looked — that laugh, peculiar to them, just as they always had. And I ponder the sense of having visited the person, just as you would in running into an old friend and in spending an hour together. In whatever way one of these dreams may end, I feel long afterward, often for days, as if I've actually met with them.
One more thing. Vanauken said very wisely, "The disappearance of the grief is not followed by happiness. It is followed by emptiness." He, of course, was speaking of the actual grief of losing his wife — the natural course of grief lessening as the years went on. But similarly, a Visitation dream does not produce elation. It produces a distinct emptiness in that, yes — there is joy that an old friend has again been seen — but upon waking from the dream or vision, their absence is more profound: the person is not there.
Precisely. That is the emptiness. And, of course, you come to realize after each individual dream — if such a thing has been real — it may have been the last conversation two old friends will ever have together....
I've never called, emailed, or texted to see if someone has had the same dream — even if I knew how to contact them. But if they had such a dream as well? That would be uncanny, not least if it were at the very same hour.
So. Chuck and Will, two elderly guys, are talking. Will asks Chuck, "Did you ever cheat on your wife?" Chuck's response is labored and delivered with his head hung low only after a very long pause:
"Yes. Once. Not long after my wife and I married. Decades ago. It was horrible — the worst thing I've done in my entire life."
Will pauses, absorbs this news, then asks, "Did you ever tell your wife?"
Chuck: "Yes. I had to. I couldn't stand the guilt. My wife and I shared everything. I had to be honest."
Another pause, then Will asks, "Did she ever forgive you?"
Chuck's head lowers even further, his shoulders sink, his head shakes slowly back and forth, and the answer emerges: "Yeah. She forgives me every single day."
I previously posted [Link] on forgiveness. Since that posting, I've come to realize even more just how many people are left laboring under feelings of judgement —. [Note: forgiveness is different from trust. Trust can, by consistent and
better behavior, be rebuilt over time; forgiveness cannot be earned at
any time. We're talking about forgiveness.]
Feeling shame or guilt is good if it's legitimate: it's a thing that tells us where we have erred if we get that sense from no where else. It's called a conscience. But after conscience has done its work — after introspection and clear vision and honesty as to the reasons for it and the consequences for others, after the offense has been admitted to the injured party and reparations made — forgiveness should reign. Real forgiveness should free an offender from the offense and allow them to move on without the weight of the event on their back. Poor Chuck. He was not forgiven. He's reminded every day. It's that simple.
And just who can live day after day under a weight of guilt like Chuck's? You? Think of your worst offense, your most beastly moment in life: could you live being reminded daily of that event? No. Not well.
The real quandary, the deep irony concerning forgiveness, is just why Christians should be so unforgiving when they are supposed to be co-workers in the business of forgiveness. And who in that business — the business of Heaven — is their boss? Let's see. Oh, yeah. That would be Jesus Christ.
Really, despite all the stories of forgiveness in the Bible, Christians too often have very little to do with forgiving or making Christ's forgiveness known. I have seen feigned "forgiveness" drive people from the church — a pastor's wife, a missionary's son, a young woman trying to find her way — rejected by the church that claims to show the way to forgiveness and healing. I've seen with my own eyes a pastor, theologian, professor, and a co-translator of the New King James version of the Bible reject a deeply contrite young man who was looking for guidance on how he might recompense someone for a past offense. The absolute crime of that pastor's rejection is to me far worse than the young man's offense.
Contrite. from Latin, contrerere: to crush, to grind. "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." Psalm 51:17.
I was also present when a pastor met a 30-something young man — someone
he had known to be wild ass in his teens. The pastor said to
30-something's face, doubtfully, "Oh...so you did turn out okay?" Where
was the hope, the faith, the love that the young man would do so? Where
were the prayers that he would turn out okay? Where was the faith that
those prayers would be answered?
I remember part of Corrie ten Boom's story; she survived the Nazi camps, including Ravensbrück, although her sister, Betsie, was murdered there. At a church meeting after the war, Corrie saw in the crowd one of the women who worked as a guard at Ravensbrück — a woman who had severely abused Betsie. Despite her reluctance (reluctance? Her well justified resistance!), Corrie approached the woman from the camp, took her by the hand, and at that moment found the grace to forgive her.
Ten Boom's is one of the very few examples I know of a Christian forgiving someone, and it is not a first-hand story — sad to say.
How shall we communicate with, understand and empathize with, the people who labor in life under their guilt? Why is it that we are so reluctant to relieve people of that burden? It's interesting that in this post we have to turn to a non-Christian (by his own confession). How about a story from Oscar Wilde?
In his play An Ideal Husband, Wilde (as he does in most of his works) turns the world hilariously upside down in order to show the very self-satisfied and hypocritical Victorians just what they were not made of — in contrast to what they believed themselves to be: a people of "high moral tone," as Wild puts it. Through great ironies, reversals, understatement, humor in frivolity, he treats this very serious issue of forgiveness. (The humor, he said, was his means of creating "non-friction," if you get his point.)
The situation in brief: Sir Robert Chiltern, now a prominent Member of Parliament, has been blackmailed: his nemesis possesses a letter he wrote in his youth, a letter which shows he used an inside-trade secret to make his fortune. If the blackmailer doesn't get what she wants, she will expose Chiltern in the press. He will be absolutely ruined. But since the time of his offense, he has become an honest figure, a representative figure, someone of character who illustrates what politicians should be and who motivates others to be such: honest, humbly so, compassionate, incorruptible, and fair.
What does Chiltern say of his wayward youth?
I wish I had seen that one sin of my youth burning to ashes. How many men there are in modern life who would like to see their past burning to white ashes before them!
In his despair he can only see one possible future in light of his sin: "I suppose I should retire from public life."
Robert Chiltern: A Sin in Youth, Then into a Dark Hole for the Rest of Life?
Chiltern's wife, upon learning of his youthful deed, banishes him from the house and from her love because of his youthful lack of character, because of the moral stain she now supposes colors her husband's character through and through, even so many years later. That is also why — even when the letter that is the evidence of the deed is safely destroyed — she will tear from him all further ambition in life, banish him into the dark hole of his past. She supposes the fact of the deed and the sin he once was capable of defines him forever: a snapshot in time.
She simply denies any usefulness he may yet have in his remaining decades and refuses him any opportunity to put his honesty and skills to work for the public, for his country, and in good character live toward some good end. No: it shall not be. His shall be a life sentence.
Her resolution is to destroy the man's hopes for any future, not to forgive nor to recognize what he has become beyond his youthful sin. She says, after all, "One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged."
Chiltern's good friend, Lord Goring, pulls Lady Chiltern aside and opens her eyes to some realities that are greater than the fact of her husband's youthful sin:
Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? .... What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great...career, if you close the doors of...life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success?
Goring has, even before this moment, expressed to Lady Chiltern that we "are not meant to judge" one another "but to forgive...when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is [our] mission."
And, last, Goring says, "If he has fallen from his altar, do not thrust him into the mire.... He would lose everything, even his power to feel love."
Lady Chiltern: "Am I Right or Am I Right?!" Flowing Robes of Sanctimony
This is true of how we treat one another, how we can banish another person from our lives (as Lady Chiltern originally did with her husband), how we hold one another in contempt and provide no room for future life.
What Lady Chiltern does not know, and what, unfortunately, many Christians do not recognize even though they claim belief in words like "redemption," is what Fredrik Backman observed:
"'They
say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often
improve later on, more than if they'd never done anything wrong,' she
said gently." (132)
I think of the intolerable weight of shame that drives people to punish and harm themselves, to forget they are human — even, in many cases, to become homeless and disappear from society (for society does not see the person who is homeless). It's often the weight of shame...that makes the despairing soul forget that there is a God who forgives, lifts us up, dusts us off, gives us clean clothes, gives us a new path to walk, and make us a better person. And so we gain a person who understands with a deep empathy a great deal more about life than if he had ever done wrong -- possessing an understanding more than many professed "saints" among us will never grasp. No, the sin is not the virtue; what they learn emerging from it is. "Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat. When you are restored, strengthen your brothers" -- Christ to Peter.
Precisely. In the end, Peter knew things that others never would understand.
Yes, there are the poor choices individuals made — the lack of "capability" (and lack of character, and...and...and) — that lie at the root of those choices. If you insist on retaining these in your view of a single person, you do not know love, forgiveness, or hope.
You see, one's past failures — sins — do not have to be the end of anyone's story, a fact that Backman (oh, yes — and Christ) point to. Yes, some people can and do choose to continue their way to destruction, and there's little we may do for them at that point. Yet sometimes it is we who force that end upon them — which starts when we forget that we made some choices along the line that may have ended up in consequences similar to theirs....
"Oh, yeah...it would, if you'd kindly not insist that I pick it up again."
If you want to see a visual representation of the brokenness of people who have failed, see August Egg's three paintings, Past and Present, the first of which one blogger sums up: "The
painting, which is one of a trio, is a swipe at fallen women. This is
the first of the three, and as the paintings progress, her situation
gets worse, until, in the final painting, she sits homeless under a
railway arch having lost everything." I would not say a "swipe at" but, rather, these paintings are a realistic depiction of their fate in Victorian society: there the fallen woman will find no understanding, no mercy, and no forgiveness. Another blogger presents all three paintings [Nichols].
Egg's Past and Present, No. 1.: The Affair Discovered
Egg's paintings, and Wilde's play, are indictments of that mindset that presents a life in which there is no forgiveness. There is none in Lady Chiltern for Robert when his crime is made known: he falls to worthlessness in her view. Many a Christian, likewise, has been seen only for the sin of their youth and thereafter banished, condemned, and left
flayed before the public, disemboweled, drawn and quartered. What was it I wrote, above, about Lady Chiltern?
"...she will tear from him all further ambition in life, banish him into the dark hole of his past. She supposes the fact of the deed and the sin he once was capable of defines him forever: a snapshot in time."
And a snapshot in time, of course, never presents an accurate image [Link] and leads to no deeply understood and contexted image of a single moment in a person's life. And it makes no room for God's continued work in us, each a part of His body on earth.
We all love and favor a picture of ourselves as having moved on in life from an old sin, as having gained not only forgiveness but also a God-given vocation (one that centers precisely on her particular sin), and gains the grace of a mission — it's a picture of ourselves as having risen above our shame and being full of heavenly ambition. It's a good picture, that — encouraging overall. Yet...too often we make no such picture of others we know to have sinned, whether against us or otherwise. We retain of them only an image by which we and others might define and judge them, even as Chiltern's letter does: he will be known only for and by the sin of his youth. It's no matter what happened thereafter to him, no matter what he became, and no matter what good he did along the way from then onward. This is precisely where we do not practice forgiveness.
We may be totally valid in our view of anyone's past sin. And of the offender: it is not that any of their better deeds through the years would make them worthy of forgiveness. That is never the case with forgiveness; it is never deserved and can never be earned. Yet there is such a thing as a recompense done with knowledge of one's sins. This is precisely what Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is all about — e.g. Julia Marchmain's life at the end of the novel, if you need an example. It is also the woman of ill repute who weeps on Jesus' feet, wiping her tears away with her hair.
It's like this. If Corrie Ten Boom had only, solely, recounted in a memoir the sordid details of what the former Nazi guard did to her sister, there is solid precedent for just such a book in the secular press. But her book is ultimately about Christian forgiveness: so Ten Boom provided a picture of forgiveness and hope for that woman — a person who could never deserve forgiveness but whom we see receive it. In that moment lies a hopeful future for the woman. In recounting that moment in her book, Ten Boom's forgiveness of that woman extended years — decades, and eternally — beyond the act of forgiving the woman and the act of publishing her memoir: Ten Boom provided a picture of forgiveness and hope that will not pass away. That is precisely how we might think on anyone in our past whom we know to have fallen, our Robert Chilterns, our "Chucks," our wives as in Augustus Egg's paintings.
Because of what we don't know about others today, we should not be dismissive about our fellows solely on the basis of their past — if we believe that Christ is working in all of us. What we tend to leave out are the very real possibilities: that our "perpetrator," severely chastened (physically, mentally, spiritually) in the years following, has become thoroughly understanding of their youthful sins as Chiltern is of his own. It can be that they deeply owned their sins and often disowned themselves because of them. That they were given a vocation, a mission, a heavenly use, and, like Chiltern — driven by shame — their usefulness may come on the heels of their sad considerations of resigning from their present usefulness in life, and such considerations will diminish the usefulness they have been given. They may well have retained an ever-present and deeply probed understanding of their youthful deeds and consequent effects then and now upon others. Some I have known remain deeply and consistently contrite — have remained crushed and ground down — by their choices in youth. One very old friend wrote to just such a person two nights ago, "It has always concerned me that you beat yourself up [about your past]."
It often happens that recognizing and owning one's sins through the years is to find that a nail has worked up from a floorboard: it must be dealt with, once again, and hammered back into place to keep debilitating guilt, like a rusty nail, from causing pain and tripping oneself up. The old nail must be pounded back down to keep us from despairing about ourselves and to keep such a mindset from affecting our vocation, and from affecting others. Hammering the nail: it means that one must (again) recognize that God forgave that old sin even when humans still do not. Not least, it means accepting that forgiveness for ourselves.
Apart from our usual thoughts about and treatment of people we have known to have failed, a more complete picture would show that they have attempted with compassion to extend forgiveness (in deed), not judgement — to guide others quietly out of a wayward choice when such an occasion arises, to hide the forgiven sins of others, and to appease the pain of wrong decisions and their hurtful pasts. It may be as we do these things through the years, they will not have been done completely without error; nonetheless, they must be done while avoiding the "high moral tone" of the self-righteous and the present-day "Victorians" (or, if you will, Pharisees) while stripping ourselves of the "flowing robes of sanctimony" as one wayward legal entity put it.
Is it too much to hope that Christians will actually "forgive" one another, to stop holding in mind an inquisition and a remembrance of old sins when Christ has forgotten them — and demonstrate that forgiveness by never speaking of the old offense again? Yet inquisitions exist everywhere even today; they didn't end in Spain. There is the example of McCarthyism and senate hearings, ruined lives, friendships, professions: these are not good examples for Christians to follow. None should have to suffer like poor Chuck: being forgiven every single day he lives and being assured and reminded that "you are forgiven for that terrible moment in life and that lack of character." Christ does not treat us so.
In his moment of crisis, Wilde's character, Robert Chiltern, will not make a public self-confession in Parliament — even though the occasion to do so provides an intensely dramatic moment toward the end of the play. Instead, knowing that his crime will be made public, he does good to his country: this, despite his firm awareness that he will be ruined the next day by the public exposure of his youthful sins. And the damage done by a public report of his youthful crime will bring with it damage well beyond the crime itself as well as obliterate the good he did thereafter. Chiltern can only persist in doing what good he may, even while he resigns himself to the ruin of his career and "reputation," to the loss of his wife and friends, and to the remainder of his days spent within an ignoble and lonely end — essentially a "solitary confinement" (for he will be shunned for the rest of his life).
Christian Cancel Culture "To understand all is to forgive all." So how are we to understand our remembering of sins against us, remembrance as an action that carries a severely prominent subtext and enactment of blame, which consigns our offenders to a fate like Chiltern's. It is very simple to understand: often it is merely ourselves holding out for revenge.
The simple and only possible answer for "why?" is that we have not forgiven.
Gracious to ourselves, we withhold the same grace from those who offend against us, will scarcely touch the load of their own guilt and our own lack of character in making deliberate choices to fall, but we'll rather bounce merrily onward to enjoy a moment of their condemnation. Period. This is simply Christian Cancel Culture. Christ never cancels as long as breath continues: "a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish." To do otherwise is not forgiveness in action. It is not love.
One who covers up another's offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.
Apparently, only by deep comprehension — nearly to the point of despair — of one's own failures can anyone come to understand what forgiveness is.
Just so: Wilde's example is Lady Chiltern. She has no concept of her own lack of character. Even when (pressed by circumstances and by convenience to herself) she commits a sin of her own, at that moment she can only clearly see other's sins but struggles to see, to accept, her own — a major theme in Wilde's play. Her own sin (comically) shocks her! How was it that Johnathan Swift (satirically) defined satire? "It is that mode of writing by which we see everyone but ourselves." Just as in An Ideal Husband. (And Wilde delightfully creates that hilarious moment when Lady Chiltern does, indeed, see her own sin — even names it — despite her utter shock at her own moral frailty, and...all is forgiven with peals of laughter — just as we all should embrace and extend forgiveness. For there will be holy laughter in heaven despite our past sins. Otherwise, it would not be heaven. The non-laughers [Ἀγέλαστος — mirthless people] will not be there.
And so the non-Christian Wilde must point out what Christians very often cannot see: they suffer the same ineptness of vision which Lady Chiltern suffered. And there stands Christ, illustrating in a parable that "he who is forgiven much loves much; he who is forgiven little loves little." If people know Christians by their love, people (both inside and outside the faith) will miss that love because it resides in the enactment of forgiveness — the forgiveness that Christians are too often very slow to give to others.
It is not so much that we give forgiveness; rather, we allow it to be given to them. It is to allow Christ's already established forgiveness to be theirs, to allow His sacrifice to cover their misdeeds, even misdeeds against us. "What you forgive on earth will be forgiven in heaven...." Look it up.
The fascinating thing about our usual response to our own and others' sin? It is seen in King Lear's absurd line:
I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning.
(Act 3, Sc. 2, ll. 59-60)
We mistakenly believe, as does Lear in that moment, that this line allows us to do two things: justify our actions and allow us to condemn someone else. It is to say, "I'm not as bad as that guy." The only answer to Lear's inane utterance is this: "so what?!" Forget everyone else. It doesn't matter what they have done. Our job is to own our misdeeds and extend forgiveness to others. That is all. And all the time we are sitting, comparing our failings to those of someone else, there is Christ saying, "Forgive them; they know not what they do."
It is both grim and astounding that Christians seem singularly unable to forgive one another — really forgive — and almost wholly unable to connect the dots of their own sins. We define one another by quick judgement, condemn one another, and then...banish (cancel) one another from the graceful treatment we would ourselves enjoy. I am literally nauseated by this fact, not at all the least when I see a propensity toward it in myself. It is not merely grotesque in us. Lady Chiltern is very gracious to herself (even when she is caught in a sin of her own). She banishes her husband. Not seeing any need for forgiveness in herself, she extends very little love to her husband in his greatest need. After all, she seems to say, echoing Lear, I am "more sinn'd against than sinning." That is a deception.
So, is there a more common example of how forgiveness works (beyond, say, Ten Boom's extreme Holocaust experience)? Yes. There is one every day you see another human being — or at least an opportunity.
In a conversation decades ago, a student-worker in an English department of a Christian college risked much by confessing to her mentor-and-friend that, while grading some exams for the department, she had cheated — changing her friends' scores so that they all received better grades. She was caught in the act by a faculty member in the department. This brought her disgrace throughout the college. Feeling banished, she transferred to another university to finish her degree.
She might have left these facts unknown to her mentor, who was away from the college at the time and who would not return to the college due to taking a position at a university — and so he might never have known. But the student risked it — confessed, and, with failing voice said, "so...I suppose you're ashamed of me and want nothing to do with me now...." The mentor? — "Look: it doesn't matter what I think. You see things for what they are. It has nothing to do with me. And this event does not define who you are unless you let it. You just need to forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on. You and I will never mention it again, okay?" The mentor continued to keep up with her, celebrate her graduation, be a reference for her in her job search, celebrate the birth of her child. Why? Because the talents she possesses, the being she is, the road to her redemption has not disappeared beneath that one indiscretion. Because she is still a being created in the image of God. In acting as he did (words are cheap), her mentor allowed the weight to be lifted off of her, and she moved on without a debilitating load of guilt — she could rest at night without that particular event raising its ugly head again. She continued well in life, not without other mistakes along the way (whose path is perfect?), but with an understanding of how we treat ourselves and others when we falter. Falter? We all shall do so at one time and another.
Don't you want the same forgiveness for that memory haunting you in the wee hours of the night?
Our situation is very similar to that of Eustace's, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — a particularly horrible person at the beginning of the story and whose outward semblance (his actual body) became the very beast he has been on the inside. Eustace meets Alsan, who peels away the layers of beast, both without and within, so that Eustace might become a real person — and so...
It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that "from that time forth Eustace was a different boy." He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun. (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 7, emphasis mine)
So much for Eustace. We see him again — a much different, a decidedly better person — in The Silver Chair. And we receive an opportunity in the Bible to see King David's sin as well as
St. Peter's denial of Christ and his deeds, later, which received stern words from St Paul. But what we see afterwards is their
continued faith in God — their chastening, their restoration, their
continued vocation. (Remember -- Christ to Peter: "Satan has demanded to sift you
like wheat. When you are restored, strengthen your brothers.") Their
disobedience is not the lone snapshot we see of them — there is a more complete picture of them in their restoration.
And, further, if Lewis's Aslan is at all like Christ, he is most so at the moment one character faces him after a string of misdeeds and direct, contradictory actions from what he had told her to do — ill deeds that produced very severe consequences for her and for many others:
And she wanted to say "I'm sorry" but she could not speak [....]
"Think of that no more. I will not always be scolding. You have done the work for which I sent you into Narnia." (The Silver Chair, Chapter 16)
Oscar Wilde's play is a comedy in the classical sense: it ends happily for all the characters. That is how Christians believe life in the hereafter will be, a resolution that begins here, now, and continues from this point in life. Then again, that's not life here on earth, as apparently some view it — it's not for everyone, just for those who can walk in some exclusive grace meant only for themselves. Members Only. The "Religious" leaders. That's horse hockey.
In contrast, there's the sinner who stands in the temple, who cannot even look up, and prays for forgiveness. Who goes away justified? In such cases, it is like real life, not like literature (not a la Wilde, but as in poor Chuck's story): most often people do precisely what they want to do and justify it all day long. Unless they are moved by Christ to do otherwise, and even then they can reject his voice. I know: I've been there plenty of times. Are you there?
Forgiveness is not solitary. It involves every member of the body of Christ, which is why Charles Williams wrote, "The thread of the love of God was strong enough to save you and all the others, but not strong enough to save you alone." You also must extend it through forgiveness in action. If you do not...you are not forgiven: it is all on His terms.
Reconnection?
As someone said, "forgiveness does not require reconnection." Reconnection is an issue of trust, not forgiveness. The question is this: "does your offender know that they are forgiven?" If we have not done our part to forgive and let them know of our forgiveness, then we are amiss and work against God's purposes.
There will come a time in your life when you will need — like me, like everyone — true forgiveness. If you pray the Lord's prayer, which is in part "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others their sins," I hope you are one who forgives — truly — making others know and experience that forgiveness, not a smiling but condemning silence — or a feigned forgiveness which smilingly extends a dagger of "reminder" every day. I hope rather that we will make people know that we do not hold onto (and present to others) a snapshot of them in their moment of failure — no, but rather that we look and hope for their good. That is a forgiveness God gives: "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more."
If you are someone who is perpetually condemned for a past offense, do not despair. Although various people will judge you for a long-past sin, banish, condemn, cancel, take opportunity from you, and paint a picture of you that is not today true (and is perhaps a picture not completely accurate to life even in the past) — they will also, of course, miss out on knowing the person you are now, who you are further becoming, and will miss the person God is (re)making you to be. Do not despair. "To despair is to turn your back on God" says Marilla Cuthburt.
As someone said, "Worry about your character, not your reputation. Your character is who you are. Your reputation is who people think you are." You want a character today that's build by God, no matter what it may have been in the past.
If you stand in the temple with your head down and cannot look to heaven because of past sins (which you are always mindful of...and which someone feels the need to remind you, and others, about), know that there are still other people, like you, who are contrite and humbly look to God for the help only He can offer. And all the while, there stands Christ, forgiving — right behind you.
