Showing posts with label Leo Tolstoy. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 09, 2015

Lessons from Gandhi - HIRD

By The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird

My wife, being a prolific reader of novels, is always going with me to return books to the local library. At the very front of libraries is a section for recommended new books. While there, I was pleased to find a brand new book Gandhi Before India. It was news to me that Gandhi was excommunicated by his own Bania caste from daring to go to England to become a lawyer. Gandhi’s family sacrificed greatly to send him to England, even pawning the family jewels. While in England, Gandhi for the first time read the Bible, finding the New Testament compelling, especially the Sermon on the Mount. As Gandhi commented, it ‘went straight to my heart’. The lines about offering one's cloak to the man who had taken away one's coat touched him greatly. Gandhi went on to demonstrate that the Sermon on the Mount will radically change one’s life and one’s society if put into practice.

After completing his law degree in England, Gandhi returned to India for a short while before moving to South Africa. While there are numerous books on Gandhi, many skip over Gandhi’s foundational twenty-one years in South Africa. Even the excellent Gandhi movie by Richard Attenborough doesn’t do justice to the prolonged complexity to Gandhi’s time in South Africa. Dr. E Stanley Jones commented that South Africa provided the rehearsal for the real drama of India: “He might have floundered had he tried India straight off.” Sadly in South Africa when Gandhi was most interested in the Gospel, he encountered the greatest restrictions: “To allow Gandhi to sit along white worshippers was impossible. The vicar's wife, out of solidarity and sympathy, offered to sit with him in the vestibule, from where they heard the service.” One of the people who had the greatest impact on Gandhi was Leo Tolstoy, especially his book The Kingdom of God is within You: “he was 'overwhelmed by the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness of this book.” Gandhi purchased and gave out even to his jailers countless copies of Tolstoy’s ground-breaking book on peacemaking in the Sermon on the Mount.

Upon returning to India, Gandhi was initially rejected by other Indians who feared that they might become ritually polluted by even offering a cup of water to someone of the wrong caste. When Gandhi successfully stood up for their rights, he became hailed as a hero and liberator. Gandhi campaigned nonviolently for the independence of India for numerous decades, spending 2,089 days in Indian jails (almost six years).

Dr. E Stanley Jones described Gandhi as the architect of the new India. In many ways, Gandhi was like an Abraham Lincoln bringing freedom to hundreds of millions of his fellow citizens. Louis Fischer compared Gandhi to David standing up to the Goliath of racial discrimination. Gandhi went from being an initial supporter of caste discrimination to being a campaigner against its divisiveness.

Jones held that “in Gandhi the word of freedom became flesh. When he spoke, freedom spoke. Gandhi was India. Most people believe in democratic freedom. Not many are willing to sacrifice over many decades to obtain such goals. Before Gandhi, it was mostly the Indian intelligentsia campaigning for democracy. Because Gandhi humbled himself and unselfishly served the poor and untouchables, both rich and poor awoke to the vision of an independent India. Gandhi made room for all regardless of race, religion and wealth. Albert Einstein said regarding Gandhi: “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” In reading Jones’ book Gandhi: Portrayal of a Friend, Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired to launch the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement.

Jones described the complexity of Gandhi’s personality as like Mount Everest. In an India full of racial, religious and economic division, Gandhi brought people together, giving them a vision for an independent democratic India. Gandhi, whose favorite hymn was ‘When I survey the Wondrous Cross’, chose the costly way of the cross, of sacrificial love even for his enemies. On the wall of his mud hut was a black and white picture of Jesus Christ under which was written ‘He is our peace’. Gandhi was a peace-maker who chose to forgive those who despised him and rejected him. Every day he would read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, motivating Gandhi to peacefully love his adversaries. Jones, who had been a friend of Gandhi in India for many years, said once to him: ‘You understand the principles. Do you know the person?’ Gandhi was very drawn to the person of Jesus Christ. My prayer for the those reading this article is that we may embrace both the principles and person of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector

St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver

Anglican Mission in Canada

-an article published in the June 2015 Deep Cove Crier

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Search for the Historical Victor Hugo - ED HIRD

By Rev Ed Hird

With the recent success of the movie Les Miserables, people have been looking again at the author Victor Hugo. What is it about Hugo that enabled him to write what Leo Tolstoy called the greatest of all novels? Who was the real historical Victor Hugo? Every day around 3,000 words are published about Victor Hugo. It has been said that to read the complete works of Hugo would take no less than ten years. Every important poet, novelist and dramatist of his age was shaped by Hugo’s prolific endeavours. Some call him the greatest of French poets. He was the dominant figure in 19^th century French literature. By the time he left France in 1851, Hugo was seen as the most famous living writer in the world. Upon his return to France, thousands of people in Paris chanted ‘Vive Victor Hugo’, reciting his poetry, and throwing flowers on him. On his eightieth birthday, six hundred thousand Parisians marched past his house in his honor. At his death, a day of national mourning was declared.

By the time Hugo died in 1883, he had become a symbol of France with all its struggles and challenges. Hugo lived through bloody uprising after uprising. Almost a million Frenchmen had died during this revolutionary period, half of them under the age of twenty-eight. Les Miserables with its passionate message about the barricades reflect this deep trauma of chaos upon unending chaos.
When Hugo was born, his parents were horrified by his appearance. His own mother could not bear to look at him. His own doctor indicated that without a miracle, Victor would not last out the month. With an enormous head and a tiny body, his father said that Victor looked like the gargoyles of Notre Dame. Such an insensitive comment led to his second most favorite novelThe Hunchback of Notre Dame. Ironically after the success of his Hunchback novel, all the nouveau riche wanted their homes to be ornamented with gargoyles.

Victor adored his mother Sophie but she cared little for her children. During his childhood, Victor deeply resented his father Leopold who was always away at war. As an adult, Victor became his father’s closest companion. His own parents had divided loyalties between the royalists and the republicans. Hugo’s parents met in Brittany while his Napoleonic father was stamping out a local royalist rebellion. Both of his parents were unfaithful to their marriage vows, something that repeated itself in Victor’s own marriage.

While only fifteen, Victor applied for the French Academy’s annual poetry contest. His poetry was so advanced that the Academy refused to accept him until his mother produced his birth certificate. Victor loved to write, commenting that ‘every thought that has ever crossed my mind sooner or later finds it onto paper. …Ideas are my sinews and substance.’

His father Leopold saw Victor’s involvement in literature as being like ‘pouring good wine down an open sewer’. So he refused to help fund his literary education: “If you were to elect a career as a lawyer or physician, I would gladly make sacrifices to see through university.” Victor often went without food in his early literary years, saying ‘I shall prove to my father that a poet can make sums far larger than the wages of an Imperial General.’ With great talent and a strong work ethic, Victor became one of a very small band who could earn their living with their pens. One of Victor’s closest friends was Alexandre Dumas, the famous author of theCount of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers.

One of Victor’s greatest sorrows was that his wife Adele was indifferent to his writings. Even his passionate love poems for his wife, she ignored. Adele warned Victor that ‘it is the fault of passionate men to set the women they love upon a pedestal. To be placed so high produces dizziness, and dizziness leads to a fall.’ Adele’s affair with her husband’s best friend Saint-Beauve crushed Victor, leading him into his own ongoing infidelity. There was great tragedy in Hugo’s life with his own brother Eugene having a mental breakdown at Victor’s wedding and his youngest daughter suffering the same fate after being abandoned by her lover Pinson. One of the deepest wounds was the drowning of Victor’s daughter Leopoldine shortly after her marriage. Out of this great sorrow came great dramatic writing, especially in his novel Les Miserables. Andre Maurois commented that Hugo possessed and would retain all his life long, one precious gift: the power to give to the events of everyday life a dramatic intensity.
Ground-zero in Les Miserables was the gracious Bishop Bienvenue who transformed Jean Valjean by his generous act of forgiveness. Victor Hugo’s son Charles was upset by his father’s choosing of Bishop Bienvenue. Charles suggested instead that his father should have made Bienvenue to be a medical doctor instead of a clergyman. Victor replied to his son: ‘Man needs religion. Man needs God. I say it out loud, I pray every night…” Victor held that humanity is an ‘unspeakable miracle.’ Of all the French Romantics, Hugo made the most explicit usage of the Bible.

I thank God for the life and work of Victor Hugo who had such a passion for life, freedom and forgiveness, especially as seen in his novel Les Miserables.
The Rev Ed Hird, Rector
St. Simon’s North Vancouver
Anglican Mission in the Americas (Canada)
http://stsimonschurch.ca