Fifth Day of Lent: Profitable Employment

At the beginning of Passus V Will, the dreamer, awakes from his dream, but that does not mean he is no longer in the world of Reason and Conscience.  Like us all, he is always in their presence, and so, on his waking, he finds himself interrogated by Reason as to how he is employed in the world, since he seems to be an idler, wandering and dreaming all day.  Will replies that the tools of his trade are the Lord’s Prayer and the psalms and that his occupation is to pray for those who show him charity—he is a “mendicant” or begging priest.  Furthermore, Will adds, he believes that clergy should not be constrained to doing normal work:  they have their place in society, to sing and pray and read and write, just as it is the place of others to perform other work necessary for human community:

            “Therefore, I pray you, Reason, rebuke me not at all,

            For in my conscience I know what Christ would have me do.

            Prayers of a perfect man and penance discrete

            Is the labor above all most pleasing to our Lord.

            Truly, not from the soil,” I said, “Man lives,

            Not from bread or feed; as the Lord’s Prayer witnesses,

            Thy will be done—that finds us all we need.””

Conscience is impressed by what Will has said, but he points out that Will’s are hardly the “prayers of a perfect man” he had spoken of.  Will agrees this is true and on the advice of Conscience and Reason makes his way to the church to worship and repent:

            “Before the cross, on my knees, I smote my breast,

            Sighing for my sins, reciting my Lord’s Prayer,

            Weeping and wailing till I was asleep.”

Once more asleep, Will returns again to the “field full of folk,” but now Reason is giving a fiery sermon about God’s judgment and need for all to live better lives.  Families must be more disciplined—“spare the rod and spoil the child,” he says.  People who are lolling about need to find some honest work instead of wasting their time.  And, most of all, pastors and monks and bishops need to reform their lives and set a better example for the people:

            “What you preach to the people, prove it yourself:

            Live as you teach us and we shall believe you the better.”

Finally, he calls on the king to act for the public good and not private benefit, and encourages all not to seek their salvation in pilgrimages to “Saint James and the Saints of Rome,” but in Saint Truth, the Holy Spirit.

What does it mean to contribute to society?  In the various forms he takes throughout this passus, Reason has trouble imagining the answer to this question as anything other than some kind of work—different work for the king than for the commoner, of course, but nonetheless some kind of work.  If everyone would just find some good honest work to do and if pastors would practice the morality they preach and if politicians would actually work for the common good, all our problems would be solved, so says Reason.  It is a tempting thought, one which we all indulge in from time to time.  We like to think all the world needs is everyone to work together, everyone to contribute to the common good, more people employed, more people empowered.

But Will (and Conscience) see that there are limits to this view of things.  Will sees this because he is confident that his own occupation, which is merely to beg and pray, is in fact be the way of life most necessary for the world and most pleasing to God.  He also sees that coming to that pleasing and perfect life means walking the way of conversion and repentance.  And that is something we are not usually eager or willing to see.  We like to think that our doing better, being better, working harder, working together is always the key to a better world.  But in truth the most necessary work, especially in this season of Lent, is the work of the Lord’s Prayer and the psalms, the work of confessing our sins instead of sharpening our work ethic, the work of praying for our neighbors, not providing them goods and services.

“Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?”  Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  (John 6:28-29)

First Sunday of Lent: the Reforms of Reason

At the beginning of Passus IV, the king has had enough of the verbal jousting between Meed and Conscience and commands them to make up.  Conscience, however, replies that he will not do so unless he is commanded to by Reason.  Exasperated, the king orders Conscience to go and fetch Reason then with all haste and bring him to court.  Conscience is happy to oblige and the two of them return just in time to find Peace making an official complaint to Parliament.  Peace explains that Wrong has been stealing his goods, assaulting and intimidating him, and doing violence to his workers.

            “The king swore by Christ (and by his crown too)

            That Wrong for his works would suffer woe,

            And commanded a constable to put Wrong in chains

            That he should not in seven years see either his feet or hands.”

Wrong’s allies and counselors, however, have different plans.  Meed presents Peace with a substantial gift to make amends for his pain and promises Wrong will desist from his bad behavior.  Peace thereafter asks the king to have mercy on Wrong.  But Conscience and Reason will have none of it and in defense of his refusal to advise mercy in this case, Reason launches on a speech detailing his vision for society:

            “If I were a king with a crown to guard my realm,

            No wrong upon this earth that I perceived would go

            Unpunished as was in my power, on peril of my soul,

            Nor would they get my grace through any gift or flattery,

            Nor gain mercy through a bribe, by Mary of heaven!

            For the man set down “Let no evil go unpunished”

            And ordered that “no good be unrewarded.””

The king and many others are much impressed with Reason’s speech, and Meed and her allies are overthrown.  Then, as Reason, Conscience, and the king are making plans to enact the reforms of Reason’s speech, Will, our dreamer, awakes.

These symbolic stories in Piers Plowman often work on a number of levels.  On the one level the allegory is a commentary on politics, economics, and society.  But on another level we can also read the story as an allegory about the kingdom of our souls.  There too we must listen to Reason (our capacity for thinking and reasoning) and Conscience (our desire to do what is right) if we are to set ourselves right.

Take, for example, the story of Peace in this passus.  How often do we allow sin and temptation (like Wrong) to threaten us, abuse us, and rob us of our spiritual goods?  Yet often we are content to come to a settlement with our sin, because of some material comfort related to the vice, like the gift Meed uses to assuage Peace.  Perhaps, for example, we are abused by the sin of gluttony, which robs us of the good of truly savoring God’s creation because we are so taken up in the act of devouring it, and we make peace with the situation because perhaps this eating is part of the fellowship we enjoy with our friends.  There, like Peace, we’re willing to let some good make amends for the evil the sin does.  But really we should be listening to Reason and Conscience, who say “No mercy, no give-and-take, no compromise: let us bind this sin in chains so that it may trouble us no more!”  It is hard to listen to this stern and radical advice, harder still to follow it, but doing so is part of the struggle against sin that Christ has called us to.

And yet surely these harsh dictates of Reason cannot be the sum total either of living a Christian life or establishing a just society, can they?  Indeed, as we continue our journey with Piers Plowman, we shall see they are but one beginning.

“Indeed, we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds.  We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

Fourth Day of Lent: The Debate of Conscience and Meed

As Will’s vision continues, we find that, although Lady Meed has been abandoned by her wedding party, she is hardly without friends.  As she awaits her audience with the king, Meed is busy making arrangements with judges, city officials, and anyone else she can find to smooth the way for her impending trial (in her behavior in this passus we see another common sense of the word “meed”: bribery):

            “Then humbly Meed thanked them all

            For their great kindness and gave to each

            Cups of pure gold and cups of silver,

            Rings with rubies and other rich gifts,

            And golden coin to the least man of her company.”

Soon enough the king summons Lady Meed.  Though he has pardoned Meed many times before, now she has brought him to the limit of his patience by trying to marry Mr. False, and the king presents her with an ultimatum:  marry Conscience, one of his knights, or be put into prison.  Meed immediately agrees to marry Conscience, but when the king asks Conscience if he will have her, the response is a resounding no:

            “Woe me betide before I wed such a wife!

            For she is weak in honesty and deceitful in speech,

            And she makes men many, many times do wrong:

            A great many has she hurt who trusted in her treasure.”

Conscience goes on to enumerate the areas of society where Meed’s influence corrupts justice and impairs the common good.  But Meed turns Conscience’s accusations around and replies indignantly that she is an integral part of society which must be embraced for things to run smoothly.  The king seems convinced, but Conscience responds with a long discourse and argues that there is a difference between the kind of indiscriminate, free flow of money and payment that Meed advocates, and giving proper payment that someone is due for their work.  As Conscience’s speech goes on, he is carried off into a vision of perfect world where Meed no longer rules human affairs and “swords are beaten into plowshares.”  When he finally finishes, Meed replies angrily:

            “Look what Solomon says,” she said. “In Proverbs.  In the Bible.

            “He who gives gifts—take heed!—a victory he wins

             And much honor with it”—so Scripture says!”

But Conscience directs her to the second half of that very proverb:  “But he takes away the life of those who receive them.”  (This is a version of Proverbs 22:9 which is different from the one found in our modern translations).

Many of the arguments in this passus reiterate, though more in-depth, the arguments of the previous passus, about honest and dishonest uses of money and payment—“meed.”  The difference here is that Meed is able to speak for herself—and she makes quite a convincing case.  Besides being personally attractive and charming (as money tends to be), she points out that the whole world runs on various exchanges of money.  How could it be any other way?  And surely not everything that goes on because of these payments and exchanges could be bad.  We can certainly imagine many people in our own day who think, like Meed, that the free and unregulated flow of money is what’s best for the world.

But Conscience insists that Meed be held to a higher standard than just the business as usual of the world around us.  He insists she be held to the standard of God’s kingdom, where swords are made into plowshares and the reciprocity of love, not the exchange of money, rules human affairs.  He calls us to recognize that we cannot tell the truth about the problems of this world by simply examining how this world works.  To tell the truth we must hold things up to the world that God has promised us.

“Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

 He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.”  (Isaiah 2:3-4)

Third Day of Lent: The Marriage of Lady Meed

As Holy Church is about to take her leave of him, Will the dreamer asks her one last question: how can he be able to tell what is false?  Instead of giving him a direct answer, Holy Church instructs him to look to his left.  There Will sees another woman:

            “She was wearing fur, none purer on the earth,

            And crowned with a crown—the king has none better.

            On all her five fingers she wore costly rings,

            Set with red rubies and other precious stones.

            Her clothes were finer than I could describe,

            For I have not time enough to tell of her attire.

            Her style and her opulence ravished my heart.”

Holy Church informs Will that the woman is Lady Meed (“meed” is a word which means “pay” or “reward” in Middle English), someone who has caused her considerable trouble.  Today, Meed is preparing to be married to a Mr. False, and Holy Church leaves Will to watch the proceedings unfold on his own, offering him some last reminders of what she had told him earlier about the dangers of greed.

As Will watches, he sees a great crowd of people gathered for Meed’s wedding, knights, judges, merchants, clerics, and common people alike, “All the rich retinue that root themselves in false living.” As the marriage is being finalized, however, Theology stands up and objects that, although Lady Meed’s father, Deceit, has arranged her marriage to Mr. False, she cannot legally be married without the consent of her mother, Recompense.  Furthermore, she has in fact already been promised to Truth, who gives to everyone their just reward (“meed”).  In order to settle the case, the whole group sets out for the courts in London, but before they get there the king, on the advice of Conscience, orders the arrest of these notorious criminals.  The men around her all flee into hiding—Mr. False finds safety among businessmen, while Mr. Liar is taken in by corrupt preachers—and Lady Meed alone is taken into custody.

In all this complicated allegory, the moral is simple:  the practice of payment and reward, Lady Meed, attracts and even encourages all kinds of dishonesty.  Furthermore, this dishonesty is always trying to legitimize its relationship to the practice of payment and reward, trying to marry Meed to Falsehood.  But in the end this practice really ought to be something that belongs to God, who will reward everyone truly and justly according to their deeds, and imitates him.

We tend not to think about how all the payments we make and receive should be modeled on how God will reward people with justice.  When we look at the businesses we may be invested in, for example, we tend to look only at what profits they are making us and not whether our investment is rewarding good deeds.  We do not first ask whether the company is rewarding its workers justly for their work or pursuing honest dealing.  We are generally content to find Meed mingling with Falsehood (though we might bristle at the suggestion she be married to him), so long as we get ours.  And so sometimes Theology has to stand up and remind us that this marriage of Falsehood and Meed is not merely neutral or “the way things are done.”  It is something that is wrong, it is a sin, and it’s not something we should just blindly go along with.  For in this world the witness we have to give as Christians is that we do not deal with our neighbors falsely, but we deal with them as God does, with love and justice.

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.  And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God:  I am the Lord.  You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.”  (Leviticus 19:11-13)

Second Day of Lent: Holy Church

As Will our dreamer continues to gaze on all the walks of life represented in the “fair field full of folk” a lady of great learning comes to him from the tower of Truth to explain what he is seeing and to give him some advice.  She tells him that most of the people he sees are oblivious to anything beyond this world and have not learned how to live with the moderation God intends them to.  She tells him that in the deep valley of Death there is one named Wrong who is always striving to deceive human kind:

      “And those that trust in earthly treasure he betrays the soonest:

      To encumber men with greed, that is his lesson and his nature.”

Amazed at the wisdom of this woman, Will asks her who she is:

      “I am Holy Church,” she said.  “You ought to know me:

      I received you at your beginning and I made you free.

      You brought me sponsors saying you would fulfill all my bidding,

      To believe in me and love me all your lifetime.”

Immediately, Will falls to his knees and begs Holy Church to pray to Christ for his sake.  And then he asks her if she can tell him how to be saved.  She responds that in the end what matters is truth and love.  She explains that by truth she means not just knowing the truth, but being true and honest in your speaking and your dealing.  And likewise by love she means love not just in your soul, but in your actions and your words as well.  Having given these answers, she takes her leave of Will.

Often in this world it is all too easy to forget where we come from and whose we are.  We get distracted by our own questions and all the dizzying business and variety of earthly life.  Even though he was talking with her face to face, Will couldn’t recognize Holy Church.  She had to remind him that she had received him as one of her own from his earliest days when he was baptized, and that others close to him had promised on his behalf that he would love and believe in her. She even has to remind him that through this baptism she has made him free from the powers of Death and Wrong.

In the season of Lent, our journeys, like Will’s, should begin with a reminder from the Church that we belong to her, and through her, to God, just as before he was driven into the wilderness to be tempted forty days, Jesus heard his Father say “you are my Son, my beloved: in you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11).  Lent calls us to embrace the trials and the sufferings of this world.  But we are not meant to embrace these trials and take on these sufferings without the confidence baptism gives us that we belong to God.  We are not meant to take up our cross without also hearing the reminder from Holy Church: “I received you at your beginning and I made you free.”

“May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.  He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  (Colossians 1:11-14)

Ash Wednesday: The Fair Field Full of Folk

 Piers Plowman begins with a man falling asleep.  As the poem opens, Will, the narrator, tells us that he had set off as a wanderer to hear unbelievable tales and see strange sights,

            “But on a May morning in Malvern Hills

            I nodded off to sleep, wearied with all my walking,

            And in a clearing as I lay I leaned back and I slept

            And marvelously I dreamt, as I shall tell you now.”

And what did the dreamer see?

            “Eastward I set my gaze, toward the sun,

            And saw a tower—in there was Truth, I trust.

            And westward then I looked a short while after,

            And saw a valley, deep—Death, I believe,

            Dwelt in those regions, and wicked spirits too.

            A fair field full of folk I found there between them

            All manner of men, the lowly and the rich,

            Working and wandering as this world demands.”

What the dreamer sees is the world of our everyday human life.  He sees “all manner of men, the lowly and the rich.”  In the lines that follow he describes all sorts of walks of life: hardworking farmers and frivolous spendthrifts, prosperous merchants and simple hermits, beggars and pilgrims and preachers and kings.

Some might have looked on this picture as simply various walks of life each going about their own business, just making it through life the way they know how, just making it day by day.  But not our dreamer.  He sees them all, this “fair field full of folk,” in a different light:  he sees that they are all of them “working and wandering” between the deep valley of Death on the one side and the high tower of Truth on the other.

When we think of how all our diverse lives fit into the rhythms and the patterns of this world, of this “fair field full of folk,” the first thought for most of us would probably not be that we are going about our daily business in a place between Death and Truth.  But this season of Lent and this day, Ash Wednesday, ask us to see ourselves in precisely this way.  When we receive the ashes on our foreheads today we hear these words: “You are dust and to dust you shall return: repent and believe the gospel.”  We are set between Death and Truth, between dust and the gospel, and to begin the journey of this season toward the cross and beyond the cross to the empty tomb, we must first acknowledge that this is the place where we live out our lives.

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”  (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

Welcome!

Welcome to Lent with Langland.  Once the season of Lent begins (Ash Wednesday is February 13) I will be posting daily devotional reflections based on the 14th century poem Piers Plowman by William Langland.