For the past couple of months on Sunday evenings, American educational television channels have been broadcasting two BBC programs centered on women and our experiences/challenges/talents:  “Call the Midwife” and “The Bletchley Circle.”  Both programs are based on historical women living and working in the 20th century.  “Call the Midwife” is an adaptation and enlargement of the memoirs of Jennifer Worth; “The Bletchley Circle” tells of the lives after World War II ended of some of the women who worked at Bletchley Park in England to crack the German codes, an act that stopped the mass sinking of British ships and most likely began to turn the tide for the Allied Forces.  Both are set in the 1950’s, an era when women were being encouraged/forced to return to “feminine” spheres and activities after the hiatus occasioned by so many men’s being in the military, leaving jobs usually filled by men open to anyone who could do them.

I’ve been riveted to both series from the beginning because the stories are so feminist and the women acting in the television versions have conveyed with such clarity just how special their characters were in the fields of medicine/midwifery and military intelligence.  Every week the secular nurses, along with the Roman Catholic nuns who run the “house” from which the midwives go forth to help pregnant women living in the East End of London in less-than-ideal circumstances.  Every week, we see at least one tiny new-born being guided out of its mother’s body and swaddled in whatever blanket is at hand.  Sometimes, these moments are cherished by all involved, but in at least one segment, the mother and the midwives feared for the infant’s safety.  The tiny baby boy was the product of an extra-marital union between the white mother and a black man, so the white husband is ready to throw away or even kill the new-born as he vents his rage and sense of being betrayed by his wife.  All the while the midwives are delivering babies, the program deftly portrays the personal lives of the nurses and nuns, all of whom are sharply delineated by the scripts.  There is the old nun, played to perfection by Judith Parfitt, who is slightly mentally “off,” but who quotes marvelous poetry to suit the occasion and who values old ways and objects over what she fears about the present with its bustle and sharp edges.  The central character, Jenny, grows from a novice midwife with theories that can’t handle the messiness of her patients’ poverty-ladened lives into a mature woman who loses her fiancé to a freak accident at his work and who comes to understand that she can no longer function in a strict hospital setting where she is not allowed to follow a given pregnancy from beginning to delivery.

These programs invite viewers to take women seriously in fields where they have been traditionally accepted but undervalued by the medical establishment and in fields where they have been deemed less than qualified for outstanding performances.  A final “plus” surrounding these two series is the atmosphere on the sets.  After each program, actors as well as directors/writers speak about what’s it’s like to be part of the program.  The male directors have both commented on two ways the atmosphere seems different because of the minor role played by male actors.  First, they say it’s hard to get the actors to stop talking among themselves animatedly so as to progress the actual filming of the segment; then, they comment on how refreshing it has been to work with mostly women because there is so little competition and back-biting that usually pervades such sessions in the high end television world.

So if you’ve not known about these series, find them on Netflix or whatever provider you use.  Your viewing time with be richly rewarded by watching stellar actors telling moving and powerful stories that do not have simple plot lines or clichéd emotional qualities.

I recently had breakfast with an old friend who is also a fine photographer.  In the course of our time together, she told me she is embarking on a new project to try and photograph “time.”  She then asked me if I would share some thoughts about what time is.  My first comment was “Time is an illusion invented to simplify our lives.” 

As our conversation evolved, I heard myself saying something that has stuck with me as absolutely what I believe:  I said “Art freezes time and memory holds time.”  In the days following that evocative breakfast, I have kept returning to this idea, wanting to flesh out what I meant when I blurted it out as I ate my delicious croissant with my friend.   John Keats’ marvelous “Ode on a Grecian Urn” came back to me as a perfect example of how art freezes time.  In that poem, he describes several scenes on a particular antique Greek vase or urn; at one point, he reflects about an image of heterosexual lovers poised to kiss.  He says “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;/Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;/She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” These lines speak of the inherent stasis that all art shares.  And Keats affirms the inherent ambiguity inherent in this frozenness–while the lovers will never complete their action caught by the person who decorated the urn, they will never grow old or come not to want to kiss one another.

So, if art suspends time by freezing what it so beautifully depicts, where can we humans look for a means of preserving the ever-elusive nature of time as it plays out in our lives?  I maintain we look to memory as an ever-expanding repository of time.  When I remember a person or place or feeling, I am able to reenter the moment being remembered.  If we separate the word, it makes what I’m claiming clearer:  “re-member” suggests a putting back into place something we think is over.  Now this process of memory’s holding time can either be experienced as sustaining or terrifying.  Surely anyone struggling with PTSD knows just how powerfully memory can hold time.  Each time something in the present “triggers” the debilitating memory, the person feels as if s/he is
“in time” again, that nothing is “over.”   Toni Morrison describes this element of memory’s ability to collapse and hold time in her novel Beloved, when Sethe can’t keep from remembering Sweet Home, the slave plantation where she grew up.  In fact, in that powerful work, Morrison speaks of her characters’ mighty but futile efforts to not remember precisely because they know that their memories contain every smidgen of a time they would dearly love to forget.

For many of us, however, as we grow older, we cherish certain memories because they take us out of what passes for the present time, allowing us to magically return to a situation or person or emotional moment categorized as “the past” by clock-watchers and schedule-setters.  I trust that my memories are stockpiles or silos where I can find all sorts of moments and people no longer tangibly in my life.  So I work to sharpen my memories in my efforts to outrun or simply sidestep the clock.  Even when honoring a memory brings me renewed pain, as if it were happening again, I welcome the process.

At the Christmas Eve service at my church, the first half hour is choral music sung both by the large and excellent choir and by the congregation.  One of the choir offerings this past year was a setting of “Mirabile Mysterium,” written by Anne Kilstofte to commemorate the first tolling of large bells in the Basilica’s belfry.  I want to ponder the meaning of the last stanza translated from the Latin: “That which he was/he remained,/and that which he was not/he assumed:/suffering neither mixture/nor division.”

Though I initially thought “Oh, this is a classic riddle like those found in some fairy tales,” as I listened to the hauntingly beautiful chords coming from the 90-voiced choir, I knew I was being asked to accept the quintessential paradox that lies at the very heart of Christianity.  What I and many other contemporary Christians believe is that what we mark on December 25th is not just the birth of the baby Jesus who will become the lynch-pin of our faith, but we are being asked to accept the tremendous generosity of a god who decided to take on human form in order that humans could inch just a little closer to goodness and love.

Parsing the quoted lines, I feel on familiar but exciting ground.  God stays just as was true before Jesus is born; simultaneously, God becomes what has never been before this historic moment, i.e., human.  Then the last two lines give voice to ultimate mystery:  God becomes human while remaining divine, and, miraculous mystery indeed, this seeming bifurcation causes no alteration at all in the original divinity.  This is something perhaps an avowed mystic or a brilliant chemist might grasp.  If we try to “figure it out,” we will get nowhere, that’s why it’s the ultimate paradox.  We simply have to stand before this moment and accept that the God of our understanding is simultaneously the deepest abstraction and the most mundane infant in a bed of straw out under the stars.  This is a prophetic declaration not a scientific or rational hypothesis.  For my part, I am able to rest inside this seeming impossibility.  And giving my assent to the final assertion fills me with spiritual excitement:  my God is “suffering neither mixture/nor division.”  My God is inviting me into the mirabile mysterium if I have the imaginative stamina to accept.

When I heard that Pete Seeger had died, I felt like I’d lost an era of my own political life.   In the mid-1970s, I was part of a large audience in Minneapolis that fell in love with the singer and his songs.  We all know that the Hudson River would have died had Pete not organized, at first with a tiny group of like-minded New Yorkers, and unrelentingly kept on organizing until the river was cleaned up and reborn.

While I never heard him in person again, I had many recordings and knew all the words to many of his emblematic songs.  My own favorite is “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, Halleluia,” a call to activists to stop doing whatever it is we are doing and focus on the injustices and horrors all around us.  News of Seeger’s death came at the same time that my church lesson from the Gospels reminded me of Jesus’ earliest recruitment of apostles.  His first two were Matthew and his brother,  simple fishermen who were in their boats when Jesus passed by them.  He asked them to row their boat to the shore, lay down their fishing gear, and follow him into a radical movement for justice and love.  Since the song Pete sang included the sacred “halleluia,” and since he often talked about his grounding in the gospel tradition in African American churches, I am convinced that he was thinking of that moment in time when he made up his words that we all responded to so fully.

So we won’t hear any more live recordings of this man of good works, but I and thousands of others will hold him in our hearts as a model for how to live in a deeply flawed world without either falling into cynical despair or being mesmerized by fame and fortune.  As he must have felt sad over so many of his fellow travelers who did become stunned and then damaged by the lime-light, Pete Seeger just kept on putting one foot in front of the other, telling truth to whatever power base he felt needed to hear it, staying centered in his fundamental belief in inclusivity–“This land is my land, this land is your land….”