The Late Miss Dorothy May

“I’ll come get you if I can. If I don’t, it means I’m dead. Or late.”

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) 

We’re now a couple of weeks into September. My younger siblings are back at school, my university Freshers’ Week begins on Monday,¹ and there’s a general sense of an approaching return to humdrum, routine normality after the change of pace afforded by the summer holiday. I find that the start of the autumn term always has a crispness, a blankness, about it – it appeals to my deep-seated human desire for a new start. And so, as a child returning to school, I used to promise myself that this year, I would be organised, I would get all my homework done with time to spare, I would remember to get my planner signed,² I would keep my exercise books neat, I would not be late.

Here we have a picture of a clock, showing roughly the time I would quite likely arrive at something that was supposed to start at 8:15.

I’m awfully good at being late – not dramatically, hopelessly late, just by a few minutes. Contributing factors to this situation include my dislike of being early (I have a dread of having to wait around awkwardly before whatever event I’m attending actually begins) and my fondness for staying in bed. Nevertheless, I still find myself greeting the new academic year with a resolution to be on time. Who knows? Maybe I’ll actually get better at it this year.

As a tribute to this resolution, and because I rather robbed myself of blog-writing time this week by spending it in rural Cornwall³ (which I suppose means, rather ironically, that I left it too late to write a proper post about lateness), I thought you might enjoy a poem I wrote a few years ago called ‘Exploits of Dorothy May’.⁴

So, tell me, then, Miss Dorothy May –

Why have you come in so late today?

I’m terribly sorry, Miss, truly I am –

I was leaving the house when, from out of her pram,

My two-year-old sister fell onto the floor,

And rolled down the hallway and out through the door.

I reached out to stop her before she went far;

She rolled into the road, almost under a car…

I managed to reach her with seconds to spare,

Then fainted away on the pavement just there,

So severe was my shock. When, at last, I came round,

I looked at my watch and I gasped when I found

I was five minutes late – but I’m sure you’ll agree

That, in this situation, you can’t punish me.

Miss Dorothy May, you’re late again!

Perhaps you’d be good enough as to explain?

Oh, Miss, an apology most, most sincere –

I was leaving the house when I happened to hear

A commotion of some kind at number sixteen

And felt I had no choice but to intervene.

In the garden, a very small fire had begun

When a spectacle lens focussed light from the sun.

Well, I say very small – it was starting to spread

And had already burned the chrysanthemum bed.

I had to do something, so took out my juice

From my lunchbox: I hoped it would be of some use.

I tipped it out over the fire, which died.

That’s the reason I’m not here on time, Miss. I tried.

Miss Dorothy May, here you are, late once more!

You won’t mind informing us why, I am sure!

I could not be more sorry, indeed I could not!

I was leaving the house, had set off at a trot,

When a spaniel ran past me, purloining my bag,

And then went on its way with a bark and a wag.

For a second, I stood there, too startled to blink,

Then I swallowed my panic and made myself think.

Assuming the spaniel would not change direction,

I worked out a short cut and planned interception.

As fortune would have it, I timed it just right.

I caught hold of my bag, pulled with all of my might,

And successfully prised it from slavering jaws,

Then I had to run back here – my lateness’ cause.

Miss Dorothy May! Yet again, you are late!

I suspect, due to more strange, surprise twists of fate?

Miss, all the apologies under the sun!

I was leaving the house, had decided to run

To make sure I would be here in plenty of time,

When I happened to witness a terrible crime.

With trembling fingers, I dialled 999.

The police wanted statements, and documents signed.

I knew I’d no time and I tried to explain,

But gave in when they asked me again and again.

It turns out, what I’d witnessed was part of a top-

Secret MI5 case, which is simply called Op. –

I’ve said too much already; I can’t tell you this!

They have sworn me to secrecy. So sorry, Miss.

Miss Dorothy May! So, you’ve got here at last!

Well, what was it today? Some new law has been passed

Making lateness compulsory only for you?

Did you end up entrapped when you walked through some glue?

Were you passing the river and jumped in to save

Some unfortunate soul from a watery grave?

Maybe bandits attacked you and stole all your books,

Or perhaps it was pirates with peg-legs and hooks.

You got stuck in a time warp and just made it out?

You were chased across town by malevolent trout?

Abduction by aliens? Meteor storm?

Well, go on, then, explain to the rest of the form!

Oh, Miss, I’m so sorry I feel I could weep –

Today, I … er … happened to just oversleep.

Footnotes

¹ I’m fairly sure the relevant pages on the Students’ Guild website didn’t look this snazzy for my Freshers’ Week: http://www.exeterguild.org/freshers/.

² Up until Sixth Form, everyone at my secondary school had a school-issued homework planner which we had to have signed every week by a parent or guardian, supposedly for our parents or guardians to indicate their approval of the amount of homework we were receiving. I have no idea how normal a system this was.

³ Not that I regret doing so one iota – it was a week away with other students from my church and it was utterly excellent. We read a book called Heart Attitudes by Graham Beynon (http://www.ivpbooks.com/9781783591718), which definitely had a lot of valuable stuff to say, but above all I loved spending time with a bunch of wonderful people who love Jesus, and so being pointed back to him.

⁴ Just to be clear, Dorothy May is a fictional character invented entirely for the purpose of this poem. Her name is of no significance: it was simply convenient for scansion and sounded rather pleasing. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, or whatever the disclaimer is.

Paul, a Playwright, and a Poet

“In the real world that I’m living in, / Being with you is like science fiction.”

Jonathan Thulin, ‘Science Fiction’, Science Fiction (2015)

Faith and Fiction. Can they cooperate? Can fiction which makes no reference to matters of faith be of any relevance to them?

I think 1 Corinthians 15: 33 might just provide an answer in the affirmative. This is it:

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”¹

Usually, of course, when we encounter chunks of New Testament around which some helpful editor has placed quotation marks, the same helpful editor has footnoted the quotation and provided a reference to the chunk of Old Testament being quoted – but this quote isn’t from the Old Testament. Some Bibles leave it unreferenced (which makes those of us who have spent hour upon hour painstakingly decorating our essays with footnotes and bibliography rather unhappy); some suggest that it probably comes from a play called Thais (a woman’s name) by Menander.

Thanks to Jastrow on Wikimedia Commons for this picture of Menander’s face, or at least a 2nd-century AD Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original sculpture of his face.

“Who is Menander?” you demand, overwhelmed by curiosity – at which point I grin the kind of enthusiastic ‘I-am-glad-you-asked-me-that’ grin that tends to spread itself across the faces of Classics students when you ask them Classics-related questions, and your insides are suddenly struck by an unpleasant sinking feeling, while your brain urgently starts working on an exit strategy for this conversation.² Fear not, I shall keep my explanation short. Well, relatively:

I am glad you asked me that. Menander was a Greek playwright who lived around the turn of the fourth to third centuries BC. He wrote so-called New Comedy, notable for its everyday, domestic settings; tidy plotlines, where everything ends well with all the couples neatly paired up; and use of stock characters. (Think along similar lines to some Shakespearean comedies, or perhaps The Importance of Being Earnest.) Greco-Roman society was obsessed with Menander, but, to the great chagrin of scholars, hardly any of his work survived past the Middle Ages – until the 20^th century, when people started digging papyrus out of the Egyptian desert and came across large numbers of fragments and some near-complete plays. Classicists were thrilled: now at last they could read the works of genius which had been so loved in the ancient world. And they read them. And it turned out that Menander wasn’t actually very funny. Cue disappointment.³

Anyway, the point is, it’s most likely Menander that Paul is quoting in his first letter to the church in Corinth. That is, Menander the Greek playwright from centuries before Christ whose work had absolutely no links to the God of Israel or his Messiah. Why?

One entirely plausible suggestion is that Paul had no idea he was quoting Menander; rather, that particular line had found its way into everyday Greek speech as a common proverb, and that’s what he was quoting. This seems pretty likely. All the same, God knew where the line came from, and purposed that it should be included in the letter. Furthermore, Paul presumably knew he was quoting something, even if it was just a figure of speech. He was teaching about spiritual matters using cultural reference points his audience already had.

The same principle applies in Acts 17:28:

for in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, “For we are also his offspring.”⁴

At this point, Paul is in the middle of a chat with some Athenian philosophers. It’s a fair bet that Mr Average Athenian Philosopher wouldn’t have had the first clue about the God of Israel or the promised Messiah, so Paul starts from what his audience did know about. He talks about their shrines and temples and explains why God doesn’t need them. He talks about God being Lord of every individual and nation, making it clear that this applies to Mr Average Athenian Philosopher as much as anyone else. And then he quotes from the fifth line of the astronomical poem Phaenomena (‘appearances’) by Aratus.

“Who is Aratus?” you mumble reluctantly, with a due sense of dread. Fear not – the guy has never come up in any of my lectures or background reading, so I have no more knowledge about him than can be acquired by scanning a few paragraphs on Wikipedia. Still, he was apparently very popular. What’s more, this time Paul clearly knows that he’s quoting a Greek writer. He is deliberately using pieces of the Athenians’ own culture, things with which they are familiar, to explain to them who God is.

Paul chooses his quotation carefully. The opening of the Phaenomena is actually an ode to Zeus, so if he had quoted, say, from the fourth line as well – “Everyone everywhere is indebted to Zeus” – it would have been much harder to get the point across that he wasn’t talking about Zeus at all. There’s such a thing as trying to squash Jesus into a framework provided by fiction and ending up distorting him. The key is to keep him and his truth as the baseline and measure everything else against that baseline to see if it fits.

So can fiction which does not concern itself with God have something to say about spiritual concerns? Paul thought so. God evidently thinks so. Chosen carefully and set in the right context, ideas found in fiction can help us to understand, and to explain to others, more about who God is. 

On that note, I’ll launch into a spot of shameless advertising: my home church in Peterborough (http://www.stmarkspeterborough.org.uk/) is launching a new style of service at 5pm tomorrow, Sunday 6^th September 2015 (helpfully called Sunday @ 5), which is going to operate very much on that principle. There will be film and TV clips, time for discussion over plenty of pizza, a short talk considering the ideas expressed in the clips, and some music as well. Having been somewhat involved in the planning process,⁵ I honestly think it’s going to be a really good and different way of doing church, and I’m pretty gutted that I’ll be over two hundred miles away at the relevant time – so do go and check it out if you’re in the area.

Finally, if you’re still scratching your head about my opening quote, I felt that Jonathan Thulin’s album Science Fiction was an excellent example of the representation of spiritual truth using ideas familiar from fiction. It includes tracks based on time travel, Jekyll and Hyde, the fountain of youth, and the boy who cried wolf, as well as referencing things like Star Wars and Superman within the lyrics. It’s already rocketed to the status of one of my all-time favourite albums despite only having been released earlier this year, so I’ll basically take any excuse to recommend it.⁶

On the other hand, I probably won’t be enthusiastically urging you to read Menander any time soon. 

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+15&version=ESVUK.

² Don’t worry, Blimey Cow has you covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUcW15PGT4.

³ This is all based on what I learned in my Greek and Roman Drama module in my first year of university. I’m quite prepared to believe there are a good number of Classicists out there who are huge fans of Menander, though I’m not quite sure why anyone would be. (He’s not that bad. He’s just not that good, either.)

⁴ Do take a look at the whole chapter. Context matters, kids! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I didn’t come up with the idea or anything; I just sat in on some meetings and designed a snazzy-looking flyer.

⁶ Some delightful human has compiled a YouTube playlist of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn53h0Wch1g&list=PLY7HXIrlrzWXcVHdcYqxdDn1xOxuOGRPf.