CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: ‘We have seen and heard enough to believe that nothing around us is ‘ordinary’’
‘Everything real is something else.’ It’s an imagination game, taught by a mum to her child in the BBC drama Call the Midwife. They live in a squalid slum in 1960s London, but you can imagine the room is a palace, the basic things around you are the most opulent of objects, fit for a princess’s use.
I love Call the Midwife, which is drawing to the end of its 14th season. In the safe hands of showrunner (and ‘secret church lady’) Heidi Thomas, it tells the story of a community of midwives, both Anglican nuns and lay women, in London’s Poplar district over 50 years ago.
I love the show for its depiction of kindness given and received by people in Poplar, and the nuns’ simple worship and devotion, their desire to ‘live to serve’.
I love how it illuminates issues which are still relevant – for example the health board chairman’s concerns about Christian people bringing their faith to work.
I especially love the fact that it explores the challenges of faith. In the current series, Sister Julienne struggles with ‘exhaustion’ and a sense of being ‘lost’. And Sister Catherine, whose parents and siblings have been wounded by her Christian faith and her desire to become a nun wonders ‘Why would God ask me to cause my family so much pain?’
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That child playing ‘everything is something else’: it was no doubt helpful in that situation. But denying the reality of what lies around us is no long-term solution.
And so we wonder: are these nuns deluding themselves with their imaginings of a loving God, and a call and a purpose?
But in Sister Julienne’s questioning she is reminded ‘why I am here, how much I can do, and who sustains me.’ Yes we Christians do stretch our imaginations. Yes, ‘everything is something else’: not ‘something else instead of’ but ‘something else as well as.’
We accept life, our circumstances, the struggles and confusion, but we have seen and heard enough to believe that nothing around us is ‘ordinary’, that everything is an expression of the God who holds all things together, who loves us and invites our response.
And so we sing with the nuns in chapel ‘Praise the Lord oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits.’
Heidi Thomas, discussing the dark themes the show sometimes explores, has said that viewers feel safe in the world centred on Nonnatus House and ‘if people feel safe you can take them to some very difficult places because they trust you.’
And because Christians believe we live in that spiritual dimension, that ‘something else’, we feel on our clearer-seeing days utterly safe (even when we are facing very trying circumstances) because we trust the divine Showrunner.
