Tag Archives: Victor Hugo

Strange Meetings and Grace

People called to some task when they were not expecting it have changed the world: Moses discovering the burning bush as he leads sheep in a desert; disciples of Jesus who don’t even recognize him when he meets them on the road to Emmaus; Paul meeting Jesus on the way to Damascus even while he is intending to arrest Jesus’ followers.

Some may at first resist the calling and the changes it requires. Commenting on Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Caitrin Keiper notes the time it took for Valjean to change from thief to benefactor of those in need. In the beginning, after Valjean is caught stealing and brought before the bishop, the bishop not only pardons the man but even gives him more silver. Valjean, however, leaves only to steal again—but then he realizes what he has done, and the redeeming process begins. (“Masterpieces of Impossibility,” Plough, Autumn 2022)

At some point, a calling is answered or a debt is forgiven or a gift is bestowed and accepted. The results, Keiper writes, are a “contract with grace.” The contract stretches “to infinity as it is passed on from one person to the next.”

Somewhere today, even among political hatreds or attacks on defenseless civilians or misery caused by selfish oligarchs, those usually small but called ones are working. They are the ones we search for, to join our callings with theirs.

The Unwired World and Victor Hugo

My husband and I accidentally became part of the unwired world. On a recent trip to my college reunion in Birmingham, Alabama, we discovered that we had left behind not only our laptop but our iPad. We gazed in horror at ten days ahead with no internet connection other than what we could snatch from those hotel lobby communal computers.

No access to instant maps, weather, and the news. And what about my blog posts? Overseeing a contest I was involved in?

Well, I wrote the blog hurriedly, but the Hampton Inn computer sufficed. I learned to dart through my email. No dawdling when another hotel visitor paces on the other side of the glass door waiting his turn.

But how would we exist without our internet fix? None of that early morning time shaping my latest work in progress, either.

My husband contented himself with the only print novel we had brought along. I jealously guarded my Kindle, on which I had recently downloaded our next book club selection, Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. I had thought its old-fashioned prose would turn me off, suitable only for releiving bordom on the cramped airplane ride. Instead, as I took the time to savor it, I relished the beginning chapters that set the atmosphere with its naration of the old Bishop’s care for the vulnerable ones. When Jean Valjean finally appeared on the scene, I eagerly turned the electronic page to savor the Bishop’s handling of Valjean when he was caught with the Bishop’s silver service.

I lost myself in the story when the Bishop told the authorities that not only had he given the silver to Valjean, but that he had meant to give him some silver candlesticks (which the thief had missed in his hurried departure from the Bishop’s residence) and handed these over as well. I’ve never seen a piece of fiction illustrate Jesus’ instructions to give to those who take from you. It exemplified the Christian ethic: giving instead of hoarding, forgiving instead of retribution, loving instead of despising those who have broken society’s rules.

I may have grasped the story reading it hurriedly between my time on the computer, but not with the delight that this leisurely read allowed me.