Living at Charing Cross

The center of London is the Charing Cross railway station. Samuel Johnson once said "I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross." Perhaps this is why the poet Francis Thompson used Charing Cross as a metaphor in his beautifully penned "The Kingdom of Heaven," where he says:

But (when so sad, thou canst not sadder)
Cry and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's Ladder
Pitched betwixt heaven and Charing Cross,

And yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter,
Cry, and clinging to heaven by the hems,
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Gennessareth, but Thames.

Thompson himself lived at Charing Cross--down and out in the streets of London, with a brilliant intellect that had been squandered when he dropped out of Oxford University due to his opium addiction. Lowly he sank into that grave-pit of life, living and breathing depression. But he magnificently portrays the salvation of his depression with the lines above.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, though helpful, of Martin Luther when he was battling immense and sincere depression. He could not muster the strength to pull himself out of bed for days at a time during the greatest period of difficulty early in his ministry as the entire force of the Papacy had been brought to bear against this young German monk. His wife, one day (as the story goes), walked into Luther's bed chamber dressed entirely in black and announced "God is dead." Luther shouted that his wife had utter unfettered blasphemy. She replied to him "Is it not equally blasphemy to behave as if God were dead?"

It was supposedly out of this episode that Luther was inspired to write the famous hymn "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," the third stanza of which is as follows:

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us,
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.

Being something of a materialist (not to be confused with being "materialistic"), I don't exactly see the world "with devils filled" in some sort of literal sense wherein there are these red or green demonic creatures roaming about the earth. The world, however, is filled with devils, devils of the soul. These devils plague us by manifesting themselves as selfishness, as unloving sentiments, unkind words, unfaithful actions, uncontrolled behavior. They destroy us from the inside out. But they can also destroy us from the outside, too. You see, it is not just the devils within ourselves we have to encounter and fight, but the devils in everybody else too.

We have to meet the selfishness in others with grace and peace. We have to meet the unyielding opinions and motives of others with patience and self control. We have to break the bone of the purveyors of these ills with that kind word the Proverbs speak of.

In the midst of living at Charing Cross, we might be enticed to bow our head under the weight of the miseries of the world. But instead we must look upward, for it is only there that we can see the Ladder of Jacob. From the Book of Genesis,

"Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: "I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."

The beauty of the literature of the Old Testament is its universal applicability to the circumstances in our lives. Francis Thompson understood it marvelously well. We see Jacob's Ladder, not by traveling to a far off land, but in the place where we are supposed to be, or at least the place to which we are to return. We are shown the vision of promise in our own milieu, our own land. Moses may have encountered God atop Mount Sinai, but he would never have done so had God not first reached out to him at the burning bush. Peter would never have witnessed the majesty of the transfiguration had Christ not met him at his fishing boat.

And so Francis Thompson closes his poem with that most beautiful line "And lo, Christ walking on the water, not of Gennesareth, but Thames."