ITV PLAYER CRASHED last night as thousands tried to watch Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey online. I don’t wonder. This is television at its best. Echoes have reverberated in me throughout the night and throughout a busy Monday. I think it’s something extra-ordinary and am apparently not alone.
Several conversations today have reflected upon Lady Mary’s being both a flawed character and utterly, utterly loveable at the same time. And I feel like that about almost all the characters – even the awful O’Brien calls forth a measure of sympathy in me. What a miserable existence her kind of spitefulness ekes out in the lives of anyone who harbours it. And the cowardice in young Thomas (God help him) rings painful bells.
Gazing upon a maelstrom of societal change that seems now, in 2011, as though it’s as familiar as yesterday, I’m deeply, deeply touched anew by the enormity of the tragedy wreaked upon countless millions of lives by warfare – between nations and between persons. There’s a power about Downton that – and I really mean this – renews my vocation as a priest. And I’m not talking here about being a parish priest though that’s my profession. But I’m talking about a renewed vocation to Christ-likeness, to compassion, to empathy, to a trying to see through, and learn to live with, the flaws that are a part of every human life, without exception, to that which is utterly, utterly loveable and – with only the slightest bit of effort and imagination on my (or anyone’s) part – understandable.
May we learn to swim and to thrive in the tide of change – each of us as flawed and in need of change (sometimes called “repentance”) as everyone else. May we learn to swim in the tides of life and of love. I don’t believe we were made in order to be overwhelmed, or to be drowned by life’s ebb and flow, nor constantly to be required to toe the line according to someone else’s beck and call. I truly do believe that we’ve been made and fashioned to be free. But we have to learn to live freely, and responsibly, just as surely as Lady Edith has to learn to drive a car, Lady Sybil to bake a cake and an entire human generation to come to terms with something of redemption’s arising out of one of the greatest ever human catastrophes.
Every generation has to aspire to a “Brave New World”. But surely to God we can learn to aspire, we can learn to change, without further recourse to such catastrophic human upheaval and distress. No classical painting of Hell ever quite envisaged what we now know was found by young innocents in the battlefields of the Somme. I can feel in my soul that Downton Abbey has some more important lessons in store for us, upstairs, downstairs and in unspeakable trenches …
Marvellous. And actually extra-ordinary.
