The British Are Coming...and They Won!

They learned from the colonists and masterfully use our own strategies against us.  They hide in the forests and thicket; they lure us to the clearing and then ambush us.  We are shocked, scream against the injustice, but they were victors over us.  They are no longer battling with muskets, bayonets and cannons, but with costumes, venues, the mystique of the British aristocracy and screenplays.  We are enticed episode after episode, follow season after season and then Carnival films, the leading UK television drama producers, drops a bomb on us unexpectedly. 

My daughter and I watched the last episode of this season of Downton Abbey, reconciling the dangling subplots, suspense mingling with hope leading right up to the last few joyous moments of the otherwise crisis-plagued aristocratic family of Lord Grantham.  Finally all seems to be ending well. Even the hints of potential conflict properly whet our appetite for yet another peek into an elegance of a by-gone era.  Rather than giving us a feel-good ending and nudging us toward the next season, reputed Masterpiece Theater turned, with one-tragedy-too-many, a quality series into a soap opera.  We watched the last scene screaming “No! No! You can’t do that!”  But they did.  I gave up soap operas a very long time ago and now I have given up Downton Abbey.  Their catastrophic, irreversible ending was not creative, but what you would expect from a “dime-store-novel.”  It did not leave me wanting more.  I was more than disappointed, I was appalled!

This makes me wonder, “Am I so needy of happy-ever-after endings?”  Certainly in my leisure moments I don’t want to deal with harsh realities, pain and abuse that of course we do deal with in real life.  If such crises appear in my “fantasy life”, I want it reconciled or corrected before the end of the movie or book.  I’m with my favorite author, Lynn Austin, who said, “I loved to read, but I was tired of reading books that didn’t offer hope at the end of them.  So I started writing books with hope in them.”  Even Jane Austen’s novels held conflict, tragedy and unseemly behavior, but she managed to bring about realistic and believable endings to her novels.  And she was British!

“Do I think life doesn’t have drama and tragedy?”  Absolutely not!  I am currently living some drama of my own.  I have friends who have been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, another who will for the rest of her life be at stage-four cancer.  I know real people forced into financial austerity because they have been swindled or caught in the perfect storm of economic downturns.  Downton Abbey’s financial woes were not so incredible. I know a matriarch who this week is burying another of her children who have preceded her in death.  Definitely tragedy is a part of life.  Actually, true life may be more dramatic than fiction.  But there is an element of hope in real life that I lost sight of in Downton Abbey. 

The series allowed us to vicariously view change and the struggle with it in this long-established family.  They faced change on many fronts; we laughed at their struggles, cringed at their insensitivities and identified with the difficulty they faced.  We could say with them, “We like our old ways better.”  Gradually episode to episode we saw new rules and protocol becoming increasingly comfortable and even the staunchest characters survived the process. We don’t have to reach far to recognize similar change processes in our own lives and the resulting revelry and wonderful discovery of “How did we ever get along with doing it all the old way!”  That would have been a sufficient message from Masterpiece Theater instead of the clandestine bayonet through our hearts.

When I turned off the TV, I determined I was not going to give the show or the ending anymore thought.  I had other issues more worthy of my concern.  I repeated that determination every time I woke up during the night.  By the time the alarm went off I had a headache from all the alternative plots I had concocted in my half-sleeping state. 

I can’t pass up any learning moment.  I pull lessons from the most obscure experiences.  So I have one from my disappointment in the Downton Abbey ending.  Unlike movie scriptwriters, directors and producers, God is not out for mere drama in my life, but out for my good.  Whatever adventure, reversals, disappointments, ecstasies, they are all for his best in me and for me.  His “action calls” are purposeful for my life, my abundant life. Do I often balk at the process? Indeed!  But even when all seems doom and gloom, one-tragedy-too-many, and choices are difficult because uncertainties rule the day, I can write the following agricultural metaphor into my life’s screenplay.  It was proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah to a nation who’s obstinacy and bad choices rival Downton Abbey’s and mine.  This passage reassures me that God’s processes in my life are not frivolous nor are they intended to diminish, destroy or crush me. 

Listen and hear my voice;

pay attention and hear what I say. 

When a farmer plows for planting,

does he plow continually?

Does he keep on breaking up and

harrowing the soil?

 When he has leveled the surface,

does he not sow caraway and

scatter cumin?

Does he not plant wheat in its place,

barley in its plot,

and spelt in its field? 

His God instructs him

 and teaches him the right way. 

Caraway is not threshed with a sledge,

nor is a cartwheel rolled over cumin;

caraway is beaten out with a rod,

and cumin with a stick. 

Grain is ground to make bread;

so one does not go on threshing it forever. 

Though he drives the wheels of his threshing cart over it,

his horses do not grind it. 

All this also comes from the LORD Almighty,

wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom. 

Isaiah 28:27-29