No mercy on the Megabus

Why is sin such a sickly, sticky thing in the human heart?

Jenny Lander

Jenny is training to be a priest. She holds a PhD in law and writes at the intersection of law, politics and theology.

An upset man holds his hands on his head as he misses a bus.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

“I’m begging you, I’m begging you,” pleaded the passenger. His two large suitcases lying around him, the Nigerian man knelt on the pavement outside the Megabus station. The bus driver stood surly-faced, arms crossed. The passenger’s jacket was ripped where the driver had shoved him off the bus. The passenger had one too many bags; he had not read the Terms and Conditions on his ticket.

The man groaned – “I must get to Heathrow, I have a flight to catch! I’m willing to do anything – to pay for an extra ticket, to pay the extra bag fee, I have money, see?” He showed the driver his wallet pleadingly, demonstrating his possession of several bank cards.

A few concerned passengers stepped off the bus. “We don’t have a bag in the hold; we’re happy for this man to have our space.” Another person said, “I booked a ticket but my friend didn’t come – there’s a whole seat’s worth of luggage space available in the hold.” Yet the bus driver would not budge. Even though Megabus has an excess baggage policy, it was down to the driver’s discretion. The driver alone had the power of life and death, to say “yay” or “nay” – to restore a man’s dignity or completely ruin it, along with his jacket.

As the minutes ticked on, other passengers began to get irate with the Nigerian man – “just buzz off mate, you’re making us late!” “You should have read the rules!” “You’re making the bairns on the bus cry!” Stony faces pressed against the window as the man knelt on the pavement. Even those who had tried to help him left him in the harsh hands of the bus driver and his colleagues, tiny kings in a kangaroo court. For the bus driver, there was no backing down – he was pacing, sweating and red-faced, repeating over and over again to himself his side of the story. And in the end, we left the Nigerian passenger in the heartless hands of bus bureaucracy, wiping our hands of the injury done to him – “we tried.”

How mucky and murky the human heart can be.

The whole experience on the Megabus that day left me feeling sick. We all like to think of ourselves as decent folks, as long as we do our “bit”. But on that bus I realized the difficulty: what is “my bit”? Who decides what is “enough”? How quickly a petty issue of baggage can descend into a power play. How quickly do ordinary nice people become a mob when they are outraged or inconvenienced. How mucky and murky the human heart can be.

The only word that feels strong enough to me to describe this condition is “sin”. This word may sound like a relic of a bygone Britain, but I think it’s as relevant as ever. It’s a serious word, loaded with a sense that the things we do mean more than we know. Sin suggests that I am accountable for how I treat people – not just to my own perception but some higher standard that safeguards the dignity of all human beings. Christians believe that it is God who safeguards our humanity, who sets the standard for how we should and should not treat others. We are accountable “vertically” – to God – as well as “horizontally” to each other.

It seems to me that “sin” is not a laundry-list of rules but more like a tangled knot of slippery threads – I can’t see where it begins and where it ends, in my own heart or in the world at large. The Christian Eastern Orthodox tradition often likens sin to sickness or a dis-ease of the soul; it infects our reasoning, our emotions and our actions. And that’s why the hurt and pain we cause each other is so “sticky” – no one is left untouched by the effects of the damage we cause each other.

It was quite clear to me that there were some “sins of deliberate fault” on the Megabus that day – the bus driver’s behaviour was patently unfair and verging on abuse. But I would say sin also flourished in the self-defending logic of the passengers who just wanted to stay in their lane, and for the Nigerian chap to stay in his. Don’t bother me, with your problems. I look after me, you look after you. There were sins of ignorance too – I felt this sick sense in my stomach as the bus pulled out of the station that there was more I could have done, but I didn’t quite know what. All I know is that every person needed mercy on that Megabus, whether we knew it or not. Ironically, the Nigerian man was the most innocent of all.

Article

Advent

Christmas culture

Joy

Poetry

20 December 2024

6 min read

The Advent poets who can’t wait until the world is sane

Tennyson to Eliot, Rossetti to L’Engle, find despair doesn’t preclude joy.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Beyond a misty and raindrop streaked window, a colourful triangle shape emerges.

Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, critics began to notice a change in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Some thought this was for the worse, that Eliot’s newfound faith dimmed his literary powers, making his usually impenetrable style more conventional. But there is a less cynical view. I think, instead, that his conversion brought a sense of clarity and purpose to his poetry. I think what really happened is that, like many Christian converts before and after him, he found a sense of joy.

Nowhere better can we find that distinctly Christian sense of joy than in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, an Advent poem recounting Jesus’s birth from the point of view of the magi travelling to meet him. Like many of my favourite Advent poems, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is not straightforwardly cheerful, instead dwelling on the idea of alienation. The last stanza of the poem in particular is devoted to the magi’s confusion at returning to their old life after witnessing the miracle of Christ’s birth:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s hard not to read these lines and imagine that Eliot himself might have experienced a feeling of alienation, as a new convert, when looking back on his old life. And yet, the magi’s sense of being ‘no longer at ease’ in their old home, of being among ‘an alien people’, is not something that only converts experience. All of us, whether we are converts or reverts, whether we were brought up in the Christian faith or are still contemplating it with uncertainty, have a moment when we realise that believing in Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection radically changes the way we look at the world.

And conversion isn’t something that just happens once. Every year, during Advent, we are asked to meet despair with joy. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, we’re specifically asked to do this in the darkest and coldest time of the year, when nature looks so gloomy and unwelcoming. As Christina Rossetti puts it in one of our country’s most beloved Christmas hymns, Jesus comes not at a time of flourishing nature, but rather ‘in the bleak midwinter’, when the earth is ‘hard as iron’ and water frozen ‘like a stone’. Just as we persevere in our yearly hope that spring will come again, so too we are called to renew our conversion of heart each Advent, waiting in hope for Christ’s birth.

But hope doesn’t have to mean blind optimism. The older I’ve become, the more I’ve come to think that rejoicing during Advent doesn’t have to involve unadulterated cheerfulness. Grief has its place within joy, as counterintuitive as that may seem. In fact, Advent is an opportunity to cultivate the virtue of hope in spite of grief, and in spite of the evils that we see in the world. ‘Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?’, ask the magi. The answer is both. Each year Christ’s birth reminds us that faith requires us to die to our old selves. For some, this means having uncomfortable conversations with family or friends who don’t understand their conversion to the faith. For others, it means facing illness or death of a loved one or other kinds of trauma without giving in to despair.

None of this is easy, of course. Clinging to hope in dark times can truly feel like ‘bitter agony’, as Eliot writes. And yet, as one of the magi says in the final line of Eliot’s poem, ‘I should be glad of another death’. When we die to our selves, we also experience a new birth in Christ. Even as we celebrate his birth, we are reminded of his death on the cross for us, of the fact that he so loved us that he was willing to bear unbearable pain for our sake.

That kind of love, although it doesn’t remove all the sources of suffering in our daily life, does call for rejoicing. Another wonderful Advent poem, Madeleine L’Engle’s ‘First Coming’, emphasises the necessity of joyfulness in the face of a corrupted world. L’Engle begins by reminding us, stanza after stanza, that Jesus didn’t wait for humanity to become perfect before coming to us: ‘He did not wait till the world was ready’, she begins, before adding, ‘He did not wait for the perfect time’, ‘He did not wait till hearts were pure’. Rather, Christ came ‘in joy’, to ‘a tarnished world of sin and doubt’, right ‘when the need was deep and great’.

L’Engle ends ‘First Coming’ by encouraging us to imitate Christ not just in his patience, but also in accepting joy now, not when we world finally stops being rife with sin and pain:

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

We can’t wait until ‘the world is sane’ to be joyful. Joy is remembering that Christ really did come ‘to share our grief’, no matter how seemingly unbearable it may be. Lord Tennyson expresses a similar sentiment in his poem In Memoriam, an elegy written after the loss of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. He admits that the pain at his friend’s death is so intense that, as Christmas is drawing near, he almost wishes ‘no more to wake’, and for his ‘hold on life’ to ‘break’. Then, he hears the sounds of bells:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

Happy memories of Christmas bells from childhood are mixed with pain for Tennyson, bringing him ‘sorrow touch’d with joy’. That’s what all the best Advent poems, from Tennyson to Eliot, From Rossetti to L’Engle, show us: that sorrow doesn’t preclude joy. In the weeks leading up to Christ’s birth, it’s normal to dwell on both birth and death; Advent can be a season for both somberness and merrymaking. Most of all, Advent is a time for prayer, that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge that Christ loves us even in our sorrow, and that the very knowledge of Christ’s love may in turn fill our hearts with joy.

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