Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
11th of June, 2023
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
I was ten the first time I read Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, and it traumatised me for life. It was not the madwoman in the attic who horrified me, but Jane’s life at the Lowood Institution, based on Bronte’s own experience at a Clergy Daughters’ School. I hated the Reverend Brocklehurst who oversaw the school and I have never forgotten the outrage I felt at his addresses to the teachers and his labelling of Jane as a liar. Upon discovering that ‘a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese’ has twice been served to the inmates of the Institution by a teacher because the breakfast was inedible, Brocklehurst intones:
You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying. Should any little accidental disappointment of the appetite occur, such as the spoiling of a meal, the under or over dressing of a dish, the incident ought not to be neutralised by replacing with something more delicate the comfort lost, thus pampering the body and obviating the aim of this institution; it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them to evince fortitude under the temporary privation. A brief address on those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicial instructor would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the primitive Christians; to the torments of the martyrs; to the exhortations of our blessed Lord himself, calling upon his disciples to take up their cross and follow him; to his warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to his divine consolations, ‘if ye suffer hunger or thirst for my sake, happy are ye’. Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls![1]
Luckily my utter abhorrence of both Brocklehurst and his version of Christianity, though I did encounter them at an impressionable age, did not influence my later life choices. Continue reading
