Shaw’s Mirror: Major Barbara Reflections 1
Book Review
Shaw’s Mirror: Major Barbara Reflections
Kurt Stuke
Franklin Pierce University
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement of
TL715 Leadership and the Creative Imagination
Mary Ann Sullivan, DA
16 August 2009
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Somewhere between my forty-fifth and forty-sixth birthdays, I decided to renew a quest I had
abandoned many years before and reentered a doctoral program. As I prepared my application
materials for the program, I reread some articles I had written more than twenty years ago. I reminisced
about all those years spent studying philosophy and theology. What occurred to me was that despite a
bachelor’s degree, two masters’ degrees, and completing the coursework for a PhD, I did not use my
education as a conversion opportunity. In truth, my faith was as shallow when I was dispersed from the
holy land of academia as when I entered. Over the last decades, despite my arrogance and stupidity,
God managed somehow to find me. No matter how hard I protested or fought, God held on. God’s love
became real for me through the love I experienced (and continue to experience) in marriage. God’s love
became real for me as I experienced (and continue to experience) the joy of being a step-father and
eventually a father. God’s love became real for me as I sat (and continue to sit) quietly in the pews and
participate actively in the sacraments. After all these years and after all these lessons so painfully
learned, I made a commitment to avoid the empty scholarship of my youth and to use my second
attempt earnestly as an opportunity to grow in faith and in service.
Within my very first course, I was tasked with reading Shaw’s Major Barbara. While Shaw’s play
is centered on the title character of Major Barbara, a Christian, the depiction of Christianity through
Barbara’s character is not flattering. I struggled with how to use a non-favorable depiction of Christianity
in my commitment to avoid empty scholarship. As someone who tends to stumble awkwardly upon
truth and insights, it slowly occurred to me that I could learn from studying the reflection of Christianity
as offered through Shaw’s writing – even if unflattering. While the first instinct experienced while gazing
upon an unflattering image is to look away and perhaps hope that the image is distorted somehow, I
forced myself not to look away and to interact with the reflection. In the midst of the uncomfortability, I
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found myself wrestling with the issue of “how ought we to love as Christians?” Thinking back upon my
Synoptic’s course in graduate school, I saw a connection between a well-known verse and what Shaw
was reflecting: “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” (Mt 6:21) The Greek is much
more direct: “thy heart; thy treasure.” It is common, especially among homilies, to place the objects of
our affection as the focus of the Matthean passage. In this treatment, the passage is calling us to
examine the objects of our affection so that, if we are missing the mark, we may change the objects. By
changing the objects or that which is being loved, we change our hearts. Shaw is offering us the
opportunity to use the reflection of Major Barbara’s so that we study a Christian heart whose treasure is
salvation. Should we focus our attention on the soul and therefore prioritize salvation and posteschatological bliss over all matters? Or do we need to change the treasure so that we may change our
heart accordingly?
While it seems intuitive to stress the potential of salvation when proclaiming Christ’s love, there
are some dangers inherent to this approach. The first danger is that the focus on the “redemption of
fallen sisters and erring brothers,” (Shaw, 1905) may be understood by others as indifference to
suffering and marginalization. Thus our actions can potentially create a “barrier to entrance” for us, but
more importantly, to God’s love. Not convinced? Try the following thought experiment: 1)imagine a
community in which unemployment exceeds ten percent, homelessness is rampant due to a mortgage
and lending scandal, medical care is unaffordable and non-existent, the educational infrastructure has
been demolished and almost leveled by budgetary constraints, hunger and hopelessness are present on
every corner, and crime is nearly unpreventable (I wish this scenario were a little more difficult to
frame!), 2) now imagine a Christian who is moved so powerfully by the news that death has lost its
sting (and rightly so!) that he or she has entered that same community solely to bring them the good
news of salvation. Within this thought experiment, the Christian will only speak of salvation but will not
offer any other service. What are the likely outcomes within the scenario? I think the most likely
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outcome is that the messenger will be rejected. It may be a matter of speculation just how forcibly the
messenger is “asked” to leave, but the most likely outcome is rejection. Why is rejection likely? Because
the Christian as alienated himself or herself from the community. Who will listen to a message of love
and hope from someone who seems oblivious to the obvious needs of the community? It is also not
impossible that the message, i.e. Christianity, will be excluded from the community. Note that whether
or not the hypothetical Christian is actually apathetic or whether he or she merely appears to be
indifferent is immaterial. If we are understood or viewed as not caring then, regardless of what is in our
hearts, the damage is done. Also within the realm of possibilities is that the messenger would be labeled
a hypocrite. It is inconsistent to declare on the one hand that “Blessed are the poor” and “God is Love”
while, on the other hand, appearing to be indifferent to the impacts of marginalization. Consider Major
Barbara’s action at the conclusion of Shaw’s play. She welcomes her fiancé’s acceptance of a very
lucrative and powerful position as the leader of an ammunitions company on the grounds that it will
allow her to expand her preaching of the good news of salvation beyond the marginalized (her audience
while working for the Salvation Army), to the middle and upper classes. Shaw is not claiming that even
the affluent need the gospel. He is reflecting an image of Christianity to us that treasures either selfish
needs and/or the good of salvation over social justice and is therefore either inherently hypocritical or
unloving or both. Barbara’s readiness to abandon her flock and her desire to “move on up” to an
affluent community (built on the blood money of ammunitions) is simply a reflection of what she truly
treasures, and, in Shaw’s opinion, a reflection of what is genuinely valued by Christianity in general. In
the least, this particularly grotesque reflection, whether distorted or not, warrants prayerful
contemplation.
The second danger (and I believe this danger is far more grave) of prioritizing salvation is that
we may actually become indifferent to the suffering. Even while preaching the secular gospel of
socialism, Shaw does not lose sight of the need to touch the suffering surrounding him. In the face of
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severe poverty and acute socio-economic oppression as experienced in early twentieth century England,
Shaw exhorts his readers to focus on the suffering of the working class. He calls for action in order to
assuage the suffering. He describes poverty, not the Church, not any of the readily apparent sins, e.g.
war, greed, etc, as the highest enemy of humanity: “And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering,
greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, not any other of
the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.” (Shaw, 1905) After letting the barb of
“priestcraft” pass, I began to realize that Shaw was absolutely correct. We should not be offering “piein-the-sky” to a world that is actually starving. Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate,
calls for a commitment to justice on the grounds that, in the face of growing marginalization as a result
of globalization, a commitment to justice is an expression of genuine Christian love. Within the first few
paragraphs, Pope Benedict demonstrates that if we are to truly love, we must “strive to secure a
common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors.” (Pope Benedict XVI, 2009) In short,
the truly loving heart should treasure the common good and should seek to make that good a reality. I
wonder how differently Shaw would have reflected Christianity in his writings and through the character
of Major Barbara had he witnessed the type of love called for within Caritas in Veritate?
Thus far, I have described various reflections of how others may see Christians through Shaw’s
mirror of Major Barbara. I think it is fair to label the reflections presented as horizontal or as “person to
person” or “fictional character to person” types of reflection. I wonder if there is a more vertical
reflection also present in the same mirror, a sort of “person to God” type reflection. In a recent reading
of Freedom, a text exploring the theology of the body, I read: “our image of God determines who we
understand ourselves to be.” (Pinto, 2009) Thus the” treasure” of salvation as chosen by Major Barbara
offers us insight not only to her “heart” (as explored above) but we can also examine her “treasure” as a
way of understanding how she has bracketed or conceptualized God. I would argue that in order for
her to emphasize the good of salvation to the exclusion of earthly goods, and in order to focus on post-
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eschatological bliss over the rampant suffering of her day, I believe she would have to possess a
predominately platonic vision of God and of reality. If we “see” God as the Christian Platonists have
framed God (and our reality for that matter), then indifference to matters of social justice is
understandable. Existence in heaven is real; existence on earth is not. Our treasure should reflect the
philosophical landscape it is built upon and, in the case of Platonism, should be the soul and its
salvation.
Why should we hesitate in accepting this vertical reflection? Consider the language of the
Apostle’s Creed. Every Sunday, in our masses and in our services, we recite one of the many versions of
the Apostle’s Creed. Regardless of the version chosen, we proclaim publicly that we believe in the
“carnis resurrectionem,” the resurrection of the body. Our faith and our tradition declare that our
bodies are indeed real in a distinctly non-platonic sense as it will be our bodies that will experience the
joy on the other side of the eschaton. Thus a treasuring of the soul over a treasuring of the body seems
profoundly misplaced. By extension, Barbara’s prioritizing of the needs of the soul over the needs of the
body also seems misplaced.
More importantly, we should hesitate in accepting or adopting this reflection as our own as our
faith and tradition informs us that God, unlike the idealic vision of God reflected within Christian
Platonism (and through Major Barbara), is not an uncaring, immovable, and static platonic form
sometimes also thought of as an idealic old man wistfully floating among the clouds, perhaps strumming
a lyre. Rather, God is an eternal gift of dynamic self-giving love, so essentially loving, that Jesus entered
our history, our narrative, in order to offer God’s gift of eternal love, salvation, to us. It is not that
salvation is not to be valued or desired. On the contrary, salvation is a loving expression of God’s desire
for communion with God’s creations and the highest of gifts. But since love is, by nature, self-giving, we,
too, are called to be self giving. Salvation is not merely a message of God’s love; it is an application of
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God’s love. When we love sincerely and genuinely, we proclaim God’s love and not only spread the good
news, as Barbara intended, but we share in the giving and nurturing of that gift. Our treasure, then,
should not be salvation per se but to love authentically such that we become instruments and servants
of God’s love. If we love authentically, our hearts will be transformed and we will be moved into action.
If Shaw were to base a character depicting Christianity upon what he observed in us, would the
reflection, either horizontal or vertical, be different than the reflection as offered through Major
Barbara? What do we treasure? How do we love? Do we love authentically? I hope that I continue to
tend to these questions, not only in my scholarship and as I pursue a doctorate, but throughout all
aspects of my journey.
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References
Pinto, M. (Ed.). (2009). Freedom. West Chester, PA: Ascension Press.
Pope Benedict XVI, (2009). Encyclical Letter: Caritas in veritate. Retrieved July 30, 2009, from Vatican:
The Holy See Web site:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_benxvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html
Shaw, G.B. (1905). Major Barbara. New York, NY: Penguin Books.