Name: The Dean's Watch
ISBN: 9781598568875

Elizabeth Goudge

In a remote mid-nineteenth-century English town, cathedral Dead Adam Ayscough holds a deep love for his parishioners and townspeople. When an obscure watchmaker strikes up an unlikely friendship with the Dean, it leads to an unusual spiritual awakening in both men, and eventually reaches out to the entire community.

The Dean's Watch

Edwin Lang

Some years ago, one very early morning, in the quiet of a long train ride on my way to attend a business meeting, I got the notion that God wanted my friendship. It seems absurd now but then it had seemed ok and that became part of my daily morning prayer. What emanates from The Dean’s Watch, an excellent and uplifting story in its own right, is that quintessential Christian realization: God loves me and I am a sinner. But I have never found that enough – in some way I felt let down by that statement and over time I began to separate thinking, and especially Christian thinking, into two main streams: Old Testament thinkers, and New Testament thinkers. I think Elizabeth Goudge’s story is an example of New Testament thinking. There is a wonderful and stirring moment in Genesis which occurs while Isaac’s son Jacob, in collusion with his mother, Isaac’s heartthrob of a wife Rebecca, is lying to Isaac who by this time is old, feeble and blind, to gain Esau’s birthright. One suspects that Isaac knows that this hairy-man before him is not Esau and a couple of times Isaac asks ‘are you my son Esau?’ and receives in reply from Jacob the lie. And then there is an almost magic moment when we, reading this, sense Isaac’s realization that God is at work here. Isaac then immediately goes along with the lie and blesses Jacob giving him Esau’s share of the fortune. Isaac could do this, make this instantaneous leap of faith, not because God loved him but because Isaac and this He, God Himself, had this special relationship between them, this friendship. We live in an era when there seem to be bosses galore, puny unimaginative grey-souled organization men and women in seemingly every sphere of our lives who want to lord it over us. Like Jacob, they want it all: the power, the glory, the loot. Perhaps in their souls there is a terror that unless they amass power and wealth, lead armies, be the loudest and best, taste victory, their lives will be meaningless and empty. In what I see as his friendship Jacob was ready and able to let it all go. A New Testament thinker believes implicitly in goodness, in the power and movement of the Spirit, in the huge transformative effect that seemingly small insignificant acts of kindness can have on us and on those around us. In the Catholic tradition, we have a lot of the great saints, some of whom contributed to the Church’s power and authority and others who were nearly invisible: Marie Francoise Therese Martin, later to become known as the Little Flower and St Therese of the Child Jesus, and one of our most beloved saints, who lives to only 24 years old, was nonetheless one of these nearly invisible ones who believed in the God of the small and that He meets us where we are, in the most mundane moments of our lives, who like Jesus made God accessible and beloved, and it is said of her that she wrote her spiritual classic in her Carmelite cell in the company of the Holy Spirit. It seems to me no accident that Jesus Christ, God and man, was born obscure and in poverty, remained that way for his entire life, and died in obscurity and quite badly. He is of course the New Testament, and his life highlights what it means to be God’s friend, to be an Isaac, a Little Flower, even to be an Isaac Peabody, a worn-out occasionally depressed master craftsman of clocks. Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch begins and ends with this crumpled old man. The story begins in the quiet of Isaac’s unassuming shop, late Friday, and it is in this quiet that Peabody is writing little uplifting or humourous notes to include in the watches owned by the modest that he has repaired for them. One of these notes goes astray, into the Dean’s watch, and that is how the Dean, Adam Ayscough, a very important man in the City get to know Isaac and how, essentially, the Dean transforms from an Old Testament VIP, a winner by every standard, to a New testament one, living generously, spontaneously, happily and almost selflessly, driven by the spirit of goodness. It is said that when God visits the prophet Elijah it is in not in the glory of riches or a cathedral but in gentle blowing, a whisper, in the hush. I am an extreme dog walker, and although I had to recently suffer the humiliation of down-sizing from a Border Collie / Australian Shepherd mix to a mini Golden Doodle I know still what it means to be in the quiet. I know my seeming ever-presence adds value to the community in deterring criminals, in being available to little old ladies out for some companionship and other dog walkers, picking up stray trash or dogs, chasing away cats, in the early morning and late night, or on cold days when no one with any sense is out, one can feel God’s presence. I will pay any price for such moments. I think Elizabeth Goudge has God more present and active in Isaac Peabody’s shop – in a man who ironically who did not believe in God but lives nonetheless the New Testament way, ethically, invisibly, with kindness and goodness and magnanimously, and in the small – than anywhere else with the exception of Miss Mary Montage, who although perhaps richer and better off than Isaac, is now old, always unattractive, crippled, unmarried and never wanted, but a woman who has dedicated her life to loving. Isaac and Miss Montage are pivotal to the story of Adam’s transformation. I found it interesting that Elizabeth Goudge gave as Christian names for her three key characters: Peabody’s Isaac, a New Testament-oriented friend of God, Miss Montage’s Mary, Jesus’ mother without whom the New Testament would have been impossible, as catalysts for change in Dean Aycough’s Adam, which in Hebrew translates to mankind. Edwin

The Dean's Watch

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