"Call the Midwife.....the end of an era"

This week was the season finale of “Call the Midwife” which once again had a subtext that is highly relevant to the state of our culture in this Year of Our Lord 2016. It illustrates the continuing clash between traditional religious values and the overwhelming force of socialized government. We see this every day. In education. In health care. In marriage. Even in going to the bathroom.

The show also had some significant changes and endings. Spoilers ahead.

This episode deals with two major plot lines. In one the effect of the Thalidomide drug and the birth of deformed babies that hit England like a ton of bricks. They have been setting this up for quite some time. Last season they dropped an anvil when Doctor Cigarette prescribed it as a wonder drug and now the other shoe is starting to drop. A baby was born brutally deformed earlier in the season and was left out to die in a cold room like this was some sort of Greek tragedy. They revisit it as the Mom is found at  the café sneaking gin into her tea. She was devastated. They also had an amazing beautiful baby with flippers for arms and legs. The CGI was amazing and the actress playing the distraught Mom even more so. Dr. Cigarette gets an alert and starts to review his cases and finds several cases including these two. He freaks out. Which is understandable. It is the perfect meataphor for the force of government destroying everything it touches. The National Health mandated prescribing these remedies for nausea and he followed the guidelines like a good little Eichmann. The flipper babies were the result. As the weeping Mom said “Why didn't I just fight through it like me Mum? Why did I take a pill just to make myself feel better?”

The second plot was the death of the beloved Sister Evangelina. She was the working class nun who was the backbone of Nonnatus House and had delivered thousands of babies in her thirty years of no-nonsense service to God and her community. She had a stroke and realized her diminished capacity so she refused to handle infants. But called in to help one of the nurses she had one more chance to help a Mom. In this case a recent immigrant from India in a flea infested hovel without water. She soldiered on and comforted the Mom and the young nurse she was working with. She was exhausted and when she got back home she sat by the fire and quietly died. The outpouring of love from the East End was Spectacular. Her vow of poverty meant everything to her. She gave everything away that she owned. In fact in a subplot the sisters decided to give away her wedding dress that she was initiated into the order. The Nuns were as you know Brides of Christ and used to wear Wedding Dresses when they took their final vows. They gave the dress to a young woman who was getting married while massively pregnant. She gave away her worldly goods even after she had passed.

The outpouring of love was overwhelming. The best part of the season and maybe the series was when the undertaker came to talk to Sister Julienne. He wanted to pay for the entire cost of the Sisters burial. The interment. The coffin. The plot. Everything. He told a story of how he was born two months premature and how Sister Evangelina sat for two weeks bathing him in olive oil and keeping him alive while his Mom was feeling poorly. He got choked up. Sister Julienne got choked up. I am not ashamed to say I cried like a little bitch. It was an amazingly emotional performance.

The point of this is that is how the religious life was integrated into the life of the community. I remember when I was a kid in the 1960’s that was how it was in Brooklyn. There was a nursing sister who helped so many Moms in the neighborhood. The Nuns knew all of our names. Some of them had taught our parents. They provided an institutional religious memory that was the lifeblood of the community. All of that is gone now. People have gone away from the Church. From the Community. Much of it is because of changes in the Church itself. The changes and liberalization of the Church did not increase the Church but instead devastated it. The religious life was no longer a calling in the way it had been in the decades prior. The rules were thrown away just as the government threw away the rules for medical treatments. The government knew best. The government became king and the internal working of the neighborhood and the family was aborted for lack of a better term. People had become rootless and without an anchor.

All of this is foreshadowed in this episode of “Call the Midwife.” Mourn Sister Evangelina. We will not see her like again. Those days are gone forever. The transient lifestyle is the norm. The government will break every taboo and every rule that has kept society coherent. Gay marriage. Abortion of viable babies at the whim of the mother. Perverts and mentally ill people being able to lawfully enter the bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex. Soon enough pedophilia and polygamy and even bestiality will be normalized and declared to be a civil right. This will become the new normal. If it is not already.

The pendulum always swings. It is in the full libertine cycle right now. Until the inevitable reaction. Where that reaction will come from is the question. Will be from the Muslims? Will be from the revival of Christianity and/or Judaism? Will it be some new form of a quasi-religion like the Falun Gong or Scientology? Or will it be a 1984 style government.

I just know it will not be as benign as the reign of the Sisters at Nonantus house. Those days are gone forever.