Geoffrey Chaucer, the guy who might have had Shakespeare’s reputation if Will hadn’t done his thing so brilliantly, wrote this little book you might have heard about. His magnum opus is, of course, The Canterbury Tales, and its prologue reads like 13^th century reality television, a sort of Real World for Medieval England. Chaucer examines his own society in all its wacky diversity and throws twenty-seven characters together on a journey, many of them religious. They are, supposedly, going to pay homage to a slain archbishop, but it's just a set up. We're more interested in the bufoonery on display than the pilgrimage itself.

As I see it, Chaucer’s pilgrims are the perfect mirror of his society.  They are alternately perverse, holy, hypocritical, promiscuous, chaste, and hilarious. The Roman Catholic Church is the target of much of his fun, but he also takes a shot at gender roles, infidelity, body building, stupidity, and farting, among other targets. It’s a hoot, let me tell you.

In re-reading Chaucer, I am impressed by his wit. It can’t be missed. Had Chaucer’s Christian characters all been scoundrels, I would’ve dismissed him as a nasty critic, only eager to expose the religious misfits and hypocrites. But Chaucer’s genius is even better displayed in his evenhanded treatment of the world he observes. Consider this description of the humble Parson, a country pastor whose love of his congregation showcases the transformation of Christ in a perverse world:

He was a shepherd and not mercenary.
And holy though he was, and virtuous,
To sinners he was not impious,
Nor haughty in his speech, nor too divine,
But in all teaching prudent and benign.. . .
There is nowhere a better priest, I trow.
He had no thirst for pomp or reverence,
Nor made himself a special, spiced conscience,
But Christ's own lore, and His apostles' twelve
He taught, but first he followed it himself.

I like Chaucer’s impartiality. The poet painted an unflattering portrait a few stanzas earlier of a religious evangelist selling fake relics for profit and seducing the barmaids, but takes the time to cast his gaze in the direction of a true servant of God in the middle of all that hypocrisy.

Modern satirists, I’m afraid, seem uncomfortably relentless in their attacks, choosing only one absurd camera angle.  They will ignore the beauty right in front of them while chasing the ridiculous. Christians are hammered for peering through a too-narrow peephole from which to see the world, but I say it's a human problem not reserved for the religious. Secularists tune their radio frequencies to the loony hypocrites, all the while missing the clearest pictures of Christ and his transforming power in the lives of regular people.

Chaucer perhaps teaches us that the best critical minds discern the nuances in humanity, the possibility that one man doesn’t speak for all men, the chance that God transcends the absurdities of humankind. I've met both of Chaucer's Christians in my lifetime. The fakers might still be doing their thing, but the humble servants are walking in the light as they've done for centuries. Will anyone notice?