CONFESSIONS OF A HELVIDIAN

I have gradually – as a Catholic friend predicted years ago – acquired a great fondness and veneration for her whom Anglicans call the BVM and Orthodox the Theotokos. Mary, or Mariam/Myriam as was probably her actual name, is indeed, as the theologians say, the first and foremost in humanity’s response to the Saviour. Her reply to the alarming appearance of an Archangel in her spinning-room on an afternoon in March was “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” And with that, she set the tone for all of us. 

She has, of course, become whatever the faithful want her to be: Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady Star of the Sea, and – a particular favourite of Pope Leon IV and of mine – Our Lady of Good Counsel. She is often easier to address than her Son, and one often feels that she is a kindly listener.

The veneration the Church accords her has resulted in some curious dogmata. Most recently (1950), her bodily Assumption into Heaven, celebrated on August 15. Perhaps the earliest was that of the Divine Motherhood (Ephesus, 431). Her freedom not only from personal sin but from Original Sin was proclaimed by Pius IX in 1854.

All these are far removed from our daily experience and concerns. Faced with them, even a faithful Catholic may shrug and say OK, why not? I feel the same way, though only if I agree not to think about them too closely. But the fourth – in history, the second – dogma halts me in my tracks. This is the dogma of her Perpetual Virginity, proclaimed by the Lateran Council in 649. It is because of this that Yeshua’s brothers and sisters, mentioned in Mark 6:3 – the brothers even by name: Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and Shimon – had to be demoted to “close relatives” or “cousins”. This was clearly of the utmost importance. Why? Because, according to even the early Church Fathers, sexuality, even in holy marriage, was a “defilement” and thus, obviously, inapplicable to the Mother of Yeshua Meshiach. Him she had to conceive “without sin” by the Holy Spirit; but that was not enough: she had to continue her virginity lifelong.

In part, such “virgolatry” is a trait of Mediterranean culture. In most if not all of the countries surrounding that inland sea, women are seen as one of three avatars: virgin, mother  or whore. Mothers are respected; but the Mother of Christ was above even such respect, hence virgin. Secondly, we see here also a remainder of Manicheism, which flourished in Europe from the second century on and was only slowly disappearing at the time of the Lateran Council. Its dualism, which saw flesh and matter as inherently evil, had a long underground life, reappearing in the Middle Ages with the Cathars and persisting, in one form or another, even to this day. 

One sees, therefore, why the Council adopted such a position; however, it did not do so without at least some opposition. The main opponent was one Helvidius, of whom we know little, and that little only from the treatise that St Jerome wrote against him: De Virginitate Beatae Mariae, Adversus Helvidium. From Jerome’s citations, we can gather that Helvidius’s opinion was thoroughly commonsensical: he took Mark 6:3 seriously and maintained that Mary, while virgin at the time of Jesus’s birth, went on to have a normal family life with Joseph, giving birth to four more sons and at least a couple of daughters. Jerome berates him and insults him, and goes on to use elaborate arguments to suggest that Jesus’s brothers were cousins, that a “firstborn son” may just as well be an only son, and that not only did Mary remain virgin, but that Joseph himself was and remained virgin all his life. True, he says, marriage is an honourable state; but virginity is much to be preferred for those who would be holy, because while a virgin only wants to please God, a married woman must and does make an effort to please her husband before pleasing God. It is perhaps true that there have been holy women who were married; but in that case they were holy only when they had ceased to have sexual intercourse. 

The Catholic Church finds it difficult if not impossible ever to alter a theological position it has adopted: hence, Mary’s perpetual virginity is still dogma. One does wonder how many Catholics actually believe it; but among Catholic laymen the counterpart to the Church’s rigidity is often a capacity -- not shared by, and always suprising to, Protestants – for cognitive dissonance: in other words, believing two incompatible things at the same time. Many years ago I heard on the radio an interview with some Irish working-class women about birth control. Do you practice birth control? the journalist asked. Of course we do, they replied. But you are Catholic, aren’t you? Oh yes, we are that. And the Church forbids birth control, doesn’t it? Oh sure, yes it does. Well, don’t you feel that there is a problem there? At which they burst out laughing and said, And why should we care what a bunch of old bachelors in Rome say?

I love to think of the Holy Family, and will write some more about that. Meanwhile, I am a Catholic, though not officially Roman, and I am an unashamed Helvidian, no matter what some Macho Mediterranean Manicheans foisted upon the Holy Church.

                        Image: Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the church of Gennazano, near Rome

 

I CAN THINK OF NO OTHER EXPLANATION

Note: what follows is in no way intended to refer to any living normal human being.

I am eighty-four years old, I have watched with interest the political developments and personalities of five countries for many years, I grew up with lived stories of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, and I am now faced with President Ubu, an enigma that calls for an explanation before any reaction can be contemplated.

Ubu is not like Vladimir Putin. Putin is an unscrupulous KGB-er with a greater than usual talent for the logistics of tyranny. Putin feels that “the West” has humiliated his rodina, his motherland, and in this he is not entirely wrong. Being an unscrupulous KGB-er, his instinctive reaction is tyranny at home and revenge abroad. The result is a sullen silence at home and the sound of closing doors as formerly friendly countries depart.

Ubu is not like Josef Vissarionovich Djukashvili, the Man of Steel or Stalin. Stalin was a darkly savage brute whose only dream was power, for himself and for his country with which he identified even as he despised it. Stalin did not invade Ukraine: he depopulated it by starving its inhabitants. Stalin created Siberian labour camps, kangaroo courts and mock trials and killed more people than even his German rival. 

Ubu is not like Adolf Schicklgruber alias Hitler. Hitler was a minor but brave soldier ulcerated by defeat, by the humiliation of Versailles and by the fearsome economic collapse that followed. Hitler was not a great man but an ordinary one who pursued his dream of greatness with the merciless application of his one talent: oratory and publicity, and pursued it in the key of goosestepping militarism.

Ubu has a bit of each of them, but is essentially less. He has the resentment of Putin, but pettier; he has the power-hunger of Stalin but does not dare actually kill; he has the publicity talent of Hitler but not the discipline. He has the mental equipment of a twelve-year-old and the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old. He is old, fat and ugly; his speeches are the wandering rambles of senility; his mind is a television screen where reality appears in video clips with sound bites; he agrees with the last person he has talked with; and underneath it all, he is constantly trying to prove to the ghost of his father that he is not the “loser” that ghost accuses him of being. In other words, he is childish, narcissistic and of a stupendous unimportance.

And he is the most powerful man on a planet of 7 billion others; he rules that planet’s most powerful country; he has turned hundreds of powerful, intelligent politicians into slinking, craven bootlickers whose only idea of policy is whatever he dictates from moment to moment; and he has surrounded himself with an inner circle of clever, unscrupulous men who are helping him thoroughly to destroy the nation they claim to serve. 

    For make no mistake: the goal is destruction. The country’s democratic institutions must be humiliated, undermined, laid low and demolished. From social services that help the sick, the poor and the miserable to universities that produce cutting-edge research in medicine, science, mathematics, technology but also in history, literature, anthropology, art and music: all must be destroyed, utterly. And it is happening. Extraordinary as it may seem, he scores victory after victory, triumph after triumph; whenever he is finally about to fail, fate gives a twist of its tail and he comes out, once again on top. And the country bleeds, like some Egyptian camel described by Lawrence Durrell that is being dismembered with axes while still alive, to make a meal for the assembled pilgrims.

This is not possible. This cannot be happening. An evil twelve-year-old who pulls the wings off flies cannot have near-absolute power over the earth’s geatest former democracy. It does not add up. 

There must be an element we are missing, says the Startrek observer studying this, to the Captain. 

There is. I can think of no other explanation. I have resisted it as long as I could, but it keeps coming back.

Demonic possession. Most people no longer believe in it. But Father Vincent Lampert, the Vatican-trained official exorcist for the Diocese of Indianapolis, a cheerful realist who has exercised his profession for 18 years, has no doubts whatever about its existence. It is rare but real, and is accompanied by other types of infernal activity.

I am reluctantly but ineluctably coming to believe that Ubu is – now, if not for all of his earlier life – the vehicle for – well, we should perhaps avoid naming him. But he, the Nameless, does appear to be riding Ubu, directing him, and collapsing the knees and the consciences of all who come into contact with him. With the goal, of course, which always Nameless’s: destruction, damnation, chaos and Hell. 

What is needed is not only resistance. It is the charity of exorcism, as well. Ubu is not beyond salvation; but, steered by Nameless, he has corrupted the conscience of millions of supposed Christians. Those Christians who have his, as well as the country’s, well-being at heart; who still believe in the Incarnation, the Bible, the Cross and the Resurrection; will need not only to be innocent as doves but to be wise as serpents; to be very afraid, very courageous, very prayerful – and to find and convince a great exorcist.  

Image: Le portrait du Père Ubu, by Alfred Jarry 

A MOTHER'S HEARTBREAK

 

What is it about Latin hymns that is so attractive, indeed addictive? I think it is at least in part the majestic tramp of the trochaic tetrameter, that so suits the sculptured Latin language. Most of them are in medieval Latin, which makes them easier for us to understand as it has a simpler syntax that is closer to European vernaculars. 

Reading volume V of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s astonishing The Glory of the Lord, I came upon a chapter dealing with “Holy Fools” – and there was the seriously weird Jacopone da Todi (†1303), a Franciscan brother who was reputed mad and wrote fine poetry. He had been a lawyer, and when his wife was killed by the collapse of a theatre stand, he discovered on her body that she had been wearing a penitential hair shirt or cilice. This shocked him into a serious devotion that also gave him strange visions; obedient to one of these he was seen crawling around Todi’s main square on all fours, wearing a saddle, while on another occasion he turned up at a wedding in his brother’s house tarred and feathered from top to toe. He eventually became a Franciscan friar of the strictest sort, a mystic and a poet who wrote one of Christianity’s most famous hymns, the Stabat Mater.

It is a meditation on Mary the mother of Christ, standing at the foot of the Cross on which her son is dying a hideous death. In the true manner of meditation, the poet imagines: he imagines her feelings in this frightful moment, the feelings of any human mother who not only has her child die, but sees him undergoing the truly shocking horror of a crucifixion before her eyes; the whole exacerbated and made still more pungent by the paradox that he who is undergoing this is the Son of God, is God Himself. This imagination is developed for 10 3-line stanzas; then, for the second half of the hymn, the poet places himself beside her and begs her, the model for all the faithful, by her intercession to procure for him participation in Jesus’ suffering: that he may suffer the same pain, bear the same wounds, feel the same near-despair; and that through this he may, at the Last Judgement, be allowed to join his Lord in paradise.

Read with what von Balthasar would call the eye of faith, it is a searingly moving and beautiful work. The tension between the love and horror on the one hand, and the stately measure (in every sense) of the Latin on the other, makes it as disciplined and monumental as liturgy; as such it has been set to music by many great composers. Nevertheless, to me the finest vocal version is the simple Gregorian, chanted here by Benedictine monks. Below I give the Latin with my own translation. If your Latin is not all you would wish it to be, read the translation, and then the Latin, aloud for the rhythm and authority.

1. Stabat mater dolorosa

juxta Crucem lacrimosa,

dum pendebat Filius.

2. Cuius animam gementem,

contristantem et dolentem

pertransivit gladius.

3. O quam tristis et afflicta

fuit illa benedicta,

mater Unigeniti!

4. Quae mœrebat et dolebat,

pia Mater, dum videbat

nati pœnas inclyti.

5. Quis est homo qui non fleret,

matrem Christi si videret

in tanto supplicio?

6. Quis non posset contristari

Christi Matrem contemplari

dolentem cum Filio?

7. Pro peccatis suæ gentis

vidit Jesum in tormentis,

et flagellis subditum.

8. Vidit suum dulcem Natum

moriendo desolatum,

dum emisit spiritum.

9. Eja, Mater, fons amoris

me sentire vim doloris

fac, ut tecum lugeam.

10. Fac, ut ardeat cor meum

in amando Christum Deum

ut sibi complaceam.

11. Sancta Mater, istud agas,

crucifixi fige plagas

cordi meo valide.

12. Tui Nati vulnerati,

tam dignati pro me pati,

pœnas mecum divide.

13. Fac me tecum pie flere,

crucifixo condolere,

donec ego vixero.

14. Juxta Crucem tecum stare,

et me tibi sociare

in planctu desidero.

15. Virgo virginum præclara,

mihi iam non sis amara,

fac me tecum plangere.

16. Fac ut portem Christi mortem,

passionis fac consortem,

et plagas recolere.

17. Fac me plagis vulnerari,

fac me Cruce inebriari,

et cruore Filii.

18. Flammis ne urar succensus,

per te, Virgo, sim defensus

in die iudicii.

19. Christe, cum sit hinc exire,

da per Matrem me venire

ad palmam victoriæ.

20. Quando corpus morietur,

fac, ut animæ donetur

paradisi gloria.

Amen.[9]

There the mother, full of sorrow,

stood beside the Cross-tree weeping

as her Son upon it hung.

Through her soul in sadness sighing,

Sympathetically dying,

Struck and pierced a killing sword.

O how sad and sore afflicted

was that dear and blessed woman,

mother of the Only Son!

How she grieved and sorrowed inly,

Mother reverent, as she witnessed

tortured there her glorious son.

Is there man who’d not be weeping

if he saw Christ’s loving mother

in such pain and suffering?

Who could not with her feel sorrow

as he saw Christ’s holy Mother

grieving with her ravaged Son?

For the sins of all her people

saw she Jesus in his torment

helpless under lashing whip.

There she saw her dearest firstborn

dying and of all abandoned

and at last give up the ghost.

Ah, dear Mother, love’s own wellspring,

make me feel the force of sorrow

that I too may mourn with thee.

Make my heart burn brightly, flaming

in the love of Christ the Saviour,

that he may be pleased with me.

Holy Mother, do this for me,

of the crucified the lesions

print upon my living heart.

Let me share with thee the anguish

of thy Son who in his mercy

deigned to suffer this for me. 

Let me join with thee in weeping

grieving for the one there hanging

for as long as I may live.

Stand beside the Cross together

you and I, this now I ask for,

Closely joined in this our grief.

Virgin high above all virgins,

do not now refuse, I beg thee,

let me weep along with thee.

Let me bear Christ’s death within me,

be the consort of His passion,

and His wounds in me receive.

Let me with his wounds be wounded,

with the Cross inebriated,

drunken with the Son’s dear blood.

Lest I burn with flames eternal,

let me by thee be defended,

Lady, in the Judgement Day.

Christ, when comes my day of parting,

through thy Mother grant me access

to the palm of victory.

When the body falls to dying

let my soul receive the glory

of thy Father’s paradise.

Amen.

Image: Francesco di Vannuccio, Crucifixion (1387-88)

PLOUGHMAN OR ICARUS

It came to me, not in a dream, but out of a dream: a dream of passionate love with a woman with an oval face and otherwise unknown. As I awoke, a double context suggested a verity. The love of Charles (Morgan) and Margaret (Rawlings), I realised, could not but end badly. Why? Because in both cases it was an ultimate love for a mortal. It transgressed, in other words, the Great Commandment. We tend to think of this commandment with an emphasis on the adverbial conditions; suddenly I was led to place the accent on the object of our loving. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength” – the Lord thy God, and no one else or less. Charles and Margaret loved indeed with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and all their strength – but they loved one another so, and that was, and is, idolatry and hubris.

For most people, this is not a danger. Most of us are not capable of such a consuming and consummate love, and would recoil from its approach. That gives us another problem, for how then shall we obey the First Commandment? But it saves us from the danger of an Icarian amour. 

The Commandment remains. It is, truly, awesome. For it, 613 other commandments have apparently been abolished; more awesome still, in it, 613 other commandments have been fulfilled. If, in other words, we can so live as to live that love, no other commandment, no other rule, is needed: it is absolute – necessary and sufficient. And it is universal. But it is universal. It calls upon you and me and the retired fire chief and hunter who is my neighbor. We are not great lovers, not swept-winged albatrosses of the heart. And yet we are called to the sublime. 

If this is a call and a command, what will give us the strength to respond? The answer lies in who is calling. For it is our Father who calls us, who will never ask from us more than we can give. A command, yes, but a command such as a loving father will give to his young child about to run into danger. Stop! Don’t move! He commands out of love; he commands what will save us. And when we respond, he is our place of greater safety. “Thou art a place to hide me in, thou shalt preserve me from trouble : thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:8) 

Image: Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560)

 

IT'S A MYSTERY

 It seems odd to say that one loves the Trinity. One appears to be loving a concept: the name comes from Latin trinitas, ‘tripleness’. An ancient and fairly universal concept: human ideas are known often to take a triple form: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness; Children, Kitchen, Church (Nazi Germany); Work, Family, Fatherland (Fascist France).

The idea that the Deity should take a triple form is scandalous to both Jews and Muslims, who see it as the thin end of the polytheist wedge. And yet a Christian can repeat, with fervour and sincerity equal to theirs, the Shema Israel or the Allahu Aqbar. For the Christian God is One God, in no way connected to Greek or Hindu polytheism. But: he is One God in Three Persons, and this (to quote Shakespeare in Love) is a mystery. The Father is a Person and the Son is a Person; the Father is not the Son, neither is the Son the Father; and yet the Father and the Son are One God. The Holy Ghost (from Germanic geist = spirit) is not the Father, nor is the Son; but he and they together are One God.

The Trinity, therefore, is almost impossible to visualise. The finest attempt to do so is that by the Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 – c. 1430), who painted three human-like figures (properly sexless, in spite of a tasteless modern feminist caricature) seated at a low table with a chalice, the whole forming a triangle perfectly centred within a circle.

The three aspects of the Trinity are so important that traditional theology sees them as Persons. The Father is the Creator who loves his creatures and longs to be loved by them in return. The Son is the Redeemer who with the currency of his own life buys back the creatures from the Devil’s pawnshop window, so that they may go back to returning the Father’s love. The Spirit is that love that passes all understanding, so vast that he too is a  Person, in fact the Person who is right here with us, always accessible, always ready to save us in the nick of time. 

The philosophic psychologist Carl Gustav Jung found the concept of a triangle inherently unstable, and felt that the Catholic Church had solved that instability by seeing the Virgin Mary as a fourth Person, thus incorporating both sexes and creating a stable quartet. 

The Anglican communion, while venerating Mary, is happy with an isosceles triangle’s stability and sees its trinitas as deeply adequate to the human condition. Indeed, it may sometimes create, only half playfully, a trinitas trinitarum, a trinity of trinities, as in this brief and flawless poem by the Anglican saint George Herbert:

                 Trinity Sunday

                               Lord, who hast form’d mee out of mudd,

    And hast redeem’d me through thy blood,

    And snctified me to do good,

      Purge all my sins done heretofore;

    For I confess my heavy score,

   And I will strive to sinne no more.

     Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in mee,

    With faith, with hope, with charitie;

    That I may runne, rise, rest with thee.

Three sections of three lines each; the first two showing one aspect of the Triune God in each line, while the third has three lines each of three elements. In the first section, the Trinity is Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier; in the second, the redemption shows its elements of purgation (cleansing) following confession and followed by the firm intention not to repeat the faults; and in the third section the heart prays to be enriched with faith so that it may run with God; the mouth prays to be enriched with hope so that it may en-courage those in despair to rise; and the hands pray to be enriched with charity so that they may give richly and generously, after which (and only after which) they, and we, may rest.

The Trinity is a mystery; but when it is experienced and joyfully accepted, it allows us to live daily in a transparent cloud of wonder.

PLENI SUNT

 

·      “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that has faith in me, even though he dies, shall live. And all that live and have faith in me shall never die.” (John 11:25)

·      Why are we believers not in a state of perpetual wonder at the magnitude of the gift we have received? Perhaps because we are not often faced with evidence of it in our daily lives. Getting and spending we lay waste our wonder. Worse, infirmities and blows befall us, and worse befalls the Umwelt, the wider world; all of which the Adversary incites us to parse as counter-evidence.

·      Is there, then, a way back, or forward, into recognition and thus renewal? Yes.

·      Pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua. We live, move and have our being in an ocean of God’s glory. Oh yeah? say our atheist friends. Yeah.

·      Begin at beginners’ level: an April day in the Southern French countryside. Everything is in flower, from the humble campion via pale irises and roses’ intensity to the pouring gold of laburnums and the Tyrian shout of Judas-trees. Bees crawl over the wistaria in an ecstasy of fulfilment. A cuckoo sounds in the distance. Bright golden sunshine touches your eyelids, and a cool breeze murmurs to your hair. Yes, you say to yourself: this one’s easy. Nature doesn’t get much better. Glory is all about.

·      The Spoiler, though, is only briefly embarrassed. Look, he says. You are walking slowly, with two sticks. You discover a new pain every day. You have prostate cancer. Your neighbour has had much of his intestine removed and carries a stroma. One of your friends ended up, too young, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Your mother died of a stroke after five interminable years of Alzheimer’s. Glorious?

·      After a brief prayer you reply, Yes. I am here, giving thanks and praise; not only for Thibault the donkey whose nose I just stroked, but for his lookalike, the young radiotherapist who treated my cancer, and the tireless ladies who tended his machine. My neighbour has kept his huge echoing laugh and every scrap of his fighting soul. My friend was cared for with extraordinary love by his wife, a nurse, and his condition brought his friends and colleagues to organise an entire small conference in his honour, in his own remote city, where he was surrounded by honour and affection in his last year. And my mother’s illness brought out in my father a depth of sacrificial love and self-abnegation neither he nor we dreamed he possessed. All conditions of the earth earthy; but that terra was and is plena also of glory.

·      The Contrarian gnashes his teeth, allowing you at last to hear what that sounds like. As we know, he is expert at teleportation; and he whisks you in a whoosh to another part of the country where the houses are experiencing their fifth flooding in two months, women and men are hopelessly piling furniture and working mops and pumps and discovering that their insurance has found an excuse not to pay up even as their walls crack and peel with the absorbed moisture. Aye, he grins. There’s glory for you.

·      But his eyes darken as the Fire Brigade appears. The young men and women are all volunteers, part-timers, the friends and neighbours of the afflicted, They turn up with boats of several kinds, helped by local farmers with tall tractors that brush aside the water; they help the elderly out of their flooded houses, wrap them in blankets and take them to the high-school gym where other volunteers are already preparing hot coffee, tea and cocoa, as well as comforting hugs. Glory creeps in through the windows and swirls invisibly among the rafters. Level Three, and it’s still there: stronger than ever, perhaps.

·      Now the Enemy switches on the television even as he tunes your smartphone to three different social networks simultaneously. As casualty figures from Sudan mingle with Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Islamist decapitations in the Middle East and teenagers kicking other teenagers to death in a Parisian suburb, he grins. Gloria in excelsis? he hisses.

·      Yes, well, this is the graduate course. Were you ever told it was going to be easy? You go back and pray. Time out: need to work on this one. And yet, and yet, something comes tiptoeing out of the wreckage and the gore. Something difficult at first to identify, but call it Horror. You can see it in the faces of the reporters in Boutcha, in the womens’ eyes behind the niqabs, and in the classmates of the French teenagers as well as their parents. It is a strange glory, this: it crawls with agonizing slowness from Fear to No Complicity to Resistance – and it is a glory, perhaps the greatest even: a glory crowned with thorns.  

·      So: pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua? Indeed they are; but often unexpectedly. Which brings us back to That Man. Yeshua Meshiach. Who was expected to turn up as a new King David, with an army, to take Jerusalem and then make the Romans an offer they couldn’t refuse; and who instead appeared as a tall, bony itinerant rabbi striding through the North Country, preaching in villages an unlikely message of returning the measureless love of an invisible Father and extending risky affection to troublesome neighbours. A supposed monarch who rode into town on a donkey; a holy man who let himself be put to a hideous death with slaves and killers; a dead man who came back and ate fish on the beach with his friends. From his life to his message to his return, everything about him is unexpected. You can’t make this up. This isn’t a religion: gods don’t act like this. Gods drink nectar on mountaintops and flirt with nymphs.

·      So, this being the case, we may expect gloria sua also not always to be probable either. And it works both ways. If we learn to recognize the glory, from the laburnums all the way to the resistance, then perhaps we can begin to understand the Gift – a Gift which, like the glory, lives below and beside our everyday life, an insistent and reassuring heartbeat. A vita eterna that has already begun, coursing silently but mightily through our days, always only the whistle-thin membrane of a prayer away.

AN UNLIKE SEASON

 

 

This year, everything has been different. Christmas; birthdays; festivities and the daily humdrumlies; and now Easter. No need to go into reasons, some of which are medical, some family-related; but what interests me is what it tells me about our relation to ritual. I was brought up mostly without it: liberal Protestantism was a sober if kindly religion, and such rites as we had were intimate family ones, relating to birthdays, holidays and the Eve of St Nicholas (Dec. 5), which for children resembles the Father Christmas/Santa Claus feast of rewards for good behaviour in the form of presents, and for adults becomes increasingly hilarious.

            When, as an Oxford undergraduate, I became an Anglican, I embraced that church’s newfound ritual with the enthusiasm of a convert. Vestments, incense, liturgy and the inimitable choral music: it was heavenly, in the strict as well as in the figurative sense. And the rich sound of Cranmer’s English, our version of Latin or Church Slavic, meshed gratefully with the Elizabethan poetry that it was my trade and my pleasure to teach.

            Such elevated joys could not, of course, last. First, I moved to France where liturgy was the local version of Vatican II Catholicism: cheerful, appreciated by the country folk, but without beauty or reverence of any kind. Then, on the occasions when I was back in the Anglican communion, I discovered the woes of Common Worship which insisted on addressing the Creator in the language of daily commerce or afternoon tea. Apart from not-very-assiduous attendance at local Mass, I reacted with an increasingly private faith, the more since in France one is surrounded by more or less righteously secular atheists. I read the Carthusians, plunged into St Francis de Sales, was encouraged by St Augustine, and found a mercifully reliable, intelligent and kindly guide in Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI.

            And now, for many months, much of the remaining ritual has had to be simplified or suspended, and I find myself, Catholic-of-the-heart as I now am, back in a life much more like the liberal Protestantism of my childhood. And to my considerable surprise, I do not feel deprived or resentful. On the contrary, the change seems to be affording me a livelier and more intimate relation to the Deity. Daily prayer – the one ritual remaining changeless – is more heartfelt; Lent and Holy Week, kept raggedly and without consistency, nevertheless are more deeply felt than formerly.

            I can’t explain this, yet. But I have had a hint in exploring novelist/playwright Charles Morgan’s concept of the imagination. Contrary to the dictionary meanings, which always link this term to a reality that is absent, Morgan used it to describe his – or any artist’s – relation to something, or someone, present. A place, a person, an event, was to him merely a part of the surrounding landscape unless and until he imagined it. By this, I think, he meant something close to Keats’s remark in his letter to Benjamin Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination . . . the imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it truth.” I believe it also has to do with something else Keats wrote: “The excellence of every art lies in its intensity.” What Morgan calls “imagining” involves a fresh look at something, or someone, previously known without remark: a look that seems to re-create the object, charging it with an intensity partly emitted, partly received. Such “imagination” is lawless: one does not control it though one may co-operate with it. Great photography is perhaps one of its more comprehensible examples. In art it is best, and necessarily, complemented by a mastery of technique; in human and/or divine relations it needs to be accompanied by care and reverence, by a sense of angels’ fearing to tread other than lightly. But it is a mighty gift that merits immense gratitude and thanksgiving (when the initial surprise settles down). And one lives newly messy and turbulent seasons with real joy.