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.  

THE WAY IN

 

I used to resent Lent. In the rising glory of the spring – flowers, birds and sunshine --, in the rising energy of my youth, it told me in no uncertain terms to be gloomy, to be penitent, because I was a miserable sinner. To be miserable and in a kind of mourning for forty long days. To fast: to give up all the good things and moments of my days and ways; to go to bread and water and maybe the odd fish, when the world was full of delicious temptations to give in to. I didn’t feel like a miserable sinner: I knew I was far from perfect, but heck, basically I wasn’t a bad egg. The whole thing seemed perverse and rather revolting.

            There were good moments. When I was about thirteen, my parents took me to the annual performance of Bach St. Matthew Passion in Naarden, a small ancient town in the centre of the Netherlands, where the great work was played and sung in its entirety, with break for a picnic lunch in the open air. The performers were the finest the country had to offer; and Laurens Bogtman, who sang the part of Christ, was so imbued with the spiritual responsibility of the part that he prayed and meditated for months before the concert. 

            Much later, a cheerful parish priest told us that Lent was a sort of spring clean of our spiritual house: confession was throwing out the accumulated garbage, almsgiving was sharing hoarded food with a neighbour down on his luck, and fasting was stopping yourself from piling up new junk to clutter the swept and garnished rooms.Such a positive view was appealing; but Lent, after all, ends in Easter, and with that it seemed to have little to do. 

            This year, now that Lent is with us again, a new interpretation occurred to me – new to me, though ancient and long known to saints and sages. Lent, I now believe, is the way in to the wonder of the gift. The gift is the Cross and the man upon it; the gift is the empty Cross and the empty tomb; the gift is the stupendous love described with great sobriety by R.S. Thomas:

 

And God held in his hand
A small globe.  Look he said.
The son looked.  Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour.  The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
               On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky.  Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs.  The son watched
Them.  Let me go there, he said.

 

The gift, first of all, is the Coming, the Incarnation. Then, the gift’s continuation is the  teaching, the preaching, the healing. Further and intensely, the gift is the Sacrifice: the cup drunk to the dregs. And climactically, the gift is the Resurrection: the conquering of death, for us, the everywhere and always presence of love, for us, the continuing nearness of the bread and wine of forgiveness and renewal, for us.

            For many, in this age of creeping neopaganism, all this is quite simply unknown. ‘Huh?’ The gift, for them, is not only unknown but meaningless because they have not learnt to reflect upon their human condition. But for those of us who do have some connection to the faith, the gift is often seen in faded colours, part of an old wallpaper, its annual remembrance become repetitious, ritual.

            The gift, in its vast power and complexity, invites wonder. To respond to it suitably is to be overawed, to be amazed, to be very nearly perplexed. 

            And I am coming to the conviction that Lent is the way in to this wonder. By a cross of grey ash; by damping down our own egotistical life-force, by constraining it in some kind of fasting; by opening the eyes of our souls, to others and to God, in giving time or money; and by opening our ears to the murmur of the Spirit in praying with, as Solomon put it, a listening heart; we make ourselves capable of the wonder that can recognise and respond to the Gift. 

            So now I see Lent not as a contradiction of the joy of spring but as an accompaniment and an intensifying of it. The way in to the wonder of the gift.

 

GHOST

 

 

He is the oddity in the Trinity: like Winnie the Pooh’s East Pole, people don’t seem to like to talk about him. Well, Anglicans and Catholics, annyway. He is an ancient embarrassment: it was he, after all, who was at the origin of the notorious filioque clause, on account of which rival groups of medieval monks came to blows. Does he, did he, “proceed from” the Father, or from the Father filioque “and the Son”? The author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (Luke?), on the other hand, is quite at home with him: Pentecost/Whitsun is his feast. Genesis says that he was there at the beginning: like a vast and formless fowl he “brooded over the waters” of the tohu-wa-bohu, the primeval chaos. “By him, all things were made;” yet at the same time he “bloweth where he listeth” and none can tell whence he comes and whither he goes. 

            St Ephrem of Syria was called his harp. Perhaps his wind-harp, sounding as he passed. And there is always in meditations on him a sense of air moving. He is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin: in each case words of three meanings, “breath”, “wind or breeze” and “spirit”. (Our, or rather Cranmer’s, “ghost” comes from the Old English gast, linked to German geist, always a spirit.) In John 20:22 the resurrected Yeshua gives him to the disciples: “and then he breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost”.

            Theologians tell us that he is the love between the Father and the Son. This ties him closely to both, and reminds us that love is the language, the essence, of the Deity; but in no way does it enable, or even encourage, us to regard him as a person. This is a bother in prayer. Do we pray to him? We can pray to the Father; we can pray to the Son; but can we pray to (someone who is) a relation(ship)?

            Strangely, I think we can. It does, of course, seem presumptuous; but no more so that praying to the Creator of everything the Webb telescope sees as if he were our dad, and no more so than calling upon the Resurrected King of Peace and informing him that I, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe, have sinned today. If we can forget scale, and address him firmly but humbly, experience has convinced me that he listens. If we ask him for such things as he is not only able but willing to give, we shall usually receive them: guidance, for instance; direction; love where we lack it; discernment; and courage. 

            And as this happens, and goes on happening, in our nighs and quiet moments, we do gradually get a sense of a person on the other end of the line. A person who rarely speaks in words, but who sometimes forms a perfectly clear idea or response to the eye of our mind. One surprising example: one night, I asked him to help me, a former Protestant, better to understand the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There was silence, both aural and visual; then, suddenly and briefly, a clear vision of a deep well in time, at the bottom of which I saw a clearly prehistoric, clearly female, hand reach out and make fire, and light some kind of primitive candle or oil-lamp. That was all; but it was a clear response, and equally clearly it was up to me to make sense of it. I should be hard put to it to explain it; but my feeling of having understood was, and is, entire. 

            When I need him, I call upon him; and if his answers are never simple, he has never let me down. 

            Accende lumen sensibus:                    unto our senses strike the light
            Infunde amorem cordibus:                 abundant love pour in our hearts
            Infirma nostri corporis                        shore up our bodies’ weakness now
            Virtute firmans perpeti.                      with virtue that will bend nor end. 

 

(from Hrabanus Maurus’s glorious 9^th-century hymn Veni creator Spiritus)

 

AVECARNE

 

Advent, when I was young, was a penitential time, a sort of milder Lent. You gave up something and were encouraged to search your soul. The darkness of the season was also, perhaps, the darkness of your sinful self; and the awaited light of Christmas announced itself with a very cautious and meagre growth of candles. Christmas, that hybrid feast of salvation’s birth, light’s return and Saturnalia, would be the explosive reward after four to five weeks of deepening gloom. 

            There are things in today’s Church I do not like: the decline of solemnity and reverence; the frequent implication that the tired, the sad and the melancholy in the pews are bourgeois rentiers who need to be shaken out of what peace and comfort they have found; the relentless pursuit of the Second Commandment, in its NGO simplification, over the First. But among the good tendencies I cherish is the new interpretation of Advent. We are now encouraged to see it as a time of waiting: waiting for, and waiting upon. Waiting for the Coming that has always already come and is always still to come; waiting upon the holy, the silent, the infinitely vulnerable love of the infinite who waits upon us. 

            Lent is introduced by Carne-vale: a farewell to meat; but also a farewell to the flesh, to sarx in one Biblical sense: to the insistence of the bodily, the daily, the worldly. And in that, our farewell of course anticipates and echoes His farewell: His farewell to the flesh that He had taken on to be part of what He loved and wanted to save: our precious but lurching human race. The Passion and Resurrection are his carne-vale, a gradual one completed in the Ascension. 

            Seeing this helps me to understand Advent better. Not a carne-vale; but the gradual anticipation of an ave-carne – an in-carn-ation. A taking-on of the too, too sullied human flesh; the flesh that, whatever the spirit’s willingness, is always so movingly weak. The flesh that gives us pleasure, that accords us sometimes a foretaste of ecstatic joys; but that lets us down, that attacks, that suffers, that dies. In R.S. Thomas’s “The Coming”, the Son, peering down at the thin yearning arms on a small polluted globe, says, “Le me go there.” And in going, to us he comes. He takes on that carne, he in-carnates. 

            And we? By Isaiah and other seers, we have been given notice that this coming is coming. That is it is true and will be real. Knowing that, we wait. Waiting is different from the daily round: it is the daily round pointed toward something. But for what? We have been told that at “the end” there will be a Parousia, a final Second Coming; and as a whole and in the long run, we wait for that. Vigilantly, because we have been told that it, that He, will come silently and suddenly, like a thief in the night or like a most peculiar bridegroom. 

            But for now, in this Advent, what we immediately wait for is the ceremonial mini-Coming that annually renews the Great Promise. Soon, we shall re-enact the Nativity, but at the same time we shall light candles, celebrate Santa Lucia, eat massive meals in a season of no natural food, defy the darkness, sing of Yule, imitate a silly fake-Santa-Niclaus by giving each other things; in fact, we shall celebrate not only light but the Flesh: the Flesh that He honoured, and will honour again, by taking it on, by settling into it; by an Ave-Carne.

Image: Edward Weston (1886-1958) "Neil [his young son] Nude" (1925)

A MONARCH AND HIS AWKWARD SUBJECTS

The Church tells me that Stir-up Sunday is actually the feast of Christ the King of the Universe, and my unreconstructed mind wonders what to do with that concept. If He is King of the world, the world clearly is unaware of the fact, like South Sea Islanders in the 18th century ignorant of the fact that their island now belonged to King George III. Also, in such a case, He is having a hard time making his laws obeyed and encouraging His subjects to keep the kingdom in good order. If He is King of the Universe it becomes more comprehensible: so many trillions of planets to look after, maybe it’s been centuries since He looked at ours.   

The real point may be to remind us that we are idle if not actually rebellious subjects, and that we may not be able to get away with this for ever. We are, as St Teresa reminded us, the only arms, hands, legs and eyes God has on this planet. It may be, as astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau reminds us, that we are already too far gone in collective suicide for anything feasible to save us; it may be that our race’s evolution since 1600 has been a disastrous mistake; it may be that we really were meant to go on living as hunter-gatherers with a 35-year life expectancy. In that case, what should our reaction be as children of a loving God?

Given the unlikelihood of any government on the planet’s being ready to turn the clock back 500 years, we might simply concentrate on the two commandments to which our King reduced the 613 He inherited: to love our Father with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength; and to love our neighbor as ourself.  

For the first, that means praying more which, as French bishop Olivier de Cagny reminded us recently, means listening more. Solomon, when God offered him whatever he pleased as a new king, asked for a listening heart. We listen to others, if we are wise; but do we listen to Him? More often, we bombard him with requests, as if we were children yelling to Santa. We might learn to shut up and listen more. 

The link between the two commandments is praying for others. Again, though, let’s not make it a wish-list: our loving Father knows perfectly well what we should like for those we love (and perhaps even for those we love less). What praying for others means is helping to place them in the trajectory of the Father’s love, commending them to His attention, and (thus) adding our strength to theirs in their need. 

So now we are in the second commandment which, the Gospel tells us, is “like unto” the first. Not the less for being second, in other words. And yet without the first to order and protect it, it turns the Ekklesia that is the Church into a humanitarian NGO that will eventually succumb to some form of original sin. So we should be as the good Samaritan – do what we can for the needs around us, privileging the hic et nunc, the here and now rather than the distant and mediatised – and then continue our journey, always praying.

For this Kingdom of the Universe, for this kingdom of a fevered planet, prayer is still the most important of all languages, of all sciences, of all music and of all poetry. Even as we work even as we play, even as we suffer, let us be His troubadours: artists and poets of prayer. That is what hope is made of. 

 

THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

 Tomorrow is the glory of all the saints. The grand saints, who are known to millions: St Mary Magdalen, St Francis, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Teresa of Avila, Ste Thérèse of Lisieux, and my beloved patron saint St John (Yochanan), the only disciple who didn’t skedaddle from Golgotha but stayed at the foot of the Cross.  But also the little saints whom nobody knows except their neighbours, their family members, or the customers of the store or restaurant or gas station where they serve, or the passengers of the taxi they drive. The people who are always there when you are ill and feeling down, who give you a smile on a grim day, who make you feel for a moment that life is not so bad after all. The people of whom you know that they feel your pain – and the knowing already calms it a little. 

            Tomorrow, then, is their feast. Worth celebrating hugely. Buy them a beer, or just lift your glass and think of them with love.

            But tonight: the Eve. What is the Eve? La veille, as the French say. And in that word is the verb veiller, to watch, to stay awake and alert. Because, said the ancients, on the Eve of such a feast, a feast of so much sheer goodness, the forces that cannot bear the goodness, that find it intolerable, will come out and torment. They will flly and slide and whisper around our houses; they will try to enter our minds and persuade us that the world is lost, that Evil has allready won, that there is no hope, and that we all are just killers without a gun. 

            And that – tell your children – that is why we carve pumpkins into grimaces, why we parody evil in silly costumes, why we celebrate goofy trick-or-treats, why we have drunken parties: to taunt the evil spirits, to show them that we are not afraid, because All the Saints are with us, and tomorrow we will celebrate them with dignity and style, and be thankful for their prayers and their protection. We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the universe, but we are also children of God, and we are loved. We are never alone under a black sky; we are never delivered utterly unto hate; we are loved, and the Evil One cannot defeat our faith. 

Happy Hallowe’en!