AUTUMN, LEO, AND GOOD COUNSEL

Three months is entirely too long. Why have I been absent from this blog for so long? Well, for one, this summer, here in the South of France but just about everywhere, has been a foretaste of the Place we Do Not Want to Go To. It has left many people, especially agèd crocks like yours truly, enervated, drained, and concentrating merely on survival. 

        Secondly, I’ve been working on a new theological project. Which seems like pretty good cheek for a retired professor of poetry and other literature: I am rushing in where even saintly giants like Josef Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar trod only with great care. And it means that most of my thoughts on Heaven and Earth (and vice versa) have been scribbled into notebooks or typed on computer notes filed under “Theolimag”. And finally, I’ve been made to realise that blogs, man, are so over – if you want to be taken seriously, Substack is the only way.  Well, I love my Substacking friends, but I find this easier, perhaps because I’m used to it, so here we are, back in the autumn and breathing again on a cool and sunny day in Southwest France, and ready to go on muttering into the void.

So what shall we talk about first? Well, Pope Leo is coming to France, and 600,000 people have signed up to attend his Mass in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. In a country where often, among the educated, a cheerful slightly scornful atheism seems to be the order of the day, this has surprised quite a few. So perhaps the rumours of youth flocking to churches are not entirely false? The French are the more pleased that Leo is coming because they remember the deliberate snub they received from his predecessor Pope Francis. And the present Pope, moreover, is one of the very very few international leaders currently respected for their integrity (someone recently said that he and Mark Carney of Canada are about the only two left). At his inaugural Mass in front of St Peter’s, I was delighted to see largely displayed the portrait of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Genazzano that also stands by my bedside. (See above.) She is a very potent defence against folly – a thing much needed in this day when even intelligence is departing for an artifical shore....

A little more privately, I am discovering – by way of a young adopted man distantly related – how extraordinarily difficult a condition bipolarity is. Quite unlike the image I’d always had of it, of people cheerfully incurring a mountain of debts one week and imprisoned in unending suicidal gloom the next. No: the upside being mainly living in a home-made version of reality where you are adult, intelligent, not too badly off, paying the mortgage on an air-conditioned house and owning a car or two, when in real reality you are on indefinite sick leave, out of a job, left by your spouse, living on a tiny benefit, having exhausted your anguished parents’ life savings, and clueless as to how to handle any of that. And the downside? Well, your spouse left you after she had found you in the bathtub with water turning red around your wrists one day.

OK: there’s the wounded traveller by the roadside. You’re in a passing car. What do you do? (Comments, as always, welcome.)

   

Image: Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the Shrine Basilica at Genazzano, Italy. History: "On April 25, 1467, a miraculous event took place: an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on a wall of the church, which was still under construction. It was later recognized by two Albanian pilgrims as the same image venerated in Shkodër, Albania, which had disappeared from the place where it had been venerated.

The event caused great amazement and attracted thousands of faithful. Miracles and graces were reported, and thanks to the donations that poured in, the construction of the church and the Augustinian convent was completed. "

(Vatican News Service)

 

OF BODIES, AND OF GIVING

I translate and reproduce here a homily for Corpus Christi by Brother Benoît Mailleux of the Belgian Community of Tibériade, for its simplicity, its honesty and its vast overtones.

Dear brothers and sisters,

The Eucharist is God giving in. Yes, God couldn’t resist it. After having manifested the greatest possible love by giving his life for us, he couldn’t bear the thought of once again being distant, hidden from our view as in the first Covenant. He is and remains Emmanuel, “God-with-us”. Obviously there is still a play of hide-and-seek in that eucharistic presence, which reminds us a little of the play of mutual seeking and finding in the Song of Songs. God gives himself, even as he desires to be sought by the faith and the desire of the faithful. Hence, at the beginning of each eucharistic celebration, we should remember the intensity of Jesus’s words: “I have wished with a great desire to eat this Passover with you!” Is that desire mutual? Do we thirst for that encounter? Are we hungry for God?

I should like to evoke three aspects of this great Mystery of the Eucharist.

1. The sacrament of the poor.

And the poor man, first of all, is the Lord. The eucharist celebrates the victory of a broken body, of a man humiliated. The divine light shines from a pierced flank. We are in the presence of the gift of the Crucified and Resurrected who has conquered hate and death; and who gives himself over to us. The eucharist expresses the poverty of God who gives himself into our hands under the kinds of bread and wine, transformed, transubstantiated by the Holy Spirit. And once again he runs the risk that we may do with it as we please. 

On the other hand, there is also the poverty of man, who cannot live without that bread, the bread of the Word, the bread of the forgiveness which lies at the heart of each celebration, and that living bread of Heaven that is Jesus. The first reading reminds us that to be able to eat the manna the Hebrews needed to know hunger, the poverty of that life in the desert which reduced them to their deepest selves, crying out to God. So is it for us as we encounter the eucharist. In receiving the body and blood of Christ, we live the poverty in giving thanks. And before “giving thanks [gratias]” to God, we are conscious of “receiving that grace [gratia]”. The eucharist teaches us to receive, to live in gratitude. We do not lay hands on this gift of God; we open our hands to it, we hold them out to it, to receive it. And so this attitude of poverty and openness becomes my attitude toward the other. The eucharist  stops me from “wanting to possess”, from “wanting to take hold of”. I do not lay hands on the other and I do not use him. The love of Christ in the eucharist becomes a genuine love of the other. As St Theresa put it, “The more I am united to Him, the more I love all my sisters.”

2. The great question.

The gift of manna is also the gift of the question. That bread which fed the Hebrews in the desert is at the same time the bread of questioning: Mân Hou?  What is it? And it is the questioning that permits the continuing journey. Here, the true bread that comes down from heaven is Christ Jesus. And it – he – does not come as the answer to everything. He also brings with him a question, the great question: do you love me? Cardinal Suentes said that  that is the only question that will remain and the only question that is worth while . . . And to that, everyone must work out one’s own answer, rather than copying St Peter’s.

3. Becoming what we receive.

This great gift of the eucharist: we receive it, it gives us life, and we distribute it in the Church. Henri de Lubac put it in this apt phrase: “The Church creates the Eucharist and the Eucharist creates the Church.” And indeed, it is the eucharist that makes us into the Church. St Paul reminded us that “many as we are, we are one body, because all share one bread.” We are not united here by similar tastes or by similar expectations; we are united by the risen Christ. And it is the shared hearing of his Word, the communion of his Body and Blood, that shape our unity and make of us his Body.

That communion becomes our commitment. “He who eats me will live by me.” In other words, it is the feelings of Christ, the will of Christ, the love of Christ for his Father and for men, that must invade us and take possession of our being, day after day. And the Church does not exist for itself, but to carry unto the ends of the world the Risen Christ and God’s “I love you”.  One might quote the words of Etty Hillesum (replacing “the office” by “the Mass”): “I thank you for having drawn me out of the peace of this Mass to throw me into the suffering and the troubles of these times. It would be easy to have an idyll with you in the protected atmosphere of a Mass, but what matters is to take you with me everywhere, intact, and to remain faithful to you whatever befalls.”

Prior Christophe of the Tibhirine monastery wrote, about his community, “Lord, there are seven of us here. Take us, grant grace to this crumb of nothing-much . . . and share it out for all those out there.” We too could adopt that prayer for our families, our groups, our communities or for ourselves individually: “Lord, take us, grant grace to this crumb of nothing-much, and share it out for all those out there.” Amen.

 

HINTS FOR BUSY TRAVELLERS

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” If he is the way, where does it lead? To the Father, obviously. It cannot be a long way: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” To emerge from the metaphor: what is the way that he is? “To keep my commandments.” What are they? “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” The Jewish law counted 613 commandments: to keep them all was essential; to keep them all was impossible. An imperative that is both essential and impossible generates the greatest possible degree of stress. What replaced them? “To love your  God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.” And: “To love your neighbour as yourself.” Simple. All he asks is everything. And yet, supposedly this is a light burden and an easy yoke. How can that be? 

The first one is the biggie, even if we usually think only of the second one. And it bothers us. How, if you are not a saint, can you love God? Assuming, that is, that He exists. Can you love a Supreme Being who lets tsunamis drown thousands and who lets grown men and women torture 3-year-olds? Well, shall we for moment stop blaming him for what we, as humans, do? Think differently. “Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.” Think of the sunset’s afterglow on mountain tops in clear cold air. Think of the robin’s beady eye outside your winter window, waiting for breadcrumbs. Think of the surprising smile and kindness of an overworked hospital nurse. Think of the gaunt medic, always helping one more bomb victim with the last of his own strength. Hints, just hints. But hints of that glory that fills the earth as, we are told, it fills heaven. And if we learn to see them as the gifts they are, we may learn to love the giver. After a long life with a heart turned, and tuned, to heaven Josef Ratzinger’s last words were “Signore, ti amo”.

Loving your neighbour as yourself is only apparently easier. It may be your mother-in-law, your boss, your teenager, the guy across the street or the Head of State. First, remember that (s)he is only, for present purposes, your neighbour if s(he) actually enters your daily life. The story he told to illustrate the question is that of the traveller left robbed and bleeding by brigands by the side of the road. A priest came by, saw him, and muttered, “Sorry, but I’m late for Mass” and hurried on. A Levite came by, saw him, and thought, “Oh no, if I stop and help him with all that nasty blood I’ll have to spend a whole day or week re-purifying myself for the Temple service,” and hurried on. Then a foreign businessman came by and saw him. He stopped, got the first aid kit out of his car and did some careful disinfecting and bandaging. He put the man into the passenger seat and drove him to the nearest inn (this was before cell phones), and left him with the landlord, saying “Do what needs doing for him, I’ll pay for everything when I come back next week.” And, leaving a wedge of cash on account, he went off and continued his business trip. 

Come to think of it, this is a startlingly unromantic story. The businessman did not go into floods of sympathetic tears; he did not get converted and start an NGO for helping battered travellers; he did the minimum and went on with is life. That teaches us something about that second commandment. It doesn’t ask for your heart and soul: it asks for you to DO something when you stumble upon a need that you can do something about. Perhaps that is what he meant when he talked about light yokes. When all is temporarily well with you, remember to be thankful. When you turn a corner and see a need, do what you can. That’s all; but that is also everything.

It’s part of the way. It’s part of the truth. It’s part of the life. Once you are on the way, you are in the truth, and you have the life. [And if you want the whole vast and cosmic giant echo to your little charcoal-burner’s day, you are on the way to the Father, you are in the truth of the Son, and you have the life of the Holy Spirit. Signore, ti amo.]

             Image: Duccio di Buoninsegna (Siena, d. 1319), Jesus Teaching the Disciples

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)