FAMILY VALUES

Frank Mason Good, A carpenter's workshop in Nazareth, 1875

Today is Family Sunday in the Catholic Church, and there is much mention of the Holy Family, with pictures of Mary, Joseph and young Jesus. I’ve long been intrigued by a different view of the Holy Family: Joseph, Mary, and at least seven children, of whom Jesus was the eldest, but which included James, Joseph, Simon, Jude, and at least a couple of sisters. This is an ancient view, which ended up being severely quashed by the Church because it denied Mary’s perpetual virginity. Those of us inhabiting climes well North of the Mediterranean and living some 1500 years later than those theologians find virginity less crucial to holiness, and I for one enjoy the thought of a busy carpenter’s workshop with a number of boys working under their father’s direction and enjoying the curious harmony radiating from their eldest brother.

What happened later? We know that at one point, when someone pointed out to Jesus that his mother and brothers were outside and wanted to see him, he replied ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? These (pointing at those in front of him) are my mother and my brothers.’ (Mt. 12:46-50) Not a kind reply, we’d have thought. And it’s intriguing that there is no mention of any brothers or sisters during the Passion and the Crucifixion – only Mary is mentioned, with John. Later, though, James ‘brother of Jesus’ is mentioned as heading the young Church in Jerusalem.

We don’t know. So here is one narrative that might work. Jesus and his brothers get on well during their youth. When they are in their twenties they go separate ways, as brothers often do, getting together only for family celebrations. Then, when their eldest brother is thirty, he changes, gives up his job, and becomes an itinerant prophet. I can easily imagine his brothers finding this more than peculiar. Moreover, from what thy hear about him, it seems that he is spreading some seriously heretical ideas. Would they have necessarily approved?

Much depends on what their mother would or would not have told them about her eldest. They must in any case have noticed that she approached him differently; but she might not have told them about the Angel  Gabriel and the Holy Spirit – a little strong for young stomachs. So we might imagine them at the very least quizzical, and quite possibly disapproving, with regard to the life their brother had started leading.  And when this led to his being arrested for a combination of heresy (to the Jews) and treason (to the Romans), they may well have been angry, or scared, or both. After all, even out of 11 remaining disciples only one was there on Golgotha: where were the others?

And then, perhaps, after the Resurrection, one can imagine at least James, the next-eldest brother, going through a profound and painful conversion process as the news spread; and ending up in charge of the new faithful in the capital.

            All of this, of course, is rank speculation; but I, for one, find it a much more interesting image of the Holy Family, and at least as instructive and inspiring.

A LOVELY MAN

Today is the feast of St John the Evangelist, whose name I bear as my second Christian name -- he was my parents' favourite apostle, and I agree with them. (So, apparently, did the Lord Himself.) I like this painting by the distinctly peculiar seventeenth-century Florentine Francesco Furini, because it shows John as a young man, with a kind of vivacious sensitivity that makes one realize why he was loved. His Gospel is full of poetry. He was the only apostle under the Cross, and he was the one who cared for Lady Mary in her old age. He ran to the Tomb on Easter morning, and saw, and believed. Just like that. We, of course, are asked to believe without having seen; but he knew that we would be, and did a lot of writing in his old age to help us with it. Thank you, St John. 

POIGNANT AND FINE

Every year on Christmas Day, I put up a small poem by the late Jill Furse, which moved me when I first read it nearly fifty years ago and still moves me today. Jill Furse, a young and brilliant actress, was the beloved first wife of the poet and glass-engraver Sir Laurence Whistler. She died just after giving birth to her second child, at the age of 29. I strongly recommend Whistler's The Initials in the Heart, a beautifully-written account of their marriage. 

CAROL

Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf. 

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

Jill Furse (1915-1944)

FROM COOP TO BYRE

There is an old tradition that in the night of the Nativity, the animals can talk. Only to one another of course, not to us: we lost that privilege long ago. They murmur to each other, from coop to byre: there is a low clucking in the henhouse, a soft cheeping in the occasional tree, and there are strange quiet grunts in the cowsheds and the pigpens. They owe this to the ox and the ass who were present in the stable on the original Christmas Night, and whom we see here, in Lorenzo da Monaco's painting from New York's Metropolitan Museum, gazing with benevolent intensity at an apparently levitating Christ child. Joseph, whose neck must be deeply painful, is gazing at the angels. I love the thought of the animals talking, and murmuring the Holy Name. The cat murmurs it, on this night of truce, to the mice; the hawk to the rabbit; the deer to the hunter's mastiff; the badger, perhaps, to himself. As we move into Christmas, via a Midnight Mass, a réveillon, or just a quiet evening before the celebrations of the morning, it is good to think that we are surrounded by a world of quiet joy and shared languages. May we come to be worthy of such small but immense miracles. Sssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh . . . . . . .

GETTING THERE?

    This year, the Fourth Sunday in Advent is also the first day of shortening nights. It’s as if the fourth candle had an infinitesimal but enormous effect: infinitesimal in time (a few minutes), enormous in space (all over the hemisphere). We are approaching Christmas. Are we getting there? Depends where There is, of course. Getting to the end of shopping; getting to the end of decorating; getting (for a few) to the end of fasting and penitence; getting closer to the Nativity; getting closer to New Year’s Eve; getting closer to 2014; getting closer to Epiphany. But is there a There there? What is the fourth candle’s effect on us? 

    There are moments – insomniacs, monks and those on guard duty know them – when dawn has not quite begun, when there is no real light in the East, but when the night no longer smells like night, when there is a strange sense of impending alteration. It is perhaps that sense that our four candles convey. We still need them, to see by, to warm our hands at, to help keep our faith alive and watchful until the Dawn; but the night no longer smells like night, and here and there there is a rustling as of a homeward badger or a waking bird. And so we nod our heads wisely, like the old campaigners we are (or imagine we might be), and murmur, “Getting there”.

And for those for whom Advent, consciously or not, has been a battle on a storm-tossed sea, and who are looking forward to Christmas, or what follows it, or the meaning of it, as a long-desired safe harbour, I’ll add a hymn I wrote last year, to the tune of “Melcombe” (hear it here):

Receive us, Lord, just as we are:

Our wandering feet have led us far

In deserts of the daily round –

Lonely and lost, we would be found.

The songs we sang our lips have lost:

We stand surrounded by a host

Of ghostly troops whose panoplies

Are powdered ash and prancing lies.

Our traitor hearts, each trudging day,

Thoughtlessly throw thy gifts away:

The gifts that meant us only good,

Humble and priceless: paid in blood.

We cannot fight our way to thee

With arms undone by treachery;

Helpless, our torn and ragged soul

Only by thee can be made whole.

Thy love is all we have to trust,

Thy heart more merciful than just

We cling to: we have wandered far –

Receive and free us as we are.

THE SMILE OF GOD

  I have been much around the very young recently, including a 5-month-old baby; and I have been fascinated by the baby’s smile. It is tiny, fleeting, but of pure delight.  
          Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about the “unless ye become as one of these” passage in the Gospels. Children, after all, are frequently a pain in the arse; they are entirely focused on survival and presents; they are jealous of each other; they are piercingly noisy and they have a capacity for littering that no adult can equal; they often whine. I don’t think Yeshua was a dewy-eyed sentimentalist thinking dreamily about their innocence and cuteness. So what is it in the baby or the small child that makes it the model of Heaven’s citizen?
        In the first place, I suspect, it is single-mindedness. Whatever a child feels, while it feels it it feels it, lives it and expresses it 100%. For adults this is almost impossible and not even considered desirable: our feelings are crossed, shifting, complex, and each one contains its opposite. Singleness of mind, as Charles Morgan wrote in a fine preface to a play on the subject (The Flashing Stream), when we meet it in adults, has a kind of terrifying nobility – and may very well be of the stuff of Heaven. 
Secondly, there is the simplicity of trust. A child about to cross a busy street sticks up its hand without looking, knowing that its parent by its side will take that hand and guide it. Such simplicity, again, is direly hard for adults to come by. It implies knowing that there is someone beside one; that that someone has powers one does not have oneself; and that that someone is dedicated to one’s welfare and will take the proffered hand. It also implies putting away cynicism, suspicion and doubt.
Thirdly, there is the confidence of the loved child that it need not always feel guilty. Sometimes it does things right, and when it does, the adults smile with real pleasure. How many of us are prepared to think of God smiling fondly at us because we have done something right?
There are other things: the child’s delighted capacity for observation, of the almost inumerable things that are new, strange and fascinating in its universe; its lack of embarrassment at feelings; its pleasure at learning a new skill and showing it off. If we look at these with some care, we may be able to triangulate some sense of what Heaven expects of us. Starting with a smile: “a condition of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything.” (T.S. Eliot) 

HELP!

“Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) Boy, does that express what many of us feel. There is that awful feeling, when in unguarded moments you look at the whole  faith thing with your scholarly mind, that the entire structure is a fantasy, that the available evidence suggests that in all probability we wink out like a blown candle at the moment of death, that the universe exists in space and time but has no meaning whatsoever, that the Old Testament proposes to us a deity we would not want to know much less worship, that the New Testament pays tribute to an astonishingly admirable man around whom have been built a number of untenable theories, and that the whole thing is a tottering card-house of wishful thinking.

Right. Then what? You can argue against this: I have heard arguments for the Defence that are not entirely fanciful, though none of them would hold up in a scholarly, much less a scientific, world. (On the other hand, the so-called “scientific” arguments of the Ditchkins school are mere scientism and do not hold up in a truly scientific world either.)

Something I read recently helped me through this, at least for the time being. Whether you feel God’s presence, or His answer to your prayer, is unimportant. The point is that He is answering it whether you feel it or not. He is present whether you feel Him or not. He loves you, and wants to come and live with you, whether you feel it or not. At the moments when you feel it’s all a load of codswallop, He hears you thinking and feels a rueful sympathy, saying to Himself, “poor So-and-So: I do understand how (s)he feels – but (s)he will get over it in time, if I hang in there.”

A bit of us knows this: so the best we can do is be totally honest when talking to Him, and saying, like the father of the epileptic, “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief.” And I rather suspect He will.

DARK, BUT ?

Three candles: the light is growing, however slowly, however modestly, however vulnerable to the winds of change and the rain of disappointment. Which might make us reflect on the curious virtue of hope.

In common parlance it refers to the thought of something that may occur and that would please us if it did. I hope it’ll be sunny tomorrow for the school picnic. Such hope is natural, but it’s hard to think of it as a virtue. Hope as a virtue is something much tougher, more like the weed that grows through the almost invisible crack in the tarmac of a parking-lot. It is that in us which allows us – urges us, compels us – not to give up. To fall down, to get up and to go at it again. To fall down again, to get up again, to go on again.

So if we apply this to the three candles, the trinity of theological virtues – Faith, Hope, and Charity – we see that Hope is a central religious virtue. Not (just) in the sense that we “hope for the Second Coming”, but in the sense that the falling down, the getting up and the going on apply a fortiori to our relation with God. We should like to be better at it than we are. We aren’t happy with the way we live it from day to day. And so?

Hope is not a wish, not even a confident wish: it’s a determination, and a rueful recognition that the more we fall down, the more we will realize that if we manage nevertheless to get up and go on, it’s not our doing but that of Him Who loves us. As such, Hope is a gift from Him to us, and one that we return. Without it, we would long ago have given up; we would have given in to despair. With it, what it hopes for, the causa finalis or “ending end” as Sidney called it, is in fact being created, is happening, in and through the process itself. In the same way as a good marriage – something many of us hope will happen to us – in fact is created, happens, in and through the daily humdrumlies, falling down but getting up again and going on. So is a true friendship. So is good parenthood. And as God’s love for us has something of all those three things, if we stubbornly return it day by day, refusing to be terminally discouraged, it becomes reciprocal, and a thing of beauty. Through Hope.

DEEP IN THE DARK, A FLAME

Today is the feast of Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, better known as St John of the Cross. It is the day of his death, of erysipelas, in 1591 at the age of 49, in an obscure monastery in Southern Spain. From an impoverished family, he had taken orders and thus been able to go to the famous University of Salamanca. Quiet, studious and above all given to meditation and prayer, he got taken up by the walking tornado that was Teresa of Avila and drawn into the wasps' nest of Carmelite reform, which led to imprisonment, torture, periods of exile, and indirectly to his death. However, he was also one of God's, and Spain's, great poets. In an age that had rediscovered mysticism and meditation -- the age of Ignatius of Loyola and of Teresa -- he was the most ardent of them all. To us the language of such mysticism is so unfamiliar that it makes us go over all funny and escape into theories of erotic sublimation. What makes it peculiar is the imaging, the "notable prosopopoeias" as Sidney called them, that takes the experience of God's love and, so far from seeing it as a commandment or order, show it as something of which the most total of earthly passions is only the palest reflection. There are "extreme sports"; this is extreme religion. It is not for the faint-hearted or for the soapy-souled. When reading it -- as when reading the Song of Songs -- one has constantly to force oneself to realize that this, like a sacrament, is an "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace". It makes one feel like the clumsiest beginner on a local climbing wall watching Royal Robbins soloing the 3,000 feet of El Capitan in 1968. Crazy; but sublime. Here are two of St John's most famous poems, in Spanish and English, because it is worth at least mouthing them in the Spanish to get the feel of the climb.

EN UNA NOCHE OSCURA

En una noche oscura                                        On a dark night
con ansias en amores inflamada                       With long and burning love
¡oh dichosa ventura!                                         -- oh, happy chance! --
salí sin ser notada                                             I went out without being observed
estando ya mi casa sosegada,                           for my house was already at rest,

a oscuras y segura                                            in darkness and secure,
por la secreta escala disfrazada,                        by the secret hidden ladder
¡oh dichosa ventura!                                         -- oh, happy chance! --
a oscuras y en celada                                        in darkness and hidden
estando ya mi casa sosegada.                           for my house was already at rest.

En la noche dichosa                                         In the happy night
en secreto que nadie me veía                            in secret, that no one saw me
ni yo miraba cosa                                             nor did I behold anything
sin otra luz y guía                                             with no other light nor guide
sino la que en el corazón ardía.                        that that which burned within my heart. 

Aquesta me guiaba                                           This guided me
más cierto que la luz del mediodía                    more surely than the light of noonday
adonde me esperaba                                          to where awaited me
quien yo bien me sabía                                     whom I knew so well already
en sitio donde nadie aparecía.                           in a place where no one came.

¡Oh noche, que guiaste!                                    Oh, night that guided me!
¡Oh noche amable más que la alborada!           Oh, night more lovely than the dawn!
¡Oh noche que juntaste                                     Oh, night that joined together
amado con amada,                                            Lover and beloved,
amada en el amado transformada!                     beloved into Lover changed!

En mi pecho florido,                                          In my breast that bloomed,
que entero para él solo se guardaba                   that He kept for His own,
allí quedó dormido                                             there He stayed, asleep,
y yo le regalaba                                                  and I gave Him what I could
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.                       and the fanning of the cedars gave a breeze.

El aire de la almena                                           The breeze from the battlements
cuando yo sus cabellos esparcía                        winnowed His hair
con su mano serena                                           with its serene hand
y en mi cuello hería                                           and wounded me in the neck
y todos mis sentidos suspendía.                         and all my senses stilled.

Quedéme y olvidéme                                        I stayed, lost in oblivion,
el rostro recliné sobre el amado;                       my face reclined on my Lover;
cesó todo, y dejéme                                          all things ceased, and I abandoned myself
dejando mi cuidado                                          abandoning my care,
entre las azucenas olvidado.                             forgotten among the lilies.



OH LLAMA DE AMOR VIVA

¡Oh llama de amor viva,                                    Oh living flame of love
que tiernamente hieres                                       how tenderly You wound me
de mi alma en el más profundo centro!              in the deepest centre of my soul!
pues ya no eres esquiva,                                    Since now You are not aloof,
acaba ya si quieres;                                            complete it if You wish;
rompe la tela de este dulce encuentro.               and tear the veil of this our sweet encounter.

¡Oh cauterio suave!                                           Exquisite cautery!
¡Oh regalada llaga!                                            Oh wound given as a gift!
¡Oh mano blanda! ¡Oh toque delicado,             Oh hand so white! Oh touch so delicate,
que a vida eterna sabe                                        that something has of life eternal
y toda deuda paga!,                                            and every debt redeems!
matando muerte en vida la has trocado.             killing Death, You've changed it into life. 

¡Oh lámparas de fuego                                       Oh lamps of living fire
en cuyos resplandores                                        in the radiance of whose flame
las profundas cavernas del sentido                     the deepest caves of sense  
que estaba oscuro y ciego                                  that was dark and blind
con extraños primores                                        now give, with strangest skill,
calor y luz dan junto a su querido!                     to the beloved heat and light together!

¡Cuán manso y amoroso                                     How calmly and how loving
recuerdas en mi seno                                          You recall(?) in my breast
donde secretamente solo moras                          where secretly You dwell alone
y en tu aspirar sabroso                                        and in Your fragrant breathing
de bien y gloria lleno                                          with good and glory filled
cuán delicadamente me enamoras!                     how exquisitely You make me love You!

The seriously curious thing is that in Latin languages you can't be fuzzy about sex/gender; and in the first poem the "I" is consistently written in the feminine. Is it that for Juan the "I" is his soul (alma - F.)? Or does he become submissive like a woman to this Divinity?