OFFERING (AGAIN)

The French author Daniel-Rops published, in 1952, a little book called "Missa Est" with very fine B&W photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot and a series of brief texts explaining parts of the Mass followed by short meditations on each part. Here is his meditation on the Offering of the bread and wine (my translation):

If you have nothing else to offer the Lord, lay before Him only your works and your travails:

this piece of bread resting there on the paten cost many men many efforts.

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all you have suffered:

for the wine to be poured into the chalice, did the grapes not have to be trampled and their skin opened?

If all you have inside you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all humanity’s anguish:

let your hands lift up those sad things, for Mercy has received them in advance in His Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to offer and implore, if all inside you is absence and abandonment:

only accept in silence that Another take care of you on your behalf and accept you, so that the Offering and the Offerer may be one gift. 

GUEST COLUMN

Today I'm turning over this blog to David Brooks of the New York Times, whose column today I found moving and take the liberty of reproducing.

Alone, Yet Not Alone

There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.”

It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

         Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.

For example, Audrey Assad is a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (You can see her perform her song “I Shall Not Want” on YouTube.) She writes the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor.

She had an idyllic childhood in a Protestant sect prone to black-or-white dichotomies. But when she was in her 20s, life’s tragedies and complexities inevitably mounted, and she experienced a gradual erosion of certainty.

She began reading her way through the books on the Barnes & Noble Great Books shelf, trying to cover the ones she missed by not going to college. She loved George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and was taken by Tolstoy. “He didn’t have an easy time encountering himself,” she says, sympathetically. “I was reading my way from darkness into paradox.”

She also began reading theology. She’d never read anything written before 1835. She went back to Augustine (whose phrases show up in her lyrics) and the early church fathers. Denominationally, she went backward in time. She became Baptist, then Presbyterian, then Catholic: “I was ready to be an atheist. I was going to be a Catholic or an atheist. “

She came to feel the legacy of millions of people who had struggled with the same feelings for thousands of years. “I still have routine brushes with agnosticism,” she says. “I still brush against the feeling that I don’t believe any of this, but the church always brings me back. ...I don’t think Jesus wants to brush away the paradoxes and mysteries.”

Her lyrics dwell in the parts of Christianity she doesn’t understand. “I don’t want people to think I’ve had an easy time.” She still fights the tendency to go to extremes. “If I’d have been an atheist I’d have been the most obnoxious, Dawkins-loving atheist. I wouldn’t have been like Christopher Hitchens.”

Her life, like all lives, is unexpected, complex and unique. Her music provides a clearer outward display of how many inwardly experience God.

If you are a secular person curious about how believers experience their faith, you might start with Augustine’s famous passage “What do I love when I love my God,” and especially the way his experience is in the world but then mysteriously surpasses the world:

“It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.”

A SCHOLAR AND A GENTLEMAN

Today is the feast of one of my favourite saints, François de Sales. He was born when Philip Sidney was 13, in what is now the Haute-Savoie, the region of Annecy (a town in a setting so lovely that it cries out for a small university). Destined for the law, he decided instead on the priesthood, and became Catholic Bishop of Geneva. As Geneva was a Calvinist theocracy, this was a tricky job. Wisely, he decided not even to try installing himself there, but lived in Annecy instead.

I came across François as an undergraduate, through Louis Martz’s excellent book The Poetry of Meditation, in which he shows the influence of Renaissance Christian meditation practices on the religious Metaphysical poets. The main forms of such meditation were found in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and in François de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life. I still have my old paperback copy of this latter book, very tattered and almost read to bits. François de Sales was known for his learning, but especially for his tact, his diplomacy, and his genuine kindness (useful qualities for a Catholic Bishop of Geneva). Together with his closest friend, Jeanne Françoise de Chantal, he founded and directed several religious orders.

Rereading the Introduction not long ago, I found it a little more uncompromising than I had remembered it, but still a masterpiece. And the Salesian meditation techniques are far more accessible to ordinary people living in the world than the Ignatian version. Each meditation is based on an hour’s duration, divided into three 20-minute parts. The Composition of Place consists of using the imagination to visualise a scene from, say, the Gospels, to place oneself inside that scene as vividly as one possibly can, and to live it. The Analysis uses the intelligence and its ingenuity to figure out what meanings each aspect of the scene contains – anyone who has read some Renaissance literature, such as Spenser, will have an idea of the richness of meaning to be found. Finally, the third section uses to faculty of the Will, to draw conclusions for one’s own life and to pray for the strength and intelligence to live these in one’s daily reality. And – this is typical of François – at the very end, he says, you go back over the whole meditation, pick out two or three of the moments you have found most valuable, and tie them into a “spiritual posy” or bouquet that you then put into your buttonhole, to take out and look at and smell for the rest of the day. What a charming man, this Gentleman Saint.

SAVING LIVES

I was struck, this morning, by the brief sermon of our new (Catholic) parish priest, a small, bouncy Algerian enthusiast (in the complete sense of the word). His liturgies are a little happy-clappy for my liking, but he is utterly sincere and suffused with real joy – which is both unusual and hard to resist.

   His sermon was, appropriately, about joy. As I continue my journey of faith, he said, and it’s been 27 years now, I find myself more and more filled with happiness and light. A happiness and a light that need to be shared.

   There are still, beloved (he said), religious – monks and nuns – and priests, and lay people too, who are steeped in Jansenism. They wear long gloomy faces, and they act as if they were called to bear the whole world and its misery on their shoulders. Well, let me tell you something, he continued: we are not called to bear the world and its misery on our backs. It is God Who bears the world and its misery! And meanwhile, He gives us what is most precious to Him: His own Son, Whom we are about to receive here in the communion. Those two facts alone should make us dance with joy! (I told you he is exuberant.) If we can let that joy flow through us and touch those we come in contact with, healing will take place. Sometimes a smile can save a life.

   Beyond Father Jean-Kamel’s enthusiasm, I was struck by the resemblance of some of this to my own recent thoughts about “flowing through”. I’m increasingly aware that what we can pray for, ultimately, is to be filled with the Spirit. As I said not long ago, aches and pains and contrarieties can open small shutters and windows that will let the Spirit into our carefully-protected egos. And a prayer for that is almost always answered. But then what? As it, as He, fills us, do we just swell like the bullfrog and pop? The point, of course, is that as we are filled with the Spirit, through all those shutters and windows, that same Spirit should flow through us and out of us again. Both upward – back to God – and outward, to all those people around us who are stressed, irritated, miserable, frustrated, exhausted, lonely and – as the French say – “ill in their skin” (mal dans leur peau).

That doesn’t mean that we should necessarily go out looking for sad people. To me, one of the interesting features of the Parable of the Good Samaritan has always been the fact that the Samaritan (we might call him the Moroccan, or the Bulgarian, or the Mexican) was on a business trip; when he found the beaten traveller, he took him to the nearest inn, paid the landlord to patch him up and treat him well, and went on his way. He did not set up a foundation to help robbed and beaten travellers; he didn’t go all over looking for them. He just did what needed to be done for a guy he stumbled upon. The lesson here is that bringing joy to others isn’t a life-changing occupation: it’s a small but enormous sea-change in our daily humdrumlies. As the Facebook sign I shared not long ago said: Be kind, the person you meet is engaged in an enormous battle you know nothing about. But if there is a Spirit flowing through and out of you, it will touch those persons in the middle of their battle, and (to quote Spenser) add faith unto their force. And, your smile having perhaps saved a life, you go on with your trip.

Thanks to Roona-MBH for the image.

TRADUTTORE TRADITORE

Every translator is a traitor. And yet one tries. Confronted with Hermann von Reichenau's medieval hymn "Salve Regina" I was pained by the languorous rosewater sentimentality of the translations I found. So what do you do? You stick your neck out. Here, for what it's worth, is my small effort. 

Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae:
Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus, exsules, filii Hevae.
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.
Eia ergo, Advocata nostra,
illos tuos misericordes oculos
ad nos converte.
Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis, post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens: O pia: 

O dulcis Virgo Maria.

Hail, Majesty, mother of mercy, hail,

Our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

Eve’s children, exiles, here we call to thee,

Lamenting, weeping, here we sigh to thee,

here in this vale of tears.

Turn, then, thou who plead’st for us,

to us thine eyes of mercy.

And after this our exile show us

Jesus, thy womb’s blest fruit.

Thou merciful, thou gravely reverent,

exquisite Virgin Mary.

Note: 'and after this our exile' is of course the last line of section IV inT.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday".