MON DIEU, JE VOUS L'OFFRE

  

Travelling (I’m in Chicago for a conference where my edition of Sidney’s Correspondence is having a prize presented to it) is conducive to thought but mainly in bits, choppily, and perhaps more suited to Twitter than to a pensive blog.  On the other hand, its vicissitudes include, at my age, aches and pains and contrarieties, and those lead me to consider the old French expression of resignation Mon Dieu, je vous l’offre. It is repeated, mutteringly or with a shrug, even now by those who may years ago had a Catholic education but who have since confined their churchgoing to Christmas and Easter.

However, early one morning I thought of it again and wondered what it really meant, or could be brought to mean. The idea was, or so the young were told, that when something unpleasant happened to you you offered it up to God. Why, I wondered. If I miss an aeroplane connection, or if I am experiencing a nasty arthritic cramp, what would God want with that? And yet even my beloved Carthusians mention such offering in their writings, and they are so far advanced in spirituality that I can barely see their dust. So I kept pondering.

In the first place, I began to see, it may clean the wound, so to speak. If I miss that plane or have that cramp, I am filled with negative vibrations – rage, anguish, pain – that take up all the space in my mental house and make it a damned unpleasant place to be. If I off-load all those vibrations on to Someone else, I shall be rid of them. Oh, goody.

Yet there remains the problem: why would I saddle God (Who, one hopes, has better things to do) with all that grudge and grunge? Here, Lord, You take it, I don’t want it. An unattractive attitude, surely?

Well, in the course of some stubborn pondering, three answers either suggested themselves or, I prefer to think, were suggested to me. The first one has to with that chap Yeshua. I (thank God) so far have mainly aches, pains and contrarieties; He went all the way. If He could offer all that horror up to His Father, then – whether I understand it or not – it has to make sense. What’s more, He did it for me, which is a sobering thought.

Secondly, it leads one to think about what “offering” means. And the more you think about it, the more you realise it’s not just  dumping or unloading. It’s giving. Now that still seems odd; but if you give what is attacking you to God, it does two things to your spirit. It reaffirms your status as a child of God: when a kid meets a problem too big for its understanding, it presents it to its father who, being an adult, can and should handle it. Pain, suffering of all kinds, passes our understanding. C.S. Lewis once said that for a modern Westerner the only rational choices are Stoicism or Christianity (or perhaps Judaism if you are born into it). So if you give your suffering to God, you are recognising Him as your Father and behaving as you should. Also, the giving is an offering: you give to God something that either is precious to you or at least takes up a large space in your life. And you give it as an act of thanks, as an expression of belonging, or as an act of beseeching: here it is clearly the latter.

Thirdly, if what you want in life is to be filled with the Spirit of God, the Spirit that is God, think of those moments of giving, of offering – even the small ones – as creating, and opening, a small window in the wall of your spiritual house: a window that lets in a little more of the Spirit Who is always waiting, loving and surprisingly patient, outside until you are ready to open up. A large suffering, offered, opens a large window: my father, spending every day and night for several years looking after my mother who had Alzheimer’s, I suspect opened a huge window. But even a small suffering – an ache, a pain, a contrariety – can open a small but important little shutter and let in another bit of that huge and wonderful Spirit Who is very much a Person also, one-third of the Triune God.

And – as a friend who posted Philippians 4:4-7 on Facebook reminded me – if you do manage to do this, the ache will frequently go away, and at least a little piece of the Great Peace of God, which passeth all understanding, will take root and grow in your heart.

This is a really small and clumsy beginning of coming at, and getting a glimmering of, what seems like a huge truth. Stay tuned, and we can explore it some more. For those interested: I’m reading Lewis’ The Great Divorce and finding it moving and perceptive – perhaps it has something to do with these scattered intuitions.

The painting above is Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World".