DAY OF TWO GIANTS

Two “pillars of the church”. Most of us tend to prefer Peter: he was more like us – impulsive, emotional, lurching from insight and courage to idiocy and cowardice. And yet it was him that Jesus picked out to take on the responsibility of the work on earth, afterwards. Of Paul, too many people nowadays remember mainly his strictures on the role of women, in marriage and in the church, which were of course perfectly in tune with Middle Eastern mores at the time. Paul was an uncompromising character, not entirely devoid of fanaticism. He had been a kind of mullah, stoning, arresting and crucifying supposed apostates, until he was hit hard on the road to Damascus – not a comfortable place, even to this day. Then he went through metanoia, a 180-degree turn, but he remained quite as uncompromising as before. In today’s reading, he tells his protégé Timothy just how tough he’s been, how he’s hung in there, run the race, stuck it out; now all he has left to do is cross the finish line and he will get the winner’s reward. Not really an attractive speech, though you can imagine it coming from a veteran’s chapped lips. A little more modesty, we might think. Yet if you look at all he did, and at all the communities he founded, maintained, blew new life into, gave hell to, you do see his point. We admire Paul; but we can’t help liking Peter, who wept at cock-crow.

Illustration: El Greco, "St Peter and St Paul", at the Hermitage, St Petersburg

THE SUNDAYS AFTER TRINITY

The Sundays after Trinity are a peculiarly English phenomenon. The Roman Catholic Church calls them the Sundays after Pentecost; other churches don't call them anything much. But in the Church of England they are a long, lazy period from the end of the Easter season to the beginning of Advent. Thinking of them makes me long for the churches, not of my childhood but of my early Anglican days, churches like the Dorset village church above, in the days before villages sported BMWs and when churches were allowed to be customary without being deserted. A world of Matins and Evensong, of Women's Institutes and summer cricket, in whites. So when I found the poem below in the recesses of my computer, I thought I would put it up here. The author was a businessman, a poet, and also the novelist who wrote Moonfleet. His father was a reclusive clergyman, of a type the Victorians seemed to breed, in the far reaches of the Dorset combes.

AFTER TRINITY        
John Meade Falkner

We have done with dogma and divinity,          
Easter and Whitsun past,      
The long, long Sundays after Trinity          
Are with us at last;      
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,          
Neither feast-day nor fast.        

Christmas comes with plenty,          
Lent spreads out its  pall,      
But these are five and twenty,          
The longest Sundays of all;      
The placid Sundays after Trinity,          
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.      

 Spring with its burst is over,        
 Summer has had its day,      
The scented grasses and clover          
Are cut, and dried into hay;      
The singing-birds are silent,          
And the swallows flown away.        

Post pugnam pausa fiet;          
Lord, we have made our choice;      
In the stillness of autumn quiet,          
We have heard the still, small voice.      
We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom?          
Thick paper, folio, Boyce.        

Let it not all be sadness,          
Not omnia vanitas,      
Stir up a little gladness          
To lighten the Tibi cras;      
Send us that little summer,          
That comes with Martinmas.        

When still the cloudlet dapples          
The windless cobalt blue,      
And the scent of gathered apples          
Fills all the store-rooms through,      
The gossamer silvers the bramble,          
The lawns are gemmed with dew.        

An end of tombstone Latinity,          
Stir up sober mirth,      
Twenty-fifth after Trinity,        
Kneel with the listening earth,      
Behind the Advent trumpets          
They are singing Emmanuel’s birth.

photo: Lynda Franklin

WE MIGHT NOT HAVE LIKED HIM

Today is the feast of St John the Baptist, here portrayed by the immense Florentine sculptor Donatello. I'm not sure we should have liked him. He was extreme in every way. He went off to live in the desert where he ate locusts and wild honey -- the locusts, presumably, raw. In order to preach, he can't have lived entirely alone, unless he preached to the bees that provided his honey. Preaching, he was extreme also. "Repent!" he shouted, in what was presumably a hoarse if stentorian voice: "Repent!" He was a kind of extreme version of an Old Testament prophet, someone who said what God had commanded him to say, to whom God had commanded him to say it (even, sometimes, to the King), and let the chips fall where they may. 
What was he telling people to do? Matthew's original Greek (well, John actually spoke something like Aramaic, but we know about him in Greek) word translated as "repentance" is metanoia, which we might also translate as "changing one's mentality". This is interesting, because "repent" has come to connote feeling sorry, apologising to God and men, grovelling; whereas metanoia lays the accent on changing. And why is this necessary? Because the basileia tôn ouranôn, the "kingship of the heavens" has arrived. Not "will arrive soon": it has arrived. 
An uncomfortable situation; and John did nothing to make it less so. When you go to Luke, you get much more of what he said. Not concerned to flatter his audience, he called them a brood of poisonous snakes: a set of sterile fruit-trees, good only for firewood. He seems to have had a massive presence, for instead of going home or stoning him, they meekly asked him what, then, they should do? And he had simple, practical answers. To the ordinary  folk: if you have two coats, give one to the guy who has none. If you have more than enough to eat, share it. To the collaborationist tax-collectors he said, Don't take a rake-off, just collect what the rules say. To some soldiers he said, Don't do violence to civilians, don't make false accusations, be content with your wages. 
In other words, Shape up. Be decent people. Change your mindset. Simple decency, sharing, taking what you're given and no more. It doesn't seem like a huge program, yet it blew people's minds. Because there was that something more: the Why. The Reign of Heaven has arrived. I just seal your good intentions with water; but there is Someone arriving just after me, and He is the real thing. He won't be using water. He'll be using wind and fire. (Wind: pneuma is breath, wind, spirit.) He'll be bearing a flail and threshing you like corn; and the husks, the empty chaff, will go into the fire. 
In other words: guys, this is serious. It doesn't get more serious, it won't ever get more serious.  
And when the Someone turned up, just quietly standing in the lineup to get into the river and have water poured on his head, John couldn't believe it. You? Baptised by me? 
It seems that John was genuinely staggered. Perhaps not just by the fact that the Someone had really arrived and was standing in front of him, but that the Someone was not breathing wind and fire. And this may have marked a change, a metanoia, even in John himself. He had to learn that Yeshua, the chap he'd more or less known, or known about, from childhood, was a different kind of Meschiach: not an avenging angel but Isaiah's Suffering Servant.
It is interesting that John did not become a disciple. Instead, as far as we know, he went on being a fiery prophet until he admonished one King too many, and was beheaded by Herod. His own capacity for metanoia seems to have gone only so far.

INTERLUDE

No comment . . . .

UNIMAGINABLE?

I was away in Germany on Trinity Sunday, so my (first) post  on this sublime mystery is a few days late. Last year, I simply reproduced Andrei Rublev's famous icon, made in the monastery of the Trinity and St Sergius between 1408 and 1425, and now preserved in Moscow's Tretiakov Gallery. This year, the admirable French daily La Croix published a very fine commented reproduction of it. I haven't been able to make the arrows work, but the explanation is quite clear.

The three persons are set in a circle (which I've added here), with the central person’s hand as the centre. The circle,  with neither beginning nor end, symbolises eternity and places the three persons within one and the same reality. Their faces are identical (identity of nature of the three Persons of the Trinity) but their clothes are different, though all contain the blue of divinity. The wings emphasise their spiritual nature.

The left-hand person signifies the Father: it is on him that the others’ regard is turned, and they bow to him (he is the origin and principle of all); the colour of his raiment is indeterminate for he is indescribable. Behind him, the house is Abraham's tent, and “the Father’s house”.

The central person is the Son: in the purple, gold-embroidered tunic of Christus Pantocrator, he bows his head as in the Crucifixion icons. He presides over the table, and his hand blesses the cup that contains a lamb’s head: the cup of the New Alliance. The tree behinid him is the Oak of Mamre and also prefigures the Cross.

The right-hand person symbolizes the Holy Spirit: dressed in green (colour of youth), for “he makes all things new”. Behind him, the rock symbolizes his role as Defender: “my rock and my fortress art Thou” (ps.18)

One thing to remember is that these three persons are also the three persons (men? angels?) who visit Abraham and Sarah at Mamre (Genesis 18) and are fed by them. Which brings us back to the extraordinary saying of Jesus that if we will keep his commandments, he and his Father (and, evidently, the Holy Spirit) will come and dwell with us. 

The Trinity is the deepest mystery of Christianity. As one commentator said, it is not just a theological or philosophical concept, but of perfect topicality in the world: I and You and the Holy Spirit that unites us in love, are called to be living icons of God's deepest nature. Vertiginous! 

FIDDLING ON THE TITANIC OR SINGING ON THE ARK?

I have been reading the admirable French daily La Croix’s decennial survey of the state of the French Catholic church and its presumed development over the next ten years. It is dire, of course: the number of baptisms is falling, the number of committed lay persons is falling, the number of those calling themselves Catholic is falling, and the number of vocations is plunging.

The suggested remedies are many, various, energetic and coming from all over. They include foreign priests, more work by the laity, reorganising dioceses, etcetera. And yet there is a vast and dense silence on a number of possibilities that instantly suggest themselves to a non-Roman-Catholic.

In the first place, married priests. Admittedly, that would prove complicated in terms of salaries, pensions, and adaptability to movement. But it would instantly augment the number of vocations, and in the face of 450 years of Anglican experience it is impossible to maintain that married men make less good parish clergy. To do the Pope justice, he did recently tell a bishop from Amazonia that the church would not exclude the consecration of viri probati, “proven” married men. But only in such extreme cases.

Secondly, women priests. This would double the pool of vocations if not triple it. And again, as the Anglicans are discovering, women make excellent priests.

Thirdly, a conservative redefinition of celibacy. Conservative in the sense of going back to medieval practice. Celibacy should mean not living in the context of a marriage and a family, and thus being available on a permanent basis. It should not mean giving up all sexual relations for the rest of one’s life. That is a great deal to ask of young males: and such a demand may be fine when there are many – in ages where priesthood confers status, education, and security --, but it should be completely reconsidered when the flood of vocations is reduced to a trickle.

Fourthly, the possibility of couples, straight or gay, both serving as priests, perhaps in the same parish or neighbouring parishes.  

Pope Francis memorably said, a year or so ago, that it would be wonderful if the Church could stop thinking about sex all the time. Notice that all the solutions I’ve mentioned as not being discussed or (publicly) envisaged have to do with sex.

As for the dwindling of the laity, I have long suspected that it had something to do with the Church’s (no: the churches’) relentless “updating” and “modernizing” of their habitus. And I notice that all the suggested remedies in the La Croix issue go in the same direction.

If each diocese decided to have a number of churches where a traditional liturgy was used – and not only at 8 a.m. -- , these might stop the drifting away, or the not turning up, of those whose faith is best served by a liturgy of reverence, of formal beauty, and of some distance. At the moment, such believers are faced with the choice of either post-Vatican II liturgical chumminess or Lefebvrist theological archaism. An unfair choice, that I’m sure alienates a larger number of the faithful than the Church realizes.

Finally, a number of French dioceses are moving in the direction of laymen getting together for church services without a priest. I have attended one or two of those, and they are embarrassing in their lack of direction and form. Once again, if there were more contact between French Catholics and Anglicans, the latter could suggest a translated version (which exists already) of their Prayer-Book Matins and Evensong services (minus the prayers for the Royal Family), which would meet the case admirably. This would also mean going back to an earlier conception of Communion, or Mass, as an occasional, say monthly, liturgical high point; something the Reformation instituted but has been moving away from.

In a time when the seas are rising, Christians should reflect on the nature and course of the ship they are manning. Are we bound for an iceberg or for Ararat?

BREATH OF LIFE

²² And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: ²³ whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

We all know this passage from John about the resurrected Christ communicating the Holy Spirit to the disciples; but at the local Mass for Whitsun/Pentecost I heard an interpretation of it that was completely new to me, and very powerful. Our lively Algerian-born priest Fr Jean-Kamel said, in his homily, that this is not primarily a justification of the spiritual authority of the Church. No: it is about us, he claimed. We have received the Holy Spirit at our baptism: and so this statement about the forgiveness or retention of sin is addressed directly to each of us. If we forgive our neighbour his sin, it is forgiven, and (s)he is freed; if we retain it – if we do not, cannot forgive it – (s)he remains its prisoner.

I found, and find, this vertiginous: such power it adds to the Second Great Commandment.

FOR WHITSUNDAY -- OR PENTECOST

I've been reading the magnificent collection of Latin hymns I bought at the Kalamazoo medieval conference (One Hundred Latin Hymns, Ambrose to Aquinas, from Harvard), which is an absolute treasure. Peter Walsh's translations are lovely- metre without rhyme, like most of the hymns themselves. So it occurred to me to try my hand at an unrhymed hymn in the iambic tetrameter the Latin often uses.

AD PATRIS LIMEN REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

CONVERSATION

I have long wanted to say this here, and now seems a good moment. One of the bloggers I most admire (yes, Michael G, you know who you are) has resolutely turned off any comment facility on his site, presumably to stave off robocomments and the purely asinine. It had occurred to me to do the same, but I decided not to. Nevertheless, I have found that few people do in fact leave comments, and when I share a blog post to a Facebook link, those who get to it from there usually comment on Facebook itself.

So this is where I crawl out of my usual shell and invite comments. Why? Because the kind of topics I deal with on this blog, I think, invite conversations. And since comments are legible to all, others can then join in – something else I invite. The beauty of the Internet is that it temporarily and partially annihilates vastnesses of Time and Space. This strikes me as a genuinely religious effect. I am in the South of France. You may be in Oregon, in Yemen, in Moscow, in Pretoria, in Buenos Aires or in Wellington. Yet we can talk about prayer, about the gifts of God, as if we were leaning on a bistrot counter over a glass of wine.

Obviously, those who are gratuitously rude will be deleted: the usual rules apply. But on the basis of respect and affection, conversations may commence and proceed. Not on Facebook (much as we love it): right here.

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