IN CASE YOU WONDERED

For many of us, prayer has its moments of frustration, mechanicalness, even tedium. Just in case we wondered what, in the end, was the good of it all, I found a little text by the 13th-century beguine Mechtild of Magdeburg (who knew a thing or two about it) that picks us up by the scruff of the neck and firmly reminds us what it's all about. 

The prayer of him that prays with all his might

has great power.

The embittered heart it softens,

the saddened heart it lightens,

the impoverished heart it turns to riches,

and the foolish heart to wisdom.

The timid heart it emboldens,

and the afflicted heart it relieves.

To the blinded heart it gives light,

and to the chilly heart a fiery warmth.

It calls down great God into the narrow heart,

and lifts the starved into God's plenty.

It reunites two lovers,

God and the soul,

in a wondrous place where they converse of love.

THE FIFTH PETITION

A couple of posts ago, I said that I’d write something about forgiveness. One of my reasons for doing so is that I’ve been rereading Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) Jesus of Nazareth, one of the most gloriously intelligent books on Christianity I have seen for a long time. And in his section on the Lord’s Prayer, his chapter on the Fifth Petition (“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”) is a model of perceptive and noble insight. I will try to repeat here what he says, partly in quotation, partly in précis, because it is very much worth pondering.

            First, there is trespass – we all know that. ‘How to overcome guilt is a central question for every human life’. What does one do about offence? The first human reaction is to retaliate. As the old Marines’ saying has it, ‘Yea, I shall walk through the valley of death and fear no evil, because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.’ In real life, of course, retaliation has no logical end and becomes vendetta. But ‘with this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation.’

           And it is God, not we, who has taken the initiative. ‘We should keep in mind that God himself – knowing that we human beings stood against him, unreconciled – stepped out of his divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us.’ He washed his disciples’ feet; he told the story of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:25-35).

            So what do we do? Here I have to quote at slightly greater length, because the argument is dense and pertinent. First, if we want to get into this properly, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place?

Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more that a matter of ignoring, or merely trying to forget. Guilt must me worked through, healed, and thus overcome.’

            (Notice that he treats ‘guilt’ not as a feeling, but as a fact. Not ‘I feel guilty’ but ‘I am guilty.’ That is already a biggish step, in a lot of situations.)

            ‘Forgiveness exacts a price – first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself.’ (My emphasis.) This I find extraordinary in its profound perception. The sentence is worth copying out and meditating on.

            ‘As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil, are made new.’

            Sounds wonderful, we say. But does it work in real life? Damned hard. Offence is offence; evil is evil. (It may not help that ‘bad’ and ‘wicked’ have become compliments . . .) We are not good at confronting evil, because when we do we discover how powerful it is. It is bigger than us: as Reinhold Schneider says, ‘it lives in a thousand forms; it occupies the pinnacles of power . . .it bubbles up from the abyss.’ And then he says (to God): ‘Love has just one form – your Son.’

            This is where one the one hand the solution lies, but where on the other hand it gets difficult. ‘The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today.’ For two reasons: one is that, even while we take the horrors of history as proof that God can’t exist, we trivialize evil: we don’t see the horrors as emanations of something. (‘Shit happens.’) The other reason is that we tend to see the human being as being solely an individual, ‘ensconced in himself alone’. We find it hard to think of all human beings as deeply interwoven, and as all in turn being encompassed by ‘the One – the Incarnate Son.’

            Perhaps, says JR, an idea of John Henry Newman’s (the Victorian Anglican who became a Catholic and a Cardinal) my suffice. ‘Newman once said that while God could create the whole world [read: universe] out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender.’

As such, we have a model we can follow: however hard it is, we aren’t pathless. ‘The overcoming of guilt has a price. We must put our heart – or better, our whole existence – on the line. And even this act is insufficient: it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all . . . who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross.’ We need first to give thanks for that, ‘and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love.’ We are not terribly good at this, and we keep falling down; but we are held within the power his His love, which means that our puny attempts ‘can still become a power of healing.’

In all honesty, I’ve never read such a profound and powerful analysis of what it means to forgive – not just the little things, the friend who forgot my birthday or the teacher who gave me an unfair mark, but the big things: they know what they are. To forgive and to be forgiven: it means, inevitably, a relationship, a coming together in a challenge. Without prayer, it’s all but impossible; with prayer, it’s hard, but we are not alone. The Force is with us.   

        

Thanks to Rick McNary at rickmcnary.me for the image.    

ANGLICAN 'ACHE OF THE KNOWN'?

There are, I suspect, many Anglicans for whom Edward Noke's painting of Cockington Church reflects their inmost idea of what a church, indeed what the church, is and should remain. No amount of inner-city "diversity" and "outreach" can shake this. If we could face a new century and new conditions with this image in our hearts, and intelligent ways of adapting it without losing it in our minds, conservation and loss might be balanced in kindness. (The 'ache of the known' is, of course, the English translation of 'nostalgia'.)

Incidentally, the album is a fine example of English choral singing, with some splendid descants.

FEAST OF THE HOLY CROSS 2

Last year I posted some of the Old English poem "The Dream of the Rood", and I can't resist renewing the experience. Here are a couple of passages in the 1970 translation of Richard Hamer, who taught me Old English at Oxford, followed by the original of the passage in colour, just for the pleasure of that powerful tongue. I love the image of Christ as the "young hero" ascending the Cross.

And then I saw the Lord of all mankind

Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount

Upon me. I durst not against God's word

Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all

The surface of the earth. Although I might

Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

Then the young hero (who was God almighty)

Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.

He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,

Bold in the sight of many watching men,

When He intended to redeem mankind.

I trembled as the warrior embraced me.

But still I dared not bend down to the earth,

Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.

A rood I was raised up; and I held high

The noble King, the Lord of heaven above.

I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails;

The scars can still be clearly seen on me,

The open wounds of malice. yet might I

Not harm them. They reviled us both together.

I was made wet all over with the blood

Which poured out from his side, after He had Sent forth His spirit.

………

On me

The Son of God once suffered; therefore now

I tower mighty underneath the heavens,

And I may heal all those in awe of me.

Once I became the cruellest of tortures,

Most hateful to all nations, till the time

I opened the right way of life for men.

So then the prince of glory honoured me,

And heaven's King exalted me above

All other trees, just as Almighty God

Raised up His mother Mary for all men

Above all other women in the world.

………

Ongyrede hine þa geong hæleð - þæt wæs God ælmihtig! -

strang stiðmod; gestah he ongealgan heanne,

modig on manigra gesyhðe, þahe wolde mancyn lysan.

Bifode ic þa me se beorn ymbclypte; 
ne dorste ic hwæðre bugan to eorðan,

feallan to foldan sceatum, ac ic sceolde fæste standan.

Rod wæs ic aræred; ahof ic ricne Cyning,

heofona Hlaford; hyldan me ne dorste.

FEAST OF THE HOLY CROSS - 1

A 15th-century iron cross overlooking Cordes-sur-Ciel, at sunset

A HYMN FOR THE FEAST OF THE HOLY CROSS

The Cross: two bars of bitter wood

the image of our shame:

for when the Son of Light and Good

for our redemption came

and loved and healed us where we stood,

we savaged Him with blame.

The Cross, where all directions meet,

the central point of space:

we drove Him there, on bleeding feet,

with slow and stumbling pace

till, thorn-crowned, in the noonday heat

He lifted up His face.

The Cross, that raised Him up on high

to suffer through the hours,

to thirst, to bleed, to break, to die

abandoning His powers;

while we were marble to His cry

deliverance was ours.

The Cross, now central point of time,

meeting-place of our prayer

where, maculate with sin and grime

beyond what we can bear,

we meet Love’s harmony and rhyme

and brightness in the air.

The Cross: two bars of living wood,

the image of His grace:

it stands where our despair once stood,

it centres time and space,

and brings us to the Light and Good

to kneel before His face.

I wrote this last year, and take the liberty of re-posting it here today. If anyone wants to sing it or have it sung, the intended tune is Morwellham. 

THE NEED TO SEE CLEARLY

In an interview with the French daily Le Figaro, the Tunisian philosopher Mezri Haddad corrected his French colleague Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had said that "Jihadism" was a new form of fascism. I found his correction both intriguing and moving, because we often think that not enough Muslims are speaking out against what we now call jihadism, and what Haddad urges us to rethink as something both broader and deeper, and even more dangerous. 

I decided to publish this here in part because Christianity has gone through the same traumatic development in past ages -- think French Wars of Religion, think Calvin's Geneva, think English Civil War -- and because Christianity is occasionally tempted, in the face of what seems like galloping indifference, to call into question its 200-300-year-old pact with the Enlightenment. 

Here, Haddad addresses Lévy:

No, Sir, it is Islamism itself that is by definition, by its nature, by axiology and by etiology a neo-fascist ideology. It is the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928) that is the mother-cell of jihadism, Khomeinism, Talibanism, Al-Qaida, Hamas, Boko Haram, Ansar-al-Sharia, the AKP, Ennahda, ISF . . . If those terminological metastases, those excrescences and ramifications becloud analysis and trouble Western rationality, they do not prevent the Muslim philosopher from seeing what unites them all and which constitutes their common foundation, i.e. the indissociability of the temporal and the spiritual, of the sacred and the profane, of the religious and the political. The difference between an Erdogan or a Ghannouchi on the one hand and a Ben Laden or Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, on the other, therefore, is not a difference of nature but of strategy or more precisely of tactics. In this respect, the Machiavellian difference based on the readjustment of means relative to ends should enlighten us more: in Islamist doctrine, Islam is a religious means in the service of a political goal: power, total power, nothing but power. 

A necrosis of Islamic civilisation, an alteration of the Muslim religion, Islamism is a neo-fascist, theocratic and totalitarian ideology.  It is not the incarnation of Islam but its incarceration. It is a “secular religion”, as Raymond Aron termed Nazism and Communism. And there [Levy] is perfectly correct when he says that “Fascislamism” is the final form of modern totalitarianism to be fought, because it constitutes a danger not only for the Muslim world but also for the Western world. In a recent address to the diplomatic corps in Saudi Arabia, King Abdallah – who knows whereof he speaks! – declared, “If they do not react, Europe and the USA will have jihadists in their own countries within a month”!

And this combat is one of philosophy against sophism, of autonomy against heteronomy, of alterity against identity, of knowledge against ignorance, of hermeneutics against exegetic fundamentalism, of truth against lies, of reason against passion, of pedagogy against demagogy, of the Enlightenment against obscurantism, of secularisation against clericalism, of liberty against totalitarianism.

BETTER THAN A SONNET

I'm a day late for this post, but as a born Prot the Nativity of the Virgin is something I have yet to learn to celebrate, and the Twelfth Sunday After Trinity is a celebration of a different kind.  Here is the glorious Collect, originally from Leo and revised by Gelasius the African (see on left), and gloriously translated by the Blessed Thomas Cranmer:

Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

As Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl say in their delightful book on the Collects, this one is "a treasure chest, truly overflowing". If you take it bit by splendid bit, and meditate on each, you have a rich day's thinking and meditating given to you. 1) He is always more ready to hear than we to pray: Ouch. At once wonderful and rueful. Really? No, we aren't bothering Him by praying too much: we bother Him by praying too little. Ouch. 2) He is "wont" -- used -- in the habit of -- giving more than we desire -- really? and there we are, always thinking that our prayers go unheard? -- and also commonly giving more than we deserve -- OK, that we can get into, we don't deserve an awful lot -- but still, both those sentences start from the idea that we are absolutely smothered in gifts from Him -- had we perhaps not noticed?
So it goes on. The main petition: pour down upon us the abundance of Thy mercy. I love the pouring -- there is something so huge and exquisitely excessive about that pouring down, like tropical rain. And what pours is the abundance. I love abundance -- indeed, I love excess. It may be part of having spent the first 4 years of my life in wartime, under occupation, and in permanent shortage. I love abundance. But in this case what we ask for is the abundance of mercy, which sort of brings us up short. Whoops. Could it be that we need mercy, not measured out in neat cups, but poured down in abundance? And what does that say about us?
Well, the point is mentioned right away: forgiving us the stuff of which our conscience is afraid. I do like that scared conscience. We all know about guilty consciences, or shabby ones: but sometimes the stuff  we have thought, said, or done (or left undone) makes our conscience quite simply afraid. And that needs forgiving. (Benedict XVI has some staggering paragraphs about forgiveness, what it is and how it works -- stay tuned.)
And then we ask for -- what? We don't know. But we trust Him to know. We ask him for the things we don't dare to ask. Love that? There is stuff we feel too damn small even to ask for. So we say to Him: give us what we don't dare ask for. Whatever it is. Sometimes we feel it, formlessly working within us; sometimes we feel too small to ask for the big things; but nevertheless, we stick our puny necks out and ask for -- that. Those. Them. You figure it out, Lord. Just remember, whatever It is, we need It. And on our mingy own, we fuck up. 
What a truly glorious Collect. And let no one say this is nasty old 16C English that needs to be modernised before anyone under 50 can"relate" to it. This is clear as spring water, and every bit as beautiful. Trinity Twelve; and today, on the night of the full moon, we can celebrate it as it deserves.

COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE?

Fernandel as Don Camillo

Is Christianity no longer a religion for ordinary people?

 This sounds peculiar, I know; but it has been haunting me for a long time. There is, I admit, a splendid congruence between St Paul on the one hand and, say, Pope Francis on the other: both keep hammering away at the extraordinary nature of discipleship, the total availability expected of all followers of Christ, the complete scission beteen them and the “world”, the prodigies of charity we are called upon to perform, the complete solidarity we are expected to show at all times of day, week, or year with the world’s poor and miserable, the entire purity our motives and behaviour must exhibit, and the fact that, as disciples, everyone calling himself a Christian is expected to follow the Master to the Cross, to be nailed there like St Peter or stoned like St Stephen.

 This is the voice of the 21^st-century Church, faced with minority status, massive desertion, indifference on the part of both bond traders and jobless single mothers, and the loss of everything that gave its members simple joys and pleasures.

 Now go back to Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo. Or to the Dutch novelist Aart van der Leeuw’s I and my Minstrel. They show a world – admittedly not in a mode of gritty naturalism – where a village can have a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor, where the former can discuss with the figure on the Cross, where a Sunday can begin with a Mass and end with a dance, where ordinary life (in other words) can be blessed by the priest’s holy water and where ordinary folk can be encouraged, shriven when penitent, and feel that their daily round, with all its difficulties, is regarded by a Father’s benevolent and smiling eye.

 Could it be – I sometimes wonder – that we have put the cart before the horse? That the changes in our Church are not, in fact, a reaction to its desertion by thousands but that said desertion is, on the contrary, at least in part a reaction to the changes?

 There were hundreds, if not thousands, that were touched, healed, fed by Jesus, all over Galilee and points South. There were twelve – count them, twelve – disciples, eleven of whom skedaddled on Good Friday; there were at most 72 apostles, sent to convert the planet. What about the others? What happened to the Roman officer, to the Samaritan woman, to the healed epileptic, to the diners at Emmaus, afterwards?

 To want to re-institute a Church that will bless daily life, expect confession but offer absolution, accompany ordinary people in their problems while projecting a timeless and benevolent authority, is nowadays to put oneself beyond the Pale. I find it deeply sad that not only the Anglican Eucharist but the Catholic Mass no longer offers absolution following the General Confession, giving the worshipper instead only the thin gruel of a conditional.

 The world does not consist only of wealthy financiers on the one hand and immigrant drug dealers in the housing projects on the other. The world mostly consists of simple people doing their best in difficulties ranging from indigence to Alzheimer’s. What they need from the Church is, among other things, a sense of stability, of visibility, of serenity, of being there for them – not (as Pope Francis said at the beginning of his Papacy but has largely negated since) as an activist NGO but as the father and mother they lack, as the kindly encouraging parent or grandparent missing in their world. Not the urgent and absolute love of a saint ready to be stoned for them: the comforting practical love of a family member ready to take them in for a meal, a song, a dance, and a good sleep. They need priests visible in cassocks, nuns visible in habits, timeless liturgies, and a blessing at the end of the day.  

P.S. The original of Guareschi's Don Camillo, Don Camillo Valota, was not only a parish priest but a fighter with the Partisans during World War II and a prisoner in two concentration camps.