ADVENIET!

 German Advent calendar ca. 1930. A shutter opens each day; on Christmas Day double doors open showing the Christ Child in his crib.

My old neighbour in the village (now gone to meet her Maker) had a long shapeless skirt and only one visible tooth. Since her husband’s death she lived alone in a vast crumbling farmhouse with a gorgeous view she did not, I think, take in. She told me once that every November she would go into a deep depression. Here in the South of France winters are not usually severe in the Canadian sense of that word, but they are chill, dank, dark grey and often rainy. Poor Mme Nouviale was clearly suffering from what we would now call Sunshine Deprivation Syndrome; but at this time of year many people (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) feel the cold and the dark in dimensions beyond the physical.

   For some, who still live the agricultural year, it comes with the slowing down of activity, the look back over a (frequently unsatisfactory) year of harvests, the anxious analysis of the accounts; for others, living in cities, there is the pressure of work, difficult relations in the office, family problems that seem to intensify as the nights grow longer; for many living alone there is a growing dread of the dark and the silence.

   Although this unease is often projected onto Christmas, it has little to do with that feast. It is the primeval dark that makes itself felt to humans no longer attuned to it. As such, it calls for the cave-dweller in us to stock up with meat and berries and wood, to light large fires and make loud and joyful noises to drive away the enormous night. Which is perfectly in tune with Christmas, that curious half-pagan half-divine festivity.

   But those of us to whom it is also the feast of the Incarnation, that stupendous and overwhelming surprise, these weeks of darkness leading up to it are more strongly, and differently, charged. As the readings for today – the first Sunday in Advent – point out, we are called to be night-watchmen, vigiles as the French say. We know when He came, but we do not know when He will come again; and Advent celebrates both that past and that future.

   If we are to be good watchers, we must be awake. And so this season is not, as I used to think, a penitential season so much as a thoughtful and a wakeful one. We need to use these weeks to awaken our faith, our hope, and our love. Our faith, which does tend to nod off at times, either through laziness or intellectual incredulity; our hope, which gets overwhelmed by duties, problems, activities and misery; and our love, which sometimes disappears beneath a scrum of tangled irritations and defiant selfishness.

   Today is the day of one candle in the night. ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the dark’ runs the old proverb. The candle has been lit. The night is no longer whole and definitive. Hope is awake, just barely, and sleepily stirring its neighbours Faith and Love. In my little German advent-calendar in the form of a snowy house, one shutter is open, and on the translucent paper window is written, in Gothic lettering, ‘Lord, I await Your salvation.’

IN A NEW YEAR

Last Sunday, we were reminded that the Last Sunday After Trinity, now known as the Sunday Before Advent, and known in Catholic circles as Christ the King, is in fact the last Sunday of the liturgical year. So tomorrow, the First Sunday in Advent, begins a new year. And it begins so quietly. One little candle in the darkness, in the storms, in the long nights of snow, in all the depths of the world. About that we can talk tomorrow --  but what about this new year, then? There should at least be a little celebration, a sense that renewal is not doomed but possible, a consciousness that, as someone put it, we fall down ten times; but when we get up the eleventh time, that’s faith. And hope.

   Many years ago, in early January, Schultz published a Peanuts cartoon featuring Lucy looking crossly at the sky and saying, “We’ve been cheated! It’s not a new year! They’ve given us a used year!” Sometimes January’s new year can feel like that. But the new year of Advent should not. No matter where we are, how we are, in that new year the year can be new. In our hearts, in our minds, and – let’s bring back that entity the Enlightenment downplayed – in our souls, a spring is possible. Somebody wrote that the fig tree is such a beloved symbol in the Bible because it burgeons, it gets leaf-buds, very early, yet its fruit ripen late. So if in the spring of this new year we bud early but then not much seems to happen, let us not be sad or discouraged: there will be a summer, and there will be fruit.

   And a final word about “the season” – “the holiday season”, “the shopping season” and all those things we love to get angry at even as we are part of them. A new year suggests a few good resolutions. Could we perhaps begin with the resolution not to be defensive about Christmas, not to bitch at bad music in shopping centres, not to grouch and grinch and complain? A resolution to live this season – which is as much happily pagan as it is, for us, also happily religious – with confidence and pleasure, on whatever scale pleases us and those we love? Such a resolution would help increase the joy of the world in expectation of the dies Natalis, would allow us to smile at our families, our neighbours, and strangers, and to pass on whatever help we can spare to those whose new year begins in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity. In newness of life.

ET IN SPIRITUS SANCTUS

Lately I've been pondering the subject of the Holy Spirit, Le saint Esprit, der heilige Geist, the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Trinity. On one Catholic forum I saw that someone had written, 'We Catholics tend to forget about the Holy Spirit: we have the Father, the Son and the Blessed Mother.' In slightly more sophisticated theological discussions, I have been seeing the Spirit referred to as the dynamic of love between the Father and the Son into which we can be drawn through prayer. In the New Testament, the Spirit is given in curiously specific ways at curiously specific moments, just as 'peace' becomes something very specific: leave your peace in the house you visit, but if it does not receive you well, take your peace back again. Jesus breathes on the apostles and they receive the Holy Spirit. 

It's all very confusing. How can the Spirit be both a spiritus -- a pneuma, a ruach -- a cloud, a wisp, a breeze, present but intangible like a gas or an odour, and a person? Is the Spirit a He or an It? One place this leads us, of course, is to the Creed, which tells us that the Spirit 'proceeds from the Father and the Son'. It did not always do so: the gestation of that phrase in the Creed was a long and horribly difficult one, as the Wikipedia article on the subject shows. 

So I thought I'd look up a Church Father or two -- in our busy lives we tend to ignore them, which is foolish of us. If Christians read the past scholars and thinkers of their faith as carefully and assiduously as devout Jews do those of theirs, our religious life would be less simplistic and infinitely richer. St Basil did not answer my question but he did write something very fine which, through a metaphor, answered another of my constant questions: how can God, creator of the Whole, be present to little me, a speck on a speck, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe? Here is Basil:

Simple in himself, the Spirit is manifold in his mighty works. The whole of his being is present to each individual; the whole of his being is present everywhere. Though shared in by many, he remains unchanged; his self-giving is no loss to himself. Like the sunshine, which permeates all the atmosphere, spreading over land and sea, and yet is enjoyed by each person as though it were for him alone, so the Spirit pours forth his grace in full measure, sufficient for all, and yet is present as though exclusively to everyone who can receive him. To all creatures that share in him he gives a delight limited only by their own nature, not by his ability to give.  . . . .

As clear, transparent substances become very bright when sunlight falls on them and shine with a new radiance, so also souls in whom the Spirit dwells, and who are enlightened by the Spirit, become spiritual themselves and a source of grace for others.

From the Spirit comes foreknowledge of the future, understanding of the mysteries of faith, insight into the hidden meaning of Scripture, and other special gifts. Through the Spirit we become citizens of heaven, we are admitted to the company of the angels, we enter into eternal happiness and abide in God. 

The question of the Spirit's Personhood remains; one keeps looking, and thinking. But meanwhile, we know that He is accessible to us, that He is our Comforter and Advocate, that whenever we pray, it is He that prays in and through us and makes it possible for us to pray at all. Perhaps we have trouble seeing Him clearly not because He is far away but because He is so close. Veni, creator Spiritus.

THE HARDLY, BARELY PRAYABLE

Reading Thomas Friedman’s excellent New York Times columns from Dubai recently, I was struck by his point that for the first time, the countries of the Middle East can no longer simply blame the problems on “the West” but are, or will be, forced to recognise that ISIS, or Daech, is a homegrown monster that calls into question everyone’s understanding of what and who they are and intend to be. And seeing the degeneration of Sunni-Shia relations in the area, I’m reminded of, say, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 and the fact that, 400 years after that, my mother still refused to buy meat from our town’s Catholic butcher. We Christians have been there, done that. Yes, torn the other guys limb from limb, cut their throats, decapitated them, drowned them in barrels, the lot. It makes one think about how we got out of that. I suspect it involved three or four successive and in part cumulative factors.

First, strong monarchies and symbolic power. When I first visited Versailles, I found it excessive and vulgar. Only later did I realise the gigantic and brilliant public-relations exercise it had been. Louis XIV accomplished, with Versailles, the astonishing feat of convincing provincial seigneurs, who had real power in the form of private armies, that the number of feet they were allowed to stand from the King’s bed at his morning levée – in other words, symbolic power – was more important to their well-being than being lords of Lorraine.  That began the drain away from murderous mobs run by ambitious warlords.

Second, the Enlightenment. That curious and formless movement toward knowledge in harness with civilised behaviour, that second Renaissance that briefly celebrated balance and harmony and went on to apply thought to emotion, modified faith by making it unreasonable to maim and kill for its sake. In the time, and the world, of Diderot and Voltaire, faith was increasingly what one lived in one’s private relation to God; the Church was where those of faith came together, but society as a whole was supposed to be directed by reasonable and civilised behaviour. This, of course, had a few serious birth-pains involving guillotines and terror, but in the end it proved irresistible because, like democracy, it was the worst conceivable system except for all the alternatives.

Third, the Industrial Revolution. This almost-unimaginable J-curve of social and material change, which is still going on, although for many it intensified their faith (think of the Oxford Movement), made the habits of the Enlightenment – faith as something you might propagate but you did not maim or kill for – not only attractive but essential. It also continued another aspect of the Enlightenment: atheism, the failure of faith when touched by reason, grew apace and from then on faith could no longer ignore it.

So, now. What about now? In large swathes of the world, Christian faith is being threatened by real, physical enemies who still consider faith something worth maiming and killing for. How do we, and should we, react? On a worldly level, Friedman, I think, is right: containment to stop the horror spreading, and amplification to help good developments where they are starting to happen. But what do we do as Christians? Well, in many churches there is an admirable movement to help fellow-believers in that part of the world. But beyond that? Yesterday at a dinner party I heard some devout people’s reaction: No truck with Islam in any form, it’s an evil masquerading as a religion, maybe it was decent once but that was centuries ago, etcetera etcetera.

It made me reflect that in the various churches I have worshipped in since 2001, not once have I heard prayers for those we feel, and often know, to be our enemies. I have heard prayers for the Queen; I have heard prayers for various Presidents and their governments; I have heard many prayers for persecuted Christians everywhere; but I have not heard prayers for the members of ISIS; I have not heard prayers for Vladimir Putin; I have not heard prayers for Boko Haram. Let us ponder this very seriously. And reread Matthew 5:43-48, in the full knowledge that for those in the field that is almost impossibly difficult, but that for us, for us in safety and in prayer, it is probably crucial.

HUMDRUMLIES

I was rereading the wonderful Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love where, in the introductory chapters, an author (they are always anonymous) explains the difficulties facing a young monk entering the Order. Seduced by the Absolute, expecting marvels of saintliness, he will be surprised and dismayed by the banality of the daily life there, “a kind of dull grey” with occasional conflicts among the brothers and endless compromises within the “family”. Only gradually will he discover that it is in precisely such banality that God develops the qualities which make the mature Carthusian such a remarkable figure in the world of devotion and prayer.

It touched a chord. Since, at the age of 70, I decided that religion was the adventure befitting this new stage of life, I was beginning to miss the illuminations of the early years, the sense of discovery, and had started to feel a dull grey weight of daily humdrumlies interfering with the adventure. So reading our Carthusian friend made me realise that perhaps precisely that weight of humdrumlies is the stuff of God’s action and His way of addressing one. Of course, once you realise that, you remember that George Herbert had been telling you the same thing ever since you discovered him at the age of 20 or so: you have been a little slow on the uptake.

You also remember Brother Lawrence, that amiable 17^th-century German servant of a monastery who turned out to be the saintliest man there, and whose very simple piety based itself on “the practice of the presence of God” and a continuing conversation with Him. A conversation that went on while he was cooking, baking, sweeping floors and tending the kitchen garden.

It is yet another stage in the education to humility. A Church service is wonderful: “I was glad when they said unto me: we will go into the house of the Lord” (Ps. 122:1). An exquisite service with flawless choirs, as in Oxford, is even more glorious. A simple Mass in a country church is still a Mass, where God is present in a very specific and precious way. But reading the stories of Elijah and Elisha at home, sweeping the kitchen floor “as for Thy laws”, making beds, changing the oil on the family car, cooking vegetable soup or dirty rice while having constantly one’s ear open for the murmur of the Spirit and conversing with Him as freely as with one’s intimate friend or family – that may lead us to unexpected uplands of surprising sunlight.

The Elixir

Teach me, my God and King,

         In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything

         To do it as for Thee.

         Not rudely, as a beast,

         To run into an action;

But still to make Thee prepossest,

         And give it his perfection.

         A man that looks on glass,

         On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

         And then the heav'n espy.

         All may of Thee partake:

         Nothing can be so mean,

Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"—

         Will not grow bright and clean.

         A servant with this clause

         Makes drudgery divine:

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,

         Makes that and th' action fine.

         This is the famous stone

         That turneth all to gold;

For that which God doth touch and own

         Cannot for less be told.

George Herbert