CHRISTMAS AND BEYOND

CAROL

 Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf.

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

Jill Furse (1915-1944)

Jill Furse (granddaughter of the poet Sir Henry Newbolt) was a young actress of great promise who married glass-engraver and poet Laurence Whistler. Their brief but idyllic marriage was cut short by her death after the birth of their second child, and was exquisitely described by Whistler in his book The Initials in the Heart. I was privileged to know both Whistler and his daughter, and have always loved this little poem Jill wrote in their secluded cottage in Devon. 

I used to wonder at the ending, but have come to understand what was doubtless elementary to all but me: that the Incarnation implies the Crucifixion. If the almighty and everlasting God of the entire universe (and possibly of a few others also) decides, in His son, to take upon him, not a human form but human substance, human life itself; if Deus homo factus est; then that human life implies a human death. The rich womb opens the way to the poor cross. 

And the poor cross, of course, is not the end. Et resurrexit tertia die: Christmas points to Good Friday, but Good Friday points to Easter morning. Laurence, who wrote some very moving poems after her death, died in December 2000. It is a good thought that they are now reunited.

ADVENT 4: A GIFT

On the Fourth Sunday in Advent I was at Mass in the rather beautiful village church of Milhars, a cut above most others in the region, perhaps because of the proximity of the large ancient château perched above it. And in the silence following the Communion it occurred to me that each Eucharist repeats the entire story of the Gospel.

At the moment of Consecration, the Incarnation repeats itself. Our Lord and heavenly father, the almighty and everlasting God, again sends his Son to take matter upon himself, et homo factus est in the Body and Blood on the altar.

At the moment of Communion, his preaching life, his healing life, and his crucifixion are compressed into a brief but extraordinarily intense moment: at one and the same time we understand his action, we are healed by his touch, and we crush him in the Host.

And in our subsequent renewal, in our fresh energy of loving, his Resurrection is repeated: our inward life shines with an Easter glory.

This thought is, I am sure, present in the work of mystics and Church Fathers; but in this case it was given to me in a few minutes of quiet, awaiting the Solemn Benediction in a French village church. What a Christmas gift!

BATTLEFIELD?

Last week we travelled over 500 miles to see Peter Brook’s new production, Battlefield, a brief (70-minute) excerpt from the immense Mahabharata – which last he produced as a 9-hour stage performance 30 years ago. Battlefield is set after a vast battle that left “millions dead” and brought a new king to power after a bitter struggle between two clans. In the aftermath, the new king confronts his predecessor and uncle, his mother, and a variety of other characters that include the god Krishna and the personification of the River Ganges. All is done on a virtually empty stage with four actors and a Japanese virtuoso drummer. The review in Singapore’s  Straits Times gives a good idea of it.

What interested me particularly was the grave fatalism expressed. Man has no choices, but (and) must accept the full weight of responsibility. The new king is told that he will reign virtuously and happily for 36 years, and will then pass on the kingdom to a youth who will be the only survivor of a battle. At the play’s end, 33 years have passed, and the dreadful signs and omens are massing for a new apocalyptic battle – and we learn that the succession will be like the former one, and that there is nothing that can be done about this. Death rules every man; fate rules the life of humanity. Nevertheless, responsibility is all.

It is like a strange related version of existentialism. There, absurdity rules all; yet again one must accept responsibility and act with courage and virtue. The universe is, for the existentialist, nonsensical; for the mournful kings on the corpse-littered battlefield, entirely closed. “This victory is a defeat” says the winner, with infinite sadness.

It brought home to me, in this third week of Advent, the utter astonishment of what we are preparing for. That the closed, ineluctable universe of Fate should be cracked open by God is one thing; that God should decide to do so by entering into human life is another; that He should do so, not in glory or power or cosmic war or starring on CNN but as an anonymous infant in a remote pub’s stable on the East coast of the Mediterranean, cared for by a slip of a girl and a carpenter and visited by a few shepherds; that is completely astounding. Et incarnatus est, de spiritu sancto, ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. And with that, the terrible cycle of fate, the unyielding melancholy of the kings on the battlefield, is broken. Light floods in. Angels sing.

In paganity, Yuletide celebrates the return of the light; but there will always be a return of the dark. The glass is half full, but half empty also. There is no escape, no opening in the pagan universe. We can celebrate, briefly, but the cycle is unending.

Et homo factus est announces Emmanuel, “God with us”. Not to depart again. It announces the Cross; but the Cross issues in the Resurrection. Death does not rule all. We may celebrate cyclically; but what we celebrate is done. It happened, once and for all, in specific, knowable and known, points of time and space.

Right now, it’s still dark, in every sense of the word. Days are short, horrors happen, hate and foolishness abound. But there is a glimmer of light, and in the distance, very faintly, a sound as of angels rehearsing.

ADVENT 2 - ODD OPTATIVES

While it is tempting to write about St Nicholas – because the Eve of his feast is a traditional Dutch version of Father Christmas, when children get a visit from the Saint in episcopal robes and receive their presents --, I did promise to pursue the odd optatives in the Lord’s Prayer for a bit.

It has always struck me as peculiar that the first three petitions are couched in the language of a wish rather than in that of a prayer. ‘Hallowed be thy Name, thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done’: may all this happen, we appear to be saying, rather than putting a direct request as is normal in a prayer.

Since I never have an original idea, I assumed that others must have noticed the same thing; and, indeed, when I started looking I found a rich literature on the subject, which I will only touch on lightly here, on the Second Sunday in Advent. Let’s begin with the Catholic Catechism, which is (as one would expect) stoutly declarative on the topic:

2807 “The term ‘to hallow’ is to be understood here not primarily in its causative sense (only God hallows, makes holy), but above all in an evaluative sense: to recognize as holy, to treat in a holy way. And so, in adoration, this invocation is sometimes understood as praise and thanksgiving.⁶⁶ But this petition is here taught to us by Jesus as an optative: a petition, a desire, and an expectation in which God and man are involved. Beginning with this first petition to our Father, we are immersed in the innermost mystery of his Godhead and the drama of the salvation of our humanity. Asking the Father that his name be made holy draws us into his plan of loving kindness for the fullness of time, "according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ," that we might "be holy and blameless before him in love."⁶⁷

2808 “In the decisive moments of his economy God reveals his name, but he does so by accomplishing his work. This work, then, is realized for us and in us only if his name is hallowed by us and in us.”

This is interesting, but no reasoning is given (normal, in a catechism), and no. 2808 seems rather circular.

For a 20^th-century Calvinist view, I went to Karl Barth. In The Christian Life he wrote extensively and brilliantly on the optatives. About these petitions, especially the first, Barth says that a) we can, when praying ‘Hallowed be thy name’, only fold our hands and trust God to fulfil it; yet at the same time b) we cannot escape our own responsibility, as really pressing God with this petition involves being ‘startled and disquieted’ and involving ourselves both in earnest prayer and committed ethical action.

This too is interesting and ethically admirable, but I am not sure why the petition is startling and disquieting, nor why the consequences he lists follow logically.

By this time, I was starting to wonder about the optative, and thought I would pursue it in terms of the New Testament’s Greek. So I found a fascinating and lively Hellenist blog (BGreek), where the subject had also been discussed. The Hellenists concluded that it was not an optative but an imperative (as in ‘Let there be light!’). That, as one of them pointed out, makes the petitions extremely powerful. Then another said that the 3^rd person aorist imperative was standard in Greek prayers. And a further person then pointed out that Jesus uses the same form when he is healing someone (e.g. Mt 8:13). NB: As someone else pointed out, the aorist implies that the object of the prayer is a one-time happening rather than an ongoing process.

This was exciting, though it didn’t really clear up my confusion: the imperative, again, is not obviously a prayer.

However, a Church Father agreed: Origen, in De Oratione (‘Origen On Prayer’ CCLE) in his 2^nd chapter on the Lord’s Prayer (ch. 14), also claims – arguing against Tatian -- that it is an imperative on the order of ‘Let there be light!’.

In the case of the First Petition, there is also the whole subject of the Name, on which the consensus seems to be that God’s Name is coextensive with His nature. Matthew Henry refers to ‘God’s Name, that is, God Himself’. There is also a passage from Ezekiel 36:22ff.: ‘Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. I will sanctify [= hallow] my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord GOD, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land.' (NRSV) This led someone to write that ‘we are making a virtue of necessity’ when we pray this, as God has said He will do it Himself anyway.

Why Jesus put them in the optative we will never know; not down here, anyway. That he did so is, I think, beyond doubt: someone on the Hellenist blog pointed out that Matthew was a Mokhes, or douanier, an excise man, and that as such he was used to making shorthand notes, which he would then later elaborate in Greek and send to Rome with the tax receipts; hence his version of Jesus’ words has good authority, whereas Luke confessedly wrote from hearsay.

So where does this leave us, and the optatives? All the answers above are enlightening in some ways, but do not seem to me to answer the original question: how can such optatives be a prayer? The slightly circular no. 2808 of the Catholic Catechism, I think, comes closest. Perhaps the way in which this first half of the Pater Noster can be a prayer, a beseeching, is in the following sense: ‘Father, grant us the grace to hallow thy Name; grant us the strength to help thy Kingdom come; grant us the discernment to do thy Will on earth -- as the angels and saints do it in Heaven.’

ABUN D'BISHMAYYA -- NOT TO BE MISSED

I had been meditating on the Lord's Prayer and its curious optatives; then, browsing a little further, I came upon a remarkable little video from the Talmidi Jewish community, which gives a reconstruction of the prayer in Galilean Aramaic, the dialect Jesus spoke. It's a reconstruction, because no original version of it in the language is known; but it is borne out by one or two other specialist websites and seems accurate. The prayer as reconstructed here and then re-translated seems to me not only quite beautiful but entirely acceptable to a Christian -- indeed, as the speaker says, it clears away a few bumps that those dealing with the traditional Greek-based Christian version stumble over. I particularly like both his view of the prayer's twofold organisation and his explanation of the final three petitions. Here is the link. I'll return to the optatives in my next.

FROM A RUGGED AND THOROUGHLY MODERN MYSTIC

Thomas Merton in his handbuilt Kentucky hermitage

"We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. The only thing is we don't see it...I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

My Lord, God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. The fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please You. And I know that if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear. For you are ever with me; and You will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Thomas Merton