THE FORGOTTEN VIRTUE?

I’ve been thinking about hope. It is curious that there are two great commandments but three theological virtues. Faith, obviously, corresponds to the first great commandment; charity to the second. So where does hope come in?

French has two words for hope: espoir and espérance. The former is the more common, and applies to simple things as well as to profound ones. J’espère gagner à la loterie: I hope I win in the lottery. I hope my kid passes his exams. I hope there won’t be another jihadist attack in Paris. In this sense of the word, “hope” is close kin to “wish”. It implies goodwill but no sense of personal empowerment or responsibility.

So what about espérance? The verb it is linked to, nominally, is also espérer; in fact, it is almost never used. Espérance is the noun used for the theological virtue (and also for the Cape of Good Hope, incidentally). And just as in English, one doesn’t use the verb much in this sense, probably because of its association with the more trivial meanings.

Then, in this morning’s reading in my little monthly booklet Prions en église, I was struck by its version of Hebrews 11:1: Frères, la foi est une façon de posséder ce que l’on espère, un moyen de connaître des réalités qu’on ne voit pas. “Brothers, faith is a way of possesseing what one hopes, a means of knowing the realities one does not see.” And, as the commentator, the Hellenist Roselyne Dupont-Roc, noted: this shows us faith as the hypo-stasis, the basement and foundation, of hope.

If this is true, then true hope is inseparable from faith, and presupposes it. This sense of hope is not (only), as I have written before, the force that lets us get up for the forty-seventh time after we have fallen forty-six: it is rather the projecting of faith upon our life in the world. Abraham had faith in God; when he was told to sacrifice Isaac, it was hope in this sense that allowed him to obey. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had faith in God; it was hope in this sense that empowered him, and the rest of the Bekennende Kirche, the “Confessing Church”, to speak up in the furnace of Nazism.

One of the curious things about spirituality is that, negatively put, you need faith in order to have faith; but positively put, once you feel your lack of faith, you in fact have faith. Perhaps this is what it means to possess what one hopes. Contrary to what many people say, faith is not something arbitrarily given to some, withheld from others. It’s a great deal more complex than that. It’s a reality that has many more dimensions than four or five. But it is also the surprising force that allows us to enter that reality and then to live in it; and when we do, hope – espérance -- takes over. We possess what we hope; we know the reality that is unseen. Dazzling.

LATE AND SOON

In a time when many are shaken; in the winter season when sunshine is rare; at moments when ways ahead are unclear or menacing; one aid -- never easy, but always there -- is the existence of the Carthusians. Above is their symbol: the seven stars are St Bruno and the six companions with whom he founded the Order; the motto explains the image: "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis" -- "the Cross stands, while the world turns". To their writings, always anonymous, we can turn when the world is too much with us. And from one of their books,  The Wound of Love: a Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 1994), I share this magnificent passage of consolation.

           The encounter that love desires, between God and me, involves my whole being. Its rendezvous will be the truth, communion between my true self and the true God. But who am I? I enter into the deep caverns of my spirit in order to discover myself and then to be able to give myself. I encounter my demons, the dark forces that dwell in me. I name some of them, but they are legion. I try to determine my interior face, but it dissolves into a thousand changing masks. I want to offer my heart, but my freedom shows itself host to innumerable determinisms, the majority of which elude me. So, am I only the ephemeral confluence of impersonal and obscure forces?

            No, even if all the ‘matter’ of my being were such, my spirit can look at it from outside and say yes or no to it. Seeing what little light I have, I can trust in the light that comes from God and receive from his word the ultimate knowledge of myself. So I know, in faith, that I am made in the image of God, a subject endowed with freedom, called by God to a communion of love, son of the Father in the Son, by the gift of the Spirit. It is the Spirit alone who can tell me my name in the silence of my heart. So let me be silent in prayer in order to hear who I am. My chastity is humble attention before the mystery that dwells in me, that transcends me.

'It is the Spirit alone who can tell me my name in the silence of my heart. So let me be silent in prayer in order to hear who I am.' 

IS NOTHING SACRED?

There has been a great deal of noise, most of it generous, in the wake of the killings in France. It seemed useful to ponder a little on the deeper issues, some of which were raised by the Tunisian thinker and essayist Mezri Haddad in a recent article. Apart from immediate political arguments, his chief point was that Western civilisation in its post-Enlightenment form depends on “the de-sacralisation of the sacred”. So is this true, and if so, what does it mean and what does it imply?

The OED’s chief definition of sacred is: “Of things, places, of persons and their offices, etc.: Set apart for or dedicated to some religious purpose, and hence entitled to veneration or religious respect; made holy by association with a god or other object of worship; consecrated, hallowed.” For the related “holy” definitions are longer and multiple, but they all concur in the meaning of “set apart, set aside, dedicated to veneration or worship”, culminating in the moral and spiritual perfection of God (in Christianity, but, I believe, also in Judaism and Islam).

Haddad’s phrase, clearly, is not meant literally in this sense. His invoking the Enlightenment is a clue. What, I think, he means is that in a post-Enlightenment society no specific object or belief can be considered sacred to, and its veneration therefore binding on, everybody, except (a respectful) freedom.

In the last few days, the outpouring of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo and its murdered contributors has made this seem obvious; and yet it is not, nor should it be. It is obvious only to the superficial. Nothing – no thing – is sacred: yet I have the greatest sympathy for the outrage of ordinary Catholic Dutchmen in 1556 when gleeful bands of supposed Reformers profaned and destroyed their beloved statues of the Virgin and Child. I have no sympathy whatever for the Inquisition; yet if one believes that certain statements of faith represent objective truth, those who attempt to turn others to unbelief are worse than murderers – a murderer kills only your body, a heretic murders your immortal soul for eternity. Mezri Haddad says, rightly, that the Prophet himself would have disallowed considering him as sacred, for only God the Almighty is so. And yet millions of ordinary Muslims consider him “entitled to veneration or religious respect” as ordinary Catholics do a representation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; so that while to insult that respect may not be a crime, it is certainly a blunder.

Several issues intersect here, and should not be confused. In the first place there is the issue of respect. Again, it seems obvious that one should respect what another holds sacred; yet what to do when faced with those who in the name of what they claim to hold sacred maim, torture and slaughter others? As the caption beneath a recent drawing of a Kalashnikov read, “Ceci n’est pas une religion” – this is not a religion.

We might think that in such a case it is better to fight with reason and education (and an efficient secret service); but in every age and especially in France there are those for whom the best weapon against the barbarians claiming religion and/or authority is laughter. When faced with others whose culture knows no irony, these take a grave risk; but it is theirs to take.

What has the Enlightenment brought to Christianity? A conviction that our faith cannot be forced on unbelievers; that if (as we hope) it is one day to become universal, that shall happen by acceptance and not by conquest; that no persuasion, metaphysical, social, or political, shall be allowed to dominate the public sphere; that no thing is sacred; that all faith shall be considered private but as such inviolable. Moreover, a sense that when the ill-bred, the ill-intentioned, the ignorant and the busy mockers invade our religion and attempt to provoke us to retaliation, we are not touched in what is essential and we can say “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

We should, however, be aware that other religions, other cultures, have not necessarily gone through an Enlightenment, and that in a globalized world we increasingly live cheek by jowl with them. We may think that it would be good if some of what Kenneth Clark called “the smile of Reason” should rub off on them; but meanwhile a certain caution and a certain respect should perhaps rule our actions, our words (more about those later), and even our drawings.

( Test your tolerance. For those who have only seen the Mohammed drawings: this was Charlie Hebdo's cover on the gay marriage controversy. Mgr Vingt-Trois is the Cardinal Archbishop of France. "Mgr Vingt-Trois has 3 daddies". )

NOT FISH HOOKS

When we pray, we ask for something (see my last). And in many cases, we end our prayers, often mechanically, with ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’.  It comes from the age-old Latin per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. But what does it mean? The origin of the phrase is in John 14:13-14: ‘And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.’

What do these two expressions mean? To ask A (who is in authority, and can therefore refuse the request) for something in the name of B implies that B has more influence with A than we have; to ask for something in B’s name means that we ask it as if B were asking it, hoping thereby to give the request more weight in A’s eyes. If B is someone to whom A has an obligation; or someone of whom A is exceptionally fond, and to whom A can, as we say, ‘refuse nothing’, then our putting our request in B’s name (with B’s permission, obviously) clothes that request with something of B’s special relationship with A.

The Latin expression per is not quite the same. To ask A for something through B is to persuade B to do the asking for us – again, because B’s requests carry more weight with A than ours. In court, we plead through our lawyer, our advocate. And, as John puts it elsewhere (ep. John 2:1), ‘if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ the righteous.’ In Greek, the ‘advocate’ is a paraklètos, someone who appears on your behalf to plead for you. And we have heard that the Holy Spirit is also referred to as the Paraclete. So when we ask for something through Jesus Christ, it is as if we are putting a request via our lawyer.

Either way, such an expression is not and should not be a simple tag. It has enormous implications. In the first place, we are engaging Jesus to plead for us. This is not nothing: we are presuming to implicate the Meshiach, the Saviour, the Son of God, to carry our little requests to the Throne of the Father. And we can do so only because he has said that we may: and in saying so, he has appointed himself our paraklètos. One does sort of feel like removing one’s shoes before asking for things in those conditions; and one doesn’t easily ask for fish hooks. Moreover, John has told us that he is our advocate if (well, when) we sin – when we screw up, when we act as if we were refusing love, when we briefly think we know better. So in the moments when we bugger things up most, when we feel least proud of ourselves, we don’t get some junior from the Public Defender’s Office: we get the top man himself to plead for us.

Secondly, we are encouraged to go beyond the courtroom, and to ask in his name. This means that he is offering us the mantle of his status, his influence, to ask for things from the Father as if he himself were asking them. Again, this makes you think twice before asking for stupid things. What sort of mantle is it he is offering us? A mantle that has been torn by Roman soldiers. A mantle stained with his blood. A mantle he put off only when he was nailed to the cross. The more you think about this, the more sheer awe you feel, and the more humility.

Thirdly, what both these expressions do, at least potentially when experienced to the full, is to give us a way into the immense and secret intimacy of the Triune God. Remember, we are told to ask in his name ‘that the Father may be glorified in the Son’. We are entering into very high and deep mysteries here; and yet he has allowed us in, he has invited us in. Into the relationship between the Father and the Son: into the highest love of which the universe is capable. We are allowed to put our requests in his name to the Father, as if he himself were doing the asking. This really is holy ground.

‘Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace:

that they may be cleansed from all their sins,

and serve thee with a quiet mind.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

BEST WISHES?

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.”

Huck Finn’s predicament is both more general and more subtle than Twain makes it seem. Most prayer is beseeching. We ask for something. Usually, we are grown-up enough not to ask for fish hooks, or a video game, or a Corvette. But we have no problem asking to be allowed to get the job we are applying for, or a better grade on the exam, or for the person we are in love with to agree to have dinner. More importantly, we feel encouraged to pray for others: for our best friend’s mother to be healed of her cancer, for a 40-year-old acquaintance to recover mentally from being raped at 16, for an elderly lady’s arthritis to cease torturing her, for a friend’s husband in the last stages of Parkinson’s to be allowed a swift and not too painful end. Beyond that, moreover, we are encouraged to pray for peace in the Middle East, for reconciliation in the Ukraine, and for the end of murderous civil wars in a number of faraway countries.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Really? The answer to all of the above prayers seems utterly arbitrary. Sometimes it’s yes, more often it’s no. Why? No one can tell us. Those who say that it is God’s Will are not only wrong, they are obscenely wrong. It is not God’s will that men torture and slaughter one another. But then, what is the answer to the enigma? It is difficult not to conclude that all those prayers are for fish hooks. That we are all Huck Finns, in church or out. As the French would say, our problem remains entire.

Thanksgiving – the impulse, not the festival – complicates matters. Most of us feel the need to give thanks when good things happen to us. But if the good things come from God, does that not mean that the bad ones do, too? Which would lead us to either a micro-managing but arbitrary Deity or to a kind of theistic fatalism that says that whatever is, is God’s will and therefore good, whatever we think it is.

After many years of pondering this, my provisional conclusion is that the answer was given by Jesus on that serenely beautiful hill above the Sea of Galilee which I had the privilege of visiting when my daughter was married in Nazareth. Having told people to stop worrying all the time about what will happen tomorrow, about having enough to eat, about having decent clothes, so forth, He said “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

If we apply this to prayer, it will show us – as, alas, it did not show Huck – what Miss Watson meant. “Ask, and you shall receive” is not a test to see if you know the password. It is the description of a law of God that works like a law of nature: a law of God’s nature, if you will. If we seek first the Kingdom of God; if we ask to know and love Him better; if we yearn to be filled with the Holy Spirit, whatever the cost; if we do that constantly, and go on doing so; then we shall  receive what we ask for, because the receiving is always already inherent in the constant asking.

And if we want to pray for others, once again we should ask for the same thing: that they may come to know and love Him better. For there is no good that we can ask for that is better or more important than that.

I cannot believe that God micromanages Creation. Microbes do their work just as mosquitoes do. Things live, things die. We live, we die. The difference is that we have a consciousness of love, which means that we have free will, which means that we are free to refuse love, i.e. to sin. So we have the capacity to add sin to death, which is horrible. On the other hand, if we seek the Kingdom of God – His reign, in us and elsewhere – and his righteousness, the integrity that is its hallmark, then all kinds of good attend us, because we will have become a certain kind of person, the kind that attracts good things like a magnet. It’s not a reward, it’s a consequence.

All the rest is fish hooks.