ON OUR OWN

This morning I attended what the French Church now calls an A.D.A.P.: Assemblée dominicale en l’absence d’un prêtre, a Sunday assembly in the absence of a priest. This is relatively new: it was foreseen by Vatican II, but it is growing in importance as the number of priests declines and the number of clochers (literally ‘spires’) served by each increases. Our local parish priest now has 48 spires, which obviously borders on the ridiculous, indeed the monstrous. 

In the little modern missal-cum-hymnbook I found the official passage explaining ADAPs and giving some idea as to what they should be like. Some of the points I remember: congregations should be reminded that where two or three are gathered together, Christ is in the midst of them, and should therefore rate such events at their proper value (read: don’t complain because there’s no Mass); there should be readings from Scripture and prayers; but on the whole there should not be communion (from previously consecrated Hosts), because then people might end up thinking of the Mass as only one of several available ways to receive communion. 

What fascinated me was that for the form of such assemblies, no rules are given at all: ‘they can take many different forms’ is all that is said. They appear to have no consciousness of, or no interest in, the fact that in the Anglican Church, for example, there are beautifully-structured ADAPs called Matins and Evensong, which can perfectly well be celebrated without a priest: the only difference is that in such a case the Absolution is replaced by the glorious Collect for Trinity 21:

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. Amen.

I don’t believe that the way ADAPs are conceived here includes a Confession and Absolution of any kind; at least this morning’s had none. (What I found alarming was the first intercessory prayer: ‘for those who confuse the Faith with a collection of rituals to practice: for those whose prideful obstinacy divides the Church and the World and imperils Peace; for them, Lord, we pray.')

I once owned (and have now, alas, misplaced) a beautiful little French translation of the Book of Common Prayer, published (curiously) in Dublin in 1777. Later I discovered that many Huguenots (French Protestants) who had fled France when their faith was proscribed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had gone to England but had then continued on to Ireland and joined the Church of Ireland. Being French, they were clearly not known for their ability to learn languages, so the CofI decided to print French Prayer Books, just for them. I should rustle up the texts of Matins and Evensong from that book again, remove the prayers for the Queen and Royal Family, and present them to the organisers of the next ADAP . . .

NB: the exquisite little painting above represents a village congregation coming from Evensong. It is by Samuel Palmer, a pupil of William Blake's, and was painted during his mystical year at the village of Shoreham in Kent. 

OFFERING

I found this meditiation from the 'Offertory' section of Daniel-Rops's Missa Est moving. All too often, while the priest prepares the bread and the wine, the congregation fumbles for coins and treats this moment as an interval; yet the Offering is that of both the 'kindly fruits of the earth' (much more present in a country parish among fields of wheat and vineyards), and of what we bring, in matter and/or in spirit, and which the priest's preparing of bread and wine represents.  

If you have nothing else to offer to the Lord, simply present your work and your pains;

it has cost many men much effort, this piece of bread lying on the paten.

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all that you have suffered;

for the wine to be poured into the chalice did the grapes not have to be crushed and the skin torn?

If all you have in you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all the anguish of humanity,

let your hands lift those pitiful things up to heaven, for Mercy has already received them in advance at his Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to present and to implore, 

if all that is in you is absence and abandonment,

simply accept, in silence, that Another take care of you for you and take charge of you, 

so that the Offering and the Offerer may be a single gift.

TORAH TORAH, or, THE JOY OF JOY

This is a rambling post; but I was trying to think through some ideas, and react to some things I’d heard, and I thought I’d share the thoughts.

“Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields.” (C.S. Lewis on Psalm 119 in Reflections on the Psalms) It was Lewis who first made me realise that the Torah and the Old Alliance gave the people of Israel the joy of a clear way through a trackless desert – or a firm path through a muddy field or, worse, a bog of quicksand. It was a clear and firm guidance.

Now in his admirable Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI alias Joseph Ratzinger explains that in the New Alliance Jesus is himself the new Torah. So that on the one hand not a jot or tittle of the old Law will be annulled, because it is fulfilled in him; on the other hand the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and whoever believes in him – follows him -- will have eternal life.

If this is so (and it seems to me magnificently plausible), then this new Torah and this New Alliance should give the new Israel, the community of believers i.e. the Church, a similar joy: they are not told how to cross the desert, they are shown. Not a road map but a living guide.

So is this WWJD (What Would Jesus Do)? Up to point, yes: always a good start. But it’s not just a matter of imitating deeds: following him means going much further, and following him – for example – into the High Priestly Prayer, into the heart of God: it means the Transfiguration, it means the forty days in the desert. It means knowing the Old Alliance and its texts almost by heart. And it leads, we mustn’t forget, to the Cross. He is the King of Jews; he is the King of the world, says Ratzinger. But he reigns from the Cross: there is the paradox the Sanhedrin couldn’t accept and that intelligent but cowardly Roman Pontius Pilate could only recognise in irony. Tragedy, then? No: because the Cross, when not avoided but accepted, leads in turn to the Resurrection – “and death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die” (John Donne).

This is a joy far greater even that the path through the desert. So the new Israel should be filled with incredulous happiness, a beacon of alegria throughout history. Its two chief elements have names that begin with the prefix “Good”:  eu-angelion (the authoritative Good Message) and  eu-charistia (the Good Thanksgiving). So why is the New Alliance so rarely communicated, and felt, as joy?

I was listening the other day on French radio to the delightful Cardinal Barbarin (archbishop of Lyon) explaining Pope Francis’ text Evangelii Gaudium (“the Joy of the Gospel”). And time and time again the emphasis – a rather gleeful emphasis – was on how uncomfortable the Faith ought to make us; how it should discombobulate us, shake us up, kick us in the fundament and yank us out of everything we are used to and love. But as Henry Rydal put it in Charles Morgan’s The Empty Room, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you won’t cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” It’s as if the only saying of Jesus we should treasure were “I come not to bring peace but a sword”.

If that had been so, I thought, would thousands have followed him, running, not walking around the whole of the Sea of Galilee to get to the other shore before his boat? Would they have flocked to his teaching? Would the two travellers to Emmaus have felt their hearts on fire within them as he explained the Torah? The five thousand did not come to be fed: they came to hear him speak – the bread and the fish were an afterthought. I’ve always been fascinated by those crowds, who are never mentioned again afterwards. Something must have remained in their very ordinary lives --  something sweeter than the honeycomb, as John Ruusbroec said, following the Psalms.

To hear some current church authorities, Jesus was understood only by twelve men, and that most imperfectly; and we must be like them, only better – eleven of them, after all, ducked Golgotha. We must this, we must that; we emphatically must not the other; doesn’t it sound like the Law all over again? Is this an eu-angelion? We are told we must be disciples, in order to be Christians. But there were only twelve of those, out of all the thousands. What about those who, He said, were saved by their faith but who did not spend the rest of their time following him around – the paralytic, the centurion, the woman with the issue of blood? Their lives, certainly, were changed; they walked in a fog of happiness for some days, then went on living normally, yet with a new sweetness that must have radiated in their little towns and neighbourhoods.

As Ratzinger says, the key to following him lies in the Beatitudes, especially the pure in heart. They shall see God. Like Abraham; like Moses. Perhaps those nameless ones I’m thinking of had their hearts made pure by seeing him, touching his garment, listening to his words. Perhaps they, as much as the Twelve (who, remember, could still argue, and in his presence, about rank and precedence in Heaven!), saw God. After all, they saw, and some of them really saw, Him: and “who has seen me, has seen the Father”.

Good deeds are important; they are humanly important. They come in many different forms, from the Boy Scout’s good deed to the NGO’s aid worker’s, but also from the church-music composer’s motet to the Carthusian monk’s prayer. As C.S. Lewis (him again) put it: “Not nice people, but new men”. Even the hearts of the best of us are pure only in spots, like the Curate’s Egg: our vision of God is blurry and occasional. But even blurry and occasional, it remains to haunt us.

What is it like? What was it like, for those people in Galilee? They saw a man, in some ways ordinary; but there was something. To me, the most convincing imaginary portrait of Jesus has always been Rembrandt’s: a youngish Jewish man with long dark hair – and those eyes. Because when they saw him, the ones who really saw him saw through him. They saw more – this, I suspect, is where the halo comes from.

Contrary to some sentimental portraits, they did not see someone down in the gutter, the Highest of the High having become the Lowest of the Low. Yeshua bar Yosef was at first a respectable Galilean artisan, running the family carpentry firm; then he became a noted itinerant rabbi admired for his learning and followed by crowds, who taught in synagogues and in the Temple. He wasn’t a little weakling because he walked and walked and walked, everywhere. So what they saw was, as E.V. Rieu put it in his Introduction to The Four Gospels, “tremendous power, rigidly controlled”. And the ones who saw through him saw, intermittently and blurred but frighteningly, God. “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” was Peter’s reaction (Luke 5:8). And John – the only disciple who didn’t duck Golgotha – thinking back as an old man, found the words: “The Word was with God; and the Word was God…. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Head of Christ"

THE JOYS OF TRANSLATION

My priestly daughter suggested I translate into English the admirable little French book on the Mass about which I wrote here in October 2014, Missa Est by Daniel-Rops with stunning photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot. Little did I think what joy the work would give me. One may read a book, which is already an improvement to skimming it; but when you translate it you read it a far more profound way: you have not only to find the words' equivalents but their meaning, which includes their resonance and their overtones. It is this meaning that must be recreated in the new language.
   (I have since discovered that there exists a 1950s American translation put out under the aegis of the very media-oriented Bishop Fulton Sheen, with photographs by the great Canadian Yousuf Karsh; but I don't want to see it before finishing my own, as you can perhaps imagine.)
   Apart from a whole new appreciation of Daniel-Rops's writing, both in the historical explanations and in the fervent meditations on each part of the ceremony, I've been struck by the intricacy, the structure, the profundity of significance and the potential for spirituality of the 1570 Tridentine Roman Mass. We non-Roman Catholics often grew up with an apprehension of things Papist on the one hand; and on the other, our Roman brethren have now, since the Second Vatican Council, so altered the liturgy that it often bears only the faintest, reminiscent resemblance to its magnificent forebear.

   The intricacy, first: as Daniel-Rops explains in his Preface, not one of its 30 parts can be considered, as the Tridentine Catechism puts it, 'as useless or superfluous'. 'The smallest versicle, the sentence it takes only seconds to pronounce, are an integral part of a whole where are associated and proclaimed the gift of God, the oblation of Christ and the Grace we receive. It is like a spiritual symphony, where all the themes come back, complete one another, and unite in a single intention.'
   The structure, second: we enter with anticipated joy; find our emphatically-imperfect inner mess a block, so confess; are absolved; hear the Church's teaching in readings and homily; include the world in our preparatory prayers; offer the fruits of the earth that will be transformed; assist, in wonder and prayer, at the Consecration; communicate; are brought back to the world in the Postcommunion; are blessed, and go back to our lives. It is as structured as a great play. 
   Profundity of significance. There is not a detail -- as I once explained to student to whom all this was new and fascinating -- that does not have at least six centuries of meaning attached to it; that does not come from years, decades or centuries of intelligence feeding devotion. Take the Confiteor, the General Confession: the priest who leads it, and who is sometimes followed in this by members of the congregation, strikes his breast three times, an ancient sign of humility. These three strikes are knocks: Christ's knocking at the door of our closed and stubborn heart. If we open to them in the Confession, we may be freed from our burden by the Absolution. 
   Finally, the potential for spirituality. If we participate entirely, with our whole being, in such a Mass, we will emerge as from a great tragedy: scoured and cleansed, washed and slightly trembling, but with a renewal of joy, hope and courage for the days to come. 

But where to find such a Mass, today? The international and universal intelligibility of Latin has gone, and visitors can barely follow what is going on. The Mass as I experience it in my cluster of French villages is a travesty; the gestures are hurried if not suppressed, half the words are missing, the atmosphere is that of an amicable chat among friends; the texts are half improvised, the homilies bellowed into an unnecessary microphone --- and yet the villagers are happy. The flow of the liturgy is brutally checked by the exchange of the Peace, as if King Lear were interrupted in the middle of Act IV by a loquacious bumpkin engaging the audience; yet the elderly peasants smile and say 'La paix du Christ' to their neighbours. It is all very Evangelical and sort of Baptist in atmosphere. It is, apparently, what the Council Fathers in the Sixties wanted, and one suspects it suits our present Pope perfectly. 

Yet those who want something else, who need, who crave a true, silent, adoring worship; who need time and stillness for intense prayer but time and stillness not alone but in community; they are short-changed. Those who yearn for worship of the Highest in reverence, in beauty, in quiet, in a movement of the spirit they can join in, in a 'spiritual symphony', are neglected and, if they are not close to some major city where there is an eccentric Church more or less frowned upon by the authorities, have nowhere to go.

   I do not know the answer to this. I simply hope that those of us who have the need for such a Mass (or Eucharist), replete with the history of our faith and of our Church, filled with the wealth of symbolism it carries, will have the courage to make our needs felt and not to let ourselves be treated as antisocial, egocentric and reactionary aesthetes. 
   As for us Anglicans, who have long had good reason to feel dubious (to say the least) about the Council of Trent, perhaps we should look again at this Mass, which our otherwise admirable ancestors dismissed as diabolical flummery: if we look again, with a devout eye and an open mind, we shall find such a wealth of nourishment for the soul as will last us days, weeks, months, and even years.