WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN

Hallowe'en is catching on even in France. I suspect that 90% of those who celebrate it have no idea of its context nor of the feast of which it is the even. Mind you, few know much about its background either: the Wikipedia article on it is long and most informative. Still, I thought it would be good to have a little post on All Saints' Day, as a counterweight to all that cobwebs 'n candy.

People who like to read are divided into two kinds: readers of fiction and readers of non-fiction. For the latter – often those engaged in business or other ‘prosaic’ occupations – the favourite kinds of reading are history and biography. History has the pleasure of narrative with the assurance that this story ‘really happened’ and is thus not a flight of fancy or of mendacity; biography, often the lives of great men and women, has the virtue of inspiring admiration and emulation.

For readers of biography, the saints of the Church are a special case. One finds among them few entrepreneurs or scientists, and not many military heroes. However, there are no milquetoasts or marshmallows either. There are Martyrs: those who have suffered and died for the faith, from the victims of lions and gladiators in the Roman arenas to Maximilian Kolbe in Auschwitz. There are Confessors: those who have proclaimed the faith and worked tirelessly for it, and/or have lived signally holy lives, from the earliest hermits in the desert to the twentieth-century St Faustina Kowalska in Poland. There are Doctors: those who have applied their intelligence and learning to the faith and thus light the way for the rest of us, from St Athanasius to St Thérèse of Lisieux. There are the Evangelists, like St Francis Xavier, who brought the faith to far corners of the world. And there are the saints of Charity, like St Vincent de Paul and Mother Teresa, who have worked tirelessly for the poorest and most forgotten of humanity. Reading the lives of all these, and the works some of them have written, is indeed a journey of admiration and if inspiration: we learn courage, intentness, commitment, meditation, prayer, steadfastness and a vastness of faith that most of us sadly lack.

A particular case is that of the Saints Unknown. The Church allows for this: there are those whose faith shines, but shines in a small or remote context where it is not noticed by those who could bring it to the attention of the Church as a whole. Some of us have known people like this, and our lives have been genuinely blessed by the privilege and the joy. I find it pleasing that the category is recognised: there are so many flowers in so many fields, after all.

The Feast of All Saints celebrates and commemorates all those, famous, known, and unknown, who have been received in Heaven and there rejoice in the Presence of God. It is a joyful feast: meditating on all these extraordinary characters, one can almost feel caught up by them into a faint but joyous echo of Heaven here on earth. In one sense, it should be a permanent feast: the doctrine of the Communion of Saints recognises that we, the faithful of the Church Militant here in earth, are in communion with the Saints of the Church Triumphant. Catholics pray to them, as do some Anglicans; other Anglicans venerate them without asking them to intercede for us. But either way, we can derive strength and support from their courage, their commitment and their discernment. 

I can understand but deplore the representations of Heaven and its saints in most of the Last Judgement paintings. Hell is graphically and hideously imagined; Heaven has serried ranks of boring and bored-looking ecclesiastics. Of course, the experience of Heaven must be ineffable, and hard to picture; but surely something better could have been achieved? Heaven, if it is anything, is more beautiful than beauty, more joyful than joy, more glorious than glory, and more loving than love. The angels are its denizens; the saints its welcome immigrants. What joy, if this were our future. Imagine . . .

I can recommend the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, in paperback, as an inexpensive source of pleasurable study on the subject.

CARPENTRY AND DANGEROUS READING

Benedict/Ratzinger cites 'liberal theology' as theorising that Jesus, having hitherto lived a perfectly normal life in Galilee, at his baptism by John underwent a shattering experience that began his ministry. He condemns this as being the attitude of a 'Jesus novel', and claims that Jesus is above our psychologising, that we should read the whole episode theologically.

He is doubtless right in the major sense. But I do not think that it is either irrelevant or reprehensible that we, as humans reacting to the story of a God who took full humanity upon him, should wonder how he came to the point where, ca. 30 years of age, he began his ministry. And if this is a 'Jesus novel', then so be it: a novel conceived, composed, and read in faith.

I have spent a number of years wondering about, and being fascinated by, the 'lost years' of Jesus, between 13 (in the Temple) and 30 (on the bank of the Jordan). The image that suggests itself to me pleases me but is not therefore necessarily wrong. 

It is of a young man much marked by his childhood, much marked by his mother's presence and stories, but otherwise a young carpenter (teenagers worked) of Nazareth; a young Jewish carpenter, i.e. one who not only learnt the trade but learnt to read and spent much of his spare time studying the Scriptures. A little later, say ca. 21 or 22, I suspect he is taking over the shop: he is the eldest son, and Joseph is either retired or already deceased. So he is a young professional craftsman, running a small business -- and reading, reading the scriptures at night, as well as conversing with his mother, who must have been a major presence.

During this time, partly because of the climate of the period, partly because of what Myriam may have told him about his birth, what he reads is especially the passages about the Messiah, and notably those of Deutero-Isaiah, that show a counterintuitive Messiah, a Messiah who is not a conquering king, not a supreme warlord, but a sacrificial lamb, a scapegoat almost, a Messiah who takes upon him, into himself, all the sheer awfulness of crapulous humanity and bears it into the mouth of Hell. And gradually, there must have come upon him as he read these scriptures an awful (in every sense) sense of recognition. My feeling is that the Revelation came upon him gradually, that it stole into his consciousness, that it crept in upon him, until one day, at the age of perhaps 29, he could no longer put it aside or ignore it -- much as he may well have wanted to. The recognition that 'OMG, it's me.' But also the day his regular and devout prayers open, open up a vast space in which at first he is lost, but which then surrounds him like cosmic skin, immeasurably vast and utterly close and intimate at the same time, where he is fully one with the Father he has been praying to and with the Ruach Qadosh who has been doing the praying, through him.

And then, having heard about John the Baptist, he realises that not only must he now go out and live this destiny in the world, but that being baptised by John is the only true and perfect beginning to such a road. He has always been God and man/boy; now he has truly become God and Man. And if Man, then he must, even if he is sinless, join with the sinners who are immersed in the water of the river overhung with trees and skimmed by kingfishers. John, remember, is his cousin; and John too has grown into his destiny. When it is Jesus' turn, he recognises him, both as Cousin Yeshua and as the Meschiach: briefly taken aback, he quickly sees the point. And the heavens open. Were they two the only ones who heard the Voice and saw the dove?

  Of course, this is novelistic, in a way. But it is also the cry of human historical inquiry since Ranke: Wie es eigentlich gewesen: What really happened? We want to know, about human events that occurred in this world, what really happened? We wish we could time-travel; we want to have been there. And it is very hard, if not impossible, for us not to think that the only alternative to 'this really happened' is 'this didn't happen, at least not in this way.' And that if we are told, as in the ancient Catalan beginning of tales, 'Aixa era y no era', 'this was and was not, that we are being told a fiction, something made up.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many modern people have turned away from religion: because we have lost the particular scale of reality it demands. A scale where what we are told is true, the form in which it is expressed is true, it is not fiction, yet it did not happen in the way that this morning's subway ride happened. It is this truth that Genmesis expresses; it is this truth that Revelations communicates; it is this truth that the story of Jesus' baptism offers us. 

Perhaps -- to continue the inquiry -- this is one of the reasons, if not the main one, that we are told to become as little children. A child at a certain age does not distinguish between truth and happoening: the stories you tell him make sense, that is all and that is enough. We all experience our children's or our grandchildren's first questioning of Father Christmas as somehow a fall from grace; and this, while inevitable, is also true. The child now begins to believe that there is a difference between truth and fiction, and that truth resides in happening. Only much later, if he is fortunate, does he relearn a sort of unity, when he is taught that fiction can contain important truths; but in that educated-adult universe, its fictionality remains. What Jesus teaches us is that what we need to be close to his, and our, Father is to regain the pre-factual sense of truth.

How to do this? That was Nicodemus's question. How can an adult become a child again? Isn't it against nature? No: it's against culture, not against nature. What we have to do is to allow ourselves to be children again. Nature will let us do this; culture disapproves. Rereading Genesis, we allow ourselves to be thrilled all over again, unquestioningly, by the image of the Spirit of God brooding over the waters. We react with absolute simplicity and enthusiasm to the story of Abraham making lunch for the angels. We see the three Children of Israel in the fiery furnace, and shiver at the fleeting vision of a fourth. And while we do so, the truth is silently building in our minds and hearts an edifice: a synagogue that can allow truth to be transmitted, a temple that can receive Emmanuel.

Benedict/Ratzinger says, and he is right, that the texts tell us nothing about Jesus's years between 13 and 30; he also says, and there I'm not sure he is right for everyone, that that means we should not try to go beyond the texts but read therm as they were intended to be read: as a young Church's attempt to make sense of the life, the death, and the resurrection of the Messiah. Again, I believe that ultimately he is right in this; but proximately I believe that a fragmentary 'Jesus novel', if conceived and received in faith, may have the virtue of helping us be, or become again, the children our daily lives and even our serious religion all too often disallow.

THROUGH THE DESERT

   I have long been fascinated by the lengthy Psalm 119, that curious love-song to the Law. One of its most striking features is the repetition of certain words: "Law", "commandments", "statutes" and "testimonies". They keep turning up in slightly different contexts, and strongly suggest a formal pattern. When I started looking them up on the Web, I found there are eight in all, and
this useful downloadable PDF lists them in Hebrew, in the usual translation, and gives the places and ways they are used by the Psalmist, as well as his responses to each.
 
   The overall impression one gets is indeed that of a formal song, but a formal song of passionate gratitude to God the Lawgiver: the gratitude of a nomadic desert people for a signpost, for a clear path through the wilderness, a path that shows shifting sands to be avoided, oases where one may rest and be refreshed, and at the end a promised land of milk (protein and fat, hard to come by in the Nefud) and honey (the universal sweetener before sugar, giving energy and pleasure). As so often, it teaches a Christian how absolutely the Old Alliance belongs to his own faith as well. I may believe that there is a new Torah, and that a living guide is even more precious than an Ordnance Survey map; studying such a Psalm in any depth explains why the new Torah in no way banishes or replaces the old but fulfils it: not an iota or punctuation mark of the old shall be eliminated, it keeps its full and glorious value.
 
   Moreover, one thing the Fathers teach us is that beyond studying the Psalms there is another approach:  praying the Psalms. For some psalms, this is both simple (though not necessarily easy) and evident: the Penitential Psalms and the Psalms of Praise, for instance. For others, it is much more difficult. Sometimes it's harder because of the spiritual depth and complexity: Psalm 22, even without its immense Christian resonance, has a range of thought and emotion that takes years to absorb fully into prayer. And what about 119? Its very length and insistence makes it difficult to pray: we tend to think, 'OK, enough already, I get the point, no need to go on and on . . .' The change-ringing of the terms for God's Word is alien to our ideas of both poetry and prayer.

   So how to pray Psalm 119? I think the answer lies in the list I cited above, in the notes on the full range of meanings attached to each term; and in a constant application of all these meanings to one's own life and experience. For instance, simply following and meditating upon the mishpatim, to us almost inexplicably glossed as 'judgements, ordinances', leads us to the insight that such judgements are those that express and echo God's loving-kindness by their justice. And that, in turn, sheds light upon on the one hand Angela Merkel's decision to receive positively the greatest possible number of refugees in Germany, and other hand my wife's decision to go and visit our 96-year-old peasant neighbour who lives a placid old age but is happy to be remembered. If one admits to one's reading of Psalm 119 such background and such echoes, praying  the psalm becomes both possible and a delight.

A DOUGHTY CHARMER

Today is the feast of St Teresa of Avila, that redoubtable organiser and absolute mystic -- an unusual combination at any time -- who died in the early hours of the first day of the Gregorian Calendar, October 15, 1582, which followed directly upon October 4. The most authentic portrait of her is the one above, a copy of a 1576 portrait, when she was 61. A solid Spanish face, quite different from what Kenneth Clark called the 'swooning beauty' in Bernini's virtuoso Ecstasy of St Teresa. She hauled St John of the Cross out of his monastery to help her found a Carmelite house for men, and herself founded seventeen convents. The Wikipedia article on her is crisply informative, but the short biography by Terry Matz in Catholic Online is more human and more charming. Readers of English poetry may remember Richard Crashaw's wonderfully strange poem in her honour. But the best way to get to know her is to read her masterpiece, The Interior Castle or the Mansions. To adapt what Victor Borge said about Mozart: 'When Teresa was my age, she had been dead for seven years. It makes you realise how little you've accomplished.'

After her death, a card was found in the pages of her breviary, on which she had written the prayer that has since become known as 'St Teresa's Bookmark':

Nada te turbe,

nada te espante;

todo se pasa,

Dios no se muda.

La pacientia todo lo alcanza.

Quien a Dios tiene nada la falta:

solo Dios basta.

Let nothing disturb you,

Let nothing dismay you,

All things pass,

God never changes.

Patience attains all.

He who has God lacks nothing:

God alone suffices.

OF CASH, OF CAMELS, AND OF TIGHT PLACES

A Needle's Eye in Jerusalem

Today’s Gospel reading in the now-combined Roman Catholic and Anglican Lectionaries was St Mark’s rather touching story of the young man who came to Jesus and asked what he should do to obtain eternal life. Jesus told him that as a good Jew, he ought to know the answer: keep the Commandments. Yes, but I’ve done that faithfully all my life, said the youth sadly; implying that he felt there was still some essential ingredient missing. Jesus, says Mark, looked at him, and loved him. I’ve always imagined Jesus previously occupied with something else, and as it were replying over his shoulder, almost mechanically. And only now turning and looking at him, and ‘loving him’. There aren’t a lot of places in the Gospels where we are told that Jesus loved someone. John, of course; Martha, Mary, and Lazarus; and this anonymous young man, who thus finds himself in very select company. Jesus looked at him, and loved him, and saw at once what the lack was. Go sell your possessions, give what they bring to the poor, and come and follow me – sensing perhaps already that the Twelve would become Eleven?

            This, clearly, was not what the youth had been prepared for. He thought for a minute, then with infinite sadness shook his head and walked slowly away, ‘because he had many possessions’. And Jesus, equally sad, turned to his disciples and said, How hard it is for someone who has much to get into the Kingdom of Heaven! It is harder than it is for a camel to get through the Needle’s Eye.

            We were reminded that Needles' Eyes were particularly narrow gates in Jerusalem, used by pedestrians after the great gates were shut, and that even a very young and skinny camel would have a hard time getting through, let alone a plump or laden one. (Also, apparently, the rich and grand wouldn't use them because it mean stooping and squeezing, most undignified.)

            What I found interesting in both the homily that followed and in the commentaries in Prions en Eglise, by Emmanuel Schwab and Marc Sevin, was the way they all pointed up a lesson, a moral, that had not occurred to me. The obvious moral is depressing to all but the dispossessed; but as Fr Jean-Kamel pointed out, we are all rich in something. As Fr Schwab wrote, if selling all your possessions was the point, you would be buying your way into the kingdom. No, the point is that any riches you have – money, goods, talent, sophistication, intelligence, culture, beauty, strength, generosity, what you will – any wealth you have that serves to make you feel secure and stops you a) helping those who need it and b) pulling up sticks and following Jesus – this is what you have to learn to distance yourself from. Not to get rid of, necessarily; but to regard with equanimity and to give. To give to those who need it; to give to Him who is the Kingdom.

            Again, the point is not necessarily to donate everything to the local food bank or to create an association helping leukemia-patients in Angola. As someone else wrote, what is asked of us is being there. Not to be in our parallel world of Facebook or Twitter or Nintendo; not to dwell in a cherished past; not to strain toward a hoped-for future; but to be there in God’s time: the present. As a wonderful Sixties book put it: Remember Be Here Now. If you wear your riches lightly, you can be there for whoever needs you right now, at any time, and all your riches will be available at once. If you wear them lightly, you can be there and follow when He calls, right now, at any time. If each of us is the rich young man, then each of us is on the receiving end of that look of Jesus’s, and of that loving. In very select company.    

CODA: How not to walk away grieving. 
After publishing this, I remembered that there was another point to the commentaries I had read. The way not to be 'rich' is to be poor.  To be poor in spirit is to be blessed. How does one become poor in spirit? By realising, in the bottom of one's heart, that one can give oneself nothing. That everything is given by God, and that we need to ask for everything. If the real riches are those of the spirit, then we are all poor. Seek, and you shall find. Ask, and it shall be given to you. Given to you, not earned by you. Quæsumus, Domine. Gratias agimus tibi.