REAR-VIEW MIRRORS AND WINDSHIELDS

Looking back on 2016 one can of course cite many horrors and many disappointments. But when one either looks more closely at  what’s happened in the world at large, a large number of blessings also become apparent: in India 800,000 volunteers planted 50 million trees in one day to help the country reforest 12% of its surface, while for the first time ever, 93% of the planet’s children learnt to read and write. One does need to be careful about absorbing “news” from media, especially television, internet and even print. Newspaper editors long worked on the principle “if it bleeds, it leads”, and this has now spread to almost all media. Social media, on the other hand, are sometimes even worse, as they can spread the steaming private rage of individuals faster than any (other) epidemic. One of the rare exceptions is the French daily La Croix, which resolutely continues to inform rather than titillate or judge, which invariably explains both sides of difficult questions, and which pays as much attention to good news as to catastrophes. (Le Monde, of which someone who worked there in the Fifties once said, “It’s not a newspaper, it’s a university”, still informs very well but has moved further away from impartiality – leftwards – and is temperamentally gloomy.)

For individuals, looking back on a year gone by is usually a bit nostalgic, slightly (or deeply) sad, rueful, or cautiously thankful. It’s a collective version of the eve-of-birthday mindset; it’s the painful travail out of which new year’s resolutions will shortly be born.

None of this should properly apply to prayer.

God does not ask us to apply ourselves more energetically to doing better at everything. God does not ask us to judge the rest of the world, even politicians. God does not ask us to hate our nasty enemies with more intensity and if possible to wipe them off the face of the earth. God does not ask us to be revenged on those who did ill to us or to our loved ones.

God asks only one thing: that we return His love. With every fibre of our being. And this is largely done not by increased activity but by allowing Him to visit, to move in, to take over. It’s almost passive, but it does take concentration: we ask Him to open our doors and windows so that He can enter and take up residence.

Once we embark seriously on doing that, resolutions become superfluous.



The illustration is William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" (1849-53) in Keble College Chapel, Oxford. Note that the door on which Christ knocks is overgrown and clearly unused to being opened, and has no handle: it can be opened only from the inside. Our inside.

CAROL

This year, as every year, I celebrate Christmas with an homage to the peerless Jill Furse, whose husband, Laurence (later Sir Laurence) Whistler, glass engraver and poet, it was my privilege to know. His account of their brief marriage, The Initials in the Heart, is an intimate, tender and painful love-story.


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)

ANATOMY OF PRAYER?

This is a long post on prayer – a subject that gets more mysterious and more fascinating the longer you study and practice it. The nature of its power is what interested me here, as well as the extent and nature of its denial.

In the first place, what is the “power” of prayer? It is a form of spiritual energy. As energy, it has potential power but it also has laws: you cannot, for example, usefully power a computer with coal. For those who accept its laws, it is as accessible as wind-power to a sailboat; more, in fact, because unlike the wind, the energy prayer taps into is there 24/7. Much depends on the person praying, just as much depends on the person sailing the boat.

            What are the laws? First, no fishhooks. Praying for things is on the whole useless: not because God deliberately refuses them, but because the energy doesn’t normally work that way. Second, prayer is always answered, but the time-lapse and the modality of the response are to us unpredictable. God answers in His own time and manner, which are by definition mysterious to us. Third, prayer is a spiritual energy that works on, and in, a spiritual dimension.  This is where it gets difficult, not to understand but, for many, to accept. God does not micromanage the world. He sees, it is true, every sparrow that falls, but He does not stop it falling. Deists got it half right: God created the world and set it going, and He does not normally interfere with the process. Only half, though: because He is present in the world at every moment, He does care for his human creatures, and He does try to guide them toward Him and toward His love.

This leaves two problems: catastrophes and hatred. Why does God not stop an earthquake that will kill 500 people? Answer: because it is part of the physical creation, and that creation’s processes He does not interfere with. Why does God not stop massacres and other loathsome deeds? Answer: because God’s nature is love, and the one limit to His omnipotence is that He cannot be untrue to His own nature. Since that is love, He is bound by love’s law, which holds that one cannot command reciprocity: if one could, it would kill love instantly. The nature of love is that it can only be returned freely or not at all. And when it is not, when it is trodden in the dirt, the lover may weep, but he cannot command. There are times when one feels the earth must be drenched in the tears of God.

How does the power of prayer, this extraordinary energy, work? Much of it, it must be said, remains mysterious. The eighteenth century was skilled in the ways, and in the use, of wind for locomotion, but its understanding of the physics was more rudimentary than ours. One thing that can be said is that casual prayer is no more effective than renting a sophisticated sailboat for an afternoon without even the minimum knowledge of its operation: the inevitable failure may even have a negative effect.

Further, prayer for specifically spiritual goals is likely to be more effective. If I pray to be enabled to give up smoking, it may or may not be granted: the objective is still very much anchored to the physical world. But if I pray, long and steadfastly, for the power to become a more generous person, this may well, gradually and over time, be granted.

Moreover, experience has found that petitionary prayer of that kind is augmented in its power if it is liberally combined with the other kind of prayer: thanksgiving. One cannot always be asking. Cultivating a keen sense for things that are gifts to be thankful for is in itself a form of healing.

All prayer is subject to God’s Will. In fact, one might say that the one purpose and effect of all good prayer is to align our being with His will, so that the former may become the unresisting instrument of the latter. As Dante put it, in la sua volantade e nostra pace: in His will is our peace.

Much of this is illustrated by Christ’s Passion. As it looms, in Gethsemane, Jesus prays for this cup (understood: this bitter cup, this cup of hemlock) to be taken from him: he is human enough to quail at the prospect. Yet at once he continues: “But not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” But, we say, did God will this? Does God will – intend, want, and cause – the nailing of an innocent to a cross? If so, He would be a malignant God, a God who could will the extermination of millions of Jews and of Russian farmers, the massacre of thousands of Syrians, and the torture of prisoners everywhere. If, in the face of catastrophe or atrocity, we say “Thy will be done” what we mean is that we pray for the strength and the grace to undergo such things in the manner that His will intends us to and hopes we will. His will is not that we be nailed to a cross; His will is that if we are we will undergo it as Jesus did.

All prayer for ourselves is contained in the Lord’s Prayer. What about prayer for others? This is an area much more difficult to understand than prayer for ourselves, if only because prayer for others is always already by definition generous and altruistic; this being so, we cannot understand why it is so often not (or not in any obvious way) granted. If my beloved, or my child, has cancer, or Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s, or motor neurone disease, and I pray eight hours a day for that person to be healed, and that person is not healed, it is understandable if I feel rebellious. What, I ask myself, or God, is the point?

This problem is made worse, in some ways, by what appear to be occasional exceptions that look like miraculous healings. My own belief is that these are probably “sports”: oddities in the process which are sometimes enabled by a particularly powerful spirit. We cannot, and should not, expect these to occur and be offended or cast down when they do not.

Prayer for others, I believe, is a way of adding to their store of spiritual energy, the energy that emerges in their own prayer. If it is directed to a specific situation, it augments their own prayer energy for undergoing, or dealing with, such a situation. True to the laws of prayer energy, we may pray for their increase in discernment, in wisdom, in charity, in patience, in love. A multitude of such prayers may, and probably does, create an energy field of great force that the beneficiary may tap into.

Nevertheless, the laws of prayer hold. My friend with motor neurone disease will not be healed by my prayers, i.e. his disease will not go away. The prayers of Mary and John and the others present did not make the Cross go away or allow Jesus to come down from it. But their power very certainly helped him, in this most human of his hours, to bear what had to be borne.

Another law of prayer appears to be that the prayers of a community are more powerful and effective than those of an individual. I can see that this might be so: six generators connected in sequence will produce more energy that one solitary one. Moreover, it means that a whole community with its energy is advancing God’s hope and plan for the world. This should not, however, prevent the individual from praying, and the longer and deeper the better.

Given all this, I find it very curious to see how many people who do not deny climate change and its roots in human activity are quite comfortable with denying the power, the efficacy, and even the interest, of prayer. Climate-change denial is rightfully decried; God-denial is accepted without a blink. It must, one feels, come from a fundamental misprision as to the nature of the energy. It is not electricity: you cannot get a bunch of experts to produce it in a form that lets a small child press a switch and light a room. It is more like the power of the wind to a sailboat, or the power of growth to a farmer: it has its own laws and rhythms that must be attended to and cannot be forced. Yet why that should call into question its existence is peculiar. Perhaps it is because many do not want it to be true. Why? Do they think it would limit their liberty? Ten thousand things already do so, from traffic regulations to polio. You can get from London to Athens quickly, by spending a great deal of money, using vast amounts of petroleum, and causing a fair mount of pollution, by taking an aeroplane. Or you can get from London to Athens by using a skill you have patiently learned, working with the wind (that, we know, bloweth where it listeth), in silence and cleanly, by taking a sailboat.

Finally, what are the rewards of prayer? If it does not normally change the physical progress of things; if it does not bring Huckleberry Finn his fish-hooks; if it does not make my friend’s cancer go away; what does it bring me? You can read the answer in a hundred books written by experts. Experts such as Augustine of Hippo, Juliana of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Juan de la Cruz, George Herbert, John Donne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton. Very simply: it brings you (into) the company of God. The God who is Love.  The lone sailor crossing the Pacific had to spend many years learning the ways of the wind and the water; but he would tell you that it was all worth it. Prayer also takes time to learn; to adapt a proverb, God’s will often moves slowly, but it moves exceeding well.

Image credit: thanks to Zack Hunt.

DARK, HARD, SILENT ----

                                                                                                             advent four



                                                                                                             Dark darker, cold
                                                                                                             colder, movement
                                                                                                             freezes. In night, lighted
                                                                                                             doors close and go
                                                                                                             dark. Streets gleam
                                                                                                             houseless, hard.
                                                                                                             Where is entry?



                                                                                                             Four candles.



                                                                                                             On bare hills, on
                                                                                                             camel roads, something
                                                                                                             has cracked open. Clouds
                                                                                                             reveal stars. Stillness
                                                                                                             is everywhere. A huge
                                                                                                             holds its breath.

LITTLE GREAT MAN, GREAT POET

Today is the feast of that truly awesome small humble man Juan de la Cruz -- St John of the Cross -- who had the alarming experience of being befriended, and roped in, by St Teresa of Avila. He was a true mystic, a man of extreme devotion (a practice as rare as extreme mountaineering), and a very great poet. Here is his most famous poem, in an English translation:

On a dark night, 
Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed, 
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure, 
By the secret ladder, disguised–--oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment, 
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night, 
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, 
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

This light guided me 
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–
A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me, 
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, 
Lover transformed in the Beloved!

Upon my flowery breast, 
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, 
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret 
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck 
And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion; 
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself, 
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

And here it is in the original Spanish:

1. En una noche oscura
con ansias, en amores inflamada,
¡oh dichosa ventura!
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.

2. A oscuras, y segura,
por la secreta escala disfrazada,
¡Oh dichosa ventura!
a oscuras, y en celada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.

3. En la noche dichosa
en secreto, que nadie me veía,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz y guía,
sino la que en el corazón ardía.

4. Aquésta me guiaba
más cierto que la luz del mediodía,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sabía,
en parte donde nadie parecía.

5. ¡Oh noche que guiaste!
¡Oh noche amable más que la alborada:
oh noche que juntaste
Amado con Amada.
Amada en el Amado transformada!

6. En mi pecho florido,
que entero para él sólo se guardaba,
allí quedó dormido,
y yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.

7. El aire de la almena,
cuando yo sus cabellos esparcía,
con su mano serena
en mi cuello hería,
y todos mis sentidos suspendía.

8. Quedéme, y olvidéme,
el rostro recliné sobre el Amado,
cesó todo, y dejéme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.

WHAT ABOUT THE JUDGING?

A point about “the judging”, as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore memorably put it. “As God is my judge” was an old oath-like phrase. And most of us have an image of such judgement, whether Michelangelo’s or otherwise.

At yesterday’s Gaudete Mass, however, our small hyperactive Algerian priest made a point in his homily that I found interesting, and perhaps consoling, enough to share. The Epistle reading was James 5:9 “Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door.” And Fr Jean-Kamel said: “Don’t get this wrong. God will not judge you. God does not judge. God only loves. It is you who will judge you. How? Because God will confront you, as you are, with the immensity, the glory and the absoluteness of His love. And when He does that, you will judge yourself. And if and when you have judged yourself, you will be forgiven, and accepted, and loved.” Rather breathtaking, I thought. Possibly heretical? But when you think it through it makes sense, even orthodoxly. Food for thought; and for rejoicing. Perhaps.