ANOTHER WORLD

THOUGHTS AFTER MASS CHEZ THE PIUS X FRATERNITY

The Church of St Nicolas de Chardonnet in Paris. It was truly extraordinary. First of all, the crowd. There must have been close to a thousand people in the magnificent early 18C church. There were old people, young people, middle-aged people, white people, black people, and everything in between. There were priests in cassocks and a tonsured Benedictione monk with a long beard. There were Sea Scouts, cubs, and girl guides.

            After a while, I realised that this was a special celebration, beyond the usual Quinquagesima Sunday: the Confraternity was celebrating the fourth decennium of their takeover of this church, and so it was a proud affirmation of their separate and schismatic identity.

            The Mass, in Latin of course, and accompanied by an enthusiastic orchestra and choir (who have much to learn from Oxford Anglicans, I might add), was quite beautiful, and gave me furiously to think. Hardened Vatican-Twoers loathe this kind of Mass and are still cross with Benedict XVI for having permitted it. Living  in the normal way of things with a moveable village Mass led by a charismatically-inclined Algerian, whom I have come to love for his huge heart if not for his chatty-cum-handclapping liturgy, I find myself breathing-in the sheer beauty and age-old ritual of such a glorious service.

            What this means is that all the gold, the gilt, the vestments, the grandeur, the incense, the candles, and the ritual movements, not to mention the Gregorian and polyphonic singing, is not flummery. It is a way of giving all the best and the most beautiful of our humble human creations to God, to honour Him. Yes, we are perfectly aware that He loves the poor widow’s mite more than all the glory; but giving Him all that we can best create has also to be an acceptable sacrifice. Solomon put much of the best work by his day’s craftsmen into the Temple. I agree that ‘worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ should not be reversed to ‘the holiness of beauty’; and yet there is a real and true holiness in beauty that can and should be offered to God rather than worshipped in idolatry (stay tuned: we will get back to that in a minute).

            So it was all very grand and very moving. The readings were done in Latin and in French, which was decent of them; and then we got to the homily, or sermon. It was a pontifical Mass, so there was a Bishop present, even if to Rome he is a schismatic and thus not real bishop. And his sermon: O boy. His theme was the Immaculate Heart of Mary: not a topic given to exciting a Protestant-educated heart like mine, but I’m willing to make allowances. Except that after a very few sentences it became clear that he was using the Immaculate Heart of Mary as a baseball bat with which to club and batter everything that reeked even faintly of modernity, liberalism, etc. I swear this is this the first time I have ever heard the Second Vatican Council referred to as ‘une cloaque immonde’, a vile and unclean sewer. In a light, proud and arrogant tenor he whipped and fustigated, he lashed and battered, without even the faintest whisper of humility, doubt, or brotherly love. At the very best it was amusing; at worst it was appalling.
            And then the Mass resumed and was beautiful; I went up and received Communion from a schismatic bishop, upon my tongue (in this crowd you wouldn’t dare hold out crossed hands), and realised that God is here too, and that Yeshua lunched with Pharisees.

            Thinking about it afterwards I realised several things. 1) These are the people whose spiritual ancestors started the St Bartholomew’s Massacre, killing around 2-10,000 Parisians in a week in 1572; 2) I deeply believe they are wrong, because they quite literally and explicitly consider ‘la tradition’ to be a theological and indipensable element of the Christian faith, which is quite simply idolatrous: they believe that the merest adiaphora of liturgy, vestment and gesture are essential to the Faith; 3) I understand and feel for them, because they feel much same as my American Democrat friends would feel if a Trump Presidency had lasted for 40 years, i.e. “the bad guys say they won and have been running the show authoritatively and vilify us as horrible creeps” – so they need to feel that they are in the right, that they are the keepers of the True Flame, and that eventually the Church will get back to the true Faith and reconcile itself with them; 4) this said, I deplore utterly their lack of charity and humility, their arrogance and their self-satisfaction.

            None of this has anything to do with the glories of the Tridentine Mass at its best, which is a wonder and which it was a folly of Vatican 2 to prohibit, until Benedict XVI re-allowed it. (Anglicans who casually toss away the Book of Common Prayer for the awful Common Worship should take note: there is a surprising number of people who really and truly do love awesome, awe-inspiring, awe-inspired liturgy in age-honoured language, and who should not be fobbed off with brief non-musical “OK, if you absolutely must” 8 AM Mattins.) The priest facing the grand altar is not “turning his back on the people”; he is joining with the people, leading them in facing Christ on the altar. If the priest in question should, moreover, ascend into the pulpit instead of farting around with a microphone and a squeak-bellow sound system, (s)he would find that pulpits are intelligent early sound systems in themselves and that, no, the congregation does not think you are coming it the toff  and looking down on them, it actually finds you easier to listen to, and might even like to look up to its priest.

            So there we are: it is a pleasure occasionally to visit a different Christian culture. This particular bit of Catholic France is special: I suspect there were a lot of people there who not only disapprove of Pope Francis but who think the Revolution of 1789 was a grave mistake, and who are not 100% sure France was wrong in capitulating in 1940. On the other hand, I have rarely seen an immense church so chock-to-bursting-full of totally committed and enthusiastic and faithful Christians in recent years, and my heart responded to the liturgy like a flower to a shower of rain.  Go figure.

OF WOODS AND TREES

Sarv-e Abarqu, a cypress tree in Iran, over 4,000 years old

When the blind man healed by Jesus first began to see, he said, ‘I see men, as trees walking.’ This Entish moment appeals to us. I’m sure it’s a true report by the Evangelist, because of its unexpectedness. And it reminds me how important trees and forests are as images in and of our lives.

         T.S. Eliot, following Dante, saw life as a journey through a vast forest: in middle age we are in its centre. The path through the trees is not always clear. J.R.R. Tolkien made great use of forests, beginning with Mirkwood in The Hobbit. But it happens that, reversing a common saying, we can’t see the trees for the wood: that the forest we travel in prevents us from paying attention to a particular tree.

         So it is with the Biblical Tree of Life (the Etz haChaim). All of us are familiar with its neighbour, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, often abusively lopped to ‘the Tree of knowledge’. But the Tree of Life gets little attention.

         In the Old Testament, after Genesis, it appears in Proverbs and in Esdras, always with an indefinite article, ‘a tree of life’. As an image, it seems to represent an abundance of spiritual life that grows out of some spiritual goodness in a person or a nation, as a tree grows from a seed. And that growth is given: it is a gift of God.

         In that sense, the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden is perhaps also the principle of life itself, especially of human life both individual and collective, that stands in the centre of the Garden as a (perhaps the) gift of God. But not of life simply physical: of life spiritual, of life as children of God, of life as it was intended to be, created human life in complete harmony with its Giver.

         If we do not, as some theologians have done, conflate the two Trees – and I find it much more convincing not to -- , it is significant that the serpent does not appear in the Tree of Life. Nor should he; nor could he.

         The Tree of Life stands in the Centre of the Garden: it is central, spiritually it is the very core of what God created: the incarnate image of life in harmony with God.

And now, nearly at the beginning of Lent, we need to turn to a thought about that Tree that first surfaced in the Eastern Church and came from it to us in the West. Not surprisingly it was Pope Benedict XVI, that tireless seeker after reunification with the Eastern Church, who expressed that thought in many of his homilies. It is that since the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the Tree of Life has a new form: the Cross. Or as we might say to bring home the full weight of that thought: the gallows.

            Ouch. The cross, the gallows, is the tree of death. It is properly shunned, it horrifies us. Or it should, if we could still see it as Jesus’ contemporaries saw it. Remember the Spartacus Revolt, the rebellion of the gladiators and slaves, when the crosses of the defeated rebels lined the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Can one wonder that St Paul was consciousness of his preaching’s monstrosity to both Jews and Greeks? In his letter to the community at Corinth he wrote, ‘The preaching of the cross is, I know, nonsense to those who are involved in this dying world…..the Jews ask for a sign, the Greeks seek wisdom; but all we preach is Christ crucified—a stumbling block to the Jews and sheer nonsense to the Gentiles.’

            However, his point is that, in contrast to those very natural reactions, natural in view of the cultures that give rise to them, for ‘us’ who have been saved, made safe, rescued, that stumbling-block, that idiocy is ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’. For God’s foolishness is wiser than man’s wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than man’s power.

And so, the gallows-tree, the ignominious tree of death, becomes in this vast, cosmic, terrifying, glorious paradox, the Tree of Life itself.

            And the Tree of Life in the full, original, Edenic sense of the word: it is now the incarnate image of the life lived in harmony with life’s Giver. It is central. As the Carthusians’ motto puts it: stat crux dum volvitur orbis: the Cross stands while the world turns. Only now the Centre incoporates a paradox: because that has not gone away. It cannot and must not be ignored. The Tree of Life, the life of the tree, cannot be as if the Son of God, the Moshiach Himself, had not been nailed to it, had not expired upon it. Which means that we cannot meditate upon it without acknowledging that stumbling-block – because stumbling-block it is, make no mistake. To adapt a bumper-sticker: Sin Happened. Sin Happens. Sin gets, chronically, in the way of Love. So that ubiquitous nasty has to be gone through. It can only be gone through by going through it. Mercifully, we are not alone. He went through it; and if He did, so can we. Because on the other side of Lent, there is Easter; on the other side of the Cross, there is the Resurrection; on the other side of death, there is life. A whole Tree of it.

THEY SHALL LAUGH AND SING

Samuel Palmer, "Harvesters by firelight"

I couldn't resist putting up the Psalm for tonight's BCP reading, for sheer beauty and glory. Enjoy.

65 ¶ Te decet hymnus Thou, O God, art praised in Sion; and unto thee shall the vow be performed in Jerusalem.  Thou that hearest the prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.  My misdeeds prevail against me; O be thou merciful unto our sins.  Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and receivest unto thee; he shall dwell in thy court, and shall be satisfied with the pleasures of thy house, even of thy holy temple. Thou shalt show us wonderful things in thy righteousness, O God of our salvation, thou that art the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of them that remain in the broad sea—who in his strength setteth fast the mountains, and is girded about with power, who stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of his waves, and the madness of the people.  They also that dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth shall be afraid at thy tokens, thou that makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to praise thee. Thou visitest the earth, and blessest it; thou makest it very plenteous.  The river of God is full of water; thou preparest their corn, for so thou providest for the earth.  Thou waterest her furrows; thou sendest rain into the little valleys thereof.  Thou makest it soft with the drops of rain, and blessest the increase of it.  Thou crownest the year with thy goodness, and thy clouds drop fatness.  They shall drop upon the dwellings of the wilderness; and the little hills shall rejoice on every side. The folds shall be full of sheep; the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn, that they shall laugh and sing.

COMPLETING THE TRIANGLE

Caspar David Friedrich, "Angels in Adoration"

In my two posts on prayer I wrote about the prayer of petition and the prayer of thanksgiving. The triangle, or trinity, of prayer now needs to be completed by paying attention to what is, in the tradition of the Church, considered the highest and most celestial form of prayer, the prayer of adoration.

In petition, we ask, we beg, we beseech; and we need to learn what to ask for, how to ask for it, and how to deal with the result. In thanksgiving, we say Thank you; and we need to learn about illogicality an d discretion. What is the prayer of adoration?

Latin ad-oro originally means “to speak to”, then becomes “to address a request or prayer to” and eventually takes on the meaning of “to worship, to venerate”. In Greek there are the verbs sebomai and proskunein, the latter implying a physical movement such as kneeling or prostration. Whereas the English word “worship” is originally a noun meaning something like “value-ness”, greatness, honourableness, and later becomes a verb meaning to honour, to venerate.

Somehow, the prayer of adoration is well beyond that. Why? Because it is disinterested, unlike petition and thanksgiving. It is the pure, natural condition for a created being: turning to the light and warmth of its Creator as the sunflower turns to the sun. In part it is simply basking; but there is in adoration a return movement of joy, of pleasure, of active giving. What do we give when we adore? As the Psalm says, “of thine own do we give thee” – there is nothing we can give God that did not come from Him, that is not always already His. And yet there is joy in giving back that borrowed joy.

The prayer of adoration is also contemplation. As the sunflower contemplates the sun, the human soul contemplates the living God. Often, His light is too bright for us to regard directly; so we contemplate Him in His creation. Thomas Traherne, whom I have had occasion to quote before, did so and managed to express it gloriously in human words. Others have contemplated God’s glory and have fallen silent before it. Still others have lost themselves, lost their selves, in becoming one with it, as a comet might fall into the sun.

The prayer of adoration is the prayer of the angels. It is the prayer of all those seen by St John in his vision of Revelation, those who surround the throne of the Almighty, those whose joy is eternal in their unceasing song. Nevertheless, this prayer of adoration has roots. It grows out of the prayer of thanksgiving: part of the joy of contemplating God is the immense gratitude for receiving all that we now give back in praise; for His creation, its beauty, its emotion, all that we see and love in life. And the prayer of thanksgiving, in turn, has its roots in the prayer of petition; for we are given what we first asked, or we are given what it did not even occur to us toask, or what we dared not ask. And so the trinity of prayer is complete; and the immeasurable, unspeakable, huge silent light of God is all in all.

Image courtesy of Abuto George Evangelical Ministry

TRIANGLE: SECOND SIDE

Further to “An Anatomy of Prayer” (22 December 2016):

In my last long post on prayer I tried to discern the nature and the modalities of that curious form of energy. The main form I considered there was petitionary prayer, both for oneself and for others: it is, after all, the most intuitive and (thus) the most common form of prayer. “Please, God, let . . .” I did, however, touch on another form of prayer: prayer of thanksgiving. One cannot, I said, always be asking.

            Thanksgiving has its own peculiarities. The first is that if one recognises that petitionary prayer cannot and should not concern Huck Finn’s fish-hooks, it is illogical to give thanks when fish-hooks come one’s way. One cannot have it both ways, our reason tells us. If God does not micro-manage creation; if whether or not we get something specific or have something specific happen to us is not “God’s will”; then logically we should neither pray for it nor give thanks for it. And yet those of us who have grown used to addressing the Father (and/or the Son, and/or the Holy Ghost) as we are encouraged to do, do often utter such brief and illogical prayers of thanksgiving. Should we stop? I don’t think so; and the reason is that while pointless and thus unfulfilled petitions tend to plunge us into depression, illogical thanksgivings will make us better human beings by connecting our joy to our Creator. Who is, if only in the second degree, its Creator: not that He gave us the fish-hooks, but that He is the source of joy.

            The second peculiarity of thanksgiving prayer is that it rarely concerns the real and proper objects. This derives from the nature of petitionary prayer. If we pray for the things that we may    properly expect to be granted; if we pray to be nearer to God and to become His more faithful children; if we pray for more discernment, for more generosity; then if and when such things are granted us, we will probably not give thanks for them, because to do so would make us resemble the Pharisee in the temple who thanked God that he was not as other men. “Thank you, God, for making me such a generous person” sounds repellent, and is. The solution here, I believe, is one of nuance. In the first place, if we have asked for a more discerning spirit and we realise after a certain lapse of time that we are indeed able to understand better God’s nature and will, then we may properly give thanks, if we do so very quietly and in private, and if we recognise that we still have a long way to go. The same goes for increases in generosity, humility, et cetera.

            All this said, thanksgiving is a good and joyous state of mind and soul, and should be encouraged wherever possible. It increases mental health, humility, and faith. And it is an indispensable complement to petitionary prayer. Together, these forms of prayer form two sides of a triangle or trinity; my next post will concern the third.