NOT KING DAVID?

On many occasions in the Gospels, we are told that Yeshua travelled the length and breadth of the country preaching the eu-angelion, which in Greek means “the good message” but which, as Joseph Ratzinger has reminded us, can also mean something like “the authoritative message”, being used for messages from the king. I wonder how often we stop to consider what the content of that message might have been. 

   For later writers, the authors of the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, the answer seems obvious: the evangelium is Christ Himself. But what, at the time, was the content of His preaching? A hint – a very large hint – is given in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, which may in fact be the conflation of several preachings. It has to do with His relation to the Old Testament commandments, which are not to be abandoned but ‘fulfilled’: internalized, as the Ten Commandments are fulfilled/internalized in the Two. 

   This ‘matter’ of the Sermon is profound and of the greatest possible importance; but is it ‘good news’? I can imagine hearers going home having heard it, in a reflective frame of mind as they apply what they have heard to what they had been taught and then to their own lives; but do they go home rejoicing or, as the modern French Psalm translation puts it ‘quivering with joy’?

   I was led to this meditation by reading all the Old Testament, and particularly the Psalms’, mentions of ‘rejoicing’, ‘shouting and dancing for joy’, and comparing them to the behavior of most believing Christians I know, who tend to live their faith with a profound happiness perhaps but on a daily basis tend to be sober, slightly austere, somewhat worried, and more apt to say ‘Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief’ than to quiver with joy.

   Yeshua, of course, wrought miracles of healing almost constantly; yet it often strikes me that he doesn’t seem to consider it central to what his does. He frequently tells those he has healed to keep quiet about it, which in anyone but him would seem disingenuous but which in him seems sincere; on several occasions he forgives the patient his sins and only when challenged about that does he heal him, as an outward and visible sign comprehensible even to the dolts who disputed him.  When Yochanan the Baptist sends to know if he is really the Meshiach, he lists the miracles as evidence – again, not as the core of meaning but as outward and visible signs comprehensible to anyone. 

   So if the healing is the outward and visible sign, what is the inward and spiritual grace? It can only, I think, be the message that the long-awaited Meshiach, the Anointed – both king and priest – has now come; that He is here, in the here and now; that the anxious, hopeful but occasionally almost despairing, waiting is over.

   This must itself have caused a great deal of confusion as well as joy. After all, the general view of the Meshiach was that he would be a new King David, a great political and military leader who would liberate Israel from Roman rule; and here was an itinerant preacher with a small band of disciples, who heals the blind and the lame and comes from Dogpatch, claiming to be Him! Where are his divisions? Where are his battalions? Yet that seems to have been the reaction mainly of the Establishment: the crowds that followed him around the Sea of Galilee appear to have taken this redefinition of Messiahship in their stride. We know that part of his teaching – as in the Nazareth synagogue – was an explanation of his actions in terms of the Book of the prophet Isaiah, which would have at least in part made clear to his hearers that this new and real Meshiach was a king of humility, come to serve rather than be served, and who would not confine liberation to freeing Israel from the Romans but extend it outward to include all nations and deepen it to free people not from political oppressors but from the tyranny of sin.

   Once that sinks in, we can see the healing for what it was: a by-product and an outward and visible sign. What matters is that the Meshiach, who is the new Torah, is here, and that anyone who believes and trusts in him is, as Henry Lyte’s hymn wonderfully puts it, ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. That is a matter for quivering with joy – almost unimaginable for reasonable and worldly adults living in a world that oscillates between catastrophe and cynicism. That is what we should meditate upon and ponder. It is eu-angelion: good news from an authoritative source. The ultimate good news from the ultimately authoritative source. Blow your mind.

early image of Christ from the Nunziatella Catacomb, Rome

(?3rd century AD)

NOT SO TEMPTING

Oscar Wilde said “I can resist anything except temptation.”

In composing the universal prayer he would later teach his disciples, Yeshua had dealt with forgiveness; now he came to closure. Should he let the prayer trail away with just one more petition, reinforcing a downward movement from the grandeur of the Name? Or should he let it climb to a final and different height, a second peak? The daily bread petition was about trust; the forgiveness petition created a parallel of responsibility. Where now? What was the line?

He decided not to pursue the “as we forgive” implication but to continue the theme of trust and need. The opening grandly affirms God’s power; the petitions show our corresponding weakness and our dependence on the gifts of his love. We need, and trust him to provide from day to day, the basics of our life; we need forgiveness, as well as the capacity to forgive. What else do we need?

And suddenly, Abraham swam into his mind. Not the one who welcomed angels; not the Friend of God; the Abraham who was told to cut his only son’s throat and obeyed, up to the very end. Yeshua shivered, as always when he thought of that trial. And look at Job: there the Father himself had allowed Shaitan, the eternal Adversary, by way of a test of faith to have his way with a favoured human almost beyond bearing. There were giants in those days, he thought.

Looking at his brothers, at Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and young Shimon, he knew that they could not stand up to such commands; and the next petition wrote itself. “Do not,” he prayed with great intensity, “force us – little ones, no patriarchs or Jobs -- into [such a] trial”, and almost automatically there followed, “but deliver us from the Adversary”. For ever since Job, it had been he, the fallen angel, who subjects men to the unbearable; he it had been who crows and rejoices when they fall, and receives them gleefully with outstretched claws. His dream of revenge is never-ending; his understanding is cosmic and his wiles devastating. Merely obeying God’s commandments and praying does not put men beyond his reach: only the Father himself, by an active intervention, can deliver the wretched human race from that vile intelligence.

Image: Laurent de la Hyre, "Abraham Sacrificing Isaac" (1650)

WHAT ROUGH BEAST

France, where I live, is currently caught up in an extraordinary political crisis: the Yellow Vests. Triggered by the announcement of a sales tax jump on diesel fuel for cars – billed as an ecological move but mainly to help out the budget --, a protest movement went super-viral on Facebook and Twitter, and quickly spilled into the streets. Wearing the yellow safety vests mandatory in French cars, the protesters began blocking roads, motorways, traffic circles and toll-gates; and, as French protests will, it all culminated in monster demos on the Champs Elysées in Paris. Uniquely, though, this movement has no structure and no leaders, and therefore no one the government can talk to. Moreover, its demands are as varied as its makeup: they quickly went beyond fuel prices to anything anyone feels mad about. Lower prices, lower taxes, higher minimum wage, ecology, all the way to the resignation of President Macron. And there is such a general disgust with “politics” that anyone in the movement who proposes actually talking to the government to negotiate something immediately receives death threats. Obviously, the parties of the extreme right and left who would love to co-opt the Yellow Vests are being told to get stuffed. It’s an extraordinary moment of universal rage (75-85% of the French support the movement, at least in the comfortable anonymity of opinion polls) that combines real anguish, especially economic, with nihilism; while the big demos are being briskly and gleefully taken over by the “Black Blocks” and other violent urban-warfare and pillage instigators.

I’ve written this long introduction to set the scene for what really strikes me in the whole affair: the complete silence of the Church and the churches. Christians have for years felt a little uncomfortable about St Paul’s exhortation to treat legitimate government as a gift from God. In Holland during WW II, as the German occupiers put the boot in, the Dutch sarcastically sang the German hymn’s adaptation of the Pauline text: Die Obrigkeit ist Gottes Gabe. And both the Dutch, fighting against Spanish King Philip II’s legitimate but tyrannical rule, and the French, creating their iconic revolution and beheading their elites, have proved that they are not slavishly obedient by nature. However, in a time when smartphones and social networks are threatening to destroy every sort of social cohesion and sending the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, there should be no ambiguity at all about a Christian reaction to a nihilist tsunami.

Christ made it clear that his kingship was not “of this world”, and that the radical life he proposed considered social and political change not as a goal but at most as a natural result. He left social and political structures intact, telling his followers to pay Caesar’s taxes and, if they owned slaves, to be good masters. The conversion he envisaged would change individuals, and thus make certain kinds of behavior unthinkable. Meanwhile, almost any form of social structure can be made to work decently if the human beings operating it are filled with the love of God.

This said, though, Churchill was right in saying that democracy was the worst possible form of government with the exception of all the others. In creating modern democratic society, the Enlightenment has played as great a part as Christianity, and the rational safeguards democratic institutions present against wickedness (and sometimes even against stupidity) represent a treasure not lightly to be put at risk. In no way are they perfect: among today’s great challenges are the equitable incorporation of ecological change, the curbing of financial mega-greed, the encouragement of citizen initiatives and volunteer projects, and the management of communication. But in all these areas the Church and the churches ought to be leaders: not by making themselves into yet more NGOs but by insisting on the position of each individual in relation to God. Can you, John X Doe, look the Meshiach who died for love of you in the face and behave as you are behaving, speak as you are speaking and tweet as you are tweeting? He loves you and needs you to help fix this gravely ill dot in the galaxy. He is standing at your door and knocking: are you making too much noise, or reading too many texts, to notice? Or care?  

THE BEST MEDICINE

Recovering after an operation, I have been reading George Herbert, a sovereign remedy for all ills. And so I share with you this exquisite poem, which has moved me almost to tears for more than half a century.

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean 

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; 

         To which, besides their own demean, 

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. 

                      Grief melts away 

                      Like snow in May, 

         As if there were no such cold thing. 

         Who would have thought my shriveled heart 

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone 

         Quite underground; as flowers depart 

To see their mother-root, when they have blown, 

                      Where they together 

                      All the hard weather, 

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown. 

         These are thy wonders, Lord of power, 

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell 

         And up to heaven in an hour; 

Making a chiming of a passing-bell. 

                      We say amiss 

                      This or that is: 

         Thy word is all, if we could spell. 

         Oh that I once past changing were, 

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! 

         Many a spring I shoot up fair, 

Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; 

                      Nor doth my flower 

                      Want a spring shower, 

         My sins and I joining together. 

         But while I grow in a straight line, 

Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, 

         Thy anger comes, and I decline: 

What frost to that? what pole is not the zone 

                      Where all things burn, 

                      When thou dost turn, 

         And the least frown of thine is shown? 

         And now in age I bud again, 

After so many deaths I live and write; 

         I once more smell the dew and rain, 

And relish versing. Oh, my only light, 

                      It cannot be 

                      That I am he 

         On whom thy tempests fell all night. 

         These are thy wonders, Lord of love, 

To make us see we are but flowers that glide; 

         Which when we once can find and prove, 

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; 

                      Who would be more, 

                      Swelling through store, 

         Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

AND NOW FOR THE HARD BIT

In English, “give us today . . .” might have suggested “and forgive us …”, just as the French “donne” might have suggested “et pardonne”; but in Aramaic the words are quite different from each other. Nevertheless, the need for the daily gift of simple food seems to have suggested to Yeshua another need, perhaps an even greater one. Forgiveness is a human subject so huge that many books have been written about it, yet on our simple daily level it is raw and basic.

Let’s look first at its place in the prayer, and how the daily bread may have suggested it. The prayer for bread may have been suggested by the daily blessing of bread at every Jewish table; and the daily prayer later called the Amidah, most elements of which date from the Pharisaic and Sadducaic time, contains the Selichah, a prayer for the forgiveness of sins. What is perhaps original in Yeshua’s version is the order on the one hand, and the linking of God’s forgiveness with our own on the other: both were standard elements in Jewish spiritual life, but the link here is striking. 

What this encourages us to look at is a) what does it mean to be forgiven? And b) what does it mean to forgive? Everyone who has ever felt genuine guilt – and children feel that a lot –knows the real torture it brings. You have donesomething (which includes having saidsomething, for interpersonally words are actions) which has clearly and strongly hurt someone in some way. You see the other person’s pain, and you piercingly want time to roll back to before you did it. But it doesn’t. Oh God,whydid I do/say that? How could I have been so stupid, insensitive, wicked? I wish I could undo it/unsay it. But Time is pitiless, and leaves us pilloried. The person I hurt would be totally justified in retaliating. And in a way, I almost wish (s)he would. Then balance would be restored, and life could go on. If the person we have hurt has real power, we may even feel rather nervous or frightened. 

And then – perhaps not right away, perhaps the next day, or the next week, the next time we meet -- the person I have genuinely and wickedly hurt comes up and puts an arm around my shoulders and says, softly, “It’s OK, I know you didn’t mean it.” And changes the subject. How do we feel? Well, thoroughly discombobulated, for a start. That was the last thing we expected. 

And then, a huge wave of pure relief flows through us, and we may start to cry. Genuine, unexpected and overwhelming magnanimity teaches us what being forgiven feels like. 

When we ask God for this, what are we asking Him to forgive? The probable Aramaic word was hóba, which can mean both ‘sin’ and ‘debt’. So it has been variously translated as ‘sin’, ‘debt’ and ‘trespass’. One might perhaps translate it ‘Forgive us what we owe You’, because we owe Him infinitely more than we might ever hope to repay. In fact, we owe Him everything – all we are and have is a gift. So to ask Him to forgive us that life-including debt is to ask Him to accept us WAF – ‘with all faults” – just as we are, and to restore us to our proper relation to him, that of loving and grateful children to a loving and provident Father. As part of that, we are also asking Him to forgive our sin(s), obviously: the times we screw up that relation in one of the many well-known ways. 

Now comes the interesting part. Because unlike most known Jewish prayers like the Amidah, this prayer adds to the penitent request for forgiveness the rider “as we forgive (or: have forgiven) those who owe us”.An instant challenge.Have we forgiven? Whom? What this does is remind us how absolutely crucial forgiveness is between humans. I know two families, formerly good friends, who have not spoken to each other for six years because of what one family-s five-year-old said to the other family’s four-year-old. The opposite of forgiveness is rancour, and the result of rancour is humiliation and resentment. 

We have seen what being forgiven means and feels like. What about forgiving? The saying goes ‘forgive and forget’. Depending on what has been done to us, forgiving may be easy or very hard indeed. If a drunken oaf driving a defective car ran down and killed one of my daughters or grandchildren, I do not know if, or how, I should be able to forgive him, and I know I should never forget. The answer, if there is one, is perhaps that forgiving is possible only with, and in, prayer. We are not a forgiving race. But uniting ourselves to the God whose very nature is love and who has forgiven the human race more than we can begin to image – that may enable us to share in some of that mighty love. If we can imagine what we, as humans, regularly do to God; if we can imagine all that we ask, and hope, for Him to forgive; then perhaps we can be enabled by that imagination and the resulting prayer of humility to share in the outpouring of His grace. 

Eventually, then, this double-sided petition, as Yeshua imagined it and set it in His prayer, is one for restoration. For restoration of us humans in our relation to one another, and for restoration of our relation to our infinitely loving Father – a restoration which we can’t accomplish but which He can, and will.  

BEYOND MOURNING

In Latin countries, and possibly in Eastern Europe also, it is demotically known as le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead. Chrysanthemums are put on graves freshly cleaned and full of photographs of the deceased. Officially, the Catholic churches, Roman, Orthodox and Anglican, refer to it as the Feast of the Souls of the Faithful Departed, or All Souls' Day. Its purpose was, and mostly still is, to pray for the souls of those who have left this life, to help them on their way, to assist them in Purgatory and to aid them in the progress of the purgation that will ready them for Heaven. There is something deeply comforting in this schema, which intellectuals may doubt but cannot disprove. How it can combine with the equally strong, and to many comforting, belief that the deceased loved ones watch over those of us still in the world is not clear; but we may perhaps reply with Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile, I believe because it is impossible, or with Christ, To the Father nothing is impossible.

There is nothing one can say about death that has not been said so many times before that it is commonplace. It is absolute: that bourn/ from which no traveller returns. (Except, of course, he whose love was stronger.) We are prevented from knowing what, if anything, takes place beyond the curtain. Also, it is usually accompanied with pain and grief, both sometimes excruciating. We can discuss it only in images; and there are two of those I have always found consoling. 

The first comes to one when one stands beside a waterfall. One sees a twig, perhaps, or a leaf, borne tranquilly upon the stream towards an edge of which it has no idea. Then it disappears into the crashing maelstrom of white foam and booming noise. And then, at the bottom, we see it surfacing, rather awkwardly at first, and continuing on its way downstream. So, in the days when the thought of death haunted and terrified me, my mantra was The river flows on below the falls.

The second image is that of the caterpillar, which (as far as we know) lives its laborious and earthbound life in complete ignorance of the glorious butterfly it will become when that stage of its living is finished. If we do not know what happens to us after death, it is perhaps because there is no need for us to know: it might ruin our caterpillarity if we did.

What we do know is that Love is stronger even than death. Not, now, in the sense that true lovers can face it together or remain true after the decease of one; no, in the sense that the One who was Himself true Love did not refuse that road, took it for our sake, and emerged on the other side, first to broil fish on a lake beach and to invite his stupefied mourning friends to breakfast, and finally to precede us to his, and our, Father's house. 

The thought that by the time we die we are not perhaps exactly ready for that new house, that our wedding garment in rumpled, stained, a little torn and in serious need of a hot iron, should make us deeply thankful for the doctrine of Purgatory. We are told that our stay there will be hard work and not always agreeable; but there is light and warmth and welcome at the end. Our love and assistance should go to those who are already there and whom our support will hearten in their tasks; our pity should be reserved for those who have made themselves incapable of even desiring God's love and to whom, as C.S. Lewis wrote, His presence in æternitatem would be torture. They dwell in outer darkness, capable of receiving only that final mercy of His absence.  

Will they do so forever? Is the 'gnashing of teeth' eternal? Theologians from Origen on have doubted, even as stern moralists have insisted. The word to remember in this context is apokatastasis or "restoration": the idea that at the end of time everything will be "restored" to its original state -- and the original state of man, of course, was sinless. Some theologians have even extended apokatastasis to Lucifer and his fallen angels, maintaining that eventually the whole of Creation will be "saved" -- restored to a harmonious and loving relationship to its Creator. 

In the meantime, let us remember those who have preceded us, let us send them the loving thoughts and prayers that they will surely welcome. 

BON APPETIT

On a Friday night as Yeshua, head of the family, was preparing to bless the bread -- baruch atta Adonai Eluhenu --, he looked at the pile of inviting, freshly-made blond loaves and thought: Yes, that too has its place in the prayer I'm building. We harvest the wheat, we thresh it, we mill the grain, we bake the flour; but without the wheat, and the millet, and the rest, what should we do? It was you, Father, who brought forth lechem min ha'aretz, bread from the earth. Nothing is so basic: it is 'bread', but sometimes we use it to mean simply 'food'. It is your gift, not our right.  And sometimes You withhold it, or seem to; sometimes rains or drought spoil the  harvest, and we go hungry. You have not given, but You have allowed, great famines. It would be proper to ask for it: "Give us today today's bread, today's food." Only today's, he thought; it would be wrong to demand tomorrow's, too like hoarding, control, security. Abba, you have taught us to care and not to care, to live lightly, loving only you so that we may the better love all else. Give us, just for today, the lechem we need.

And, he reflected, as every thing here below is itself but also an image, how true this is of the lechem! It is the warm bread we eat and enjoy this Shabbat, but at the same time it is the unleavened bread that reminds us of our flight from Egypt; it is the food that God provided for Israel in the desert -- and remember, they were told to gather only each day for that day (except for Shabbat). And the food God gives is not only that of ha'aretz, is it? 

As he meditated, walking in the fields that day, the subject opened out and out in his mind. What feeds us? What feeds our bodies? What feeds our souls? `What has fed my mind, that now I can access so many treasures of thought? And the Word of God swam into his mind: all those riches of Torah, Tanakh, all the words of the prophets, all the overflowing beauty of the Psalms -- what a banquet!

The Psalms brought him to the Meshiach, that supreme gift from God that we are promised. Meshiach, who will repair the great Ill and heal Israel of its wounds. Will not Meshiach be like bread also, not today's but eternity's?

NOT THE WILL TO POWER

Orthodox icon: Christ and Moses

In his meditation on the perfect all-purpose prayer, I imagine Yeshua, having hallowed the Name (Baruch HaShem) and expressed hope for the coming of the malkut, the kingship, the Reign, now turning to the Divine Will. This flowed naturally from its predecessor: if a king reigns, his subjects do his will. What is God’s will? The Hebrew ratzon, when linked to the Deity, leads one directly to the Torah: God’s Will for Israel – and, eventually, for humanity – is that they keep his commandments, his statues, his testimonies. By itself the prayer that this be done is large and seems adequate for a Divine instruction; but Yeshua here added “on earth as it is in heaven” (ba’arets ka’asher na’asah vashamayim). In a sense this multiplies it: we pray that His will may be done on earth, not imperfectly in our usual sloppy human way, but the way it is done in Heaven, in His own presence, where the Reign is eternal and accomplished. There, we may imagine, His will is naturally done; and since His nature is Love, the natural doing of His will is a permanent activity of love, involving all the inhabitants of Heaven. Although we cannot equal this, we can strive for it.

Whether, when he composed the prayer, he already knew it or not, Yeshua was (to be) the new Torah: the divine commandments became two, then eventually one: first, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves; then, simply, to love and follow Yeshua Meshiach in everything.

 For earthling humans, though, questions remain. If we are to help bring about that Reign where his Will is done, we nevertheless ask ourselves, on almost a daily basis, what God’s will is. In this or that situation, hypothetical, actual or urgent, what should A do? Similarly, and sometimes even more anguishingly, what, in all that happens, does so by God’s will? If we say to someone “I’ll see you next month, Deo volente”, what does that imply?

It is comforting for us to remember that Yeshua himself faced this problem. When, in Gethsemane, he prays that the bitter cup he faces may be taken from him, he ends, “Yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt”. In that case at least, the Father’s will was clear: the Son’s sacrifice had to be carried through to the end.

We are often, and rightly, taught not to confuse our desire with God’s will. Even in an apparently good cause, Deus vult is more often than not a projection and thus an error. Sometimes an attitude of suspicion, particularly toward ourselves, is salutary. On the other hand, neither should we fall into the trap of assuming the Divine will always to be the opposite of our own. It is independent of us, and of our desire. How to discern it, then?

I think that the best way is to remember the nature of the God who wills. His nature is Love. Whatever is congruent with Love at its highest may safely be considered congruent with His will. Which brings us back to the conflation of commandments in the new Alliance: 10 > 2 > 1. The eu-angelion, the authoritative good message, is precisely that: that doing God’s will is no longer a matter of memorising and following detailed rules, but of being definitively touched by the absolute, sacrificial Love of the Anointed One, and transforming one’s heart, mind and life accordingly. We are still stumbling earthlings, and will never do it as completely or as elegantly as the angels: but that, we may be assured, will be taken into account.

Once we have been touched by that Love, all we really need to do is (as I wrote before) to keep our shutters, our windows, and our doors wide open to the grace that is poured upon us unceasingly: Grace Abounding. It will fill us gradually, until perhaps one day, like Myriam Yeshua’s Mother, we will be gratia plena.

OCTOBER BEAUTY

The jeweller: Thomas Cranmer

On the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, I often put up a praise to that day’s Collect, the most perfect in the whole Book of Common Prayer. The Collects, for those who are not familiar with the term, are the prayers that in Anglican Matins and Evensong come after the Creed and some responses, and conclude the Office; in the current Roman Catholic Mass, they correspond to the prayer that follows the Absolution and introduces the readings. A Collect is a prayer said, usually, by the priest on behalf of the congregation, and from very early days on Collects were highly developed in form. A typical Collect has five sections: Invocation, Acknowledgement, Petition, Aspiration and Pleading. Moreover, the Latin Collects from the early Sacramentaries were very structured in their sentence rhythms and forms; and this was recognised and adopted by Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer and of the Collects that survive from that 1549 text to this day.

Of all the BCP’s marvellous Collects, the finest is that 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.

This is as beautifully crafted as a sonnet. Observe:

Gránt, we beséech thee,

Mérciful Lórd,

To thy fáithful péople

Párdon and péace;

That they may be cléansed from áll their síns

And sérve thee with a qúiet mínd.

First, four two-stress phrases give the Invocation (‘Lord’), the Acknowledgement (‘merciful’), and the Petition (‘grant pardon and peace’). Then each of the two things asked for is elaborated (in the Aspiration) in a three-stress phrase: pardon results in their being cleansed from all their sins, and peace, in their being able to serve God with a quiet mind. Finally, the usual Pleading: per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ The stress-patterns form perhaps the greatest beauty; but the vocabulary also plays, with the two objects of the petition being alliterative: that and their order relates them and makes it clear that the one must precede the other. There can be no peace without pardon. 

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer – in England still the BCP stipulates that, when Matins or Evensong is said by lay people, this prayer replaces the Absolution; thus recognising its particular power, compact riches, and beauty. We are sometimes told that ‘O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 96:9) should never mentally be inverted to ‘the holiness of beauty’; but it is perhaps not forbidden to suggest that liturgical texts, images, music and rituals of seriously great comeliness are the result of some kind of true blessing or holiness in their creators. Trinity 21 is an annual jewel in the crown of October.