SCANDALOUS AND IDIOTIC

I was struck, again, by the text of today’s reading in the French Prions en Eglise, which really is very powerful, and also touched by one of the commentaries on it, which seemed to me extremely perceptive. (I have retranslated the Pauline passage from the French, because it comes across strongly that way, but not without rechecking it against a few English versions and the Greek.)

“Brothers, Christ did not send me to baptise but to announce the Gospel, and that without having recourse to the language of human wisdom, which would make vain the cross of Christ. For the language of the cross is folly to those who perish, but to those who are saved, to us, it is the power of God. Indeed, the Scripture says, I will make the wisdom of the wise to perish, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the rational man of earth? As for the wisdom of the world, has God not made it folly? Indeed, since -- by a disposition of God’s wisdom -- the world, with all its wisdom, was not able to recognise God, it has pleased God to save those who believe by the folly that is the proclamation of the Gospel. While the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, we proclaim a Messiah crucified: a scandal for the Jews, a folly for the pagans. But for those whom God calls, whether Jews or Greeks, this Messiah, this Christ, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the folly of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”  (1Corinthians 1: 17-25)

Commentary by Roselyne Dupont-Roc, Hellenist and Bible scholar:

The text operates a series of reversals, from folly to a higher wisdom, from weakness to a higher strength. This reversal Paul had himself experienced on the road: an encounter had made the persecutor, sure of his rights and of his power, into the passionate disciple of the Crucified, announcing the Good News in the midst of the dangers and the sufferings of the voyage.

How can one say, faced with the Cross, that object of horror and disgust, that the wisdom of God and his power are at work? Only, surely, by experiencing in our deepest self that His love comes to us and sustains us in our distress and anguish, and by bearing witness toward those who have not known this experience, through an attentive and loving accompaniment of their crucified lives.

Image: the Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470-1528)

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS

“Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20).  This text had long fascinated me, like its counterpart “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). And then, recently, I got an inkling of its meaning, or at least of one of its meanings. Life, in its daily round, had been weighting me down, and it was all beginning to feel like one of the grimmer bits from Ecclesiastes. I prayed, as usual, to be taught the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer that prays even when we are not praying; and then, in a few moments, I remembered what I had written about a long time ago: our doors and shutters.

In the Angelus, we pray that God may “pour Thy grace into our hearts”. I’ve always loved that verb and that image. And it occurred to me that in fact that pouring is going on all the time. We live in a perpetual monsoon of grace: pouring out grace upon those He loves is what God does. And when we feel deprived of it, it is usually we who are, with a complex system of shutters and barriers, keeping it out.

If, for once, you don’t, you wake up in the morning and, as a Carthusian put it, you savour the immense gift you are being given, at this precise moment: one whole day. A whole day, of life, of love, of work, of thanksgiving. You give thanks, and you pray that you may not in this day close off your heart and keep out the outpouring that is heading for you. And as you do so, you can hear the faint creak of shutters opening. Some of them are old, fairly massive and jammed shut: they need real effort to dislodge. Some are charming, and part of you opens them with regret: they let through just the tiniest ray of light, in which dust motes danced so prettily; but they too can and must be flung wide.

And as they open, the tide of grace flows in, and you are suddenly filled with a morning sunshine of joy – which will last you all day, if you keep strong winds from closing the shutters again. And as this happens and you revisit that joy from hour to hour, you realise that the less of “you” gets in the way of the flood, the happier the real you will be.

It is “I” that keeps God out all the time. So if I can get “I” out of the way, then grace, i.e. God, can come in. And the result will be, in at least one sense, like Galatians 2:20: “Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me.” If I can empty the clutter and open the shutters, there will at last be room for Him.

A MOVING POEM FROM AN UNCOMPROMISING MAN

This austere 17C Dutch Hebrew scholar, Calvinist pastor, poet and polemicist was Jacobus Revius from Deventer. He was Secretary to the committee that made the official translation of the Old Testament; he had attended Duplessis-Mornay's Academy at Saumur on the Loire; he was a deeply devout man who, while his theology and politics were uncompromisingly Calvinist, had in his devotion and his devotional poetry learnt much from French Catholic verse. In a dusty corner of my computer's memory I came upon his one famous poem, a sonnet called "He Bore Our Sorrows", and thought I might try my hand at a translation.

‘t En zijn de Joden niet, Heer Jesu, die U kruisten,

Noch die verraderlijk U togen voor ‘t gericht,

Noch die versmadelijk U spogen in ‘t gezicht.

Noch die U knevelden en stieten U vol puisten.

‘t En zijn de krijgslui niet die met haar felle vuisten

De rietstok hebben of de hamer opgelicht,

Of het vervloekte hout op Golgotha gesticht

of over Uwe rok t'saam dobbelden en tuisten.

Ik ben ‘t, o Heer, ik ben ‘t die U dit heb gedaan

Ik ben de zware boom die U had overlaan.

Ik ben de taaie streng daarmee Gij gingt gebonden.

De nagel, en de speer, de gesel die U sloeg.

De bloedbedropen kroon die Uwe schedel droeg.

Want dit is al geschied, eilaas, om mijne zonden.

‘Tis not the Jews, Lord Jesu, crucified Thee,

Not they betrayed and dragged Thee to be tried,

Nor they that spat and mocked Thee far and wide,

Nor bound and whipped and loudly vilified Thee.

‘Tis not the soldiers with their fists defied Thee,

Held up the reed nor stabbed Thee in the side,

Raised up the cursèd tree where God’s Son died,

Nor diced over thy clothes as all decried Thee.

‘Tis I, O Lord, ‘tis I did this to Thee:

I am the beam that made Thee slip and fall,

I am the cruel cord that bound Thee in;

The nail, the spear, the scourge that wounded Thee,

The blood-soaked crown Thy skull bore for us all:

Alas, I made this happen, by my sin.

THE CLOUD -- AND THE LADY

Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà

Growing up as a Protestant, however liberal and un-Calvinist, one doesn’t spend much time or attention on the Mother of Christ. Mainly in the Nativity story at Christmas. But Catholic Mariolatry (as Protestants call it) is vaguely distasteful and very, very foreign. I remember exchanging e-mails with a colleague, a former Episcopalian converted to Rome, about this: I told him that as an Anglo-Catholic I could go along with much of what I experience in the Roman churches to which, living in France, I now go, but that the whole BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) business still put me off.

            Yet as one deepens one’s faith, one cannot avoid it for ever. It must be faced and dealt with. And what better day to do it here than “le quinze août” as they call it, secularly, republicanly, in France, i.e. the Assumption of the BVM?

            Myriam, then. Small-town girl from Nazareth, Galilee. 18 or so, engaged to Yosef bar-Ya’akov the builder, perhaps about 25. And then, one day, the Cloud happens to her. Announced by a man-like figure all of light. And in the Cloud, as we know, the Deity very occasionally comes among humans. In this case, she is pregnant; she visits her cousin Elisheva, also pregnant, and poetry happens. And later she gives birth to the Meshiach, the Anointed of God.

            So far, so good. As a scholar and a Christian (Prot or not) I can follow this; and having seen evidence of the Cloud in other places in the Bible I can go along with the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity also. And, of course, she is so very touching. Not just in her small-town innocence, but in her unhesitating Yes to the proposed earth-shaking Event. In that, she is a female Abram. “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” And in her Magnificat, which shows her to be the greatest woman poet since Sappho.

            Now, though, minefields loom. I have serious trouble with the emphasis on her perpetual virginity. Not that it’s impossible; but it’s just so convenient to a Mediterranean civilization (owing much to Indian dualism) that esteems women only when they are virgins or mothers. You put those two categories together, and Wow, a new goddess. It has always struck me as undermining the whole concept of the Incarnation. (C.G. Jung admired it: he said Catholicism was psychologically right to complete the unstable male Trinity with a female fourth. Theologically, though, the problem remains.) Moreover, the Gospel itself mentions four brothers of Yeshua by name – Ya’akov, Yosef, Shimon and Yehuda – and throws in a few sisters (typically unnamed and unnumbered, but let’s assume two and call them Elisheva and Chana). The Church’s centuries-long hemming and hawing on the subject – they were cousins, all sorts of relatives were called “brother”, etc. – would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

            I find the picture of Myriam as a richly-fulfilled Jewish matriarch (Yosef seems to have died in his Forties), presiding over a Friday-night Sabbath dinner with her five sons and two daughters infinitely probable and attractive. And it in no way contradicts anything said later in the Gospels. She was with Yeshua at the wedding in Cana, and (like any mother) whispered to the attendants not to pay any heed to his demurral but to do whatever he told them to. She appears briefly with the others in a story of which the point is not rejection but every believer’s bond to Him. And she appears at the Cross, with a few other women, when everyone else – all those brothers and sisters, all the disciples except Yochanan – has skedaddled. She is the Blessed Mother of the Pietàs, of which Michelangelo’s Rondanini is the most suggestive and heartbreaking.

            Buoyed by Mediterranean virgolatry, the Church for centuries could not bear the idea that the Mother of God could just, like, die, and be eaten by worms. So various alternatives were considered, and spread everywhere in popular devotion. The Dormition, the Assumption, etc. And finally, as late as 1950, Pius XII declared the bodily Assumption of her into Heaven to be a dogma of the Church.

            Do we go along with this? An African priest this morning stated unequivocally – and perhaps rightly – that the Assumption was and is the inescapable accompaniment of the Resurrection. I’m not sure of this, but it is true that if you  can accept the second there is no inherent reason why you cannot accept the first.

            What, now I come gradually to pay much more attention to Our Lady, I find more important is her role as “la première de cordée”, the first on the rope, the one who leads the way of all other mortals in accepting her Son. That I can see, can admire, can even worship. I can pray a Rosary (though I keep forgetting the bits) without any qualm of conscience or scholarly mind. And I rather like the image of her being lifted out of our atmosphere into the glory of her Son and being close to Him for eternity. Where she can say Baruch atta Adonai for, and with, us.  

IN THE CLOUD? (SCARY. COMFORTING.)

Reading about Moses, about the Lord moving into Solomon’s Temple, and about the Transfiguration, there is that sense of Immensity suddenly moving right in. The Cloud, in each case, is hard to imagine: something like ball lightning only MORE, more intense, huger, and not going away. This is how the Creator manifests Himself to very occasional, very chosen and doubtless very terrified little humans. 

It made me think about the insanity of scale. I have shown before, on this blog, the current astronomers’ map of the Universe, above, with its Googols of constellations and Googolplexes of planets. If (and there is no reason to assume it’s not so) the God we woship created all this, how --- the stammering consciousness asks itself --- can this be the same God whom we call Father, to whom we pray about our little souls, and in whose presence Brother Lawrence so cheerfully cooked potatoes? When I think about this, my synapses very nearly short out. Of course, one can say that this is yet one more proof that Christianity is nonsense. Judaism, at least, preserves a sense of scale in that God is concerned more with a people than with individuals; Islam seems to be more about trumpeting God’s infinite greatness than about any interest of His in small human matters; and there is Christianity teaching us to worry about what the Creator of the Universe (see map) thinks of what we said to our spouse last night. When you fully take that on board there is the sound and smell of burning connectors. 

And yet. And yet. Keep thinking. Imagine, not that we Earthlings are merely an accidental breadcrumb on the skirt of the Universe, but that we inhabit something deliberately unique. Perhaps SETI is doomed to failure. Perhaps we really are alone. Is that depressing? Not necessarily. Imagine that this gorgeous tiny blue jewel of a planet was created by a joyous Creator in an outlying corner of the Whole, as an experiment, as a laboratory where, over the millennia, something was made to grow that could think, could react to Him, could create in its turn – Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. 

But He too saw the insanity of scale – well, let’s say the extremity of scale. So first He chose a people, and communicated with them in ways they could (just) understand. And they behaved, of course, as humans will. But/And, in the end, He saw they were ready for a new way to bridge the scale gap. And He created, for and with and out of His Son, the Second Person of His triune Being, the Incarnation. An ordinary human that humans could talk to. Incredible! I remember my colleague Irving Layton, a wonderful Canadian Jewish poet, saying to me, “But Roger, Jesus is my Jewish brother. My brother farts. Does God fart?” What could I say? “Yes, Irving.”

And so, yes, we have the map of the Universe; but we also have Yeshua bar Yosef, the builder and rabbi from Nazareth in Galilee (an ordinary town, now a city, been there, my son-in-law comes from there). And now ordinary fishermen and their wives, Roman sergeants, unpopular tax collectors, quiet scholars and provincial hookers could talk to – to HIM. To YHWH. To the Creator. He healed people. He had moods. He cried for his friend. He was loved by at least one man and one woman. 

Yes, well. And then, being human, they fucked it up. Exactly as he knew they would, they killed him. So much for that experiment. But no. Because in that unimaginable night of Easter, He – now again all of He, one again within the Triune God -- killed Death. Not death – death is still around and will take us all, for a while. But Death. 

And so the experiment continues, at a new level. The Universe is still there, unfolding (as Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said) as it should; our little blue ball is still there, with us humans busily overcrowding it; and (and this is the point) he, Yeshua bar Yosef, Yeshua Meshiach, Yeshua the Anointed, Yeshua Christos, having risen from the dead, is still here also. Here to be talked to. Here to be loved, here to be confided in, here to heal broken hearts. Here as human, here as God. Here to be communicated with in every Communion, in every Mass. Being the little stumbling creatures we are, could we ask for more? The synapses glow again, the energy flows. Gratias agimus tibi, propter magnam gloriam tuam.