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.