A POET AND A FRIEND

He has always been my favourite saint. Not only was he the poet among the disciples; Yeshua loved him particularly, doubtless for a reason. And – perhaps as a result of that – he was the only one who stuck around right to the very bloody end. He almost always pictured standing by, under, the Cross, together with Myriam. All the others had skedaddled, even Peter, who had been ashamed of denying Him and had wept bitterly. He had wept, but not remained. Only young Yochanan was still there. It was to him that Yeshua entrusted His mother, a (presumed) widow and thus to be cared for. He and his brother Ya’akov (James to us Anglophones) had in their teenage years been nicknamed Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder”, presumably because of their fiery temperament. And he wrote his memoirs of his friend at the end of a long life, thinking back to those magical years and distilling from them, through the alembic of his memory, the finest and loveliest of all testimonies. He may or may not have written the apo-calypsa, the revelations or visions of the Last Things, but he may well have done --  he was a poet, after all, and as poetry the Bible’s last book is as vast, as fireful and as moving as the Northern Lights.

            What has John to teach us? How to think of him? What seems to unite all the things we know about him was that a) he was a man of heart, not a sophist or a calculator, and b) he was one who went all the way. The first should teach us that in dealing with Yeshua, as with the Father and the Spirit, we should first of all check the various locks and blocks and painted-shut windows of our hearts and open them. We tend to think of our duty as believers as being oriented to our neighbours, but the first Commandment has to do with loving God, all three of Him. Loving Him, not just respecting, fearing, being awed by: loving. Not always easy; but if we want help along that road, Yochanan is the one to go to. And he can help and teach us not only to love, but in that love to have the courage and the patience and the sticktoitiveness to go all the way. Not to run away when the big hairies come and things go pear-shaped. Not being Sons of Thunder, we may not have the sheer guts he did, but we can at least think of him when the going gets tough. 

            And also we can learn from him to express in words what our souls go through, if our talent runs that way. There is in the whole of the New Testament perhaps not a more poetic passage than the opening of Yochanan’s memoir. And then the extraordinarily moving declaration with which he begins his first letter, slightly breathless and incoherent because retrospectively overwhelmed:

That which was from the beginning -- which was from the beginning – and yet which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we beheld, and our hands touched -- the word of life; 

² and the life was shown. And we saw, and we witness, and we tell to you the everlasting life, that was with the Father, and appeared to us. 

³ And we tell you that thing that we saw and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us, and that our fellowship may be with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. 

⁴ And we write this thing to you so that you may have joy, and that your joy may be full.

He still has trouble getting his mind around it: that the hugeness, the unimaginable brightness that is the Sun, the Son, that was, is, and will be with the Father, that that was here, in Galilee, in Yorkshire, in Picardy, in Connecticut, and appeared to us; that we actually saw him with our own dim eyes, that we touched him with our own hands that scale fish and cook dinner: and why are we going to tell you what we saw and touched? so that you can be part of it too, so that we may all of us together have “fellowship” with the Father and the Son, and so that that being the case you may have joy and our communal joy may be full.. 

I can think of no more attractive simply human person – Myriam excepted – in the New Testament. I feel privileged that my second Christian name is his. 

WHAT SORT OF HOUSE

I have, in recent years, found enormous inspiration in reading the writings of Carthusian monks. They are often as learned as Benedictines, but since their life is built entirely around prayer they are as one might say its professionals. Reading them is both humbling and informative: rather as if one owned a decent sports car and did the occasional track day and then comes across a manual written by and for Formula 1 drivers. 

            In one such book – and they are always signed “A Carthusian” – I found a fascinating meditation on Jesus’ whipping the merchants out of the Temple. Rather than pondering whether or not this is a comment on capitalism, the Carthusian author proposed seeing the temple as being our heart. Thus, the words of Jesus, “this is a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves”, take on a new and richer meaning. As I spend my time at my computer, ordering books or clothes, annotating texts, organising meetings; as I go out to dinner parties or restaurants, as I look at advertisements for classic cars – is my house not rather full of merchants? Good merchants, not necessarily thieves; but then the men selling sacrificial doves, lambs and candles in the spacious Temple courtyard were probably perfectly respectable shopkeepers. 

The point is not what they do but where they are doing it. They are pursuing their perfectly proper mercantile calling not in a shop in the city but in “a house of prayer”. And so, transferring the image as did the Carthusian, I arrive at the fact that my heart should be “a house of prayer, where the Son can meet the Father in love.” I found, and find, this thought overwhelming. And it has become my daily, and almost my only, prayer:

LORD, MAKE MY HEART A HOUSE OF PRAYER

            

Because that prayer potentially includes everything else. It is in fact an application of the saying “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” If my heart is made a house of prayer, everything else is secondary but/and will fall into place. 

I share this thought because it occurred to me that others may find it inspiring also. There is such wealth to be found in Carthusian thinking: those Olympic athletes of prayer have much to teach us -- starting with their ancient motto (useful when looking at the news cycle): STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. (The Cross stands, while the world turns.)

HELP!

On this Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, and very suitably following the feasts of Michaelmas and of the Guardian Angels, we ask to be protected.

Latin original

CUSTODI, Domine, quæsumus, Ecclesiam tuam propitiatione perpetua; et quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas, tuis semper auxiliis et abstrahatur a noxiis, et ad salutaria dirigatur ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum Amen. 

1549

KEPE we beseche thee, O Lorde, thy Churche with thy perpetuall mercye: and because the frailtie of man without thee, cannot but fall: Kepe us ever by thy helpe, and leade us to al thynges profitable to our salvacion; through Jesus Christe our Lorde. Amen.

1662

Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy : and because the fraily of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the rare occasions when the 1662 revisers were more faithful to the Latin original, in restoring its a noxiis. One wonders why Cranmer left it out. He may have thought it self-evident and considered that its omission would lead the sentence more swiftly and elegantly to its conclusion. The Latin is, as usual, a jewel of compact form and shapely rhythm, employing no less than four cursus tardus and ending in a cursus velox (which, in spite of its name, I always suspect was seen by the writers as slower and more dignified).

The Latin original of Cranmer’s “perpetual mercy” is propitiatio, “an appeasing, atonement, propitiation” – which is very odd. One might translate it as “Keep,, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church in perpetual atonement”; and one wonders if the perpetual atonement may not belong rather to the church than to its keeping: so that God may be being asked to take care of a Church that lives in perpetual atonement. I suspect, though, that it is rather an unusual medieval use of the word, which makes it rather a peace-offering on God’s behalf, and which thus comes a little closer to Cranmer’s “mercy”.

It is a prayer for protection: custodi, Domine. Take care of us, Lord: protect us. And the rest of the prayer makes specific both the protection and the threat. We ask to be protected from “all things hurtful”, and if Cranmer had used 18^th- or 19^th-century punctuation instead of Tudor, he would have put a second comma after “profitable”. Because what dismays us here is not the threat of things hurtful in general, but the threat of things hurtful to our salvation. 

What are those? What can hurt our salvation? Not the horrors of the world: as St Paul put it in his letter to the Christians in Rome, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” No: the only things hurtful to our salvation can come from ourselves. And the Collect understands this: it makes this request because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall. Not the nastiness of man; not his inherent evil; no, his frailty. He is weak. He wants to do everything right; but on his own, on a daily, hourly basis he falls, he screws it up and scuppers his own salvation. So we ask Him to protect us from doingall things hurtful, and to lead us to doingall things profitable, to our salvation.

Again, a close reading of, and meditation on, a brief prayer shows how rich it is in meaning and how it helps us increase our understanding of ourselves in our relation to our loving but doubtless frequently exasperated Father.

AS COMPACT AS YOUR GPS - TRINITY 14

Now imagine 40 years of this, with 80,000 people bitching...

Leonine sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei, et charitatis augmentum ; et, ut assequamur quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. 

1549 / 1662

ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde, through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Cranmer translated this literally, and the revisers of 1662 wisely left the handsome parallellism alone.

Someone wrote that there could almost be no more compact expression of the Christian faith than this Collect. It is brief and shapely, and of an extreme simplicity. We ask God – the Almighty and Everlasting God, the Creator of the Universe – to give us the three qualities that St Paul described as “what remains”: the irreducible core of the Christian’s life, the most basic psychic waybread, that which we survive on as we travel from birth to death in the company of the others who make up the new Israel. We cannot produce them for ourselves, as the old Israel could not produce its own food in the Negev but had to be fed by the hand of God with manna and quails. We need faith, because without it we cannot recognise the God who loves us. We need hope, because without it we have no reason to go on when the going is hard. And we need charity because we are not alone in our journey, but in the company of others as frail and frightened as we ourselves. 

Yet there is more. God has given us promises. (Remember? Last week we ran to them.) The Collects, when they refer to these, do not spell them out, mainly because the form is too compact to allow this. It may be useful to pause and remember what they are. God has given us His love: that’s not a promise because we have it already – whether we are ready to receive it or not. What he has promised us is chayei olam, “eternal life”. The modern Church is embarrassed by this, and tends to insist that we should not (necessarily) think of this as something after death, but that what it really refers to is an eternal dimension of life, potentially present even in this terrestrial life. I don’t want to get into this now, because either way it is something not immediately present to almost all of us, and thus proper material for a promise. 

Either way, though, eternal life has certain characteristics. The chief one is the real, actual presence of God. In the chayei olam we are in the presence of God: of the primal light and joy that brought the Universe into being, but also of the living Father whose love (His very nature) embraces not only the dance of planets but every living human creature. Because imagination is part of our equipment we can, however dimly, imagine what it must be like not, as now, always to be divided from the one we pray to, from the one who loves us, not always to have to decode, to imagine, to piece together His answers: we would open like a flower to the morning sun. 

But how to get there? Such a promise is worth running to, but by what trail? Ah, says the Collect: here is the answer. To get to the promise, to obtain (and the Latin assequamur is even richer, since it also means “to understand”) what is promised, we need to obey God’s commands. But, since He is Love, since love is his very nature, the only way we can do so, the only way we can obey his commands in the spirit in which they were given, is to understand them; and the only way to understand them is in the spirit of love. That we need to love what we are ordered to do sounds at first hearing both odd and rebarbative: kiss the rod, you scum. Not a bit of it. God has given us orders because we are in a dire state and slow on the uptake: orders at least are clear. And since we are wandering through a desert, when we understand that the orders are what will see us through and beyond, we will undoubtedly love them. 

Finally, how do we obey them? What is it we are ordered to do? Like other Collects, this one describes a perfect circle. We obey God’s commands by using, by living, the faith, the hope, and the charity we pray Him to give us. And in all of this, the central figure, the model, the living “command” is Yeshua Ha-moshiach, Jesus the Anointed. If we keep our eyes on him, if we walk with him, if we stick to him like glue, if we – like seconds on a climbing rope – try to follow His moves in the rocks and ledges and gullies of the desert we are traversing, then – in whatever dimension, this side of the grave and/or beyond it, the light and the warmth of our Father’s love is there, open and waiting.

DON'T TRIP, STUMBLE AND FALL: TRINITY 13

Joss Naylor, shepherd and fell-runner

Latin original (in both Leonine and Gelasian Sacramentaries)

OMNIPOTENS et misericors Deus, a cujus beneficentia profiscitur ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur, tribue quæsumus nobis, ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus. Per Jesum Christum Do. &c.

1549 

ALMYGHTIE and mercyfull God, of whose onely gifte it cometh that thy faythfull people doe unto thee true and laudable service; graunte we beseche thee, that we may so runne to thy heavenly promises, that we faile not finally to attayne the same; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service; Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer’s translation is fairly tight, but deftly underlines a few points he sees in the Latin. He translates God’s beneficentia as his “onely gift” with an Elizabethanly-displaced adjective: it is not God’s only gift, it is only by His gift that we can serve him truly and well. To his credit, he keeps our running (remembering the Collect of a couple of weeks ago)to God’s promises, but he wants to stress that they are heavenly; and he dodges the complexity of the Latin offensiones, which are both physical stumbling-blocks, things that one trips over when running, and bad things one may commit or undergo. Instead, he translates the sense, neutrally hoping that in running to the promises we may not, in the end, fail to reach them.

At first this seems like a much less rich and dramatic Collect than Trinity 12. Yet it is worth looking at with real care and discernment. First, the choice of the Invocation. It’s a common one – God both almighty and merciful – but here it explains the beneficentia that earns our gratitude: God is both mighty enough to give us the capacity to serve him and merciful enough to be ready and willing to do so, recognizing our need. 

Then, the Acknowledgement. God’s fideli, His faithful people, serve him in ways that are both true (faithful and efficacious) and laudable (well enough to be praiseworthy); and they recognize, because they are fideli, that they can do this only because it is itself already His gift. We, faithful as we may be, can still do no true and praiseworthy thing for God on our own initiative and behalf. 

Now for the Petition. The sentence turns from the third person plural, the general category of the fideli and their actions, to the first person plural: we who are here in prayer. What do we realize we need, what do we want, what can we ask for? Well, first of all, to run to His heavenly promises. To recognize that they are there, that they are infinitely desirable, to desire them urgently enough to drop our parcels and run.

And secondly (this is really the Aspiration), as we run, panting, we hope and pray that we may not trip over an unseen obstacle, some sleeping policeman, some banana skin, that will leave us flat on our face with two broken ribs; or, to put it another way (Trop., say Lewis and Short), that in running toward heavenly promises, we may not do something unforgivable, like elbowing a neighbouring runner out of the way, that will ban us from receiving them.

Once again, the 1662 revisers do not like the image of running and suppress it, replacing it by the dutiful serving which, if it is dutiful enough,  will let us attain the promises,though only by the merits of Christ. One may think, as I do, that this change is a weakening; but whatever one’s opinion, it is clear that even what we may at first think a humdrum sort of Collect is a wonderfully compact commentary on the life of both fides, faith, and re-ligio, the restoring of the bond between the human race and its long-suffering Deity.

RICH AS A SUNRISE, DEEP AS LIFE - TRINITY 12

I am shamefully late in discussing this magnificent piece of dense and glorious prose, but we still just in the twelfth week after Trinity, so I will allow myself to print his now.

Leonine>Gelasian Sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, qui promptior es semper in audiendo quam nos in orando, et abundantia pietatis tuæ et merita supplicum excedis et vota; Effunde super nos misericordiam tuam; ut dimittas quæ conscientia metuit, et adjicias quod oration no præsumit nisi per merita Mediatoris nostri Jesu Christi Filii tui et Domini nostri. Amen.

1549

ALMIGHTIE and everlastyng God, |which art alwayes more ready to heare then we to praye,| and art wont to geve more than eyther we desyre or deserve; | Powre downe upon us the aboundance of thy mercy; | forgeving us those thynges wherof our conscience is afrayde, | and gevyng unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to aske,| through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire, or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer, as usual, translates closely and beautifully, even finding an English alliteration to reflect the Latin ‘et merita . . .et vota’; but he has difficulty with the compact Latin ‘quæ’, translating it first as ‘those things’ and second ‘that’ – which is awkward with the other ‘that’ that immediately follows (and which we would translate as ‘which’). However, he does get the strength of ‘præsumit’ by adding ‘dare’. Notice that what he leaves out entirely is God’s abundantia pietatis. Perhaps because for Englishmen piety was proper to men but not to God.

The 1662 revisers didn’t like the ‘that that’ either, and expanded it to ‘those good things which’; and expanded  the ‘dare not presume’ to the original's statement about our unworthiness and its palliation through the merits and mediation of Jesus. Nevertheless, as so often, I prefer Cranmer’s version, which (given the prose rhythms in the Latin) may reflect an earlier form of the original.. 

This is a favourite collect, and rightly so. People react to the parallelisms of rhythm and alliteration, and these bring us to consider the content. It is both joyful and humbling to know that our Father is readier to listen than we are to pray; and the same is true of his habit (the ‘wont’) of giving us not only more than we deserve but more than we thought we wanted! 

The psychology is profound all through. In the first place, we are reminded that even taking prayer in the very restricted sense of asking, we simply do not pray enough. As Wordsworth said, the world is too much with us: late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. We ask too much of the world – prosperity, friendship, happiness – and not enough of God. Meanwhile, He is always ready to hear. One does not have to make an appointment, say on Sunday morning: He is always there, waiting, loving, listening. 

Secondly, God is “wont” – it is His custom, His habit – to give us not only more than we deserve, but more even that we desire. That’s a two-edged statement: it reminds me of the old saying that the only thing worse than not getting what you wished for is getting it. So in one sense, God’s giving us more than we desire may appear at first to be unwelcome: the lesson is that we have to learn to desire what, and how much, He gives us. In Huck Finn’s phrase, He doesn’t give us fishhooks, even though we asked for them.  He gives us something much bigger that we didn’t hink of asking for, and so magnificent that we couldn’t remotely deserve it. 

Now, since we are here in a prayer, what are we asking for now? We ask Him to pour down upon us– abundantly, streamingly, like a downpour – and what? His mercy. Such a wonderful word, mercy. It is – not the opposite but the pendant of justice, without which justice is cold and brutal. And since we are sinners who consistently fuck up in life and in our relation to God and man, mercy is what we desperately need: more mercy than even we think we need, and certainly more mercy than we, in justice, deserve. 

And if God does this – if we get the mercy we ask for – what will that accomplish? What is the goal of our prayer? First, to be forgiven for “those things whereof our conscience is afraid”. Oh yes, we have a conscience, and it talks to us; and what it so authoritatively says is all too often not pretty. It makes us afraid – afraid of justice: unlike the Psalmist, we do not long for justice because we know all too well where it would leave us. We long for mercy.

And since we know all too well who and what we are, there are so many Divine gifts – Divine love, mercy, the beauty of holiness, the joy of heaven – that we “dare not presume to ask”. Only after the downpour of mercy, after the forgiveness, can we ask them. And so this wonderful Collect, this “treasure-chest” as Barbee and Zahl call it, comes full circle, and in its end is its beginning. 


Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Eerdmans, 2007)

SPRINT OR MARATHON? TRINITY 11

Could this be the origin of "runner's high"?

Latin Collect (<Gelasian Sacramentary)

DEUS, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserendo manifestas, multiplica super nos
misericordiam tuam, ut ad tua promissa currentes cœlestium bonorum facias esse participes. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.

Prayer book of 1549

GOD, which declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewyng mercy and pitie; Geve unto us abundauntly thy grace, that we, running to thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Prayer book of 1662

O GOD, who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(It's interesting that the Latin “parcendo et miserendo” is translated by “showing mercy and pity”. The mercy is the furthest from the Latin: “parco” means to spare. And “misericordia” is translated as “grace”.)

This is a curious Collect, and an attractive one. The attraction lies in the “currentes”: we run to God’s promises of heavenly treasure. But it is also odd: what is the relation between that running and God’s power shown in mercy and pity?

So we start thinking. Usually, in a Collect, the relation between pts 2 and 3 is somehow causal: so here we ask God to multiply upon us his mercy, so that we may run to his promises and thus may be made partakers of his heavenly treasure. In other words, we need his mercy to start running. We cannot run toward God without his mercy; and there we see the genius of Cranmer as a translator – here he has understood that what we need even to be able to start running toward God is God’s own grace.

We can do nothing good of ourselves. We are stuck in the mud of our own little barnyard, and our feet can barely suck themselves out of it to take a single step. Yet when we hear what God promises us, we are on fire with enthusiasm: we want to go, to run even, toward him and toward the treasure he promises us. But the world is too much with us: getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. So we pray for mercy, we pray for grace, to free us, to pull us out of the mud so that at last we can run.

And the interesting thing is that the essence of the promise itself is grace. What is the heavenly treasure? Eternal life: a life without time, lived in the permanent presence, in the glorious ambient grace, of the Triune God. We need his grace to run to his grace. A wonderfully virtuous circle.

THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"

STORMS AND THE HEART - TRINITY 8

Mitch Dobrowner, 'Storm Over Field'

Deus, cuius providentia in sui dispositione non fallitur, te supplices exoramus ut noxia cuncta submoveas et omnia nobis profutura concedas. Per.

O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Collect for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

For a devout person, the Acknowledgement of this collect is self-evident: since God is omnipotent, His providence orders all things in heaven and earth, and cannot fail. For one who lives in the world with open eyes, however, it seems at first little short of monstrous. For taken literally it means that everything that occurs is intended so to happen by God: which would then include earthquakes, tsunamis, the St Batholomew’s Massacre, Passchendaele, torture, lynchings, Chernobyl and homo homini lupus.

            How, then should  we take it? For the dogma of Divine omnipotence is not in doubt. With one exception, I have always said. God can do anything, except go against his own nature. And since His nature is Love, and Love cannot include compulsion, He cannot force men to return His love. Hence, they are free; and when they choose the Adversary, who delights in cruelty and revels in blood and suffering, God weeps hot cosmic tears. It is not up to Him, it is up to us to return His love for us, and to persuade others that (to quote another Collect) ‘in knowledge of Him standeth [their] eternal life, and that in His service is perfect freedom’.

            That leaves the earthquakes and the tsunamis, which even insurance companies call Acts of God. We have learnt, over the ages and with the growth of science, that in fact they are acts of nature and the elements. Can God prevent them? Technically, perhaps He could: Exodus tells us that He intervened at the Sea of Reeds. But as I have said elsewhere, it seems unlikely that God micromanages His creation. He may see each sparrow that falls, but He does not stop its falling. It seems more probable that what matters to Him is the human heart. It is the heart that He loves; and if it knows and loves Him in return, then it, and all it touches, is ‘ordered by His never-failing providence’. It can still, as a child to a loving father, ask Him to put away from us all hurtful things and give us what will do us good; but it trusts Him to do so according to His will and insight, which may not be the same as our wishes and desires.

            But among the earthquakes and tsunamis are also the hideous medical afflictions that blight some lives. And here it is all at its hardest: these are the real tests of our re-ligio.  The only decent response to these, for those of us untouched by them, is humility and silence: to do what we can to help when we come into contact with them, but in no way to preach to their victims. We can and must pray for them; and what we can pray is that they may come to, or remain in, the knowledge and love of God, and that if it be His will, their infirmities may be relieved. For history is full of the stories of extreme sufferers whose faith nevertheless so shone about them as to bless and comfort their entourage. We may admire and be inspired by them; but if we are moderately healthy, humility and silence is still our watchword. God’s providence never fails: His grace always prevents and follows and accompanies us, and we have access to it in all times and in all places; but His ways are, it is true, sometimes dark to our understanding. Hence humility; silence; and prayer. Always and everywhere: prayer.

A VAST POEM - DEPTH AND POWER

It is surprising and rewarding to read again the immense ode, the vast laudation, that is the 119^th Psalm. Like many, I used to skip over it: it was long and boring and repetitive, and kept muttering about law and statutes and commandments and testimonies. Gradually, as I spent more time reading Psalms, this one began to get my attention. First I looked up all those words, and realised that while they can, in a pinch, be distinguished, they are in the poetic sense semi-synonyms, and to be taken as such. Then I discovered that the breaking-up of Ps. 119 into 8-line sections was not a quirk of the Vulgate but an original feature, since each section begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is, therefore, either a stanzaic poem or an organised collection of short poems around a central theme: the praise of God’s law.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who reminded us Christians that the law, as here seen and praised, is not the law as we tend to imagine it. When a Christian thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, it’s a criminal court he thinks of. He tends to see himself as the accused in the box, invariably Guilty and able to hope at most for mercy and forgiveness. When the Psalmist thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, he sees a civil court, with himself as the plaintiff and “the ungodly” as the defendants. But beneath that level of argument, there is a more moving vision, which shows very clearly in Ps. 119: God’s law is a clearly-traced path which has allowed the poet to emerge from a trackless and lethal desert – imagine the Nefud in Lawrence of Arabia. Finding such a trail saves one’s life.

Reading Ps. 119 in this way is already deeply satisfying and inspiring. But as Christians, we have a further way to read it that is little short of vertiginous. If we come to it after reading both the Gospels and the letters of St Paul, we need to use a new key: for the new version of Judaism that is the faith of the followers of Yeshua Meshiach, the resurrected Meshiach (Christos) does not preach, or even reform, the Law: he is the Law. The Christian does not obey the Law: his true relation to it is what Paul describes: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”(Galatians 2:20)

As we used to say in the Sixties, this blows your mind. But now try to read Ps. 119 in this way – with Christ as the Law, and all His deeds and sayings as the commandments and testimonies etc. In a sense, the whole Psalm becomes an elaboration of, and a commentary on, Paul’s stupendous text. Nothing of the original reading is lost: as Yeshua himself said, the law is not cancelled but accomplished. It’s just that a vast and dizzying new perspective is added, so that the poem becomes even more profound and inspiring. 

Rembrandt: the Risen Christ

A VISITOR FROM EVERYWHERE

His visits are rare. Always wished-for, hoped-for, longed-for, asked-for; and when he comes, there is a sudden sense of more light in the air, of ambient sound becoming a harmony, of one’s own terrestrial weight lessening. How long he stays depends on his welcome, and on the lodging he is given. 

This morning he arrived, unannounced, at the moment I awoke, and in my mind there was the sudden image of the first half of a bridge, arriving from somewhere and touching down just in front of me. And a flooding sense of pure joy. Lightness of being. It had been such a long time since he was last here!

You will have guessed who he is. He has various names: Ruach HaKodesh, Pneuma Hagion, Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost. It feels impossibly presumptuous, imagining that one is receiving a personal visit from the Third Person of the Trinity; and I am quite prepared to be told, and to believe, that the one who came today is “merely” an angel sent by the Ruach. On the other hand, we are told that we may ask for his presence, and that that is one prayer almost certainly answered; and we even learn that if we manage to prepare a suitable dwelling, he and the other two Persons will come and live there full-time. 

Why is such a thought even possible? Because the God who is the collective name for the Trinity is (as the medieval Liber XXIV philosophorum puts it) “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Because he is both intimate and ubiquitous, holding the Universe in the hollow of his hand and meeting me with absolute love wherever I am and go (Psalm 139). This is conceivable only by learning to unite one’s faith in a Creator with the experience of prayer in one’s inmost closet. It is perfectly and stupendously expressed in the Third Collect for Morning Prayer: “O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day . . .”

It is at such moments that Theology becomes experience, that Divinity becomes real. Up close and personal. Utterly surprising. Especially if one is not a seasoned mystic, a Benedictine hermit, a San Juan de la Cruz, but an ordinary homme moyen sensuel in a French farmhouse in the Age of Bannon. Surprising, and yet not: completely natural, just also completely festive. 

How to react? I think, by deep down letting go – for the time being, letting him occupy the driving-seat and getting on with the day in a quiet and attentive way, peacefully but minutely attuned to where he turns the wheel. And keeping alive the festivity with an astonished giving of thanks. 

THE JOY OF --- WHAT?

In the readings and general exhortations I encounter in my daily Prions en Eglise, there is constant mention of joy. “Shout and dance for joy, people of God!” “Quiver for joy!” For those of us living outside certain evangelical movements and outside Southern US black churches, this is a curious injunction. For Anglicans/Episcopalians, it is virtually unheard-of, the sort of thing to make us seriously uncomfortable. Why?

Well, we are not a culture given to loud displays of emotion, first of all. Secondly, when we assemble and meet together, we tend to do so either as a quiet, well-behaved group of friends and neighbours, with smiles and murmured greetings, or as individuals in search of reverence, silence, beauty in music and in ritual, and prayer. We may have joy in our hearts, but we remember Jesus’ injunction not to show off while performing our religious duties. 

There is another reason, I suspect. We do not glow with joy because we aren’t sure what we are supposed to feel so rapturous about. When we reach down inside us for the roots of our faith, we will probably come up with the Resurrection (cf 1 Cor. 15:14); but from there to quivering with joy on this Tuesday in June the way is not, for most of us, entirely clear. We are happy that Yeshua rose from the dead, for His sake; we know that it means something important for all Christians, and perhaps for others beyond; but let’s face it, the world seems in at least as big as mess as at any other time since, so shout and dance for joy? Is that a joke? Grim fortitude, in faith, hope and charity as among castaways on a large raft in mid-ocean might seem more appropriate.

The Psalmist, and St Paul, saw it differently. Yeshua Meshiach (“Jesus the Anointed”), in his sacrifice, death and resurrection, saved Israel and by (crucial) extension saved humanity. Saved from what? Saved from the consequences of our unbelief and our non-acceptance of God’s love for us. Not the proximate consequences, usually: shit keeps happening, the planet is in danger, and the bad guys often win. But from the ultimate consequences: from the destruction of our immortal souls, from the hell that awaits all those who have made themselves incapable of living eternally near the radiant source of all love. 

If that does not at least inwardly fill us with a certain trembling and incredulous happiness, it may be because we have trouble envisaging what we have been saved from. We need, perhaps, to pay more attention to Shaitan. Not just as an active shooter, drawing a bead on us at all times and in all places, but also as a terrifying example. He is what we will become like if we refuse the gift. Grim and greedy; eaten up with jealousy; racked with the rage and pain that contemplating beauty and love causes us. Incapable of any pleasure not guilty or corrupt. And yes, it lies in wait for all of us, not least because there is Someone always ready to convince us how much braver and more fun it is to walk the edge of the abyss, and even to dive in.

Nobody alive and breathing is beyond being saved from this, unless he refuses to. As a priest I heard the other day said, that is why the Sin against the Holy Spirit is the only one that cannot be forgiven: because it is the Spirit that saves us, that pulls us out of the deep well we fell into, that rescues us by the skin of our teeth. Refusing Him means you’ve left no chink open to be forgiven through, no pulley for the rope. So here we are, wobbling, doubting, lurching, ridiculous: but saved. Saved. SAVED.

In the light of that, a certain joy is in order. Pour the martinis. Light the candles. Sing a silly song. Dance a bit. Yup. Joy. Remember?

BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

 Honoré Daumier, Le défenseur

Thinking, with joy, about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and particularly about Him as the Paraclete. Yeshua tells his disciples that the Father will, when he is gone, send them “another Paraclete” to help them. “Paraclete” comes from the verb para-kaleo, to call to one’s side. One called to one’s side, in usage, became one’s lawyer, one’s advocate, one’s defender. Two interesting points here. In the first place, they will receive  another advocate, which implies that Yeshua was already their advocate. Secondly, what they receive is what we receive also; and it is an advocate, a defender. I wonder how often we think of the Holy Spirit this way. What it means is that the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe, who is also, miraculously, our loving father, detaches a part of Himself to be our Defender. Not just “ours’ in the sense of the Christian community, the church, but even unto “ours’ in the sense of yours and mine. 

            Against whom is he our defender? In God’s universe, there is only one accuser, one adversary, one enemy: Shaitan, “the Adversary”. Whatever his disputed origin, he is there, always. He is against us, he accuses us, he disbelieves our arguments, he wants us dead, he is der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit who always denies. He has his servants: evil spirits for those who believe in those, wholly evil individuals, men who have given themselves over entirely to his way of being, men like Hitler and Stalin who cheerfully order thousands tortured and killed; men like the character Severidge in Charles Morgan’s The Judge’s Story, whose only purpose, whose only joy in life, is to rob others of what they hold most dear, of what symbolises their inmost self.

            Against such individuals, against such powers, we ordinary mortals are almost defenceless. Concentrated, pitiless and intelligent malignity is not something we often meet, which is why we tend not to recognise it when we do. There are some very rare souls who seem naturally armoured against it, but most of us are désemparé, lost and helpless in its presence. Which is why, on and after Whitsun, Pentecost, it is so important to remember that no, we are not helpless. We have a defender. We have a Defender, the Defender: the ruach,the creator spiritus who made the universe, has Himself chosen to be always at our side, our defender – the comrade who battles beside us, the defence counsel who crushes the lies of the prosecutor, the Lord who fights to defend his vassals, the father who fights to the death to save his children. The para-klètos. He is all those things because he is not only the Holy Spirit, he is also, and as such, one Person of the Triune God. 

And why? Why does he bother with little shits like us? Sometimes we think that even at our rare best we aren’t much. And yet. We have to take on board the mind-bending fact that it is for little shits like us that He created at the very least this planet and possibly the Universe. That he did so out of incomprehensible but absolute love. And that all we have to do is accept that love, accept that defence. To realise that however deep the horror or the gloom or the misery we are in, he is there with us, fighting it along with us, fighting for us, never, never abandoning us. We may feel that he is, sometimes: the Psalmist felt it and Yeshua Himself quoted it on the Cross. But that same Psalm ends in reassurance. He is with us because it was for us that he suffered crucifixion. He is with us because that was not the end. And He is with us now because “as at this time”, as the Prayer Book says, He came among us like a mighty rushing wind, and remained with us like a still, small voice – deep in our hearts, speaking words of comfort that each of us understands in our own most private language.   

A LESSON IN JEWELRY . . .

Breguet chronometer movement

.... and in humility. I thought I would try translating a French Collect back into Latin to see how close I could come to the original (which I hadn’t seen). Oh dear. Humbling for yours truly; but what a joy to see the original’s elegance!

The French: Dieu qui veux habiter les cœurs droits et sincères,donne-nous de vivre selon ta grâce,alors tu pourras venir en nous pour y faire ta demeure. Par.

My Latin: Deus qui vis habitare in cordis sinceris rectisque, da nobis vivere secundum gratiam tuam, ut poteris venire nos colere. Per. 

The real thing : Deus qui te rectis ac sinceris manere pectoribus adseris, da nobis tua gratia tales existere, in quos habitare digneris. Per.

The Collect is from the Gregorian  Sacramentary, and may date from between the seventh and eleventh centuries. It seems not to have clear quantitative clausulae in the Ciceronian tradition.  But it is still an exquisite example of miniature intricacy creating beauty to the glory of God.

SIMPLE BUT STRONG

O Lord, from whom all good things do come: Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration, we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same, through our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Deus, a quo bona cuncta procedunt, largire supplicibus tuis, ut cogitemus te inspirante, quæ vera sunt, et te gubernante, eadem faciamus. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

This week’s small jewel is compact and simple, as if it were a quick reminder of basics before the major moments of Ascension Day and Whitsun. Cranmer as usual expands a few Latin nouns and verbs with adjectives and adverbs: te inspirante loses its verb strength but adds “holy”, and te gubernante, in the same way, adds “merciful”. The only real change, though, lies in what, inspired by God, we may think: in the Latin it is quæ vera sunt, things that are true; Cranmer changes that to “those things that be good”. A Platonic equation of the true and the good? A Protestant emphasis on daily life and its moral exigencies? Or simply an echo of the good things in the Acknowledgement?

As for the rhythms, by Classical quantities most would not make clausulæ, and it is interesting that while Cranmer follows the elegant parallelisms, he does not create clausulæ in English either; which, inview of his other perfect ones, I consider supporting evidence of his recognition of, and sensitivity towards, those carefully-constructed rhythmic endings.