POOR AND FREE?

The following is a passage from the admirable The Wound of Love: a Carthusian Miscellany. The author, anonymous like all Carthusian writers, has been discussing spiritual poverty, in the context of poverty, chastity and obedience. I found these paragraphs very striking, even for those who are not monks or nuns They merit being read with real attention. 

We have no right to claim as our own the good which we do. We do not even have the absolute certainty of believing in God, of loving him or our brothers. Each morning we must receive everything anew in faith. God creates us truly at every moment. The past, we entrust to his mercy; we must empty our memory of its supposed riches so as to change it into a pure movement toward God himself beyond his gifts. This movement is lived uniquely in the reality of the present moment, in our conforming to the will of the Lord for us, here and now, in our communion of love and our close attention to him. Here poverty and simplicity become one. For the future, we entrust ourselves to God. We do not, as it were, have an account in some celestial bank, all we have is our faith in the love of the Lord, our hope and our desire to love. 

            We must not be anxious before the demands of true spiritual poverty. We are never so well off as when we have nothing. We are free and available for anything. Our ego, weak as it is, would like to cover its nakedness with furs made of material things, and intellectual and spiritual goods. The obscure light of faith is a light indeed, and whoever becomes accustomed to it will not abandon it for all the sweetness and consolations of days gone by. May God preserve us from our virtues! Our faith allows us to discard this deceitful covering in order to walk in truth along the path which is no path, which leads us to the Father in Love, that is, in the Spirit of Christ. The man who is poor finds the gates of death open, and he passes freely into the Kingdom of God. For if we despoil ourselves, it is in order to rediscover the innocent nakedness of God’s image in our hearts and thus to clothe ourselves in Christ (Galatians 4:27). Our poverty is the poverty of the children of God, who ‘having nothing, yet possess all’ ( 2 Corinthians 6:10), in hope and in faith. We have received ‘a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry “Abba! Father!”’ (Romans 8:15-17). 

JOYS WE FORGET

Rereading an old hymn the other day – humming it, remembering boyhood chapel services – I was suddenly struck by one line that leapt out at me. As Henry Francis Lyte wrote: “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven,/ To his feet thy tribute bring;/ Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,/ Who like me his praise should sing?”

And those past participle adjectives have been haunting me ever since.

            “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” How many of us manage to remember that, and/or live as if it were true? What, in any case, does it mean, exactly? 

            Let’s begin with “Ransomed”. It’s a simpler way of saying “redeemed”, and much more understandable. We humans are all sinners. True, when we’re 16 we resent that thought, but as we grow older we realise that it’s perfectly true. If we were not we should live daily in perfect union with God. Obviously, we don’t. Some people are close; but we all sin, in the sense that we do not perfectly return God’s love. In so far as we sin, we give IOUs to Old Nick, who loves lending us opportunities to sin, as he collects paper from all of us in return. But: what happened, one unique time in Israel? Meshiach came, and bought all our debts, making Old Nick an offer he couldn’t refuse (much as he wanted to). What did he buy them with? His life, no less. So he, the Anointed one, the Son of God, risen from the dead, tore up our IOUs – and still does so, for all who entrust themselves to him. Hence we are bought back: Ransomed.We were hostages; we are free.

            “Healed.” A character in a Charles Morgan novel says to another, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you will not cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” We are sick, many if not all of us: sick unto death. Some of us know it, and awake each morning with a little less vigor, a little less taste for life, a little more gray sadness. Some of us don’t, and live feverish lives “distracted from distraction by distraction”, as Eliot put it. But do we remember that we were baptized? Alternatively, do we realise that we can be baptized? And that that very process heals us, at least begins a cure? A cure that, admittedly, needs to be completed by a daily life of practical thanksgiving, but a cure nonetheless. We are, we really are, Healed.

            “Restored.” Restored to what? Well, if we are both ransomed and healed, we are restored to freedom and health. Anyone who has spent any considerable time deprived of either of these knows what it means to be restored to them. It is the day you walk out of prison and know you can go anywhere in the morning sunshine. It is the day you walk out of hospital, or your sick-room, take a deep breath, listen to the birds, and walk and walk, because you can. Restored indeed.

            And finally perhaps the greatest, or at least the most moving. “Forgiven.” The hardest to remember, because we have been taught that, sinning as we do constantly, we keep needing to ask for forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses.” It seems utterly presumptuous to behave as if we had beenforgiven. And yet. We have been told, have we not, that if we sincerely repent and pray wewillbe forgiven. So we need to remind ourselves that even if the process will likely reoccur, we have beenforgiven. And someone who has been forgiven feels as if a huge weight is removed from bowed and lacerated shoulders. Stretches, curls, sighs, smiles, and leaps. Forgiven. What joy. 

            If we could believe all this, really. If we could live, one, or two, or three days a week as if all four of those adjectives were true and applied to us; would there not be a noticeable change in our behavior? Surely there would. Who, we might say, like us His praise should sing? I we were young enough, we might tattoo on the four fingers of one hand, R H R F . As it is, let us tattoo it in our consciousness.