THE SMILE OF FAITH

In his admirable television series “Civilisation”, Kenneth Clark titled the chapter on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment “The Smile of Reason”. Virtually all the portraits of the time, he claimed, wore a smile: neither gloom nor outright laughter, but a smile of intelligent amusement. 

Pondering this, it struck me how rarely one sees the smile of faith, and how surprising that is. We are not encouraged to think of Jesus as laughing or smiling, nor indeed of the saints as doing so. After all, the Gospels seem to deal mainly with the halt and the lame and the miserable, and their penultimate chapters deal in some detail with the gruesome horrors of crucifixion. As Stanley Holloway lamented, “Nuthin’ to laff at, at all”. 

And yet. Let’s try a different regard, Begin with the incredulous joy of Myriam, once she has understood what is happening to her. Go to the jubilation of the angels and the broad smiles of the shepherd folk who came to congratulate. Go to the attendrissement on the severe and thoughtful faces of the Magi. Fast forward to the wedding at Cana. “Yeshua, they’re running out of wine. Can’t you do something?” “Hush, Mother – my time has not yet come.” I see a faint smile there. And then, Myriam to the servants: “Do what he tells you”, again with a very maternal smile. 

Now take any of the countless episodes of his life from then on in Galilee. The formerly lame man, dancing with an idiotic grin on his face. The parents of a little girl, brought back from near death, embracing each other, and Yeshua, with huge smiles through their tears. Why do we forget that this man brought sheer blinding JOY wherever he went? Happiness. Amazed laughter. 

OK, there were exceptions. The owner of the herd of pigs at Gadara probably wished him to the devil. The people of Nazareth wondered who he, Josh, the son of the local builder, thought he was, preaching at them like a learned rabbi. And the religious professionals found him positively dangerous. But the ordinary folk who crowded him everywhere seem to have found true happiness in his company; and E.V.Rieu the Hellenist even found what he thought was the confused memory of a joke on Yeshua’s part: when he tells Peter to look in the mouth of the next fish he catches to find there a tribute-coin.

We Christians have as the symbol of our belief an instrument of torture. But the essence of our faith is Easter, is the Resurrection. Imagine the slowly dawning smile, wide as the horizon, of Myriam of Magdala once she recognises the man in the gardener’s hat. Imagine the incredulous laughter and embraces of the disciples eating grilled fish on the beach at dawn with the man they had seen slaughtered and buried only days before. 

In Lent we are asked to think seriously about our shortcomings in faith, in hope, and in love. To stop repressing them, and to beg that they may be forgiven. Perhaps one of those shortcomings may be our forgetting of the sheer, real happiness, the joy, of a faith “looks through death”. At best, the smile of reason and the smile of faith should be found on the same face. Ours.

Image: St Julie Billiart (1751-1816), founder of the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"? OH, SURE

I am currently translating into English a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk, and though it might be useful to share one or two things I have learnt from it. Today, a word about prayer of intercession. All of us who pray know what it is to pray for others, from the most intimate prayer for a loved one to the prière universelle that is part of every Mass and other church services. And all of us know, and grieve at, the fact that so many of those prayers seem to go unheard or at any rate unfulfilled. We know that our reaction must be “Thy will be done,” but we still wonder at that will and at what look like its vagaries. 

My Carthusian suggests we look at this differently. First, we should cease to imagine intercessory prayer as an attempt to influence, push or divert the Lord, to change His mind, to alter what He was originally going to do. All prayer, he says, is originally God’s initiative. St Paul says that it is the Spirit that prays in us; and so in the fact that at this moment I am praying for X I am aligning myself with God’s initiative. 

Secondly, just as the air around us is filled with waves of all kinds that we do not perceive unless we have a receiver and turn it on, so that same air is filled with prayers, a kind of quærosphere. God hears all prayer, but it must also be received by the beneficiary – a fact which, in the name of love and its necessary liberty, God cannot guarantee. 

Thirdly, as Huck Finn found and as I have mentioned several times in these posts, it is no use praying for fishhooks. God does not micromanage His creation. The extreme conclusion from this is that all we can truly pray for, concerning someone else, concerning X, is X’s salvation. And that prayer’s efficacy depends on whether X’s receiver for such prayers is turned on. If it is, the prayer will be granted. 

To add a point of my own: what about the prayers for healing and so on? Apart from the fact that God does not micromanage Creation, I am convinced that they are nevertheless effective in a certain way, especially if the beneficiaries know that they are prayed for. I believe that such prayer creates a small or large tidal flow of spiritual support that in itself helps the healing process.

I believe it was St Thomas Aquinas who wrote that the only way prayer can be effective is if it is a) for oneself, b) pious, and c) insistent. I see the point of this, and b) and c) are important; but a) should not be abandoned, even in the face of what sometimes seems to be a great and uncaring silence. Intercessory prayer, after all, is a genuine form of loving. Perhaps for a) we should substitute “with our eyes open,” clear-headedly, intelligently and without illusion. Then b) piously: we should put our whole hearts into it, in hope and trust; and c) insistently: like the widow in Jesus’ parable who importuned the unjust judge till he gave her what she wanted just to get rid of her, God smilingly allows us to bother him.