GHOST

 

 

He is the oddity in the Trinity: like Winnie the Pooh’s East Pole, people don’t seem to like to talk about him. Well, Anglicans and Catholics, annyway. He is an ancient embarrassment: it was he, after all, who was at the origin of the notorious filioque clause, on account of which rival groups of medieval monks came to blows. Does he, did he, “proceed from” the Father, or from the Father filioque “and the Son”? The author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (Luke?), on the other hand, is quite at home with him: Pentecost/Whitsun is his feast. Genesis says that he was there at the beginning: like a vast and formless fowl he “brooded over the waters” of the tohu-wa-bohu, the primeval chaos. “By him, all things were made;” yet at the same time he “bloweth where he listeth” and none can tell whence he comes and whither he goes. 

            St Ephrem of Syria was called his harp. Perhaps his wind-harp, sounding as he passed. And there is always in meditations on him a sense of air moving. He is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin: in each case words of three meanings, “breath”, “wind or breeze” and “spirit”. (Our, or rather Cranmer’s, “ghost” comes from the Old English gast, linked to German geist, always a spirit.) In John 20:22 the resurrected Yeshua gives him to the disciples: “and then he breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost”.

            Theologians tell us that he is the love between the Father and the Son. This ties him closely to both, and reminds us that love is the language, the essence, of the Deity; but in no way does it enable, or even encourage, us to regard him as a person. This is a bother in prayer. Do we pray to him? We can pray to the Father; we can pray to the Son; but can we pray to (someone who is) a relation(ship)?

            Strangely, I think we can. It does, of course, seem presumptuous; but no more so that praying to the Creator of everything the Webb telescope sees as if he were our dad, and no more so than calling upon the Resurrected King of Peace and informing him that I, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe, have sinned today. If we can forget scale, and address him firmly but humbly, experience has convinced me that he listens. If we ask him for such things as he is not only able but willing to give, we shall usually receive them: guidance, for instance; direction; love where we lack it; discernment; and courage. 

            And as this happens, and goes on happening, in our nighs and quiet moments, we do gradually get a sense of a person on the other end of the line. A person who rarely speaks in words, but who sometimes forms a perfectly clear idea or response to the eye of our mind. One surprising example: one night, I asked him to help me, a former Protestant, better to understand the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There was silence, both aural and visual; then, suddenly and briefly, a clear vision of a deep well in time, at the bottom of which I saw a clearly prehistoric, clearly female, hand reach out and make fire, and light some kind of primitive candle or oil-lamp. That was all; but it was a clear response, and equally clearly it was up to me to make sense of it. I should be hard put to it to explain it; but my feeling of having understood was, and is, entire. 

            When I need him, I call upon him; and if his answers are never simple, he has never let me down. 

            Accende lumen sensibus:                    unto our senses strike the light
            Infunde amorem cordibus:                 abundant love pour in our hearts
            Infirma nostri corporis                        shore up our bodies’ weakness now
            Virtute firmans perpeti.                      with virtue that will bend nor end. 

 

(from Hrabanus Maurus’s glorious 9^th-century hymn Veni creator Spiritus)

 

AVECARNE

 

Advent, when I was young, was a penitential time, a sort of milder Lent. You gave up something and were encouraged to search your soul. The darkness of the season was also, perhaps, the darkness of your sinful self; and the awaited light of Christmas announced itself with a very cautious and meagre growth of candles. Christmas, that hybrid feast of salvation’s birth, light’s return and Saturnalia, would be the explosive reward after four to five weeks of deepening gloom. 

            There are things in today’s Church I do not like: the decline of solemnity and reverence; the frequent implication that the tired, the sad and the melancholy in the pews are bourgeois rentiers who need to be shaken out of what peace and comfort they have found; the relentless pursuit of the Second Commandment, in its NGO simplification, over the First. But among the good tendencies I cherish is the new interpretation of Advent. We are now encouraged to see it as a time of waiting: waiting for, and waiting upon. Waiting for the Coming that has always already come and is always still to come; waiting upon the holy, the silent, the infinitely vulnerable love of the infinite who waits upon us. 

            Lent is introduced by Carne-vale: a farewell to meat; but also a farewell to the flesh, to sarx in one Biblical sense: to the insistence of the bodily, the daily, the worldly. And in that, our farewell of course anticipates and echoes His farewell: His farewell to the flesh that He had taken on to be part of what He loved and wanted to save: our precious but lurching human race. The Passion and Resurrection are his carne-vale, a gradual one completed in the Ascension. 

            Seeing this helps me to understand Advent better. Not a carne-vale; but the gradual anticipation of an ave-carne – an in-carn-ation. A taking-on of the too, too sullied human flesh; the flesh that, whatever the spirit’s willingness, is always so movingly weak. The flesh that gives us pleasure, that accords us sometimes a foretaste of ecstatic joys; but that lets us down, that attacks, that suffers, that dies. In R.S. Thomas’s “The Coming”, the Son, peering down at the thin yearning arms on a small polluted globe, says, “Le me go there.” And in going, to us he comes. He takes on that carne, he in-carnates. 

            And we? By Isaiah and other seers, we have been given notice that this coming is coming. That is it is true and will be real. Knowing that, we wait. Waiting is different from the daily round: it is the daily round pointed toward something. But for what? We have been told that at “the end” there will be a Parousia, a final Second Coming; and as a whole and in the long run, we wait for that. Vigilantly, because we have been told that it, that He, will come silently and suddenly, like a thief in the night or like a most peculiar bridegroom. 

            But for now, in this Advent, what we immediately wait for is the ceremonial mini-Coming that annually renews the Great Promise. Soon, we shall re-enact the Nativity, but at the same time we shall light candles, celebrate Santa Lucia, eat massive meals in a season of no natural food, defy the darkness, sing of Yule, imitate a silly fake-Santa-Niclaus by giving each other things; in fact, we shall celebrate not only light but the Flesh: the Flesh that He honoured, and will honour again, by taking it on, by settling into it; by an Ave-Carne.

Image: Edward Weston (1886-1958) "Neil [his young son] Nude" (1925)

A MONARCH AND HIS AWKWARD SUBJECTS

The Church tells me that Stir-up Sunday is actually the feast of Christ the King of the Universe, and my unreconstructed mind wonders what to do with that concept. If He is King of the world, the world clearly is unaware of the fact, like South Sea Islanders in the 18th century ignorant of the fact that their island now belonged to King George III. Also, in such a case, He is having a hard time making his laws obeyed and encouraging His subjects to keep the kingdom in good order. If He is King of the Universe it becomes more comprehensible: so many trillions of planets to look after, maybe it’s been centuries since He looked at ours.   

The real point may be to remind us that we are idle if not actually rebellious subjects, and that we may not be able to get away with this for ever. We are, as St Teresa reminded us, the only arms, hands, legs and eyes God has on this planet. It may be, as astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau reminds us, that we are already too far gone in collective suicide for anything feasible to save us; it may be that our race’s evolution since 1600 has been a disastrous mistake; it may be that we really were meant to go on living as hunter-gatherers with a 35-year life expectancy. In that case, what should our reaction be as children of a loving God?

Given the unlikelihood of any government on the planet’s being ready to turn the clock back 500 years, we might simply concentrate on the two commandments to which our King reduced the 613 He inherited: to love our Father with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength; and to love our neighbor as ourself.  

For the first, that means praying more which, as French bishop Olivier de Cagny reminded us recently, means listening more. Solomon, when God offered him whatever he pleased as a new king, asked for a listening heart. We listen to others, if we are wise; but do we listen to Him? More often, we bombard him with requests, as if we were children yelling to Santa. We might learn to shut up and listen more. 

The link between the two commandments is praying for others. Again, though, let’s not make it a wish-list: our loving Father knows perfectly well what we should like for those we love (and perhaps even for those we love less). What praying for others means is helping to place them in the trajectory of the Father’s love, commending them to His attention, and (thus) adding our strength to theirs in their need. 

So now we are in the second commandment which, the Gospel tells us, is “like unto” the first. Not the less for being second, in other words. And yet without the first to order and protect it, it turns the Ekklesia that is the Church into a humanitarian NGO that will eventually succumb to some form of original sin. So we should be as the good Samaritan – do what we can for the needs around us, privileging the hic et nunc, the here and now rather than the distant and mediatised – and then continue our journey, always praying.

For this Kingdom of the Universe, for this kingdom of a fevered planet, prayer is still the most important of all languages, of all sciences, of all music and of all poetry. Even as we work even as we play, even as we suffer, let us be His troubadours: artists and poets of prayer. That is what hope is made of. 

 

THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

 Tomorrow is the glory of all the saints. The grand saints, who are known to millions: St Mary Magdalen, St Francis, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Teresa of Avila, Ste Thérèse of Lisieux, and my beloved patron saint St John (Yochanan), the only disciple who didn’t skedaddle from Golgotha but stayed at the foot of the Cross.  But also the little saints whom nobody knows except their neighbours, their family members, or the customers of the store or restaurant or gas station where they serve, or the passengers of the taxi they drive. The people who are always there when you are ill and feeling down, who give you a smile on a grim day, who make you feel for a moment that life is not so bad after all. The people of whom you know that they feel your pain – and the knowing already calms it a little. 

            Tomorrow, then, is their feast. Worth celebrating hugely. Buy them a beer, or just lift your glass and think of them with love.

            But tonight: the Eve. What is the Eve? La veille, as the French say. And in that word is the verb veiller, to watch, to stay awake and alert. Because, said the ancients, on the Eve of such a feast, a feast of so much sheer goodness, the forces that cannot bear the goodness, that find it intolerable, will come out and torment. They will flly and slide and whisper around our houses; they will try to enter our minds and persuade us that the world is lost, that Evil has allready won, that there is no hope, and that we all are just killers without a gun. 

            And that – tell your children – that is why we carve pumpkins into grimaces, why we parody evil in silly costumes, why we celebrate goofy trick-or-treats, why we have drunken parties: to taunt the evil spirits, to show them that we are not afraid, because All the Saints are with us, and tomorrow we will celebrate them with dignity and style, and be thankful for their prayers and their protection. We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the universe, but we are also children of God, and we are loved. We are never alone under a black sky; we are never delivered utterly unto hate; we are loved, and the Evil One cannot defeat our faith. 

Happy Hallowe’en!

IN THE BREACH

In reaction to the events in Israel, we feel intolerably weak, helpless, and uncomfortably near to despair. Yet, thinking of this in the small hours, I was drawn to contemplate the Carthusians. If we believe, as several Popes have said publicly, that the contemplative orders have an important part to play in the life of the Church, we must recognise that that function can only be based on the power of prayer. Their sole business is to pray for the world; given that fact, the combined force of 450 professional prayer generators (to count only the number of Carthusians at present in the world) must be enormous. And if we add to that all the other orders for whom prayer is their central occupation, we arrive at a vast concentration of power. Such power is of the utmost importance when the hounds of Hell are loosed upon the world. The media speak of counter-offensives upon the battlefields in Ukraine; in the chaos unleashed in the Middle East military and propaganda weapons cancel each other out and atrocities are joined and compounded by vengeance. At such times diplomacy is an indispensable component; but, like all adult acts of civilisation,  it is slow to start and almost imperceptible in its successes.

A Godless world has no more to offer and no other remedies to try. But faith has armies reason knows not. Legions of angels, to be sure; but while they are mentioned in Scripture, they have not often been perceived in earthly action. No; as St Teresa of Avila said, we need to remember that God has on earth no hands, no eyes, no ears other than ours. This may be enough for what is known as humanitarian aid; but there is more. For there is in this world a vast army that works and fights in alliance, in joint command, in communion, with the forces of Heaven: the immense, international, millions-strong army of prayer. And of this army, the contemplative orders are the commandos, the special forces, the shock troops. 

What can we do to support them? We are their reservists, their Territorials, their National Guard. We pray for them, we study them, we make them known, we help them, we do some recruiting for them: they do none for themselves. 

And finally, let us not forget that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God, a God who singled out this tiny out-of-the-way planet in His vast creation for a special environment of shalom, salaam, peace, and a malkut, a kingdom, a reign, of love between Himself and the humanity He drew out of its oceans. A God Whom we, as a race, repeatedly drive to hot tears of near-despair; but a God Who never gives up on us as long as prayer – the language of love He taught us in our infancy – persists and thrives.  

  

 

STRANGE GARDENER

It was forty days. It had to be. The “intervals” are always forty days. Forty days in the wilderness, from the baptism to the beginning of ministry’s work. For a long time, I’ve been looking at – and looking for – the shaping of Yeshua’s mind during the “lost years”, the years not mentioned in the Gospels, for him between the ages of 12 and 30. In spite of warnings from my beloved Joe Rat (Benedict XVI to you) and other Church spokespersons that we should not indulge our imaginations where the Bible is silent, nor compose in our minds a “Jesus novel”, I find myself unable to still my historian’s curiosity and my Christian desire to recapture – with my imagination since there is no other tool – wie es eigentlich gewesen, what really happened, what it was really like. 

            I tried to follow him through his young manhood, to see him in the Nazareth workshop with Ya’akov his brother, saying the blessings at Shabbat dinner with Mother Myriam, four brothers and two sisters, and then going off to join the baptism crowd around Cousin Yochanan the Dipper. I tried to follow him into the desert (Sinai?) and then to renting (or even buying) a small house in Capharnaum, near the Synagogue, from which he went out to be what he had known the Meshiach would be: an itinerant rabbi, walking around Galilee (a distant place, Israel’s Maine or Yorkshire), teaching, healing, and preaching the surprising idea that the basileia to theou, the Reign of God, had in fact come, and was right here and now.

            It is not impossible so to follow him, and we know where one ends up, so doing. One ends up on Golgotha, first, in the noise and heat and obscene unrolling of an execution; and then, after a day of stunned silence, on Easter morning with Myriam from Magdala, talking to a gardener. And from there on it becomes exponentially harder. Dare we try anyway?

 

            That gardener, then. Notice that, on a number of occasions during the forty days that follow, even those who had been closest to him do not recognise him: not Myriam, not the disciples in the fishing-boat coming to shore in the dawn, not the followers walking to Emmaus. So one thing we know is that his face was not the same. His body, though, was: he invites Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds. So how, in what details, was his face different? It could be, say, the difference between bearded and beardless; it could be that the unimaginable interval between death and resurrection had marked his features in some indelible but disguising way, like the sudden greying of hair or the carving of lines in the face. 

What is sure is that he was recognised when he spoke: his remarkable voice – remember he had addressed a large crowd from an offshore boat, without a microphone – had remained untouched. 

            Now let us go further. If we could imagine his thoughts and feelings while making scroll-cases and furniture for clients of the family business, can we imagine them in this strange between-time?

            First of all, why did he come back? He could have gone straight home to his Father, into whose hands he had commended his spirit. Instead, he comes back to spend forty days – very much off and on – with his friends and students. Why?

            Well, we know the answer. It was, in a sense, the whole point of everything. St Paul, in one of his vigorous letters, put it best: “If the Anointed One did not rise from the dead, everything we proclaim is nonsense.” Humans – his humans first, then all the others – had to know that he had conquered Death, and that Death, thenceforth, had no dominion other than an apparent one. And so he had to be there: not a ghost, not a spectre, but a human resurrected, a man who had tangible scars, a man who could make a fire and eat grilled fish. 

            What did it feel like, for him? How human was he still, in this time? Did he feel twinges of nostalgia for the old days of exchanging repartee with a foreign Samarian woman at a well, or of calming his fearful friends in a storm-tossed boat on Kinneret? Did he feel he was performing a duty, establishing the Resurrection in the minds of a core group who would then go out and proclaim it to the world? I think he felt a great wave of affection for this little group of friends who were so obviously suffering from their loss. Was he always meant to stay forty days, that Biblical interval, or did he persuade his Father to prolong it from a shorter original? He may have eaten fish, but he also walked through walls and disappeared at the dinner table. That must have felt peculiar, but doubtless in an odd way natural – a between-state in a between-time.

            I do think, though, that when Ascension Day arrived it was not a surprise to him. Interestingly, it seems to have been so for the disciples: clearly, they were not counting in forties, though they might have done. But he, I am sure, did know, if only by counting the days. We may assume that during this time, whenever he was not with them, he was in that Other Place, with the Father; and that when the moment came to go Home definitively part of him must have been deeply relieved. As he was whisked out of our dimension (they read it as “up”) he could honestly say that he had done all his duty, that he had accomplished the task the Father had set him. And the homecoming must have been joyful to a degree, and in ways, truly beyond our imagination.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Mary Magdalene and Christ as gardener" (1638)

 

ALMOST THE SQUARE ROOT OF INFINITY

For many thoughtful people hovering on the edges of faith, the Trinity is a stumbling-block. For both Jews and Muslims, it comes perilously close to polytheism. For the philosophic psychologist Jung it was a sign of incompleteness, in the Catholic Church suitably completed by the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even for many of the faithful, it is a puzzlement elevated to a mystery. So it is worth thinking about. 

St Athanasius, that uncompromising Church Father whose Creed is printed in the Book of Common Prayer as the Quicunque Vult, wrote a magnificent letter in which he explains the Trinity. Here are two excerpts:

“We acknowledge the Trinity, holy and perfect, to consist of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this Trinity there is no intrusion of any alien element or of anything from outside, nor is the Trinity a blend of creative and created being. It is a wholly creative and energising reality, self-consistent and undivided in its active power, for the Father makes all things through the Word [the Son] and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly, in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.”

“Even the gifts that the Spirit dispenses to individuals are given by the Father through the Word. For all that belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son, and so the graces given by the Son in the Spirit are true gifts of the Father. Similarly, when the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.” (Letter to Serapion)

I find this admirably clear and wholly convincing. What is still difficult, once one has absorbed it, is the complementary understanding of the Unity. Once one has grasped the identity and the relation of the three Persons of the Trinity, one wrestles with the fact that “they are” One God. In Athanasius’ explanation of the Unity, God as above all things as their principle and source and Creator is understandable. God as in all things as the indwelling Holy Spirit also makes sense. Where it becomes harder is when A. sees God being through all things as the Word, or the Son. What, here, does “through” mean? I think that it becomes easier if we change the verb. God does all things as the Source and Creator of them; He does them through (dia, per, via) the Word; and He does them in the Spirit. This leads us back to the Gospel of St John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And, as Athanasius reminds us elsewhere, Jesus also says, “Who has seen me has seen the Father.”

In the full sense all this is of course well beyond our complete understanding. We see very much as in a glass, darkly. Our window is grubby, and our binoculars ill-focused. But we can get something of a sense of this vast core of our faith. Pater (non) e(s)t Filius (non) e(s)t Spiritus Sanctus. Its dazzling strangeness reminds me of what Tertullian (or someone close to him) wrote of the death and resurrection of the Son of God: et mortuus est dei filius: [prorsus] credibile est, quia ineptum est. et sepultus resurrexit: certum est, quia impossibile. “The Son of God died: this is utterly believable because it is improper. And having been buried, He rose again: this must be true (is certain), because it is impossible.” 

 

BEYOND WEB AND WEBB

In a continuation of my Outline for a Personal Catechism (6 July 2021), this is an attempt to understand theological cosmology in Christian terms, continuing the concepts and phenomena of the Ascension. Given the current knowledge of the physical universe, with its thousands of trillions of stars and planets, a cosmological conception of Heaven is not really viable. It seems more reasonable to postulate the existence of another dimension to which we may apply the Biblical term “heaven” and which is the dwelling of the Deity. In this dimension neither time as we know it nor space as we know it exist. Its equivalent of “time” is what we know as “eternity”. It may well have an equivalent of “space”-- which is very faintly suggested by expressions such as “sitteth on the right hand of God” and “in my Father’s house are many mansions”--, but we do not know it. This dimension, “Heaven”, is not accessible to our five senses: it cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. It is accessible through prayer (and perhaps through meditation). Its cartographers are the systematic theologians; its explorers are the mystics. Apart from the Trinity (and perhaps the Blessed Virgin Mary), its inhabitants are of several kinds: angels, saints, and the faithful departed.

            The shape of the inhabitants is not readily imaginable. The likelihood of angels’ resembling adult humans with wings is small. And we know little of the “glorious body”  that is promised to the faithful for their future: even the perfectly tangible body Jesus assumed between His Resurrection and His Ascension was a temporary affair. (And note that He was not physically recognisable even to his intimate followers.) The heavenly body of the saints and faithful departed may or may not resemble what they inhabited on earth: we have no way of knowing. Given the diversity of fates that their earthly bodies met, a formal reconstruction of decayed matter seems improbable. On the other hand, we are told that they are very much their individual selves, and recognisable by loved ones. Again, this suggests a different dimension with completely different forms of life, yet with a fundamental connection to humanity.

            All Biblical scholarship and theology tells us that “eternal life” is not simply life prolonged to temporal infinity. Some explanations lead me to think that the authors are trying to prepare us for a future without life after death; yet Jesus leads us to believe otherwise --  see his words ot the Good Thief. We may perhaps imagine that “eternal life” is life in that dimension called Heaven, where there is no time. 

            When the resurrected Jesus, after forty days on earth with his friends, is “taken up into heaven” in front of their eyes, what may we imagine actually happened? I suspect that, as their conception of Heaven was spatial, His sudden disppearance was seen by their eyes as having an aspect of “up-ness”, of a rising diagonal or even a vertical. In fact, we may assume, it was a move outward, or inward, (back) to that other dimension we call Heaven, where he came “home” to his Father; a dimension not accessible to our, or the disciples’, eyesight.

 

There are other words that give us earthlings trouble when we try to understand or visualise them. “Glory” is one. If we translate it as the honour or fame that heroes or great athletes reap, its theological meanings are odd and unlikely. It is perhaps better approached by way of John Keats’s vision of Madeline in “The Eve of St Agnes”: “Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,/ And on her silver cross soft amethyst,/ And on her hair a glory, like a saint”. The glory here is a sort of halo, a glow that surrounds her head. If we can understand such a glow as not outwardly surrounding but emanating from an inwardness, then at least the terrestrial part of “heaven and earth are full of thy glory” becomes clearer. And it is thus perhaps that we can detect one of the connecting spaces or routes between our earth and that other dimension, “Heaven”.

            Another such word is”peace”. To us it is usually either the absence of war or a condition of inner quiet and comfort. But that makes its use in the Gospels distinctly peculiar. When Jesus says “Peace I leave unto you, my peace I give unto you”; and when he tells the apostles upon entering a house to say “peace be upon this house” but if they are not received then that peace will come back to them; we are left wondering. Part of the answer lies in the Hebrew word shalom, which has a much wider meaning than our “peace”: it describes a kind of universal, even cosmic, harmony, where everyone and everything is in their proper place and fulfilling their proper function, in a joyful co-operation. And Jesus seems to use it in an almost local way, as if it is a something that can be bestowed -- or taken back. 

 

Both “glory” and “peace”, then, are words that belong to our languages here on Earth, but which have a dusting of Heaven still upon and within them. And as such they help us to add to our very partial understanding of that dimension, I should almost say, that parallel universe. In that dimension – we’re tempted to call it a place or a space, because it’s hard to imagine a dimension without space as we know it – in that dimension glory and peace are part of the atmosphere the inhabitants breathe. 

            It may  be the same with all the Biblical expressions of “joy” and “exultation” which look so odd in our fallen and embattled world. In the dimension we may call Heaven it is possible that they are part of the atmosphere, part of the weather. 

            The more we go into this territory of thought, the more we learn about our world, our life, and their relation to the “land”, the dimension, of which we are supposedly also the autochthonous citizens. And when we complain morosely that “heaven and earth are full of thy glory” seems like a cruel joke in the presence of the Russian army and drowning migrants, what we should understand is perhaps that the glory is there -- but too often ignored and trampled underfoot by the human race in all its brutish and brutal sinfulness, in its uncaring search for diversion and distraction, and in its passion for domination, prohibition and the bitter ashes of false victory.

 

Image: "Heaven and earth are full of thy glory"

 

FILLING IT FULL

 

The verb “fulfil” is interesting. It means “to complete” something, to add a missing element and thus to make something whole. In some ways it is a cousin to the verb “to perfect”. One can fulfil an expectation; one can fulfil a promise; one can fulfil a prophecy.

 

“I have not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them.” (Mt 5:17)

 

Yeshua’s interpretation of the Meshiach’s task is one of inwardness. The Law gave people (individuals and the community both) ten commandments and 613 regulations to observe, in order to present themselves worthily before God. Obviously, this required much study and practice: as Psalm 19 says, “Who can tell how oft he offendeth? O cleanse thou me from my secret faults.”  

            Yeshua, steeped in the Psalms and in the Prophets, notably Isaiah, seems to have pondered this and concluded that another way was possible. After all, what was the Law for? It existed to bring God and man together again, to re-bind (re-ligare) their bond. Might there not be a way to do this more purely as well as more expeditiously? Not by abolishing and replacing the Law: that would be blasphemous, as it had been given by God through Moses. On the other hand, achieving the Law’s aim more directly would, as it were, “fulfil” it, accomplish its purpose more simply as well as more purely. After all, it is possible to live a perfectly kosher life respecting the commandments and still have a mind full of resentment. 

            So he reduced the ten commandments to two: thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart and all thy soul and all thy mind and all thy strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. I have written previously (1 September 2022) about the seeming oddity of joining the injunction of ‘thou shalt’ with the verb ‘love’; here what is important is that if you live those two forms of love completely and wholeheartedly, none of the other commandments are relevant. And this is all the more true concerning the 613 rules: if you live the second commandment fully enough to enable you to live the first, and live the first completely, then in that love between you and God the 613 rules are completely fulfilled.

            Ah, says Rabbi Neusner[1], but you are forgetting Shabbat. That is a commandment not so much for the individual but for the community, for the community of the people of Israel. However much you, as an individual, love your Father in Heaven, that does not exempt you from observing Shabbat with your family, your clan, your town. 

            And just as that was for Neusner the point where, regretfully, he parted company with Yeshua, so it is the point where the followers of Yeshua Meshiach part company with the Rabbi. Because now we come up against a further huge step in the evolution of the Meshiach. Yeshua, the man from Nazareth, had interpreted the Meshiach’s task as fulfilling the Law by creating a direct route from the human heart to God. Now, however, he has become, he is, that Meshiach, and as such he gradually goes much further. 

            First of all, he (not man in general, but he) is “Lord of the Sabbath”. Once again, he looks for the purpose: what is the observance of the Sabbath for? And he concludes that it exists to bring the people closer to their God. Shabbat is made for man: not man for Shabbat. Meaning: man is made to be with God; if there is a better, more direct, more inward (note: not easier!) way for man to come closer to God on the special day of the week than observing rules about eating wheat tops or activating a light switch, then man should choose that. 

            Next: he has always read Isaiah; now he is coming to see that Isaiah’s relevance is complete and direct: the Suffering Servant is not the People of Israel but the Anointed One himself. It is he who will take upon him the sin of the world; it is he who, alone, will face the measureless evil that is its consequence; it is he who will be at the same time the High Priest and the High Priest’s sacrificial lamb; and on the third day, he rose again from the dead. 

            So, as he has taught men to “fulfil” the Law, he himself “fulfils” the Scriptures – he gives them, retrospectively if not retroactively, their ultimate meaning. 

---

[1] Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, Doubleday 1993.

A SECRET IMMENSITY

“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

 

This saying is of measureless profundity. We live several lives simultaneously. Our daily life with its tasks and pleasures and frustrations and pains; our emotional life with its joys and griefs; our intellectual life with its searches and discoveries; and our religious life, our life as a child of God. This last is too often neglected as it does not, like daily life, obtrude and trip us up. But it is our absolute life, the breath of ultimate life, love, sin and death. And as we grow, in age but also in the questioning of our place in the scheme of things, it is of this life that the importance swells and increases. And it is there that one day we confront this saying, telling us that our life is hid with Christ in God. 

            At first sight it seems absolutely mysterious and incomprehensible. So, to understand it, let us turn to that Doctor Ecclesiæ, Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI. In the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, he explains the necessity and the immensity of Jesus’ Passion and of the Cross. In the Cross, he says, God opens himself completely to man, makes himself definitively accessible in an act of ultimate love. And this complete and utter gift that took place once, in real historical time and in a real geographical place, is still taking place: it is repeated in each Mass and Communion. 

            This is stupendous and very nearly beyond understanding, if we take it seriously and try to get our mind and soul around it. It explains that other saying, “I am with you till the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). And if we keep it in mind when we reread that saying in Colossians, we realise that this truth is true in both directions: he is with us till the end of time, but we are also with him. 

            After the interim period of his appearances following the Resurrection, he leaves the disciples, and is ‘taken up to Heaven’ in the cloud that always signals the presence of the Deity. He rejoins the Father, and sends the Holy Spirit; but he is still with them, with us, till the end of time. What Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians is that through the gift of the Meshiach, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Him even unto his presence in the Trinity. This, I think, is what it means that our life is hid with Christ in God. If we entrust ourselves completely to him, he draws us up to him within the Trinity, within the presence of God. And that life, then, is our ‘eternal life’, as Ratzinger explains it: a life no longer subject to time and death.

            The more you ponder this in meditation, the more immense and moving it becomes. It turns everything around. That touching verse, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14) now glows in both directions: for we are now also invited to make our home with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

            Finally, our life is hid – it is in the worldly sense a secret life, a hidden life. Although it may shine through our eyes, the world of humdrumlies mostly will not recognise it or comprehend it. So we should probably be ready at least to try to explain it, however difficult that may be. But in the meantime, let us taste and savour fully the mystery and the glory that is offered to us.

Image: the Holy Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 - c. 1430)

 

 

WALKING THROUGH WALLS

                 

 This is a post about serious weirdness, uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit, and oddity. The time between the Resurrection and the Ascension is deeply strange. Mary Magdalen sees Him and thinks he is the gardener. The gathered disciples see him suddenly among them. The fishermen see him eating grilled fish on the beach, and do not recognise him. Cleophas and his friend walk and talk with him for an entire long afternoon, and do not recognise him until he breaks the bread. He walks through walls and yet has scars that can be touched. And then, after giving them some final instructions, he is whooshed up into a cloud.            

The period, unsurprisingly, is forty days long: like that which divided his baptism from the start of his ministry. So in fact his active human life as Meshiach is bordered by two liminal periods of “forty days”. The first is a period of preparation, in  which he has to clear himself of the three temptations that (necessarily?) accompany the condition of being both human and divinely powerful: gratifying simple needs, performing miracles for no other reason than to show off, and bringing the Devil into one’s mission for the sake of completeness. 

The second period has two meanings. In the first place it is a rounding-off of his earthly mission. He has now conquered the world, the flesh (death), and the Devil, and completes the job by making sure that at least the core group of his supporters has ocular and tangible proof that he has in fact risen from the dead. Secondly, like the desert, it is also a time of preparation: preparation for his definitive return to the Father, keeping his humanity but henceforth only as a theological principle and attribute, which allows him, while “in Heaven”, still to be available to earthly humans’ prayers and entreaties.

            All this said, his appearances are still deeply strange. Only Rembrandt, among painters, tried to represent this, in his Munich canvas of the Resurrected Christ – who is not only uncanny but completely different from his representations of the living Yeshua (see above). The disciples must have been utterly disconcerted. But he took the kindest care to reassure them, inviting Thomas to touch his scars, asking them for something to eat, and later breakfasting with them on fish grilled over a small fire of thorn-branches. The point, of course, was not only to reassure them that he was really he and not a ghost, but also to offer proof of the Resurrection.

            And what about that cloud? What about the whoosh? Either it did or it didn’t happen. If it did happen, does it tell us something (as the disciples probably thought) about the location of Heaven? Since to them the earth was probably flat, a Heaven “up there” was not unreasonable; but for us? Where is the Father, and where, seated at his right hand, is the Son? Where are all those angels? We now have increasingly good, if still very approximate, mappings of the Universe. So in all that, where is Heaven? My own dim sense is that is exists in another, parallel, dimension, invisible to our telescopes yet very occasionally glimpsed by mystics. This in no way denies the reality of its existence, or suggests that it exists only “in the mind”. If, as some scientists consider, we can realistically imagine a plurality of parallel universes, a multiverse, then a dimension where Heaven, Paradise, really exists is not remotely unlikely. 

Images: 1) Rembrandt, "Christ Resurrected (Ecce Homo); 2) Rembrandt, "Jesus"; 3) Gustave Doré, "Paradiso: Canto 31 (Dante)"  

A QUIET SPACE

 

Sometimes, the much-maligned media can bring one something quietly and deeply good. On the first Sunday in Lent, the televised Mass came from a community I had never heard of: the Cenacolo in Lourdes. The Cenacolo community was created in Turin, Italy in 1983 by a nun, Sister Elvira, who wanted to help young drug addicts; it was recognised  by the Vatican in 2015, and there are now 60 residential communities in a number of countries, five of them in France. 

            It was deeply moving. There were about 20 young men and three or four young women, all clearly very much involved, and all with faces marked by grave experience. The priest condicting the mass was Italian, the preacher was a French Franciscan prison chaplain. He explained to us viewers the way Cenacolo works: when a new person arrives, (s)he is greeted with “Enfin, te voilà!” (At last – here you are!) Everything is done to make them instantly welcome. The purpose, and the effect, of their stay is to give them a quiet space of support in which they can rebuild themselves.

            Thinking about it afterwards, it occurred to me that the Cenacolo can be a valuable image for the experience of Lent. After all, most of us are dependent on a number of things or behaviours that do not help, or actively hinder, our relationship with God. If we imagine Lent, not so much as a breast-beating time of penitence but rather as a time/space where God welcomes us with “There you are -- at last!” and gives us 46 days of quiet and reflection to rebuild ourselves, we can see this moment – which always happens, with potential irony, in the beauty and enchantment of spring – as a kindness, as a blessing, as an expression of the love with which we are loved. 

THE NAMELESS, THEN AND NOW

 

Reading, and listening to, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches’ exhortations to the faithful in recent years, I have been struck by an anomaly, if not a contradiction. On the one hand one sees, around one in ‘live’ church or on one’s screen in a service attended online or on television, fairly large crowds of faithful parishioners. They are mostly middle-aged or older, but in many churches there are also families with parents in their thirties and forties, and children from babyhood to pre-adolescence. They look interested, fairly reverent, and quite awake: it is rare nowadays to see someone nodding off during a sermon, perhaps because sermons are now very short. They are people with busy lives who have taken the time to attend Mass or Evensong, and who clearly find there they spiritual food they need to resume life’s daily challenges. 

On the other hand there are in many cases (not all) the clergy, who appear not only to be addressing quite a different audience but to have quite a diffferent goal in mind. To read or hear them, one could easily imagine the pews filled with plump, self-satisfied burghers, Philistines to a man or woman, and thinking only of the Sunday lunch or dinner awaiting them after the blessing. And what are they hearing, these ghostly rentiers? To what are they being called? To wake up to constant challenge, to be aware that they must at all costs leave their comfort-zone, to go out and evangelise the world around them, to realise that their baptism has made them priests (but without powers or authority), kings (but without a realm) and prophets: in other words, to be disciples, all of them. 

Curiously, few or none of the people I know appear to sense the discrepancy here. The folks in the pews hear the message respectfully, and then go out and fight their daily battles; the clergy go back to their overburdened weekday lives; and no one seems to be bothered by the anomaly.

And yet, the question that sits like an invisible elephant in the room is: what is the ordinary Christian believer supposed to be and to do? What if we are not all meant to be disciples? After all, the Meshiach only had twelve (and one of them was a black sheep), and He sent out seventy. What about the others? The faces that haunt me in the pages of the Gospels are, first, those of the people He healed. The formerly blind man; the formerly lame man; the woman with the issue of blood; the father of the demon-haunted epileptic boy. Then, the faces of those who had been part of the crowd listening to His teaching. Those – not very many – who had been near and overheard Him addressing His disciples in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. Those – many more – who had heard His teaching in the synagogues around the Sea of Galilee. Those – vastly more – who had been fed by the disciples after hearing Him teach at the end of the day near the Jordan. 

Of the people He had healed, most were told to keep quiet about it. (Some theologians think that this was so that it would not be misunderstood.) Only the man from whom the demons had come out (Luke 8:35), and who had begged Jesus to let him stay with him (presumablly as a disciple) was told instead to go home ‘and tell people what great things God has done for you.’ (Rieu 140) One assumes that the others, in spite of His injunction, also told friends and neighbours; but that, in their new and healed form, they went on with their lives. 

Those who had heard Him teach, whether around the disciples on the Mount or in the Galilean synagogues, would have tried to apply what they had learned in their lives – lives that were certainly changed, whether minutely or hugely. And those who were fed in the large crowd (one does suspect that 4,000 or 5,000 was an exaggeration, especially without a microphone) would remember not only His teaching of that day but the miraculous meal or snack. And then? They might have gone home with the teachings still in their heads, and trying to apply those; or they might have mainly remembered the bread and the fish and been impressed by the miracle-worker.

The point I am trying to make is that most people who come to church have at some point been touched by His teaching and (thus, or also) by His presence. They come because there they feel healed and restored, because there they receive waybread for life’s journey, which will allow them to go home and try to apply the teachings to their daily battles. They are thus like all those nameless people in the Gospels: they believe, but pray to the Lord to help their unbelief. And if the corners of their difficult days hold some small comfort-zones, who is to blame them?

To enjoin every member of a city our country congregation to become a disciple, I contend, is unfair and unkind. As a Catholic Bible scholar recently explained, there are indeed those who are called to be disciples: to give up everything and follow Him. But the many other believers, good people with doubts but who love God and their church, should be spared the guilt that such a demand, which they cannot meet, lays upon them. As an old Dutch lady said to Noel Coward, ‘One should never ask more of people than they are able to give.’ God may sometimes ask, and enable, us to perform miracles far beyond what we thought was our ability; but I dare to think that old Mrs Hubrecht’s rule is, on the whole, His also.   

TRAINING RUN

After his baptism by his cousin – who was more than surprised to seee him in the lineup – he needs time to move out of his old life and into a new one. So he does a deal with cousin Yochanan to let him use his cave for a month or two, and moves in. Did ‘fasting’ mean nothing except water? Bread and water? Locusts and wild honey? In any case, he clearly spends his forty days mainly praying. This is his training-period before moving into full-scale messiahhood. I’m not sure we can really imagine what ‘praying ‘ means in this context. Talking to his father (the coach), certainly. Disciplining himself like an athlete, probably. Practicing? Practicing what? Preaching? Healing? For the preaching side of his future activity, he may well have been working out the details of the new theology. This would involve recall of the key Scriptures he must have by now known almost by heart – Pentateuch, Isaiah, Psalms, maybe Ezekiel, ?Daniel --, the outlines of current thinking on the subject of the Meshiach and what would be his innovations. 

At some point or points during this period come the confrontations with the Tempter. Whatever one thinks about the personal exchanges, in his situation facing three key temptations, and these three in particular, was likely and perhaps inevitable. What were they? One: hunger. Fasting is not easy, especially a prolonged fast for one who would normally only do small ritual ones. But the point here wasn’t hunger it was power. You’re the Meshiach now, dude: you can do stuff. Why not a quick sandwich to tide you over? Not a sin, just a grin. Silly power; but hey, you’re human. And your tummy is kissing your backbone.

We know the answer. (Oh, by the way: how do we know the answer? Or, indeed, the question? Only answer, if it ain’t invented: he told one or more of the disciples, at some point.) Answer: Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. Humourless, but deep. Remember Nelson? Don’t need a cloak, my love for my country keeps me warm. Basic answer: willpower, arsehole. But on top of that: God’s Word is food, and that is not a metaphor. 

Second temptation. (We don’t know the intervals.) Power. More silly power. Come on, lighten up, have some fun. Chuck yourself off this Temple roof, go on. Remember Psalm 91. The angel brigade is waiting with a net. It doesn’t give you anything, or produce anything, but it’d be fun, no? Wheeeeeeeee! Bungy-jumping sans the bungy. Only Meshiachs can do that. Tell me you’re not tempted.

We know the answer. You shall not tempt the Lord your God. Humourless, but deep. Shaitan, Adversary, your sense of humour is about as funny as a fart-cushion at a funeral. Being the Meshiach is serious. It’s the real thing. It’s about saving people from death, destruction and misery. God the Father is getting ready to put all His power into this experiment. I’m in deep training for the universe’s hardest job. And you come and prattle about bungy-jumping? 

Now comes the biggie. OK, so it’s serious. Right, I can do serious. This time I’ll do a deal with you. I’ve been shut out for aeons. No power, nobody listens to me, all I’m allowed to do is test the odd Job here and there. You’re the Meshiach. You have the Boss’s ear. I’ll do a deal with you. You get Him to let me run the experiment, and you and I will do the job. We’ll finally run that world down there the way He wants it run: bloody humans will be good whether they want to or not; no more sin, no more idolatry, adultery, rape or driving under the influence. He’s the Boss, I’m the manager, you execute, with full powers.

And if I won’t? Well, let me put it this way. If you go for it, it will take you and me say a year. If you refuse, I will work against you every inch of the way and it will take five thousand years or longer. Like the gang bosses down there, I will make you rich or I will make you dead. 

This is not silly power. This is real power. This is what every person wanting to do good efficiently in the world dreams of. The power finally to put a STOP to all the misery and evil, not drop by drop but NOW. In one swoop. 

We know the answer. Worship the Lord, and serve him only. Oh, go away. You’re just in it for yourself. You know perfectly well that the Meshiach can only be responsible to the Father. No middleman, no vice-presidents, no manager. You are not needed, you’re a hindrance and finally you’re a bore. And you’re standing in my light. Out!

And Shaitan leaves, and Yeshua is left back at the cave, with night falling. Only one more day of the 40 is left. Then he will have to get on with it. Training over;  you’re heading for the front. How did I do, Coach? You did fine, son. I’m proud of you. Get some rest. And remember, when you’re out there in the midst of it all, I’ll always be only a prayer away. You’ll never be alone. Sleep well. 

Image: Moretto di Brescia (ca. 1520): Christ in the Wilderness