PLENI SUNT

 

·      “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that has faith in me, even though he dies, shall live. And all that live and have faith in me shall never die.” (John 11:25)

·      Why are we believers not in a state of perpetual wonder at the magnitude of the gift we have received? Perhaps because we are not often faced with evidence of it in our daily lives. Getting and spending we lay waste our wonder. Worse, infirmities and blows befall us, and worse befalls the Umwelt, the wider world; all of which the Adversary incites us to parse as counter-evidence.

·      Is there, then, a way back, or forward, into recognition and thus renewal? Yes.

·      Pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua. We live, move and have our being in an ocean of God’s glory. Oh yeah? say our atheist friends. Yeah.

·      Begin at beginners’ level: an April day in the Southern French countryside. Everything is in flower, from the humble campion via pale irises and roses’ intensity to the pouring gold of laburnums and the Tyrian shout of Judas-trees. Bees crawl over the wistaria in an ecstasy of fulfilment. A cuckoo sounds in the distance. Bright golden sunshine touches your eyelids, and a cool breeze murmurs to your hair. Yes, you say to yourself: this one’s easy. Nature doesn’t get much better. Glory is all about.

·      The Spoiler, though, is only briefly embarrassed. Look, he says. You are walking slowly, with two sticks. You discover a new pain every day. You have prostate cancer. Your neighbour has had much of his intestine removed and carries a stroma. One of your friends ended up, too young, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Your mother died of a stroke after five interminable years of Alzheimer’s. Glorious?

·      After a brief prayer you reply, Yes. I am here, giving thanks and praise; not only for Thibault the donkey whose nose I just stroked, but for his lookalike, the young radiotherapist who treated my cancer, and the tireless ladies who tended his machine. My neighbour has kept his huge echoing laugh and every scrap of his fighting soul. My friend was cared for with extraordinary love by his wife, a nurse, and his condition brought his friends and colleagues to organise an entire small conference in his honour, in his own remote city, where he was surrounded by honour and affection in his last year. And my mother’s illness brought out in my father a depth of sacrificial love and self-abnegation neither he nor we dreamed he possessed. All conditions of the earth earthy; but that terra was and is plena also of glory.

·      The Contrarian gnashes his teeth, allowing you at last to hear what that sounds like. As we know, he is expert at teleportation; and he whisks you in a whoosh to another part of the country where the houses are experiencing their fifth flooding in two months, women and men are hopelessly piling furniture and working mops and pumps and discovering that their insurance has found an excuse not to pay up even as their walls crack and peel with the absorbed moisture. Aye, he grins. There’s glory for you.

·      But his eyes darken as the Fire Brigade appears. The young men and women are all volunteers, part-timers, the friends and neighbours of the afflicted, They turn up with boats of several kinds, helped by local farmers with tall tractors that brush aside the water; they help the elderly out of their flooded houses, wrap them in blankets and take them to the high-school gym where other volunteers are already preparing hot coffee, tea and cocoa, as well as comforting hugs. Glory creeps in through the windows and swirls invisibly among the rafters. Level Three, and it’s still there: stronger than ever, perhaps.

·      Now the Enemy switches on the television even as he tunes your smartphone to three different social networks simultaneously. As casualty figures from Sudan mingle with Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Islamist decapitations in the Middle East and teenagers kicking other teenagers to death in a Parisian suburb, he grins. Gloria in excelsis? he hisses.

·      Yes, well, this is the graduate course. Were you ever told it was going to be easy? You go back and pray. Time out: need to work on this one. And yet, and yet, something comes tiptoeing out of the wreckage and the gore. Something difficult at first to identify, but call it Horror. You can see it in the faces of the reporters in Boutcha, in the womens’ eyes behind the niqabs, and in the classmates of the French teenagers as well as their parents. It is a strange glory, this: it crawls with agonizing slowness from Fear to No Complicity to Resistance – and it is a glory, perhaps the greatest even: a glory crowned with thorns.  

·      So: pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua? Indeed they are; but often unexpectedly. Which brings us back to That Man. Yeshua Meshiach. Who was expected to turn up as a new King David, with an army, to take Jerusalem and then make the Romans an offer they couldn’t refuse; and who instead appeared as a tall, bony itinerant rabbi striding through the North Country, preaching in villages an unlikely message of returning the measureless love of an invisible Father and extending risky affection to troublesome neighbours. A supposed monarch who rode into town on a donkey; a holy man who let himself be put to a hideous death with slaves and killers; a dead man who came back and ate fish on the beach with his friends. From his life to his message to his return, everything about him is unexpected. You can’t make this up. This isn’t a religion: gods don’t act like this. Gods drink nectar on mountaintops and flirt with nymphs.

·      So, this being the case, we may expect gloria sua also not always to be probable either. And it works both ways. If we learn to recognize the glory, from the laburnums all the way to the resistance, then perhaps we can begin to understand the Gift – a Gift which, like the glory, lives below and beside our everyday life, an insistent and reassuring heartbeat. A vita eterna that has already begun, coursing silently but mightily through our days, always only the whistle-thin membrane of a prayer away.

AN UNLIKE SEASON

 

 

This year, everything has been different. Christmas; birthdays; festivities and the daily humdrumlies; and now Easter. No need to go into reasons, some of which are medical, some family-related; but what interests me is what it tells me about our relation to ritual. I was brought up mostly without it: liberal Protestantism was a sober if kindly religion, and such rites as we had were intimate family ones, relating to birthdays, holidays and the Eve of St Nicholas (Dec. 5), which for children resembles the Father Christmas/Santa Claus feast of rewards for good behaviour in the form of presents, and for adults becomes increasingly hilarious.

            When, as an Oxford undergraduate, I became an Anglican, I embraced that church’s newfound ritual with the enthusiasm of a convert. Vestments, incense, liturgy and the inimitable choral music: it was heavenly, in the strict as well as in the figurative sense. And the rich sound of Cranmer’s English, our version of Latin or Church Slavic, meshed gratefully with the Elizabethan poetry that it was my trade and my pleasure to teach.

            Such elevated joys could not, of course, last. First, I moved to France where liturgy was the local version of Vatican II Catholicism: cheerful, appreciated by the country folk, but without beauty or reverence of any kind. Then, on the occasions when I was back in the Anglican communion, I discovered the woes of Common Worship which insisted on addressing the Creator in the language of daily commerce or afternoon tea. Apart from not-very-assiduous attendance at local Mass, I reacted with an increasingly private faith, the more since in France one is surrounded by more or less righteously secular atheists. I read the Carthusians, plunged into St Francis de Sales, was encouraged by St Augustine, and found a mercifully reliable, intelligent and kindly guide in Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI.

            And now, for many months, much of the remaining ritual has had to be simplified or suspended, and I find myself, Catholic-of-the-heart as I now am, back in a life much more like the liberal Protestantism of my childhood. And to my considerable surprise, I do not feel deprived or resentful. On the contrary, the change seems to be affording me a livelier and more intimate relation to the Deity. Daily prayer – the one ritual remaining changeless – is more heartfelt; Lent and Holy Week, kept raggedly and without consistency, nevertheless are more deeply felt than formerly.

            I can’t explain this, yet. But I have had a hint in exploring novelist/playwright Charles Morgan’s concept of the imagination. Contrary to the dictionary meanings, which always link this term to a reality that is absent, Morgan used it to describe his – or any artist’s – relation to something, or someone, present. A place, a person, an event, was to him merely a part of the surrounding landscape unless and until he imagined it. By this, I think, he meant something close to Keats’s remark in his letter to Benjamin Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination . . . the imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it truth.” I believe it also has to do with something else Keats wrote: “The excellence of every art lies in its intensity.” What Morgan calls “imagining” involves a fresh look at something, or someone, previously known without remark: a look that seems to re-create the object, charging it with an intensity partly emitted, partly received. Such “imagination” is lawless: one does not control it though one may co-operate with it. Great photography is perhaps one of its more comprehensible examples. In art it is best, and necessarily, complemented by a mastery of technique; in human and/or divine relations it needs to be accompanied by care and reverence, by a sense of angels’ fearing to tread other than lightly. But it is a mighty gift that merits immense gratitude and thanksgiving (when the initial surprise settles down). And one lives newly messy and turbulent seasons with real joy.  

THE WAY IN

 

I used to resent Lent. In the rising glory of the spring – flowers, birds and sunshine --, in the rising energy of my youth, it told me in no uncertain terms to be gloomy, to be penitent, because I was a miserable sinner. To be miserable and in a kind of mourning for forty long days. To fast: to give up all the good things and moments of my days and ways; to go to bread and water and maybe the odd fish, when the world was full of delicious temptations to give in to. I didn’t feel like a miserable sinner: I knew I was far from perfect, but heck, basically I wasn’t a bad egg. The whole thing seemed perverse and rather revolting.

            There were good moments. When I was about thirteen, my parents took me to the annual performance of Bach St. Matthew Passion in Naarden, a small ancient town in the centre of the Netherlands, where the great work was played and sung in its entirety, with break for a picnic lunch in the open air. The performers were the finest the country had to offer; and Laurens Bogtman, who sang the part of Christ, was so imbued with the spiritual responsibility of the part that he prayed and meditated for months before the concert. 

            Much later, a cheerful parish priest told us that Lent was a sort of spring clean of our spiritual house: confession was throwing out the accumulated garbage, almsgiving was sharing hoarded food with a neighbour down on his luck, and fasting was stopping yourself from piling up new junk to clutter the swept and garnished rooms.Such a positive view was appealing; but Lent, after all, ends in Easter, and with that it seemed to have little to do. 

            This year, now that Lent is with us again, a new interpretation occurred to me – new to me, though ancient and long known to saints and sages. Lent, I now believe, is the way in to the wonder of the gift. The gift is the Cross and the man upon it; the gift is the empty Cross and the empty tomb; the gift is the stupendous love described with great sobriety by R.S. Thomas:

 

And God held in his hand
A small globe.  Look he said.
The son looked.  Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour.  The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
               On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky.  Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs.  The son watched
Them.  Let me go there, he said.

 

The gift, first of all, is the Coming, the Incarnation. Then, the gift’s continuation is the  teaching, the preaching, the healing. Further and intensely, the gift is the Sacrifice: the cup drunk to the dregs. And climactically, the gift is the Resurrection: the conquering of death, for us, the everywhere and always presence of love, for us, the continuing nearness of the bread and wine of forgiveness and renewal, for us.

            For many, in this age of creeping neopaganism, all this is quite simply unknown. ‘Huh?’ The gift, for them, is not only unknown but meaningless because they have not learnt to reflect upon their human condition. But for those of us who do have some connection to the faith, the gift is often seen in faded colours, part of an old wallpaper, its annual remembrance become repetitious, ritual.

            The gift, in its vast power and complexity, invites wonder. To respond to it suitably is to be overawed, to be amazed, to be very nearly perplexed. 

            And I am coming to the conviction that Lent is the way in to this wonder. By a cross of grey ash; by damping down our own egotistical life-force, by constraining it in some kind of fasting; by opening the eyes of our souls, to others and to God, in giving time or money; and by opening our ears to the murmur of the Spirit in praying with, as Solomon put it, a listening heart; we make ourselves capable of the wonder that can recognise and respond to the Gift. 

            So now I see Lent not as a contradiction of the joy of spring but as an accompaniment and an intensifying of it. The way in to the wonder of the gift.