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.

REAR-VIEW MIRRORS AND WINDSHIELDS

Looking back on 2016 one can of course cite many horrors and many disappointments. But when one either looks more closely at  what’s happened in the world at large, a large number of blessings also become apparent: in India 800,000 volunteers planted 50 million trees in one day to help the country reforest 12% of its surface, while for the first time ever, 93% of the planet’s children learnt to read and write. One does need to be careful about absorbing “news” from media, especially television, internet and even print. Newspaper editors long worked on the principle “if it bleeds, it leads”, and this has now spread to almost all media. Social media, on the other hand, are sometimes even worse, as they can spread the steaming private rage of individuals faster than any (other) epidemic. One of the rare exceptions is the French daily La Croix, which resolutely continues to inform rather than titillate or judge, which invariably explains both sides of difficult questions, and which pays as much attention to good news as to catastrophes. (Le Monde, of which someone who worked there in the Fifties once said, “It’s not a newspaper, it’s a university”, still informs very well but has moved further away from impartiality – leftwards – and is temperamentally gloomy.)

For individuals, looking back on a year gone by is usually a bit nostalgic, slightly (or deeply) sad, rueful, or cautiously thankful. It’s a collective version of the eve-of-birthday mindset; it’s the painful travail out of which new year’s resolutions will shortly be born.

None of this should properly apply to prayer.

God does not ask us to apply ourselves more energetically to doing better at everything. God does not ask us to judge the rest of the world, even politicians. God does not ask us to hate our nasty enemies with more intensity and if possible to wipe them off the face of the earth. God does not ask us to be revenged on those who did ill to us or to our loved ones.

God asks only one thing: that we return His love. With every fibre of our being. And this is largely done not by increased activity but by allowing Him to visit, to move in, to take over. It’s almost passive, but it does take concentration: we ask Him to open our doors and windows so that He can enter and take up residence.

Once we embark seriously on doing that, resolutions become superfluous.



The illustration is William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" (1849-53) in Keble College Chapel, Oxford. Note that the door on which Christ knocks is overgrown and clearly unused to being opened, and has no handle: it can be opened only from the inside. Our inside.

A TIME (NOT) OUR TIME?

This is a year of which many will be glad to see the end. I see the sentiment everywhere expressed, often profanely. And for this late post for the Second Week in Advent I was moved to consider the ways in which we relate to the “time of the world”. There are so many kinds of time we live in, as someone on French radio, discussing Gilles Deleuze on Proust, said recently; and what I call the time of the world is one that seems to occupy more people more of the time than ever.

The “time of the world” is not a measure of time, although years, decades and centuries might be related to it. Rather, it is “time” in the sense of Zeitgeist, a “spirit of the age” as the Germans call it: an expression dating from the nineteenth century, and which the sixteenth might have found bizarre. The sense of a Zeitgeist seems linked to what we now call communication, which in its modern sense is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and which participates (and is in part at the root of) the accelerating J-curve of “rapid social change” which the Victorians were the first generation to have to confront.

It has continued to accelerate and has now (for the time being) culminated in the smartphone. This, together with the social networks it gives us permanent access to, has had the effect of bringing the “time of the world” into individuals’ lives in ways, and to degrees, never before experienced. As such it far outstrips newspapers and television. Much, perhaps too much, has been said about this, and I’ve no wish to repeat it. But it does change the felt quality of this season of the year. Not its essence, which is darkness and hope, sorrow and the promise of light; but the felt quality, different as the Wind Chill Factor makes the felt temperature.

A year such as 2016 has brought to the world a series of misfortunes, some unavoidable (the hurricane in Haiti), some avoidable (the Syrian civil war and the American election result – which will soon be seen as disastrous by all but the few who sit on the pork barrels). And because of the “time of the world” it appears to have been a uniquely ghastly twelvemonth, spreading gloom all around. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, the world has not become worse: it still carries on in its difficult journey from the Fall to the Second Coming, a journey full of sin and misery but equally full of kindness, generosity, love and hope. That these last are not felt by many as part of the “time of the world” shows the degree to which that concept belongs to the public world and the media that reflect and comment upon it. A French radio programme, “Carnets de Campagne”, each day interviews founders and members of local organisations that work on the bases of co-operation and solidarity: the number of these, and their quality, is astonishing. I shared on Facebook today the story of Torrington in North Devon and its experience with child refugees. In a little-repeated story, France in the last 10 months has seen anti-semitic and anti-Moslem acts diminish by ca. 60% from the year before. And virtually all of us personally know people who, at whatever level, make the world a little better.

At this time of the year, I propose placing “the time of the world” in perspective by more attention to two other dimensions: the “time of our lives” and the “time of eternity”. The Time of our Lives is what happens to us personally. It may be fraught with difficulty and danger, but it is our time, to savour and to deal with and to improve. And if, as also often happens, it is a time of happiness, joy or even prosperity, we should not let the Time of the World embitter that. The Time of our Lives is the time in which we can be kind, generous, positively effective and spread comfort and joy.

And the “time of eternity”? That is God’s paradox: dark and difficult, we tend to think until we remember that those supposed to understand it best are little children. It is the time which eternity underlies; the time which eternity penetrates; the time which eternity suffuses and lights with a glow that is permanent, if only intermittently perceived. It is the time of faith, of hope, and of love, at the smallest level (a child grasping its parent’s hand without looking) and at the greatest level, a dimension far beyond our understanding. That is God’s paradox, totally incorporated in the apparently simple phrase “Our Father which art in Heaven” – which always makes me catch my breath, when I think of Hubble’s view of a corner of the Universe: the Creator and Father of that, all that, is here in this room and hears my prayer? 

Stupendous. And quite enough for two candles.