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.  

  

 

WHAT SORT OF HOUSE

I have, in recent years, found enormous inspiration in reading the writings of Carthusian monks. They are often as learned as Benedictines, but since their life is built entirely around prayer they are as one might say its professionals. Reading them is both humbling and informative: rather as if one owned a decent sports car and did the occasional track day and then comes across a manual written by and for Formula 1 drivers. 

            In one such book – and they are always signed “A Carthusian” – I found a fascinating meditation on Jesus’ whipping the merchants out of the Temple. Rather than pondering whether or not this is a comment on capitalism, the Carthusian author proposed seeing the temple as being our heart. Thus, the words of Jesus, “this is a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves”, take on a new and richer meaning. As I spend my time at my computer, ordering books or clothes, annotating texts, organising meetings; as I go out to dinner parties or restaurants, as I look at advertisements for classic cars – is my house not rather full of merchants? Good merchants, not necessarily thieves; but then the men selling sacrificial doves, lambs and candles in the spacious Temple courtyard were probably perfectly respectable shopkeepers. 

The point is not what they do but where they are doing it. They are pursuing their perfectly proper mercantile calling not in a shop in the city but in “a house of prayer”. And so, transferring the image as did the Carthusian, I arrive at the fact that my heart should be “a house of prayer, where the Son can meet the Father in love.” I found, and find, this thought overwhelming. And it has become my daily, and almost my only, prayer:

LORD, MAKE MY HEART A HOUSE OF PRAYER

            

Because that prayer potentially includes everything else. It is in fact an application of the saying “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” If my heart is made a house of prayer, everything else is secondary but/and will fall into place. 

I share this thought because it occurred to me that others may find it inspiring also. There is such wealth to be found in Carthusian thinking: those Olympic athletes of prayer have much to teach us -- starting with their ancient motto (useful when looking at the news cycle): STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. (The Cross stands, while the world turns.)

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.

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). 

USEFUL ADVICE FROM THE 4TH CENTURY

"He who only prays when he is on his knees, prays little. But he who, on his knees, yields to every distraction, does not pray at all. So, before prayer, we must enter into the frame of mind we wish to have during prayer; for it is an inescapable law that the dispositions of the soul depend on the state that preceded it; and we will see it either rise to the heights of heaven or sink to the earth, following its previous thoughts."

St John Cassian, quoted in The Wound of Love (Leominster: Gracewing, 2006), 209.

THE SILENCE OF ADVENT

Yule demands incessant busyness; Christmas demands waiting in silence. How to combine the two? Perhaps we can learn from the Carthusians. A novice-master tells a young monk the complexities of “silence”: to shut oneself up in cell for incessant prayer is not silence as the order’s Statues understand it. Opposed to “noise”, “silence” demands that we identify the source of the noise first, and when we do so we find that much of the clamour comes from one’s own heart. Outward silence does not still this, on the contrary: it invites it. True silence consists first of all of listening: you begin by listening to the others around you – not just what they say, but what they are not saying. You listen to what you can gather of their deep needs, feelings and concerns. Meanwhile, you go about your business – business-business or Yule business – but listening quietly to all you meet.

Once you learn to listen to others (for a Carthusian, “your brothers”, for the rest of us, our families, loved ones, and anyone else who comes our way), you have a much better chance of being able to listen to God. Why? Because your own self, your own ego, your own desires, wishes, prejudices, feelings, thoughts, temper, and what you will, have learnt to shut up. And this, says the old novice-master, is true Silence. Silence happens when your own self has learnt to be quiet. In true Silence, only God speaks. Sometimes in His own voice, in the ears of your heart; sometimes in the voice of your brothers, your sisters, and your neighbour.

And when that happens, you can go about your Yuletide busyness – buying presents, ordering the turkey, decorating the house, adorning the Christmas tree, sending cards, planning convivial meals and stocking up on whisky – in a perfect silence of waiting, of expectation, and of hope. The silence of Advent.  

THE LONG HARD SLOG

It happens. You decided to take your faith more seriously. You pray more – much more. You read, you write, and you try to live closer to God. From all you have read, you suppose that this will strip away a lot of inessentials, leaving your soul leaner and in better training for wherever you are going.

Yet in fact you realise that no such thing seems to be happening. You feel if anything clumsier, heavier, more chaotic, more earthbound, Your prayers begin to sound repetitive to your own ears – so how, you wonder, must they sound to God’s? It’s all exceedingly frustrating.

Opening, more or less at random, my copy of the Carthusian text The Wound of Love, I saw that the anonymous monk writing this knew what I meant. “The life of most Charterhouses is a dull sort of grey,” he wrote. There may be treasures of interior life behind these disappointing exteriors, but they are often buried in unattractive dress. And then he goes on to say, “How could it be otherwise, face to face with the Absolute? Is this not the price of such dangerous proximity to fire? For it highlights all our faults, all our roughness of character and all the petty misery which in other circumstances would be swallowed up in the surrounding sea of trivialities. To wish to come face to face with God is deliberately to consent to expose all our faults and pettiness to the hard light of day. These first become apparent to others, and then, as we become enlightened, to ourselves.“

I found this both enlightening and cheering. We in the world are not committed to as absolute a life, and an opening, as Carthusians; but perhaps the movement he describes is equally true, on another scale, for us. Perhaps it is precisely the turning more seriously to our faith and its Centre, the moving closer to the Light, that shows up our shadows and general muckiness more clearly – in our case, perhaps first to ourselves and only later (one fears) to others? It is bad logic and bad theology to invert a proposition, yet there is the cheering possibility that the frustration is, at bottom, a good sign. In one sense, only a sign that the long hard slog is settling in; but in another, an encouraging wink from Don Camillo’s Friend on the Cross.

OF POETRY AND ROCK-CLIMBING

“To reach the Creator, I must make myself a creator – at least in so far as my dispositions are concerned. I must break all the moulds in which I constantly fashion myself, for they are invariably restrictive; I must reject all securities, all familiar words, all riches, so as to offer myself utterly poor and virginal to the breath of the Spirit. In this way is the only creativity that counts made possible: the creativity that forms Christ in us, that gives birth to the Son, the creativity which forms ourselves, not just some object, into a poem of love to God, a poem that is completely unique.

Sometimes the Spirit gives me my being through solemn words of love, sometimes through words of joy. There are very mundane words, like bread, or water; there are words of humiliation, of suffering, even of sin. It is necessary to let ourselves be formed, through these various words, so that the glory of God may be sung. 

If I am the poet of the poem which is my life, I am also the priest. The word which is given to me – as a Christian*  and, in a particular way, as a priest – has the power to transform all things into the body of Christ. This is my body, this is my blood, given for you. Just as  God creates, by his Word, at every moment, so he recreates us, takes us up again in all our humanity, with the whole of creation, into the eternal offering of the love of Christ to the Father, into the heart of which we are immersed by the sacrifice of the Mass.” (The Wound of Love, 162-3)

*The priesthood of the faithful is a genuine participation in the priesthood of Christ, and gives us from the start the power of offering ourselves and all things in Christ, with the ordained priest. This dignity conferred in baptism is all too often forgotten.

This is from a chapter on Conversion, called “To Create is to Forget”. At first glance, it seems as remote from our lives as the life of the Carthusian monk who spoke it and those who heard it. This is hardly the Christianity wich we learnt (if we learnt any at all) in a local parish church, in the odd Christmas sermon, or the Christianity we read about and decided was only for those who had the magical gift of faith which we, like most people, just didn’t happen to get. 

When I first read this and other texts in the volume, my reaction was, “Why didn’t anyone ever talk to me about the Christian religion like this?” I felt like the weekend rock climber I once was, coming face to face with El Capitan and those who made its first ascent (3,000 feet of smooth vertical or overhanging granite).

Now, having read it a number of times and thought about it, I realise that while it is the word of a contemplative monk and a priest – and thus of someone who can and must devote all his time and energy to this alone – we others are not necssarily excluded from it. If we absorb this, say, in our morning prayer at the beginning of the day, and keep its essence (as St Francis de Sales said) as a “posy” or buttonhole bouquet to sniff at periodically in the intervals of work or play –- when we are driving, or bicycling, or walking; while we are doing the dishes or cooking –, then the breaking of moulds, the emptying out, the opening of inner doors and shutters, followed by the delicate reshaping of our inwardness to become a line, or a stanza, of that poem becomes not only possible but an entirely natural step to take. 

(The third paragraph, of course, goes quite far, and is a challenge. Even for the Carthusian priest, saying that all things can become the body of Christ might be questioned by his superiors as being dangerously Teilhardian; but his insistence on the priesthood of all believers, conferred by baptism, is currently very much echoed even by our local parish priest. More about that in a future post.)

El Capitan, Yosemite, California

A THOUSAND YEARS AT THE CUTTING EDGE

Girolamo Marchesi, St Bruno

Today is the Feast of St Bruno (ca. 1030 - 1101), the founder of the Carthusian Order, the most complete of the contemplative communities. The Carthusians are hermits living in community; the order has never been reformed because it has never needed reformation. Books they publish are signed not with an author's name or even a monastic pseudonym but "A Carthusian". Bruno may be the only saint never officially canonised because a Carthusian would never accept such an individualising honour. The original monastery, which in an expanded form still exists, is in one of the world's more beautiful places, the valley of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps:

The Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Order

When a German film director Peter Gröning, asked if he could make a documentary of their life, he was told, "No, we're not quite ready. Come back in 15 years." Fifteen years later, he asked again, and was given permission as long as he came by himself with only a handheld camera. The result was the stunning Into Great Silence, of which the New York Times film critic said, "I would not call it the best film of the year: rather, the antidote to all the others." It is a film of surpassing beauty, in both the aesthetic and the spiritual sense. 

Carthusians live completely apart from the world and do not admit visitors, which is sometimes frustrating for those in the world who are attracted by them. But one can read their writings, some of which are published by Gracewing, including the superb The Wound of Love; and there are international virtual communities of Carthusian-inspired lay people, such as the International Fellowship of St Bruno (IFSB) and, more recently and most interestingly, Quies.

There are male and female Carthusian communities; they are divided into full religious (in the male communities Fathers, usually priests), who spend their entire life in contemplation, prayer and study, and Brothers (or Sisters), who perform the community's practical maintenance but share in the liturgical and prayer life. And one of the few activities which touch the world is the making of Chartreuse liqueur, flavoured with herbs, a drink of extraordinary depth and subtlety. 

The Carthusians are those who have gone all the way. They have given up everything to live close to God. One Carthusian wrote, "How does a Carthusian die? Very simply. You go to sleep, as on any night; you wake up somewhere else." It is, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything." They are well worth getting to know.

A Carthusian praying in cell - from Into Great Silence

GLINTING RIPPLE, SLOW TIDE

Half-awake at 5 a.m. after a transatlantic flight is a good time and condition to reflect, meditate and pray. I had been reading Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God, which always enchants me by its simplicity and by the flavour it gives of the man -- Nicolas Hermann, a 17th-century Lorrain of little education, who became first a footman -- but, being large and clumsy, he broke things --, then a soldier, was lamed and then joined a religious order as a lay brother, working in the monastery kitchen for 40 years. A grander and more educated clergyman interviewed him on a number of occasions and wrote down Brother Lawrence's replies, as well as some things he'd heard about him.

The Practice, as the little volume of the interviews is called, radiates a perfectly simple faith. He knows that, left to himself, he is a wretched piece of humanity, and he keeps wondering why God has done him so many favours. and goes on doing so. But he refuses to worry about it, because that's up to God. So he goes about his daily business, constantly placing himself in God's presence, because that is all that really matters for our souls: even in a clattering busy monastery kitchen with everyone shouting for stuff at the same time, he does his work with admirable serenity. And if he fails at something, he says, he is never surprised, because if he didn't get constant help from God he'd be like that, perfectly useless, all the time.

So, pondering that at 5 a.m., I was taken back (and yes, slightly taken aback, too) to my experiences on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, with a sort of tide of immense peace creeping up the beach of my consciousness. And it occurred to me that in fact all one needs to do is to be completely open and receptive; because God is everywhere and always around us and asks nothing better than to be in us as well. Hardly a new thought; but for whom it happens to, a new experience.

Later, over EMT (Early Morning Tea), I read the passage about the "Journey to the Purity of Heart" in the admirable  Carthusian publication The Wound of Love, in the light of those considerations. The Carthusian points out that it will be a long and difficult journey, but that eventually Grace will complete the task for us. Well, I thought: did Brother Lawrence not find a shortcut? But the Carthusian did agree that we receive rather than achieve; only, he said (and this was the most useful point he made), it cannot be had cheaply -- I thought of T.S.Eliot: "a condition of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything".

Brother Lawrence, a soul of great and childlike simplicity to start with, paid the price in length of years. Some of the Carthusian Fathers paid and pay it, one assumes, in spiritual exercises. And for those of us in the world it may be paid in all kinds of experience, disappointment, suffering -- or, if the Lord keeps showering one with undeserved and unexpected favours, perhaps in years and (intermittent) constancy also. The low, gentle ripple creeping up my beach, after all, had taken more than five years to get there since, on my 70th birthday, I decided that rock-climbing, hiking the Pyrenees and crossing Europe on a motorcycle were not going to happen, I needed a new adventure proper to my age, and chose faith as the most suitable. Mmmmmm -- was it I who did the choosing?

SCHRODINGER'S CROSS

   Last night I emerged from a dream of an utterly confusing party in Oxford, full of lean intelligent women talking loudly, into its opposite, which presented itself as the Carthusian motto STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. The Cross stands – remains, stands still – while the world turns (lit. is turned). It’s a marvellous motto, and in my mind I saw the Nazareth Village cross, surprisingly small, maybe 7’ high, of unsquared logs, very crude, and on the other hand the Universe as we now know it via Hubble, immense, crowded with heavenly bodies, most of which turn. And the centre of that immensity is that little crude cross, which alone does not move – like Vladimir and Estragon.

      

     As I moved gradually from dreaming to thinking, all this came together with Benedict XVI’s passages, in Jesus of Nazareth, on the Cross as the centre of our faith, Christ the King who reigns from the Cross, etc. Yet then something in my mind asked, ‘But which Cross? The crucifix, the cross with a man on it? Or the empty cross of the Resurrection?’ This, I remembered, was one of the controversies I grew up with, between Catholics and Protestants: the latter refused the crucifix, saying that after the Resurrection any cross imaging our faith should be an empty one.

     The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is a true aporia. On the one hand the Protestants are right: the Resurrection empties the Cross. On the other, the Catholics are right: Christ reigns from the Cross. One needs to imagine the Cross as both occupied and empty at the same time. Schrödinger’s Cross.

     Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. The Cross is central. And yet, was it planned? Only a rigid predestinationist could assert that. When Jesus walked in Galilee, when he taught and healed, was the Cross already inevitable? So many were converted, among them some of the religious ruling class, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. And he spoke ‘with authority’. It would have taken only a few more converts, like Caiphas and Annas, for his message to have succeeded.

     Uh, oh. That sends us straight back to Peter saying stoutly that no, that horror was damn well not going to happen, implying that he wouldn’t let it. And what did Jesus answer? “Get thee behind me, Satan!” So yes, it did have to happen. In the first place, it was really inevitable – which tells us something about Jesus’ message. As someone Benedict XVI quotes put it, a man merely proclaiming that people should love one another would not have been crucified. It was his clear announcement that he was God that made the Cross inevitable.

     So the Cross was necessary. Was it also sufficient? No: it had to be completed by the Resurrection. It had to happen for the New Covenenant to be activated. For only the Cross could lead to the Resurrection; and the Resurrection is the very basis of the New Alliance. ‘If Christ did not rise from the dead, all we preach is stuff and nonsense,’ said St Paul unambiguously (I Cor. 15:14; the whole passage is salutary).

     So the Cross that stands while the world turns is Schrödinger’s Cross. It is to that the Carthusians have turned. It is Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’. So what about that turning world? Have they turned their back upon it? Yes, because a Carthusian lives in cell, having died to the world. No, because his whole life is spent in unimaginably intense prayer for that world – which, after all, is the orbis for love of which God Himself took flesh and offered Himself as the sacrifice for sin.

     We are not Carthusians; yet we might usefully carry Schrödinger’s Cross in our hearts, to remind us of both that immense love that was, and is, given to and for us, and of the victory over Death that has made us free, free to love, for ever.

     The text at my baptism was “Stand then in the freedom wherewith Christ has made you free.”  (Gal. 5:1)