THE LOWDOWN

 

I’ve often said that the worst thing, emotionally speaking, humans can do to one another is humiliation. The Nazis knew this, when they set elderly Jewish gentlemen to cleaning sidewalks on their knees with a toothbrush. Schoolchildren often have a diabolically fine sense of it, when they find just the right insult for the victim of their bullying. And at the other end of the scale governments upon occasion do it to whole countries. 

            Humiliation is almost never forgiven, and never forgotten. A woman in her mid-eighties remembers with crystal clarity the day when a grade-school teacher made an example of her for some transgression, in front of the whole class. And thousands of Russians now support their murderous and vengeful Führer because a generation ago, when Berlin’s vile wall came down, they felt their country had been humiliated beyond bearing. 

            The French language has two words for “pride”: orgeuil and fierté. The former is the chief of deadly sins; the latter is the healthy pride one may feel in an achievement of one’s own, of one’s daughter’s, of one’s football team’s or of one’s country’s. English has an additional word of great value, “self-esteem”: the form of psychologically healthy, indeed essential, pride that allows one to hold up one’s head, to walk tall. In humiliation, all these are battered, as one is made to feel worthless and of no account. The word, after all, comes from humilis, low, close to the humus, the earth, the soil, the mud.

            What, if anything, defends us against humiliation? One may take refuge in overweening pride, orgeuil, but that is a bitter draught that corrodes: not for nothing is it the chiefest of all sins. No: there is one defence, and I suspect one only, against this terrible condition. T.S. Eliot expressed it memorably and with perfect accuracy in “Four Quartets”:

 

                                    the only wisdom we can hope to acquire

                                    is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless. 

 

In what is nearly a form of homeopathic medicine, we find a word with the same root, the root of eartth, of soil: humility. He that is down need fear no fall: he that is low, no pride. Humility does not mean hating or feeling contempt for oneself: humility means the openness and the generosity of looking at most other people with admiration for their unique talents or achievements, and not thinking of oneself as better than they. And it protects one against humiliation, because if that’s the way you feel and someone snide snarls “you’re not much” you quite naturally feel that he has a point, unpleassant though he is about it. It is hard, if not impossible, to humiliate a genuinely humble person. 

            What message is there here at the level of nations? A major reason for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party was the Treaty of Versailles, which in sealing the Allied victory after the Great War humiliated the German nation as well as bankrupting it. And it has been said that one reason for the present war in Ukraine is the humiliation Putin and many Russians feel was infliucted upon their country at the fall of the Soviet Union. “In victory, magnanimity” prescribed Churchill:  a phrase sometimes remembered but rarely acted upon. 

            It would be a Good Thing if every government’s foreign policy included a constant, recognized, and expressed, contemplation of every other nation’s especial talents and achievements. Thus we, as citizens, might be taught to look upon, say, the Turkish nation with admiration for its long history of Ottoman civilization and governance; to admire the Moroccans for their medieval philosophers; to be grateful to Spain for teaching us a certain kind of pride and courage, and to Portugal for introducing us to the exquisite melancholy of saudade. We might then tell our Russian neighbours on this planet how we admire the depth and intensity of feeling that their particular culture has made known to us, and compliment the Dutch for having almost invented the precious quality of religious tolerance. We might send a memorandum to the Chinese, gravely thanking them for having presented the world with the wisdom of Confucius. And who knows? the climate of international relations might possibly improve to the point where the other kind of climate would actually benefit.

 

FAREWELL THE TRUMPETS

A Zedakah Shofar

6 `Make sure you do not do your justice/charity before men, to be seen/admired by them, otherwise -- reward have you not from your Father who [is] in the heavens;<sup>2</sup> whenever, therefore, you do charity, do you not sound a trumpet before you as the pretentious do, in the synagogues, and in the streets, that they may have glory from men; verily I say to you -- they have their reward!<sup>3</sup> `But you, doing charity, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing,⁴ that your charity may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret Himself shall pay you back.

 

This part of Yeshua’s new-Torah discourse seems simple and to a certain degree is so. We are urged not to show off when we are doing the things God has told us to do, but to do them where only God can see them. Those who show off, those who solicit and receive admiration, are already rewarded in the here and now; those who keep it hidden will be seen by God only and rewarded by Him.

            But there are a few details which, when understood, greatly increase our understanding and appreciation of what’s being said. The first is those trumpets. We find it hard to imagine even a flashy nouveau-riche magnate having a trumpeter precede him when he goes to make a gift to the poor. And we are right: that never happened.  Something got lost in translation. The Hebrew word that was translated by “trumpet” is shofar. A shofar is a ram’s horn, blown in Biblical times for religious announcements and on solemn occasions: you can still buy Kosher shofars on the Internet. So the translators thought that was what was meant and, not knowing all the customs, translated it as a trumpet. But the Mishnah tells us that in the Temple there were thirteen shofarot for the collection of alms. These were in fact horn- or trumpet-shaped boxes, broad at the bottom, narrow at the top, where the zedakah or charitable contributions were deposited. And the verb used in this passage was probably leba’avir, “to cause to pass”: “when you do charity, do not call [loudly] for the collection box to be brought to you, in the synagogue or in the street”.  The image that is being evoked, then, is of a showy rich man, in the synagogue or even in the street, calling for a shofar or zedakah box to brought to him so that he might in full gaping view deposit one or more precious gold coins in it. This, obviously, was deprecated, and not only by Yeshua: there was a saying that “he who gives zedakah in secret is greater than Moses”, and in the Temple – and in every city – there was a Vestry of Secret Givers, where alms could be deposited discreetly and respectable people who had come down in life could go for help. It is of such a saying, and of such a practice, that Yeshua is here reminding his audience. 

            And it is interesting that the Matthew’s Greek employs dikaiosunè for the first use and eleèmosunè for the subsequent ones. This shows that the author was sensitive to the shades of meaning in Hebrew (or Aramaic), where zedakah originally meant “justice” but gradually, in Yeshua’s time, was coming to mean “alms” or charity.

            If we now connect this with Yeshua’s “completion” of the old Torah in the direction of inwardness, we see that once again he moves from an emphasis on the act of giving to the mentality of the giver who, if he has fully integrated the new Torah, will do his zedakah discreetly, secretly, not only because ultimately he does it for the love of God but also, if he gives directly, to avoid humiliating the receiver and thus to show his love for that neighbour.

 

 

I am indebted to Samuel Lachs’ A Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament (New York: Ktav, 1987) for much of the information cited above. 

"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"? OH, SURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

AS COMPACT AS YOUR GPS - TRINITY 14

Now imagine 40 years of this, with 80,000 people bitching...

Leonine sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei, et charitatis augmentum ; et, ut assequamur quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. 

1549 / 1662

ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde, through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Cranmer translated this literally, and the revisers of 1662 wisely left the handsome parallellism alone.

Someone wrote that there could almost be no more compact expression of the Christian faith than this Collect. It is brief and shapely, and of an extreme simplicity. We ask God – the Almighty and Everlasting God, the Creator of the Universe – to give us the three qualities that St Paul described as “what remains”: the irreducible core of the Christian’s life, the most basic psychic waybread, that which we survive on as we travel from birth to death in the company of the others who make up the new Israel. We cannot produce them for ourselves, as the old Israel could not produce its own food in the Negev but had to be fed by the hand of God with manna and quails. We need faith, because without it we cannot recognise the God who loves us. We need hope, because without it we have no reason to go on when the going is hard. And we need charity because we are not alone in our journey, but in the company of others as frail and frightened as we ourselves. 

Yet there is more. God has given us promises. (Remember? Last week we ran to them.) The Collects, when they refer to these, do not spell them out, mainly because the form is too compact to allow this. It may be useful to pause and remember what they are. God has given us His love: that’s not a promise because we have it already – whether we are ready to receive it or not. What he has promised us is chayei olam, “eternal life”. The modern Church is embarrassed by this, and tends to insist that we should not (necessarily) think of this as something after death, but that what it really refers to is an eternal dimension of life, potentially present even in this terrestrial life. I don’t want to get into this now, because either way it is something not immediately present to almost all of us, and thus proper material for a promise. 

Either way, though, eternal life has certain characteristics. The chief one is the real, actual presence of God. In the chayei olam we are in the presence of God: of the primal light and joy that brought the Universe into being, but also of the living Father whose love (His very nature) embraces not only the dance of planets but every living human creature. Because imagination is part of our equipment we can, however dimly, imagine what it must be like not, as now, always to be divided from the one we pray to, from the one who loves us, not always to have to decode, to imagine, to piece together His answers: we would open like a flower to the morning sun. 

But how to get there? Such a promise is worth running to, but by what trail? Ah, says the Collect: here is the answer. To get to the promise, to obtain (and the Latin assequamur is even richer, since it also means “to understand”) what is promised, we need to obey God’s commands. But, since He is Love, since love is his very nature, the only way we can do so, the only way we can obey his commands in the spirit in which they were given, is to understand them; and the only way to understand them is in the spirit of love. That we need to love what we are ordered to do sounds at first hearing both odd and rebarbative: kiss the rod, you scum. Not a bit of it. God has given us orders because we are in a dire state and slow on the uptake: orders at least are clear. And since we are wandering through a desert, when we understand that the orders are what will see us through and beyond, we will undoubtedly love them. 

Finally, how do we obey them? What is it we are ordered to do? Like other Collects, this one describes a perfect circle. We obey God’s commands by using, by living, the faith, the hope, and the charity we pray Him to give us. And in all of this, the central figure, the model, the living “command” is Yeshua Ha-moshiach, Jesus the Anointed. If we keep our eyes on him, if we walk with him, if we stick to him like glue, if we – like seconds on a climbing rope – try to follow His moves in the rocks and ledges and gullies of the desert we are traversing, then – in whatever dimension, this side of the grave and/or beyond it, the light and the warmth of our Father’s love is there, open and waiting.

Cry aloud, spare not,
lift up thy voice like a trumpet,
and shew my people their transgression,
and the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet they seek me daily,
and delight to know my ways,
as a nation that did righteousness,
and forsook not the ordinance of their God:
they ask of me the ordinances of justice;
they take delight in approaching to God.

3 Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?
wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?
Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure,
and exact all your labours.
4 Behold, ye fast for strife and debate,
and to smite with the fist of wickedness:
ye shall not fast as ye do this day,
to make your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is it such a fast that I have chosen?
a day for a man to afflict his soul?
is it to bow down his head as a bulrush,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
wilt thou call this a fast,
and an acceptable day to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
to loose the bands of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free,
and that ye break every yoke?
7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,
and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?
when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him;
and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning,
and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee;
the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward.
9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer;
thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.
If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke,
the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
10 and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,
and satisfy the afflicted soul;
then shall thy light rise in obscurity,
and thy darkness be as the noonday:
11 and the Lord shall guide thee continually,
and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones:
and thou shalt be like a watered garden,
and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

Isaiah 58

ALL VOLTAIRE"S FAULT? (OR, COME BACK, WILL BLAKE)

(A friend reminded me of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Blake: this conversation is hardly new. And in France, “C’est la faute à Voltaire” is an old expression, probably as old as the Revolution.)

The award-winning French daily La Croix, reporting on the current meeting at Lourdes of the French Catholic Church’s bishops, mentioned how different the situation now is from that of 50-100 years ago. Then, the problem was anticlericalism: the Church was seen by many as the Enemy, to be reviled, resisted and refused. Now, on the other hand, the problem is indifference.

After a month’s travelling in the United States and Canada, and now returned to la République française, I find myself agreeing ruefully with this statement. Quite apart from political situations and the public personæ driving them – a play with strong characters, a chaotic plot and no visible playwright – I see everywhere human situations of need, urgency, grief, pain and sorrow that cry out for faith where no faith is.

Let me be clear. I do not mean that faith is, in the simple and especially in the simplistic sense, the solution. Where grief strikes or pain, faith will not make them go away. But faith will let such moments, such events, be lived in another fashion, another context, another dimension. Faith lets them be lived in a context of prayer – perhaps even of rebellious and angry prayer, but prayer: which means the context of a relation. In a number of languages there exists a proverb like “A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved”; and it is true that sharing a grief with a true friend lightens the burden. Hence, might sharing it with the loving Father of All not lighten it dramatically?

And yet when I look around me I find that increasingly (and more perhaps in France than in America), having faith is looked upon benignly as an idiosyncrasy, a hobby or what the French call une passion: X does old cars, Y collects stamps, Z does religion. Doubtless such pursuits give X,Y, and Z profound satisfaction, but they are best kept to oneself and not shared with (“forced on”) others. Faith is emphatically not seen as something one needs, still less something the world needs. One gets along perfectly well without it, and looking at Islam gives one less than perfect sympathy for those who live by it, let alone a desire to do so. At best, one is sometimes told, “Yes, well, you have faith: I don’t. That’s just the way it is; sometimes I wish I had it, but I just don’t.” End of subject. Faith, in other words, is something you have or you don’t, like blue eyes: the condition, whether of having or lacking, is definitive and beyond one’s control. And (it is intimated) much the best that way. 

What is one to answer to this? The Church tells us, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly, that we must be disciples and missionaries; but it carefully stops there. And all of us know that in the fairly sophisticated and utterly indifferent world in which we live, move, and have our being, trumpeting the Good News to one’s neighbours will be neither welcome nor efficacious.

There is another way, also favoured by the Church. Be merciful, it says; tirelessly do good to and for others; and even without your mentioning your faith, people will start asking themselves and others what on earth makes you tick? And that can be an opening into the subject.  Unfortunately, I have never seen this happen in real life: the indifferent are not indifferent to good works, but do not question their fons et origo. “She is a truly good woman,” they will say; but they don’t ask what makes her so.

On the other side of the picture you have those who do have faith but give it a bad name. These are to be found in many denominations, from Pentecostal to Roman Catholic. They are absolutely sure of their dogma, which they use as a sledge-hammer to beat their opponents with. They relish combat because it is, as they see it, for Christ. In analogy with “Islamists” I call them Christianists. They do untold harm. They insult and injure for Christ; they threaten and malign for Christ; and sometimes they kill for Christ and gleefully urge their government to do so. They create scornful atheists wherever they go.

So those of us who have faith -- though never enough: “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief” – faith riddled with doubt, faith skating on uncertainty – walk very quietly on the whole, between the Christianist cannon on the one hand and the Indifferent desert on the other, hoping against hope that somehow, sometime, God will do something --  appear on CNN, call Time, throw Kremlin, Tienanmen and White House into the ocean and declare Playtime Over. When disaster happens – Irma, Maria, terrorist attacks, high-rise fires – we react with surprising and touching kindness and even, sometimes,  efficiency; but overall we don’t give the impression of believing that faith and prayer are either essential or a Good Thing in this world.

Perhaps we need to feel more confident. Perhaps we need to stop confusing attitudes to religion with attitudes to sex. Perhaps we need to speak up more. Not to yank others by the shirtfront and yell at them, but to tell the world that we are eyewitnesses – not to that Event two millennia ago, but to the mercies, the spiritual gifts, the joy even in grief, that we personally have received. Eyewitnesses to the good that intelligent charity, discerningly directed love, does. Eyewitnesses to the evil that humiliation brings, whether humiliation of persons or of countries.

After all, those of us old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin Wall know that we had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to Russia and to one Vladimir Putin, and we threw it away. Our great-grandparents had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to a defeated Germany in 1918 and instead gave it the Treaty of Versailles. Even today, we have the chance to approach with discernment, charity and brotherhood the millions of young Iranians who look to us and their sometimes approachable government; we perhaps have a tiny chance left to approach that strange young man in Pyongyang to deal with him without naiveté but without humiliation.

And always, always, the basic force that moves our world – our micro-world and our macro-world – is prayer. With prayer, anything is possible. Without it, nothing profound or lasting is. Shit still happens; God does not micromanage; but we need not be helpless in the face of it.

A GOOD MAN FROM GASCONY

On the feast of St Vincent de Paul, I am happy to reproduce (with thanks) this little introduction to the man and his work from St Matthias, Somerset, N.J. I know few saints with more engaging faces. This portrait is by Simon François of Tours. 

The deathbed confession of a dying servant opened Vincent's eyes to the crying spiritual needs of the peasantry of France. This seems to have been a crucial moment in the life of the man from a small farm in Gascony, France, who had become a priest with little more ambition than to have a comfortable life. 

It was the Countess de Gondi (whose servant he had helped) who persuaded her husband to endow and support a group of able and zealous missionaries who would work among poor tenant farmers and country people in general. Vincent was too humble to accept leadership at first, but after working for some time in Paris among imprisoned galley-slaves, he returned to be the leader of what is now known as the Congregation of the Mission, or the Vincentians. These priests, with vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability, were to devote themselves entirely to the people in smaller towns and villages. 

Later, Vincent established confraternities of charity for the spiritual and physical relief of the poor and sick of each parish. From these, with the help of Saint Louise de Marillac, came the Daughters of Charity, "whose convent is the sickroom, whose chapel is the parish church, whose cloister is the streets of the city." He organized the rich women of Paris to collect funds for his missionary projects, founded several hospitals, collected relief funds for the victims of war, and ransomed over 1,200 galley slaves from North Africa. He was zealous in conducting retreats for clergy at a time when there was great laxity, abuse, and ignorance among them. He was a pioneer in clerical training and was instrumental in establishing seminaries. 

Most remarkably, Vincent was by temperament a very irascible person-even his friends admitted it. He said that except for the grace of God he would have been "hard and repulsive, rough and cross." But he became a tender and affectionate man, very sensitive to the needs of others. 

Pope Leo XIII made him the patron of all charitable societies. Outstanding among these, of course, is the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833 by his admirer Blessed Frédéric Ozanam.