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)

 

KIDDING?

 

We all know the Gospel story of Yeshua calling up a little child, pointing to it, and telling the disciples and passers-by that whoever is not ready to accept the Kingdom (read: kingship) of God like such a child cannot enter there. But what does he mean? Those who have small children love them desperately but in no way and at no time idealise them. They are adorable, selfish, slobby, brattish, quarrelsome and difficult at meals. Yeshua, as a 31-year-old bachelor, might have idealised the child in question; but as one who was Divine as well as very human, it’s doubtful. So, knowing everything about children, how could he say that that is what we should become to be citizens of the Kingdom?

            I think he was thinking first of all about a child’s simplicity. If a little girl is standing by the roadside with her father, waiting to cross, she sticks up her hand without looking, knowing that it will find the big strong secure hand beside her. A small boy who wants something from his parents asks for it. (He may or may not get it, but that doesn’t stop him asking.) Children, in relation to adults they trust, are simple and direct.

            Secondly, children naturally and necessarily experience love as a gift. They know that adults are powerful in ways that they themselves are not, and so they know that love is something they receive. Not necessarily in the form of concrete gifts, but in the form of hugs, comfort, bedtime stories, occasional treats, and Winnie-the-Pooh. If they are fortunate enough to have such love on a daily basis, they take it for granted. One day, if they meet other children who do not have it and are miserable, they will begin not to take it for granted. But meanwhile, they regard it as natural. And return it, naturally. 

            Thirdly, how do they love? First of all, it’s a love of belonging. My Daddy’s mine. My Mummy’s mine. Jackie is my brother. Lucy’s my sister. This is my house. Bingo is my dog. They all belong to me – this I know. What I don’t know, or can’t put into words,  is that I belong to them, and that thus we belong to each other.

 Then, it’s without question. Sometimes they hate Daddy, sometimes they love him, but they don’t doubt him. 

 

            Here, surely, there are lessons for those of us who wondered what the man across from us was talking about when pointing to the little kid. In relation to our Father (who is in heaven), be simple. Be direct. When you receive blessings in whatever form, recognise them as gifts from that large being who loves you. Give him a hug in return. Then go on with your day, and learn to live the  same way with those around you. If it moves, hug it. If it hits you, hit it back smartly and then hug it while you both cry. If you break something, confess and say you’re sorry (and mean it), and He will forgive you. Don’t be clever and doubt him; don’t be clever and try to outsmart him; if you want to be clever, find new ways of loving him and loving your neighbour. Channel your inner 7-year-old.

 

[What, a friend’s voice whispers in my mind, if you have never known this kind of loving happy childhood? If yours was miserable, violent, poor, and abusive? Well, I think that he would tell you a) to realise that you are now loved for real, b) that you can therefore know that trust is possible, and that c) you can therefore tell him all your past miseries, knowing that he will never tell anyone and that he will love you all the more for having told him.]

[And if you are handicapped or sick or in pain, tell him that and listen. You may hear him whisper that he knows what pain is like, he’s been there before you, and that he hopes you’ll remember what he said to the Good Thief on the cross next door. He may not be able to make it all go away, but he will give you without stint, give you strength and endless love.]

Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

NO PEACE FOR THE FAITHFUL

In Luke 24:35, Yeshua appears to the disciples even as Cleopas and his friend finish recounting their experience at the inn in Emmaus. He is suddenly there, in the way he has now, after the Resurrection, but which he had also had from time to time before, of moving in ways not common to ordinary earthlings. He is there, we may imagine with a friendly smile, and he says “Shalom!”

            The commentators tend to make much of this pax vobiscum, this “peace be with you!”, this “Que la paix soit avec vous!” But it was, as it still is, also simply a way of saying Hello. Nevertheless, it does have the unemphasised but real weight of shalom, that vast and wonderful condition we translate, inadequately,  as “peace”. It is the almost cosmic peace that results from perfect harmony, from God being in His heaven and all being right with the world; of everything and everybody in the right place, doing what God intends them to do. The peace that results from that harmony being played in the key of Love. Every little peace we make makes us “peacemakers”, who are Blessed in the Beatitudes.

            It has been a long time since the need for inner peace was as urgent as it is now. Daily, we hear that the need is not only for more nurses and hospital workers, but for psychologists and psychiatrists. The pandemic is wearing us down and Christians are not immune. So I find it alarming to see devout commentators whom I have long admired now once again insisting that no, shalom does not mean well-being, it does not mean comfort, it means taking up your cross and suffering with the Meshiach like a true disciple, it means turning your life upside down. 

            Most people are not starving swineherds with boils. There are those – always too many – who live from day to day in precarious misery, and Christians should help them in every way they can. But to assume, as preachers and commentators regularly do, that the faithful are mainly comfortable rentiers who direly need their billowy parts booted is an error that especially now causes real pain. The churches, as we know, are emptying, and so far the pandemic does not, surprisingly, seem to have reversed that trend. Could it be, in part, because they are no longer offering comfort? They are not donors, purveyors, spreaders of shalom; instead they are unrepentant purveyors of unrest, challenging believers to get off their behinds and make shalom themselves in the world. 

            This is not in itself wrong: as St Teresa of Ávila said, the only hands God has in the world are ours. But when thousands are suffering inward misery, stress, depression, frustration and grief, it might not come amiss for those who bring the word to the faithful and beyond to remind everyone of those other words: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest . . . for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30) 

 

A VAST POEM - DEPTH AND POWER

It is surprising and rewarding to read again the immense ode, the vast laudation, that is the 119^th Psalm. Like many, I used to skip over it: it was long and boring and repetitive, and kept muttering about law and statutes and commandments and testimonies. Gradually, as I spent more time reading Psalms, this one began to get my attention. First I looked up all those words, and realised that while they can, in a pinch, be distinguished, they are in the poetic sense semi-synonyms, and to be taken as such. Then I discovered that the breaking-up of Ps. 119 into 8-line sections was not a quirk of the Vulgate but an original feature, since each section begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is, therefore, either a stanzaic poem or an organised collection of short poems around a central theme: the praise of God’s law.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who reminded us Christians that the law, as here seen and praised, is not the law as we tend to imagine it. When a Christian thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, it’s a criminal court he thinks of. He tends to see himself as the accused in the box, invariably Guilty and able to hope at most for mercy and forgiveness. When the Psalmist thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, he sees a civil court, with himself as the plaintiff and “the ungodly” as the defendants. But beneath that level of argument, there is a more moving vision, which shows very clearly in Ps. 119: God’s law is a clearly-traced path which has allowed the poet to emerge from a trackless and lethal desert – imagine the Nefud in Lawrence of Arabia. Finding such a trail saves one’s life.

Reading Ps. 119 in this way is already deeply satisfying and inspiring. But as Christians, we have a further way to read it that is little short of vertiginous. If we come to it after reading both the Gospels and the letters of St Paul, we need to use a new key: for the new version of Judaism that is the faith of the followers of Yeshua Meshiach, the resurrected Meshiach (Christos) does not preach, or even reform, the Law: he is the Law. The Christian does not obey the Law: his true relation to it is what Paul describes: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”(Galatians 2:20)

As we used to say in the Sixties, this blows your mind. But now try to read Ps. 119 in this way – with Christ as the Law, and all His deeds and sayings as the commandments and testimonies etc. In a sense, the whole Psalm becomes an elaboration of, and a commentary on, Paul’s stupendous text. Nothing of the original reading is lost: as Yeshua himself said, the law is not cancelled but accomplished. It’s just that a vast and dizzying new perspective is added, so that the poem becomes even more profound and inspiring. 

Rembrandt: the Risen Christ

WHAT ROUGH BEAST

France, where I live, is currently caught up in an extraordinary political crisis: the Yellow Vests. Triggered by the announcement of a sales tax jump on diesel fuel for cars – billed as an ecological move but mainly to help out the budget --, a protest movement went super-viral on Facebook and Twitter, and quickly spilled into the streets. Wearing the yellow safety vests mandatory in French cars, the protesters began blocking roads, motorways, traffic circles and toll-gates; and, as French protests will, it all culminated in monster demos on the Champs Elysées in Paris. Uniquely, though, this movement has no structure and no leaders, and therefore no one the government can talk to. Moreover, its demands are as varied as its makeup: they quickly went beyond fuel prices to anything anyone feels mad about. Lower prices, lower taxes, higher minimum wage, ecology, all the way to the resignation of President Macron. And there is such a general disgust with “politics” that anyone in the movement who proposes actually talking to the government to negotiate something immediately receives death threats. Obviously, the parties of the extreme right and left who would love to co-opt the Yellow Vests are being told to get stuffed. It’s an extraordinary moment of universal rage (75-85% of the French support the movement, at least in the comfortable anonymity of opinion polls) that combines real anguish, especially economic, with nihilism; while the big demos are being briskly and gleefully taken over by the “Black Blocks” and other violent urban-warfare and pillage instigators.

I’ve written this long introduction to set the scene for what really strikes me in the whole affair: the complete silence of the Church and the churches. Christians have for years felt a little uncomfortable about St Paul’s exhortation to treat legitimate government as a gift from God. In Holland during WW II, as the German occupiers put the boot in, the Dutch sarcastically sang the German hymn’s adaptation of the Pauline text: Die Obrigkeit ist Gottes Gabe. And both the Dutch, fighting against Spanish King Philip II’s legitimate but tyrannical rule, and the French, creating their iconic revolution and beheading their elites, have proved that they are not slavishly obedient by nature. However, in a time when smartphones and social networks are threatening to destroy every sort of social cohesion and sending the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, there should be no ambiguity at all about a Christian reaction to a nihilist tsunami.

Christ made it clear that his kingship was not “of this world”, and that the radical life he proposed considered social and political change not as a goal but at most as a natural result. He left social and political structures intact, telling his followers to pay Caesar’s taxes and, if they owned slaves, to be good masters. The conversion he envisaged would change individuals, and thus make certain kinds of behavior unthinkable. Meanwhile, almost any form of social structure can be made to work decently if the human beings operating it are filled with the love of God.

This said, though, Churchill was right in saying that democracy was the worst possible form of government with the exception of all the others. In creating modern democratic society, the Enlightenment has played as great a part as Christianity, and the rational safeguards democratic institutions present against wickedness (and sometimes even against stupidity) represent a treasure not lightly to be put at risk. In no way are they perfect: among today’s great challenges are the equitable incorporation of ecological change, the curbing of financial mega-greed, the encouragement of citizen initiatives and volunteer projects, and the management of communication. But in all these areas the Church and the churches ought to be leaders: not by making themselves into yet more NGOs but by insisting on the position of each individual in relation to God. Can you, John X Doe, look the Meshiach who died for love of you in the face and behave as you are behaving, speak as you are speaking and tweet as you are tweeting? He loves you and needs you to help fix this gravely ill dot in the galaxy. He is standing at your door and knocking: are you making too much noise, or reading too many texts, to notice? Or care?  

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS

“Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20).  This text had long fascinated me, like its counterpart “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). And then, recently, I got an inkling of its meaning, or at least of one of its meanings. Life, in its daily round, had been weighting me down, and it was all beginning to feel like one of the grimmer bits from Ecclesiastes. I prayed, as usual, to be taught the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer that prays even when we are not praying; and then, in a few moments, I remembered what I had written about a long time ago: our doors and shutters.

In the Angelus, we pray that God may “pour Thy grace into our hearts”. I’ve always loved that verb and that image. And it occurred to me that in fact that pouring is going on all the time. We live in a perpetual monsoon of grace: pouring out grace upon those He loves is what God does. And when we feel deprived of it, it is usually we who are, with a complex system of shutters and barriers, keeping it out.

If, for once, you don’t, you wake up in the morning and, as a Carthusian put it, you savour the immense gift you are being given, at this precise moment: one whole day. A whole day, of life, of love, of work, of thanksgiving. You give thanks, and you pray that you may not in this day close off your heart and keep out the outpouring that is heading for you. And as you do so, you can hear the faint creak of shutters opening. Some of them are old, fairly massive and jammed shut: they need real effort to dislodge. Some are charming, and part of you opens them with regret: they let through just the tiniest ray of light, in which dust motes danced so prettily; but they too can and must be flung wide.

And as they open, the tide of grace flows in, and you are suddenly filled with a morning sunshine of joy – which will last you all day, if you keep strong winds from closing the shutters again. And as this happens and you revisit that joy from hour to hour, you realise that the less of “you” gets in the way of the flood, the happier the real you will be.

It is “I” that keeps God out all the time. So if I can get “I” out of the way, then grace, i.e. God, can come in. And the result will be, in at least one sense, like Galatians 2:20: “Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me.” If I can empty the clutter and open the shutters, there will at last be room for Him.

IN THE CLOUD? (SCARY. COMFORTING.)

Reading about Moses, about the Lord moving into Solomon’s Temple, and about the Transfiguration, there is that sense of Immensity suddenly moving right in. The Cloud, in each case, is hard to imagine: something like ball lightning only MORE, more intense, huger, and not going away. This is how the Creator manifests Himself to very occasional, very chosen and doubtless very terrified little humans. 

It made me think about the insanity of scale. I have shown before, on this blog, the current astronomers’ map of the Universe, above, with its Googols of constellations and Googolplexes of planets. If (and there is no reason to assume it’s not so) the God we woship created all this, how --- the stammering consciousness asks itself --- can this be the same God whom we call Father, to whom we pray about our little souls, and in whose presence Brother Lawrence so cheerfully cooked potatoes? When I think about this, my synapses very nearly short out. Of course, one can say that this is yet one more proof that Christianity is nonsense. Judaism, at least, preserves a sense of scale in that God is concerned more with a people than with individuals; Islam seems to be more about trumpeting God’s infinite greatness than about any interest of His in small human matters; and there is Christianity teaching us to worry about what the Creator of the Universe (see map) thinks of what we said to our spouse last night. When you fully take that on board there is the sound and smell of burning connectors. 

And yet. And yet. Keep thinking. Imagine, not that we Earthlings are merely an accidental breadcrumb on the skirt of the Universe, but that we inhabit something deliberately unique. Perhaps SETI is doomed to failure. Perhaps we really are alone. Is that depressing? Not necessarily. Imagine that this gorgeous tiny blue jewel of a planet was created by a joyous Creator in an outlying corner of the Whole, as an experiment, as a laboratory where, over the millennia, something was made to grow that could think, could react to Him, could create in its turn – Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. 

But He too saw the insanity of scale – well, let’s say the extremity of scale. So first He chose a people, and communicated with them in ways they could (just) understand. And they behaved, of course, as humans will. But/And, in the end, He saw they were ready for a new way to bridge the scale gap. And He created, for and with and out of His Son, the Second Person of His triune Being, the Incarnation. An ordinary human that humans could talk to. Incredible! I remember my colleague Irving Layton, a wonderful Canadian Jewish poet, saying to me, “But Roger, Jesus is my Jewish brother. My brother farts. Does God fart?” What could I say? “Yes, Irving.”

And so, yes, we have the map of the Universe; but we also have Yeshua bar Yosef, the builder and rabbi from Nazareth in Galilee (an ordinary town, now a city, been there, my son-in-law comes from there). And now ordinary fishermen and their wives, Roman sergeants, unpopular tax collectors, quiet scholars and provincial hookers could talk to – to HIM. To YHWH. To the Creator. He healed people. He had moods. He cried for his friend. He was loved by at least one man and one woman. 

Yes, well. And then, being human, they fucked it up. Exactly as he knew they would, they killed him. So much for that experiment. But no. Because in that unimaginable night of Easter, He – now again all of He, one again within the Triune God -- killed Death. Not death – death is still around and will take us all, for a while. But Death. 

And so the experiment continues, at a new level. The Universe is still there, unfolding (as Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said) as it should; our little blue ball is still there, with us humans busily overcrowding it; and (and this is the point) he, Yeshua bar Yosef, Yeshua Meshiach, Yeshua the Anointed, Yeshua Christos, having risen from the dead, is still here also. Here to be talked to. Here to be loved, here to be confided in, here to heal broken hearts. Here as human, here as God. Here to be communicated with in every Communion, in every Mass. Being the little stumbling creatures we are, could we ask for more? The synapses glow again, the energy flows. Gratias agimus tibi, propter magnam gloriam tuam.   

THIS IS, WELL, GRAVE

Recently, a columnist in the NY Times recounted the debt owed, not by Nixon to Roger Ailes but by Ailes to Nixon. It was the President who taught Ailes the value – the commercial, publicity value – of cultural resentment. This phrase has stuck in my mind, as I believe it represents almost the entirety of Donald Trump’s continuing support. None of the voters in the hinterland believe, at this stage, that TrumpCare will improve their health; none, I imagine, believe that their economic prospects will genuinely improve with The Donald in charge. So why do they go on supporting him?

The answer, I believe, is very simple. BECAUSE HE HATES LIBERALS. And he allows us to hate liberals. And to feel, not guilty but good about hating liberals. The answer, my friends, is Cultural Resentment. And it is very close to being the ONLY answer. The whole of the Trump base is about being not for anything,  but against something. Against Hillary: the glee of shouting “LOCK HER UP!” Against the effete Europeans and Asians and All Those Other Guys who believe, against all good common-sense-over-a-beer-in-the-pub, that the planet is heating up bigly. Against all those PC assholes in Massachusetts and California. Against all those smartasses who are so proud of their useless Education and who wave their f*cking Degrees at us, and take away our jobs. Against, against, against, against. Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take it Anymore! Rage, rage, aganst the rising of the light.

Can anything be done against this? I’m not sure. It may just have to sputter and squib itself out, gracelessly, mendaciously, offensively and miserably. To me, it is genuinely sinful, because it exchanges Christ for Trump, love for hatred, discernment for stupidity. The pleasure of hate is a real pleasure, but none the less sinful for that. It corrodes, it rots, it ends in a whirlwind of emptiness. And there, Hell awaits. Lord, have mercy. These are your children. They know not what they do.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Risen Christ

O MY PEOPLE

(7)It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter [or: the Defender] will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. 8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: 9 of sin, because they believe not on me; 10 of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; 11 of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. (John 16)

Deliver us from evil. And then a youngish man detonates his backpack filled with a nail-bomb, and takes with him to some imagined martyrs’ paradise the lives of 22 children, the health and cheerfulness of 60 others, and the life’s joy of countless parents and siblings. And the eternal question knocks, like the Gestapo, at the door of our hearts: how can a loving God permit this?

Change optics, as we say nowadays. Try to get into God’s mind. How can men do this to each other? I gave them life; I gave them love; I gave them my Son, who healed them and died for them; and still they do such things. What more can I give them?

They say I can do anything. They are wrong: I can do almost anything but I cannot be other than I am. I cannot go against my own nature. My deepest self is Love. The Life my creation imagined for them is a lifelong, sustained and sustaining love between them and me. Such a love cannot exist if it is coerced. If love is what we are to have; if love is what we are to be; it must be freely given and freely returned.

I teach them this, and they turn away. I urge them this, and they hate. I show them this, and they kill. They crucify. They torture. When my Son was with them, he healed them by taking their grief upon himself. He identified with them, by choice. He taught them that when they fed, watered and helped each other, they were doing it to him. Now, when they torture, bomb and kill, they are still doing it him. And to me.

This is Love’s vulnerability; this is my vulnerability, my only one. Every child they wound is my child. Every innocent they kill is my child, crucified. Can they not see my tears that fall like galaxies?

The Prince of this world, the Prince of Darkness, is judged. Is judged always already, now and for all time. But he is not yet utterly defeated. Just as we are needed for love, so are we needed for battle. The Spirit, that marvellous third Person, is our Defender. Why is not believing in Him a sin? Because it is the refusal of ultimate Love. Because it leaves the way open for the Prince of Darkness. Not just into my soul, but into all the souls my soul touches, that might have been pulled out of the drowning-ocean by my help. Yes, we are free. Free to return Love, or not. But it is not all one.

The Spirit, our Defender, is the Spirit of Love. If he reproves the world, if he judges and condemns the Prince, it is simply by being here, by manifesting the hideous contrast. The Prince kills twelve-year-old girls before their parents’ eyes, and smiles. And reproves us thereby. Love is here, it exists, it died for us, it was resurrected for us, it showed us that it is immortal and eternal and, in the end, victorious. Whose side are we on?

Whose side are we on? It is no longer a game. If it ever was. It is no longer an intellectual debate. If God says who is not with me is against me, he is not being a bully: he is stating the most painful truth about Love. Love is victorious; Love is powerless. He has given us his Son; he has given us his Spirit to be our Defender. But without us the job canot be done. He is not bullying us: he is begging us. Whose side are we on?