TEMPEST IN A CHALICE?

François Fillon

             France is a curious country. The French themselves often talk about “l’exception française”, and a foreigner is from time to time brought up short by actions or reactions that seem entirely peculiar. A recent example followed the guest appearance on the TV evening news of François Fillon, the presidential candidate who was the big winner of the conservative primary. Fillon wants to reform the French economy in ways that recent governments (in one of which, Sarkozy’s, he was Prime Minister) have not been able to do because of massive resistance, mainly by the trade unions. He is an impeccably-dressed gentleman who enjoys racing vintage cars, and he would like to be the French counterpart of Gerhard Schroeder, the social democrat who reformed the German economy in 2002-5. Fillon is bright, writes well, and has a sense of humour. And when asked about his intended, and controversial, reform of the social-security and medicare systems, he pointed out that while the cost of these systems, and the national debt-level, made reform absolutely necessary, that he would see that it did not hurt the vulnerable. “I’m a Gaullist, and what’s more, a Christian,” he said, “so obviously I will not initiate any policies that are harmful to human dignity.”

            I was watching the interview, and found this remark understandable and unexceptionable. Imagine my surprise when, in the five days following, I saw it provoke a storm of media scandal. Many Frenchmen seemed outraged that a candidate for the Presidency should say out loud that he is a Christian. Shameful! Scandalous! To a foreigner, the reaction was incomprehensible. Until I heard it discussed by a radio columnist this morning, a woman who on Saturday mornings spends 5 minutes explaining religions to the atheists and agnostics who make up most of that station’s audience. She pointed out once again “l’exception française”. Angela Merkel, she said, had maintained that her policy of welcoming refugees was solidly connected with her Christian faith (she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor); and in Germany, she said, that didn’t raise an eyebrow. But in France, she insisted, it simply could not have been uttered. Why? Because of the tradition, dating from the Revolution and reinforced in the late 19^th century, of laïcité or secularism. This insists that religion is strictly a private affair and must never be allowed into any public political discourse; and as the columnist said, you have to remember that this tradition of secularism in France was created, maintained and extended in a battle against the Catholic Church.

            Well, I understood the storm a little better, but I found it a saddening experience. Fillon was perfectly sincere, perfectly well-meaning, and for him respect for human dignity is the natural and proper outcome of a Christian faith. To be reviled for this day in, day out, by otherwise intelligent and not dishonest politicians is a spectacle that does France no credit.  

THROUGH THE DESERT

   I have long been fascinated by the lengthy Psalm 119, that curious love-song to the Law. One of its most striking features is the repetition of certain words: "Law", "commandments", "statutes" and "testimonies". They keep turning up in slightly different contexts, and strongly suggest a formal pattern. When I started looking them up on the Web, I found there are eight in all, and
this useful downloadable PDF lists them in Hebrew, in the usual translation, and gives the places and ways they are used by the Psalmist, as well as his responses to each.
 
   The overall impression one gets is indeed that of a formal song, but a formal song of passionate gratitude to God the Lawgiver: the gratitude of a nomadic desert people for a signpost, for a clear path through the wilderness, a path that shows shifting sands to be avoided, oases where one may rest and be refreshed, and at the end a promised land of milk (protein and fat, hard to come by in the Nefud) and honey (the universal sweetener before sugar, giving energy and pleasure). As so often, it teaches a Christian how absolutely the Old Alliance belongs to his own faith as well. I may believe that there is a new Torah, and that a living guide is even more precious than an Ordnance Survey map; studying such a Psalm in any depth explains why the new Torah in no way banishes or replaces the old but fulfils it: not an iota or punctuation mark of the old shall be eliminated, it keeps its full and glorious value.
 
   Moreover, one thing the Fathers teach us is that beyond studying the Psalms there is another approach:  praying the Psalms. For some psalms, this is both simple (though not necessarily easy) and evident: the Penitential Psalms and the Psalms of Praise, for instance. For others, it is much more difficult. Sometimes it's harder because of the spiritual depth and complexity: Psalm 22, even without its immense Christian resonance, has a range of thought and emotion that takes years to absorb fully into prayer. And what about 119? Its very length and insistence makes it difficult to pray: we tend to think, 'OK, enough already, I get the point, no need to go on and on . . .' The change-ringing of the terms for God's Word is alien to our ideas of both poetry and prayer.

   So how to pray Psalm 119? I think the answer lies in the list I cited above, in the notes on the full range of meanings attached to each term; and in a constant application of all these meanings to one's own life and experience. For instance, simply following and meditating upon the mishpatim, to us almost inexplicably glossed as 'judgements, ordinances', leads us to the insight that such judgements are those that express and echo God's loving-kindness by their justice. And that, in turn, sheds light upon on the one hand Angela Merkel's decision to receive positively the greatest possible number of refugees in Germany, and other hand my wife's decision to go and visit our 96-year-old peasant neighbour who lives a placid old age but is happy to be remembered. If one admits to one's reading of Psalm 119 such background and such echoes, praying  the psalm becomes both possible and a delight.

THE HARDLY, BARELY PRAYABLE

Reading Thomas Friedman’s excellent New York Times columns from Dubai recently, I was struck by his point that for the first time, the countries of the Middle East can no longer simply blame the problems on “the West” but are, or will be, forced to recognise that ISIS, or Daech, is a homegrown monster that calls into question everyone’s understanding of what and who they are and intend to be. And seeing the degeneration of Sunni-Shia relations in the area, I’m reminded of, say, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 and the fact that, 400 years after that, my mother still refused to buy meat from our town’s Catholic butcher. We Christians have been there, done that. Yes, torn the other guys limb from limb, cut their throats, decapitated them, drowned them in barrels, the lot. It makes one think about how we got out of that. I suspect it involved three or four successive and in part cumulative factors.

First, strong monarchies and symbolic power. When I first visited Versailles, I found it excessive and vulgar. Only later did I realise the gigantic and brilliant public-relations exercise it had been. Louis XIV accomplished, with Versailles, the astonishing feat of convincing provincial seigneurs, who had real power in the form of private armies, that the number of feet they were allowed to stand from the King’s bed at his morning levée – in other words, symbolic power – was more important to their well-being than being lords of Lorraine.  That began the drain away from murderous mobs run by ambitious warlords.

Second, the Enlightenment. That curious and formless movement toward knowledge in harness with civilised behaviour, that second Renaissance that briefly celebrated balance and harmony and went on to apply thought to emotion, modified faith by making it unreasonable to maim and kill for its sake. In the time, and the world, of Diderot and Voltaire, faith was increasingly what one lived in one’s private relation to God; the Church was where those of faith came together, but society as a whole was supposed to be directed by reasonable and civilised behaviour. This, of course, had a few serious birth-pains involving guillotines and terror, but in the end it proved irresistible because, like democracy, it was the worst conceivable system except for all the alternatives.

Third, the Industrial Revolution. This almost-unimaginable J-curve of social and material change, which is still going on, although for many it intensified their faith (think of the Oxford Movement), made the habits of the Enlightenment – faith as something you might propagate but you did not maim or kill for – not only attractive but essential. It also continued another aspect of the Enlightenment: atheism, the failure of faith when touched by reason, grew apace and from then on faith could no longer ignore it.

So, now. What about now? In large swathes of the world, Christian faith is being threatened by real, physical enemies who still consider faith something worth maiming and killing for. How do we, and should we, react? On a worldly level, Friedman, I think, is right: containment to stop the horror spreading, and amplification to help good developments where they are starting to happen. But what do we do as Christians? Well, in many churches there is an admirable movement to help fellow-believers in that part of the world. But beyond that? Yesterday at a dinner party I heard some devout people’s reaction: No truck with Islam in any form, it’s an evil masquerading as a religion, maybe it was decent once but that was centuries ago, etcetera etcetera.

It made me reflect that in the various churches I have worshipped in since 2001, not once have I heard prayers for those we feel, and often know, to be our enemies. I have heard prayers for the Queen; I have heard prayers for various Presidents and their governments; I have heard many prayers for persecuted Christians everywhere; but I have not heard prayers for the members of ISIS; I have not heard prayers for Vladimir Putin; I have not heard prayers for Boko Haram. Let us ponder this very seriously. And reread Matthew 5:43-48, in the full knowledge that for those in the field that is almost impossibly difficult, but that for us, for us in safety and in prayer, it is probably crucial.

IMAGINE

If parson lost his senses,

And people came to theirs . . .

Thus began, in the early 20^th century, a moving poem by Ralph Hodgson in defence of mistreated animals. The opening played through my head in reading the news about the Middle East and new anti-terrorist defences. ‘If leaders lost their senses, And people came to theirs . . .’ I thought, what might happen? What might we construct? And in a John Lennon mood, I began to Imagine.

Imagine three great monotheist religions, living in mutual respect and affection. Imagine Muslims and Christians according Judaism the respect due to the Eldest Brother, the one who was first chosen by God, the one who received the Law, the one who, with the self-confidence of his seniority, is still the only one who dares argue with God. Imagine Jews and Muslims according to Christianity the affection due to the Second Brother, the one who dared go further than the Nation and the Law, to extend God’s love to all humanity and summarize the Law as absolute Love. Imagine Jews and Christians according to Islam the respect and affection due to the Youngest Brother, the one who lives a faith summed up in Obedience, who keeps his Ramadan and, with the fire of youth, dares to believe in unadulterated values.

Imagine the nations of a vast region on the planet, recognizing that they all contain these three faiths and their respective grandeurs, and that nevertheless they all have to live in a modern world where many could not care less about religion. The vast reserve of faith they contain acts as a leaven, of respect and affection toward neighbours, and of a consciousness that there is a vertical dimension to life as well as a horizontal one. The respect and affection will furnish one of their peoples’ permanent needs, security. Meanwhile, the vast reserve of ingenuity and honesty released by this peaceful coexistence turns bomb-inventors’ talent to creating clever irrigation schemes to make the desert flower, and sees small-scale financing help the poor into trades both decent and profitable. The peoples’ other great need, modest prosperity, becomes attainable also. The three religions’ values, which tie in quite well with the secular ones of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, are now, combined, so powerful that beyond the borders of the Middle East they restrain the inordinate greed of stock trading and the corrosive political hatred that paralyzes polarized democracies. Bills for the common good get passed, elections take on the cheerful variety of football championships, prayer is no longer seen as a divisive group label but as an act of primary value, all faiths can wear their distinctive attributes openly and be respected for them, and boarding an aeroplane becomes as simple and agreeable as it was sixty years ago.

Imagine – since Christianity is the faith this blog is most concerned with – a Church that is one house with many mansions, that has healed its great schisms, between East and West, between Catholic and Protestant, and that attracts the intelligent young to serve in it. It would have many churches, and many different forms of worship to suit the various temperaments of the faithful. There would be cheerful family churches with guitars, and tall, still churches of awe and Latin beauty; churches that know the Bible by heart and churches that distil the finest points of liturgical symbolism; churches that live in permanent prayer and churches that help and defend the disadvantaged in their daily lives; churches that study the history of the faith and churches that find joy in daily conversation with synagogues and mosques, comparing ways of loving God.

None of this, says the Father we all worship, is impossible.

The image above is take from an article on the House of One, a joint place of worship for the three faiths being built in Berlin.