A SECRET IMMENSITY

“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

 

This saying is of measureless profundity. We live several lives simultaneously. Our daily life with its tasks and pleasures and frustrations and pains; our emotional life with its joys and griefs; our intellectual life with its searches and discoveries; and our religious life, our life as a child of God. This last is too often neglected as it does not, like daily life, obtrude and trip us up. But it is our absolute life, the breath of ultimate life, love, sin and death. And as we grow, in age but also in the questioning of our place in the scheme of things, it is of this life that the importance swells and increases. And it is there that one day we confront this saying, telling us that our life is hid with Christ in God. 

            At first sight it seems absolutely mysterious and incomprehensible. So, to understand it, let us turn to that Doctor Ecclesiæ, Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI. In the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, he explains the necessity and the immensity of Jesus’ Passion and of the Cross. In the Cross, he says, God opens himself completely to man, makes himself definitively accessible in an act of ultimate love. And this complete and utter gift that took place once, in real historical time and in a real geographical place, is still taking place: it is repeated in each Mass and Communion. 

            This is stupendous and very nearly beyond understanding, if we take it seriously and try to get our mind and soul around it. It explains that other saying, “I am with you till the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). And if we keep it in mind when we reread that saying in Colossians, we realise that this truth is true in both directions: he is with us till the end of time, but we are also with him. 

            After the interim period of his appearances following the Resurrection, he leaves the disciples, and is ‘taken up to Heaven’ in the cloud that always signals the presence of the Deity. He rejoins the Father, and sends the Holy Spirit; but he is still with them, with us, till the end of time. What Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians is that through the gift of the Meshiach, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Him even unto his presence in the Trinity. This, I think, is what it means that our life is hid with Christ in God. If we entrust ourselves completely to him, he draws us up to him within the Trinity, within the presence of God. And that life, then, is our ‘eternal life’, as Ratzinger explains it: a life no longer subject to time and death.

            The more you ponder this in meditation, the more immense and moving it becomes. It turns everything around. That touching verse, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14) now glows in both directions: for we are now also invited to make our home with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

            Finally, our life is hid – it is in the worldly sense a secret life, a hidden life. Although it may shine through our eyes, the world of humdrumlies mostly will not recognise it or comprehend it. So we should probably be ready at least to try to explain it, however difficult that may be. But in the meantime, let us taste and savour fully the mystery and the glory that is offered to us.

Image: the Holy Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 - c. 1430)

 

 

THE PRAYER OF THE HEART

I have been moved by, and reflecting on, a passage from the Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love on the subject of the Prayer of the Heart. The author (anonymous as are all Carthusian authors) writes that in order to attain the Prayer of the Heart, we must confront all our own weaknesses: not to attempt to conquer them but to acknowledge and live them completely in our relation to God. Then God can enter into them and transform them. Is this last, he wonders, a kind of second thought on God’s part, or is it a fundamental dimension of the divine order?

“Even in the natural order, all true love is a victory of weakness. Love does not consist in dominating, possessing, or imposing one’s will on someone. Rather love is to welcome without defences the other as he or she comes to meet me. In return, one is sure of being welcomed unreservedly by the other without being judged or condemned, and without invidious comparisons. There are no contests of strength between two people who love each other. There is a kind of mutual understanding from within which a reciprocal trust emerges.

            Such an experience, even if inevitably imperfect, is already a very compelling one. Yet it is but a reflection of a divine reality. Once we really begin to believe in the infinite tenderness of the Father, we are, as it were, obliged to descend ever more fully and joyfully into a realm in which we neither possess nor understand nor control anything.

xxx

Thus, almost without being aware of it, we enter into communion with the divine life. The relation between Father and Son in the Spirit is at a level completely beyond our comprehension, a perfect embodiment of weakness transformed into communion.

            In a way closer to ourselves, this intimate tenderness of the thrice-holy God is revealed in the relationship between the incarnate Son and his Father. We cannothelp but be struck by the serenity and sense of infinite security with which Jesus quietly proclaims that he has nothing of his own, and that he can do nothing but what he sees the Father doing. What man would accept such powerlessness? Nevertheless, this is the path we must follow if we wish to live in the depths of our heart as God has made it, and as he transfigures it through the death and Resurrection of his Son.” (86-7)

I find this remarkable, both in its depth and in its conceptual simplicity. It goes well beyond the monastic life: indeed it may be more accessible in some ways to those living in the world and, perhaps, in relationships of human love.

            A perennial difficulty for us in these latter times is that we do not seem to have the direct access to the Father that Jesus had. And yet – if we think we do not, is that not because of us? Do we not, perhaps, try too hard to do everything ourselves, try to be better persons, try to do this better and to refrain from that more consistently? I think there is perhaps a two-stage development we need to learn to follow. The first stage is “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” That takes care of our compulsive need to fight our own battles and confront our inner and outer Amalekites all on our own. The second stage goes further and says “First let the Kingdom of God seek you, and find you, and all these things will turn up” – at least in so far as they are (as the Prayer Book says) “requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul”.

            A final subject is that last sentence of the quotation: God’s transfiguration of our heart through the death and Resurrection of his Son. That needs a lot more thought: I’ll try to get back to it at a later stage.  

The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 1994,2006). Readily available through Amazon.

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY

At a chilly and quiet Mass on Saturday evening (in an exquisite old chapel built after an epidemic  centuries ago), I found myself very forcefully struck by the power of the Communion – what the President of the United States called ‘the little cracker’. And meditating on it afterwards, it occurred to me that that power comes from a threefold source (quite proper for a Trinitarian Godhead).

In the first place, Lord, here it is I who dare to confront Thee, to come into Thy presence. In the old days you came to Communion only if you were properly and officially shriven, and you were told that if you took Communion in an unworthy state, you would ‘eat and drink unto yourself damnation’. For reasons I’ll explain below, this is quite properly not insisted upon nowadays, but the coming into the Presence as, after all, a bit of a worm and no man, a somewhat wretched specimen all things considered, is pretty good cheek, or would be if Thou hadst not specifically invited us in our full decrepit creepitude. So here I am, before Thee, Lord, and Thou givest Thyself to me. I take Thee and I am redeemed – by the skin of my teeth. Completely overwhelming.

Secondly, here am I and – as Thou promisedst to those who have real faith, however wobbly and bumpy – Thou comest to take up Thy dwelling within me, even in the most basic physical dimension. I as Thy cottage in the South of France? I am fulfilled beyond imagining.

Thirdly – and here I come to a good reason not to insist too strongly on being in a ‘worthy’ state – what I am given is waybread, manna: a strange food unlike any other, that will strengthen me, uphold me, and see me through the next bit of wilderness on my winding wilful way to Thee. Astounding. I am fed. I can go out of here and go on.

And all of this at once, in ten seconds, in something the wind could blow away. I came out trembling. With the winter cold, but mainly in awe.

FOUND IN TRANSLATION?

 

                                                                         Robert Stamps                              Fr Alain Bandelier

It isn't often that a translation, or an adaptation, of a text -- especially a poem -- is as good as the original; and even rarer that it's better. But this is what I discovered when I decided to research a Communion hymn we sometimes sing in our Catholic village Mass here in the South of France, and which is one of the rare ones I love (post-Vatican-II RC liturgies have strange, meandering hymns in minor keys, perhaps as a dim memory of Gregorian chant?). It is called "Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains" -- God has put his body in our hands. And as I pursued it on the Web, I found that it was an adaptation of an American hymn by Methodist minister and theologian Robert J. Stamps, called "God and Man at Table Are Sat Down". As I listened to it sung by Stamps' friend Jeff Ling, I recognised the tune and thought it a fine hymn; but not up to the French version. Researching that, I found that it had been written by Father Alain Bandelier, an elderly priest active in the Foyers de la Charité, a world-wide network of RC lay persons living in community. I think he should have received a modest prize for this quite lovely hymn.

Venez du fond des temps, du bout du monde,
Cœurs transpercés par la soif et la faim, 
Ouvrez la porte de la joie profonde:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Pourquoi creuser le puits des eaux dormantes,
Dans le désert où vous marchez en vain?
Entrez dans le jardin des eaux qui chantent:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Ce soir de l’eau se change en vin de noce,
Sur la montagne on multiplie le pain.
La vigne en fleur nous donne un fruit précoce:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Geste posé au milieu de l’histoire,
Question posée au bord de nos chemins,
Secret posé au fond de la mémoire:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Le cœur se vide au cœur de ce silence,
Le cœur se brûle au feu de ce lieu saint,
Le cœur s’éveille au cœur de la présence: 
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Parole ouverte comme une blessure,
Mots d’un amour qui n’aura pas de fin,
Le Verbe se fait chair et nourriture:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Marie nous donne Dieu comme une enfance,
La multitude est le fruit de son sein;
Voici l’Epouse et la nouvelle alliance:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.


You can find the printed music here.

ADVENT 4: A GIFT

On the Fourth Sunday in Advent I was at Mass in the rather beautiful village church of Milhars, a cut above most others in the region, perhaps because of the proximity of the large ancient château perched above it. And in the silence following the Communion it occurred to me that each Eucharist repeats the entire story of the Gospel.

At the moment of Consecration, the Incarnation repeats itself. Our Lord and heavenly father, the almighty and everlasting God, again sends his Son to take matter upon himself, et homo factus est in the Body and Blood on the altar.

At the moment of Communion, his preaching life, his healing life, and his crucifixion are compressed into a brief but extraordinarily intense moment: at one and the same time we understand his action, we are healed by his touch, and we crush him in the Host.

And in our subsequent renewal, in our fresh energy of loving, his Resurrection is repeated: our inward life shines with an Easter glory.

This thought is, I am sure, present in the work of mystics and Church Fathers; but in this case it was given to me in a few minutes of quiet, awaiting the Solemn Benediction in a French village church. What a Christmas gift!