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)

 

 

A POET AND A FRIEND

He has always been my favourite saint. Not only was he the poet among the disciples; Yeshua loved him particularly, doubtless for a reason. And – perhaps as a result of that – he was the only one who stuck around right to the very bloody end. He almost always pictured standing by, under, the Cross, together with Myriam. All the others had skedaddled, even Peter, who had been ashamed of denying Him and had wept bitterly. He had wept, but not remained. Only young Yochanan was still there. It was to him that Yeshua entrusted His mother, a (presumed) widow and thus to be cared for. He and his brother Ya’akov (James to us Anglophones) had in their teenage years been nicknamed Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder”, presumably because of their fiery temperament. And he wrote his memoirs of his friend at the end of a long life, thinking back to those magical years and distilling from them, through the alembic of his memory, the finest and loveliest of all testimonies. He may or may not have written the apo-calypsa, the revelations or visions of the Last Things, but he may well have done --  he was a poet, after all, and as poetry the Bible’s last book is as vast, as fireful and as moving as the Northern Lights.

            What has John to teach us? How to think of him? What seems to unite all the things we know about him was that a) he was a man of heart, not a sophist or a calculator, and b) he was one who went all the way. The first should teach us that in dealing with Yeshua, as with the Father and the Spirit, we should first of all check the various locks and blocks and painted-shut windows of our hearts and open them. We tend to think of our duty as believers as being oriented to our neighbours, but the first Commandment has to do with loving God, all three of Him. Loving Him, not just respecting, fearing, being awed by: loving. Not always easy; but if we want help along that road, Yochanan is the one to go to. And he can help and teach us not only to love, but in that love to have the courage and the patience and the sticktoitiveness to go all the way. Not to run away when the big hairies come and things go pear-shaped. Not being Sons of Thunder, we may not have the sheer guts he did, but we can at least think of him when the going gets tough. 

            And also we can learn from him to express in words what our souls go through, if our talent runs that way. There is in the whole of the New Testament perhaps not a more poetic passage than the opening of Yochanan’s memoir. And then the extraordinarily moving declaration with which he begins his first letter, slightly breathless and incoherent because retrospectively overwhelmed:

That which was from the beginning -- which was from the beginning – and yet which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we beheld, and our hands touched -- the word of life; 

² and the life was shown. And we saw, and we witness, and we tell to you the everlasting life, that was with the Father, and appeared to us. 

³ And we tell you that thing that we saw and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us, and that our fellowship may be with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. 

⁴ And we write this thing to you so that you may have joy, and that your joy may be full.

He still has trouble getting his mind around it: that the hugeness, the unimaginable brightness that is the Sun, the Son, that was, is, and will be with the Father, that that was here, in Galilee, in Yorkshire, in Picardy, in Connecticut, and appeared to us; that we actually saw him with our own dim eyes, that we touched him with our own hands that scale fish and cook dinner: and why are we going to tell you what we saw and touched? so that you can be part of it too, so that we may all of us together have “fellowship” with the Father and the Son, and so that that being the case you may have joy and our communal joy may be full.. 

I can think of no more attractive simply human person – Myriam excepted – in the New Testament. I feel privileged that my second Christian name is his. 

SCANDALOUS AND IDIOTIC

I was struck, again, by the text of today’s reading in the French Prions en Eglise, which really is very powerful, and also touched by one of the commentaries on it, which seemed to me extremely perceptive. (I have retranslated the Pauline passage from the French, because it comes across strongly that way, but not without rechecking it against a few English versions and the Greek.)

“Brothers, Christ did not send me to baptise but to announce the Gospel, and that without having recourse to the language of human wisdom, which would make vain the cross of Christ. For the language of the cross is folly to those who perish, but to those who are saved, to us, it is the power of God. Indeed, the Scripture says, I will make the wisdom of the wise to perish, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the rational man of earth? As for the wisdom of the world, has God not made it folly? Indeed, since -- by a disposition of God’s wisdom -- the world, with all its wisdom, was not able to recognise God, it has pleased God to save those who believe by the folly that is the proclamation of the Gospel. While the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, we proclaim a Messiah crucified: a scandal for the Jews, a folly for the pagans. But for those whom God calls, whether Jews or Greeks, this Messiah, this Christ, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the folly of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”  (1Corinthians 1: 17-25)

Commentary by Roselyne Dupont-Roc, Hellenist and Bible scholar:

The text operates a series of reversals, from folly to a higher wisdom, from weakness to a higher strength. This reversal Paul had himself experienced on the road: an encounter had made the persecutor, sure of his rights and of his power, into the passionate disciple of the Crucified, announcing the Good News in the midst of the dangers and the sufferings of the voyage.

How can one say, faced with the Cross, that object of horror and disgust, that the wisdom of God and his power are at work? Only, surely, by experiencing in our deepest self that His love comes to us and sustains us in our distress and anguish, and by bearing witness toward those who have not known this experience, through an attentive and loving accompaniment of their crucified lives.

Image: the Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470-1528)

OF WOODS AND TREES

Sarv-e Abarqu, a cypress tree in Iran, over 4,000 years old

When the blind man healed by Jesus first began to see, he said, ‘I see men, as trees walking.’ This Entish moment appeals to us. I’m sure it’s a true report by the Evangelist, because of its unexpectedness. And it reminds me how important trees and forests are as images in and of our lives.

         T.S. Eliot, following Dante, saw life as a journey through a vast forest: in middle age we are in its centre. The path through the trees is not always clear. J.R.R. Tolkien made great use of forests, beginning with Mirkwood in The Hobbit. But it happens that, reversing a common saying, we can’t see the trees for the wood: that the forest we travel in prevents us from paying attention to a particular tree.

         So it is with the Biblical Tree of Life (the Etz haChaim). All of us are familiar with its neighbour, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, often abusively lopped to ‘the Tree of knowledge’. But the Tree of Life gets little attention.

         In the Old Testament, after Genesis, it appears in Proverbs and in Esdras, always with an indefinite article, ‘a tree of life’. As an image, it seems to represent an abundance of spiritual life that grows out of some spiritual goodness in a person or a nation, as a tree grows from a seed. And that growth is given: it is a gift of God.

         In that sense, the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden is perhaps also the principle of life itself, especially of human life both individual and collective, that stands in the centre of the Garden as a (perhaps the) gift of God. But not of life simply physical: of life spiritual, of life as children of God, of life as it was intended to be, created human life in complete harmony with its Giver.

         If we do not, as some theologians have done, conflate the two Trees – and I find it much more convincing not to -- , it is significant that the serpent does not appear in the Tree of Life. Nor should he; nor could he.

         The Tree of Life stands in the Centre of the Garden: it is central, spiritually it is the very core of what God created: the incarnate image of life in harmony with God.

And now, nearly at the beginning of Lent, we need to turn to a thought about that Tree that first surfaced in the Eastern Church and came from it to us in the West. Not surprisingly it was Pope Benedict XVI, that tireless seeker after reunification with the Eastern Church, who expressed that thought in many of his homilies. It is that since the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the Tree of Life has a new form: the Cross. Or as we might say to bring home the full weight of that thought: the gallows.

            Ouch. The cross, the gallows, is the tree of death. It is properly shunned, it horrifies us. Or it should, if we could still see it as Jesus’ contemporaries saw it. Remember the Spartacus Revolt, the rebellion of the gladiators and slaves, when the crosses of the defeated rebels lined the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Can one wonder that St Paul was consciousness of his preaching’s monstrosity to both Jews and Greeks? In his letter to the community at Corinth he wrote, ‘The preaching of the cross is, I know, nonsense to those who are involved in this dying world…..the Jews ask for a sign, the Greeks seek wisdom; but all we preach is Christ crucified—a stumbling block to the Jews and sheer nonsense to the Gentiles.’

            However, his point is that, in contrast to those very natural reactions, natural in view of the cultures that give rise to them, for ‘us’ who have been saved, made safe, rescued, that stumbling-block, that idiocy is ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’. For God’s foolishness is wiser than man’s wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than man’s power.

And so, the gallows-tree, the ignominious tree of death, becomes in this vast, cosmic, terrifying, glorious paradox, the Tree of Life itself.

            And the Tree of Life in the full, original, Edenic sense of the word: it is now the incarnate image of the life lived in harmony with life’s Giver. It is central. As the Carthusians’ motto puts it: stat crux dum volvitur orbis: the Cross stands while the world turns. Only now the Centre incoporates a paradox: because that has not gone away. It cannot and must not be ignored. The Tree of Life, the life of the tree, cannot be as if the Son of God, the Moshiach Himself, had not been nailed to it, had not expired upon it. Which means that we cannot meditate upon it without acknowledging that stumbling-block – because stumbling-block it is, make no mistake. To adapt a bumper-sticker: Sin Happened. Sin Happens. Sin gets, chronically, in the way of Love. So that ubiquitous nasty has to be gone through. It can only be gone through by going through it. Mercifully, we are not alone. He went through it; and if He did, so can we. Because on the other side of Lent, there is Easter; on the other side of the Cross, there is the Resurrection; on the other side of death, there is life. A whole Tree of it.

FULL OF IT?

     In the Sanctus we sing “Heaven and earth are filled with Thy glory.” It suddenly struck me yesterday how curious that is. Heaven, yes. We know it is filled with His glory. But dear old Earth? I recently attended a conference occasioned by the quincentenary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia: almost all the sessions either were about dystopian subjects or used “utopia” and “utopian” in the sense of daydreams and illusions. At best we are encouraged to regard our blue planet with alarmed compassion, like a seriously-wounded person encountered by a car wreck: possibly dying and direly in need of something we are not competent enough, or not numerous enough, to perform. And this poor wretched miserable planet, the ultimate champion in the Victimhood Stakes, is “filled with His glory”?

     Note that it is not a prayer, a begging, a wish, not even an optative like the first three petitions of the Our Father: it is a statement, bold, absolute, that dares to equate Earth with Heaven. Not the lovely, innocent Earth we think once existed before humanity screwed it up; not the final, redeemed Earth of the Second Coming; no, this same planet in which we live, move, and have our being. Right now.

     First, this should give us furiously to think. Second, it should send us off into our daily comings and goings with fiercely-open eyes, in an exercise to which Pokemon Go is mere flummery. Where is the glory? Where is it hiding? If the Earth is full of it, why can’t I see it? Why aren’t I overwhelmed wherever I go?

     We furiously think because if we are to find it we need to know what it looks like. Clues? Well, it presumably looks like Heaven; and it presumably looks like God. Mmmm. So, an Alpine valley at sunrise? Beethoven’s Ninth? The Northern Lights? Well, overwhelming beauty is certainly an aspect of God’s glory. So, I suspect, are a surprisingly large number of human beings. The truly righteous (note: not “self-righteous”) of all faiths are perhaps the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the glory: but without wood fire cannot burn and without water we die. When I look at a group of small children in a playground, there is kind of pearly spider’s web of glory being made there. When, on a busy street, I see a thoroughly professional beggar woman, with scarf and baby, whining for alms, and someone nevertheless stops and puts something fairly large in her paper cup, it’s as if a quick flash of glory came and went. In the psychiatric hospital where I spent a few hours this year visiting an agèd friend, the sheer kindness of the staff, joking lovingly with those who stared, those who cried inconsolably and those who just looked lost, created a kind of mist of glory that hung, not quite visible, in the ancient cloister.

     The Sermon on the Mount, which Benedict XVI calls the “New Torah”, may help us to find this fullness. Note again, that the Beatitudes are not promises or prayers: they are statements. The pure in heart are blessed. And as such, they are also blessings: each a tiny ray in that immense glory that fills the earth. And usually recognisable when we meet them.

     The Cross, which still and always stat in our orbis, is not a negation of this glory, but the culmination of it. He who was the Living God made man, is now the Living God with man, and in man. Yesterday’s Gospel showed us the two thieves crucified beside him, and his answer to the good thief’s begging: “Amen, I tell thee: today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” After that, the Communion is a wellspring of glory.

“Heaven and Earth are filled with Thy glory.” Perhaps we just need our eyes opening. 

BATTLEFIELD?

Last week we travelled over 500 miles to see Peter Brook’s new production, Battlefield, a brief (70-minute) excerpt from the immense Mahabharata – which last he produced as a 9-hour stage performance 30 years ago. Battlefield is set after a vast battle that left “millions dead” and brought a new king to power after a bitter struggle between two clans. In the aftermath, the new king confronts his predecessor and uncle, his mother, and a variety of other characters that include the god Krishna and the personification of the River Ganges. All is done on a virtually empty stage with four actors and a Japanese virtuoso drummer. The review in Singapore’s  Straits Times gives a good idea of it.

What interested me particularly was the grave fatalism expressed. Man has no choices, but (and) must accept the full weight of responsibility. The new king is told that he will reign virtuously and happily for 36 years, and will then pass on the kingdom to a youth who will be the only survivor of a battle. At the play’s end, 33 years have passed, and the dreadful signs and omens are massing for a new apocalyptic battle – and we learn that the succession will be like the former one, and that there is nothing that can be done about this. Death rules every man; fate rules the life of humanity. Nevertheless, responsibility is all.

It is like a strange related version of existentialism. There, absurdity rules all; yet again one must accept responsibility and act with courage and virtue. The universe is, for the existentialist, nonsensical; for the mournful kings on the corpse-littered battlefield, entirely closed. “This victory is a defeat” says the winner, with infinite sadness.

It brought home to me, in this third week of Advent, the utter astonishment of what we are preparing for. That the closed, ineluctable universe of Fate should be cracked open by God is one thing; that God should decide to do so by entering into human life is another; that He should do so, not in glory or power or cosmic war or starring on CNN but as an anonymous infant in a remote pub’s stable on the East coast of the Mediterranean, cared for by a slip of a girl and a carpenter and visited by a few shepherds; that is completely astounding. Et incarnatus est, de spiritu sancto, ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. And with that, the terrible cycle of fate, the unyielding melancholy of the kings on the battlefield, is broken. Light floods in. Angels sing.

In paganity, Yuletide celebrates the return of the light; but there will always be a return of the dark. The glass is half full, but half empty also. There is no escape, no opening in the pagan universe. We can celebrate, briefly, but the cycle is unending.

Et homo factus est announces Emmanuel, “God with us”. Not to depart again. It announces the Cross; but the Cross issues in the Resurrection. Death does not rule all. We may celebrate cyclically; but what we celebrate is done. It happened, once and for all, in specific, knowable and known, points of time and space.

Right now, it’s still dark, in every sense of the word. Days are short, horrors happen, hate and foolishness abound. But there is a glimmer of light, and in the distance, very faintly, a sound as of angels rehearsing.