GOOD GRIEF

 Makarioi hoi penthountes, hoti autoi paraklèthèsontai. ”Fortunate are they that mourn: for they shall be consoled.”

            Very different from the first Beatitude, this one. It refers, not to the nature or character of the fortunate ones, but to a condition arising from a specific situation. 

 

            The situation involving the verb pentheō is usually death; and the root of the consoling verb is the same as that of the Paraclete: the Defender sent to help us when we are the prisoner at the bar: the Holy Spirit. This may help us understand what is meant. All of us are mortal; hence all of us except the loneliest will at some time be mourners. Mourning is not the same as grief: it is a reaction to grief. Psychologists speak of the “work of mourning” – a task that needs to be undertaken and accomplished before life can go on. And in traditional societies it is a very outwardly-evident work, undertaken collectively by family, friends and acquaintances; visible and audible in wearing black (or, in the Far East, white) and keening or wailing, in keeping vigil, in sitting Shiva: a work of the community of which the deceased was a part. This is added to, and partly absorbs, the individual grief of the nearest and dearest, thus already providing a level of consolation: a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved or at least reduced.

 

            Beyond this comes the Paraklètos. Why, here, a Defender? A friend summoned to help us in court? In the modern, psychological sense because guilt is always a part of mourning. We feel we could have, should have, been closer, more supporting, more positive, a better friend, lover, spouse to the deceased. In mourning, a part of us is always the prisoner at the bar. And the Judge is He ‘in whose sight no man living is justified’. As always, for now, He is silent, which only increases our apprehension. Someone once wrote that Hell is the confirmation of all our worst thoughts about ourselves as  definitively true.

 

            But here comes the Defender. As invisible to earthly eyes as the Judge, he wraps himself around us and brings to remembrance all that is good in us, and notably the fact that we have been bought back – at a high price. Bought back: “redeemed”, like a pledge, or a hostage. And bought back by that other Person of the Trinity: the Judge’s own Son. If we were worth buying back, redeeming, by him at the cost of his own life, and if we recognise and accept that, then surely, says the Defender, we are free? Free, and consoled. For moreover, those for whom we mourned are now in the direct presence and care of Him who loves them as He loves us. 

 

            “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted” says the Authorised Version. And perhaps here that version of makarioi is truly a good one.

 

BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

 Honoré Daumier, Le défenseur

Thinking, with joy, about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and particularly about Him as the Paraclete. Yeshua tells his disciples that the Father will, when he is gone, send them “another Paraclete” to help them. “Paraclete” comes from the verb para-kaleo, to call to one’s side. One called to one’s side, in usage, became one’s lawyer, one’s advocate, one’s defender. Two interesting points here. In the first place, they will receive  another advocate, which implies that Yeshua was already their advocate. Secondly, what they receive is what we receive also; and it is an advocate, a defender. I wonder how often we think of the Holy Spirit this way. What it means is that the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe, who is also, miraculously, our loving father, detaches a part of Himself to be our Defender. Not just “ours’ in the sense of the Christian community, the church, but even unto “ours’ in the sense of yours and mine. 

            Against whom is he our defender? In God’s universe, there is only one accuser, one adversary, one enemy: Shaitan, “the Adversary”. Whatever his disputed origin, he is there, always. He is against us, he accuses us, he disbelieves our arguments, he wants us dead, he is der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit who always denies. He has his servants: evil spirits for those who believe in those, wholly evil individuals, men who have given themselves over entirely to his way of being, men like Hitler and Stalin who cheerfully order thousands tortured and killed; men like the character Severidge in Charles Morgan’s The Judge’s Story, whose only purpose, whose only joy in life, is to rob others of what they hold most dear, of what symbolises their inmost self.

            Against such individuals, against such powers, we ordinary mortals are almost defenceless. Concentrated, pitiless and intelligent malignity is not something we often meet, which is why we tend not to recognise it when we do. There are some very rare souls who seem naturally armoured against it, but most of us are désemparé, lost and helpless in its presence. Which is why, on and after Whitsun, Pentecost, it is so important to remember that no, we are not helpless. We have a defender. We have a Defender, the Defender: the ruach,the creator spiritus who made the universe, has Himself chosen to be always at our side, our defender – the comrade who battles beside us, the defence counsel who crushes the lies of the prosecutor, the Lord who fights to defend his vassals, the father who fights to the death to save his children. The para-klètos. He is all those things because he is not only the Holy Spirit, he is also, and as such, one Person of the Triune God. 

And why? Why does he bother with little shits like us? Sometimes we think that even at our rare best we aren’t much. And yet. We have to take on board the mind-bending fact that it is for little shits like us that He created at the very least this planet and possibly the Universe. That he did so out of incomprehensible but absolute love. And that all we have to do is accept that love, accept that defence. To realise that however deep the horror or the gloom or the misery we are in, he is there with us, fighting it along with us, fighting for us, never, never abandoning us. We may feel that he is, sometimes: the Psalmist felt it and Yeshua Himself quoted it on the Cross. But that same Psalm ends in reassurance. He is with us because it was for us that he suffered crucifixion. He is with us because that was not the end. And He is with us now because “as at this time”, as the Prayer Book says, He came among us like a mighty rushing wind, and remained with us like a still, small voice – deep in our hearts, speaking words of comfort that each of us understands in our own most private language.   

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?

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Veni, Creator Spiritus . . . I have always loved the Latin hymns with their stately iambic tetrameters; and this one especially. Since my youth – and an education not given to particular ‘devotions’ – I’ve had a special orientation towards the Holy Ghost (and towards St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named at baptism and who was the poet of the Gospels). The Third Person of the Trinity, so ungraspable, so strange and yet so close: what do we do with him?

The question is of course the wrong way round. What does He do with us? The readings I’ve seen recently give one useful answer, which has doubtless occurred to many. Jesus promises the disciples that he will send them the Spirit to be with them after he has gone up to the Father. So, says Fr Marc Sevin, all the things that Jesus says he still has to tell them but which they ‘cannot bear now’: these are the things the Spirit will tell them – tell us – in and through the community of the Church, from the first Pentecost to the Second Coming. 

So in that sense, the Spirit is the One who continues Jesus’ teaching. What else does he do? Another reading says that the Pentecostal event of the tongues is not about speaking, but about hearing and understanding. Each person heard and understood what was being said, in his own dialect. So the Spirit teaches us to hear and understand both God and our neighbour in our own dialect. First, we can look through and beyond language- and communication-barriers to the heart, and meet one another in the language of love; and secondly, we hear and understand both God and our neighbour in the way we, personally, are capable of doing so. The Spirit, then, removes barriers: the barriers between us and our neighbours are removed by both of us hearing the one who is speaking of God, and the barriers between us and God are removed by our understanding what is being said. 

What else does the Spirit do? Paul says that He prays in us. ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Romans 8:26) – and the Father understands this, says Paul, because the Spirit does so kata Theon, in conformity, in harmony, with God. This goes very deep. If when we pray the vastness of God Himself prays in us; like something holding us up as we learn to swim; then our prayer takes on a trembling confidence we may never have thought of.

I wrote last time that the Spirit is our Paraclete, our Defender, our Advocate. He is also our ‘shield and defender’ against the Evil One. And he is the Comforter – a word we have somewhat trivialised in applying it to blankets and such. And, we are taught, ‘comfort’ in Early Modern English still has the sense of con-fortare, strengthening. He is the Comforter in that sense: he strengthens us when we definitely do not feel up to things. Here again, we should learn to be aware of that as a Presence, and to rely on it: how many people might avoid the clutching quicksand of depression, the knifing of despair, if they knew Who was ready to hold them up and give them that extra ounce of strength they lack?

He teaches us; helps us hear and understand; prays in, with and for us; strengthens us and holds us up. No wonder Pentecost, Whitsun, is a feast. A feast; a festival; a celebration. We can’t earn the Spirit; we can’t work to receive him; we can’t get him by making sacrifices or fasting or doing good. He is given us, as a gift, a present, free of charge. He gives Himself. As the French say, Que du bonheur! What joy.

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

The Church year has two moments of dolorous absence: Holy Saturday and the ten days between Ascension Day and Whit Sunday. I heard a brief recorded homily recently by a Carthusian on the former: he enjoined his brothers not to slide over Holy Saturday but to live it to the full: ‘we must be dead with the God who is dead,’ he said. I remember, when I frequented St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, the powerful impact not just of the shrouded statues and the parishioners’ uninterrupted prayer vigil, but especially the empty tabernacle with its door open. It gave me a sense of complete desolation, worse even than a disaffected church being bulldozed.

The time between the Ascension and Whitsun is in some ways similar. The risen Lord was there: he was there in upper rooms, on the beach, at the dinner table of an inn. He wasn’t a ghost: he was flesh and blood and could be touched. (He did walk through walls, though.)  He explained things to the lads: to a couple of them, on the road, he explained the whole of the Scriptures and their pointing to him as the new Scripture, the new Torah, the new Temple. Their joy must have been a little tempered by uncanniness, but so intense. And then he left, whisked off to heaven, not ‘up there’ as we now know, but ‘out there’ (which from a spherical planet always looks like ‘up’, anyway).

Of course, he had explained to them, patiently, that this had to happen: he had to go back to his (and our) Father, and he had to make room for the Third Person of the Trinity to come and join them, for all time (until the End of Time and his return). But the Paraclete did not come until Whitsun, and for those ten days I imagine them feeling desolate in the extreme. No time-scale had been told them. They had little idea what the Holy Spirit would be like. It must all have seemed vague beside the acute and definite loss.

What can we do with this time of in-between, these days of absence? First, realise that the absence is liturgical, and thus both symbolic and recurring: literally, we live in the time of His (the Spirit’s) presence. Secondly, learn from the desolation we feel what a world without God would be like. ‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.’ An increasing number of otherwise intelligent people are saying the same thing; which to them means Good riddance:  we can now do as we please. We can at last have world without God. And, as Ratzinger says in Jesus of Nazareth: when we look around us, we are beginning to see what that looks like . . .

Third, we can prepare for Whitsun by pondering the Third Person of the Trinity. What – who – is the Holy Spirit? I’m always surprised by the mentions of him in the book of Acts, for example, where he is shown as a very definite, almost physical, event: he can come in an instant and have very obvious manifestations: speaking in tongues, for one. Nowadays, in mainstream churches, one gets taught about him differently if at all. As I have written before, he is now often defined as the relation of love between the Father and the Son; but can a relation be a Person?

We are told he is the Paraclete, the Defender, the Advocate. He is, in other words, on our side. Against whom? The obvious thought is, He will stick up for us when we stand as little guilty children before the stern-browed, loving but terrifying Father. But we could expand that. Against whom do we need defending, really? Mmmmm, right. Let’s not name him, but we know whom we mean. Several authors say that ‘Lead us not into temptation’ means ‘Do not test us beyond what we can bear’, and the kind of test they have in mind is the one inflicted on Job, with the Father’s agreement. If such testing were contemplated again, the Advocate would speak up for us on the one hand, and help us bear any subsequent test on the other.

He is also the Spirit of the divine love. Not himself a relationship, but perhaps the One who incarnates and thus creates the love that circulates eternally within the Trinity. God the Father, we imagine, may be Love but has other attributes also, such as Creation and Justice. God the Son, we imagine, may be Love but also has the experience of being (having been? being?) human as well as divine, with all that that implies of difficulty and suffering. Perhaps the Third Person is pure Love, with no other attributes: the fons et origo, the wellspring of heavenly love, that overflows, first within the Triune Godhead, and then down to us pauvres pécheurs, to help and sustain us, to defend us and deliver us, to be always within our reach, to never let us go: to give us the joy that begins on Whitsun. Pondering this might be a very good way to live the ten days of strange, uncanny, unheimlich absence.