THE TEST OF HOPE

In The Wound of Love, the admirable collection of Carthusian writings, one author describes what happens to a new monk. “In the first days of the monastic life, heaven is very near, and the road that leads there seems short.” Then, as time goes by, the way becomes longer and more sinuous, and the goal further and further away. Gradually, “God withdraws the sensible consolations of the first days and hides himself the mystery of absence.”

This happens, I think, not only to monks: it seems true of almost all believers who take their faith seriously. Most people who would not call themselves atheists or retreat into the often mendacious cover of “agnosticism” spend years being what Matthew Arnold memorably called “light half-believers of our casual creeds”. Then something happens that changes them and makes them decide to take their faith seriously. At first, this turns out to be brilliant and exciting. One wonders where it has been all one’s life. It seems as if each day is a conversation with God: one asks questions, and receives answers.

Then, gradually, this too becomes a routine. Prayer is more frequent and more intensive, but there is less and less sense of being answered. The “sensible consolations” seem to have disappeared except on rare occasions. One is increasingly aware of the total indifference to faith of the world around one, and even one’s own mind begins to ask awkward questions. Death is less and less distant: what does happen afterwards? “I have a sin of fear,” wrote John Donne, “that when I have spun my last thread, I shall perish on the shore.” Has it not all been an illusion, a centuries-old structure of wishful thinking?

If we can allow ourselves a metaphor, this state is like the increasing dark of the year as it moves into winter. Days get shorter; and while there is a certain comfort “when melancholy autumn comes to Wembley,/And electric trains are lighted after tea” (Betjeman) the air is cold and dank, clothes seem heavier and comfort harder to find. In other words, we are moving into Advent.

Today is Advent II, and it teaches us a hard lesson with which the Carthusians can help us. When God hides, as the sun seems to hide, in the mystery of absence, it is to us a lesson that we must rely solely upon Hope. Hope instructed by Faith; Hope fed by the Word of God – a daily diet of “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”; Hope that continues to bear the fruit of Charity, nevertheless. Never the less.

Hope, the second great theological virtue. Not blind hope; not Micawberish trusting that “something will turn up”; not betting on an outsider to win at 20 to 1. Informed Hope, instructed Hope, intelligent Hope. Hope as trust, Hope as the Force that is with us, that allows us to get up the twenty-seventh time after we have fallen twenty-six; Hope that keeps us hanging in there when all seems lost; Hope that sees beyond foolishness, beyond crime, beyond sin. Hope that lights two candles as the world goes dark and very, very cold.

THE DARK IN THE LIGHT

Today is St Lucy's Day, in the old Julian calendar the winter solstice. Lucy was a martyr under Diocletian, dying in A.D. 304; but her name implies light, and she has often been identified with the return of light after the solstice: in some Northern countries she is represented by a child coming into the room wearing a crown of lighted candles. 

On August 15, 1617 John Donne's beloved wife Ann née More died at the age of 33, after 16 years of marriage and just after giving birth to her twelfth child. And on (or about) December 13, Donne wrote this poem, perhaps the greatest poem of mourning in the English language. Advent, here, seems forgotten: in fact, the poem's mourning is precisely defined and augmented because it creates an appalled opposite of Advent: "nor will my Sunne renew". 

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, being the shortest day

'Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seven houres herself unmaskes,
     The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
     Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
          The world's whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth has drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
     For I am every dead thing,
     In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
          For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
     I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
     Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
          Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaoses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
     Were I a man, that I were one,
     I needs must know; I should preferre,
          If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow,'a light, and body must be there.

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
     At this time to the Goat is runne
     To fetch new lust, and give it you,
          Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoys her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

A couple of explanations help, for a modern reader. He says that, as a result of being ruined by Love, the alchimist who had previously favoured him, he is reborn as the quintessence of Nothing; and defines that negatively by the various orders of being. Men -- humans -- are defined by consciousness; animals are defined by desire; plants and stones also "desire" (plants grow upward because they desire the light; stones fall downward because they desire the earth, or if magnetic desire each other. An "ordinary nothing", like a shadow, still implies a substance of which it is a shadow. 

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

After the Kingdom – or the kingship, the reign – the Will. Fiat voluntas tua: Thy will be done. We say it, often mechanically, as the third petition, or option: “may” or “let” Thy will be done – the verb is an optative, a mood of hope or encouragement. In the present case, of course, it may also be one of resignation. But how often do we really concentrate on what it means, what it can mean, what it might mean?

            The first stage of thinking about it is one of humility. Not my will, Lord, but Thy will be done. It is a phrase of obedience. You lead, Lord, and I will follow. Even if I think I want fishhooks (remember Tom Sawyer?), the fact that I don’t get them when I’ve prayed for them means, presumably, that Your will is for me not to get them. Oh well, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it: Thy will be done.

            But think some more. Where have we heard that phrase “not my will, Lord, but Thy will be done” before? That’s right. It leads straight to Gethsemane, and via Gethsemane to the Cross. It gets very serious indeed. You can get dead that way.

            Now keep thinking. Because it also leads us to a major problem. Christ, in Gethsemane, knew what His Father’s will was, or at least He had a pretty good idea, even though He was human enough to hope and pray it wouldn’t happen. But when we try to apply the phrase in our own lives, we run up against the serious fact that most of the time we do not know what His will is.

            I saw a photograph of a hand with W W J D tattooed on four fingers: What Would Jesus Do? It’s one way out of the problem: let our imagination suggest to us what He would do in present circumstances. But we are not called to be Jesus, and I’m not always sure we are even all of us called to be Disciples: there were only twelve of those, while there were hundreds, thousands, who were touched by Him and whose lives were changed. W W T D – What Would They Do?

            The second problem with this is that we’re depending on our imagination, which is a useful servant but an uncertain master. In fact, what “Thy will be done” should lead us to is Discernment. This quality, mentioned quite often by St Paul, is in its simplest form the capacity to tell good from bad; but as life is complex and the human mind was created to be a fine instrument, we can and should take Discernment further. At its best, discernment is the use of human reason in the support of faith.

            The relation of faith to reason is the chief topic with which the remarkable writings of Pope Benedict XVI are concerned; and in his little guide Doctors of the Church he reminds us that it is the essential element in the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas. Not only, said Aquinas, does faith illuminate reason; reason can be very good at underpinning, supporting and protecting faith.

            In other words, “Thy will be done” leads us down two paths. One is to using the minds God gave us: instructing them by reading (serious Jews read far more of their faith’s writings that Christians tend to), training them to analyze situations, and using them to help our faith live and work in the world. The other leads to the Cross. And there I am reminded of the final words of the great John Donne’s final sermon, “Death’s Duel”, on the text “To God the Lord belong the issues of death”, preached at Whitehall before King Charles I at the beginning of Lent, 1630. Donne was dying; and some in the congregation said that the Doctor was preaching his own funeral sermon. And he ended it with these words:

There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen.