WALKING THROUGH WALLS

          

 

Now, after Easter, we are in the Resurrection Time – a limited period between Easter and the Ascension. The time when Yeshua is back, for a specific task: to explain to the disciples and the expanding community what his ministry, passion and resurrection have all been about, so that they will understand it as a coherent whole, an act of the Father’s love for his human children; and to set the community on its future path of realising the New Alliance between God and the expanded Israel that is the whole human race. 

            It is a strange time. One of the things Benedict XVI points out in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week is the fact that when the disciples closest to Yeshua meet him after the Resurrection, they do not recognise him. This is extraordinary. They have lived with him every day for three years ; and yet when they land their boats and see a man grilling fish on the beach who says “Come and have breakfast!” they do not recognise him at first. Likewise the two less close disciples walking to Emmaus, who were clearly among those who had listened to him, seen him, admired him and followed him, and who now spend a couple of hours at his side, listening to him explain the Scriptural basis for the Passion: they only recognise him when, at table in the inn, he breaks the bread with the Baruch atta Adonai prayer – at which point he vanishes. 

            It makes you wonder what his resurrection-body looked like, what it was. Rembrandt painted it, and when you compare it to his paintings of the living Yeshua (probably after one of his Jewish neighbours in Amsterdam), you can in fact see a very uncanny difference. I’m not sure anyone else has imagined it so well. But would he have been unrecognisable? One may also wonder what this resurrection-body in fact was. Was it a temporary one, taken on only for this time between Easter and the Ascension? It did have the stigmata of the Passion, as the story of Thomas shows. Or was it his definitive eternity-body which he still has today, sitting at the right hand of the Father? That’s not something even the boldest theologian can answer.

            Also, this resurrection-body walks through walls. The disciples are together in an upper room; the doors are closed and locked; suddenly there he is among them. Not a ghost: feel my wounds. But suddenly, there. At table in Emmaus: whoosh, he is gone. Now this reminded me of something Benedict does not mention, although I’m sure others have – nothing that can be thought about the Gospels has not been thought and written, usually many times. When Yeshua returns to Nazareth and at first the people are thrilled by him and then turn against him, they want to throw him off a local cliff: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”(Luke 4:29-30). I have always found that astonishing in its serene calmness. This is an angry mob, the kind that stoned Stephen and would have stoned the woman taken in adultery. Few things are more terrifying and more dangerous. But he passed through the midst of them. 

            In other words, even in his entirely human mortal body there was something uncanny. A touch of the resurrection-body, one might say, was always already there. This was not one of his “miracles”: it was not done for someone else, and no fuss is made about it. He just wasn’t there any more. 

            So now, in this Between-Time, this Resurrection-Time, we might wish that he would still suddenly appear among us and have a bite of fish; but that’s not going to happen. The Ascension is past, and he is now in Eternity-Time. But still patiently waiting for us, as he was on that beach at breakfast. Would we have recognised him? Do we now? He did tell us where to look: in the child holding out a trusting hand; in the lonely old woman whose children never phone or visit; in the retired psychiatrist whose days not longer make sense; and in the entirely unexpected smile of a total stranger. Perhaps, apart from the gestures such incarnations call forth in us, the thing for us to do at this time is to think and learn and discuss as we would have in that inn at Emmaus, and so come to understand the coherence of the life, calling, death and resurrection of this most unlikely Meshiach.

Images: Rembrandt, "Head of Christ" and "The Risen Christ"

EASTER WITHOUT MARKERS

For a variety of reasons, this Easter season has been very different. No church services, much busyness, absolutely nothing conducive to quiet, ritual, or contemplation. What to do in such a case?

What it has done is make me think more deeply about the Passion and the Resurrection, quite apart from ritual and in ways more individual than ecclesial. On Good Friday I awoke at 5 and spent two hours meditating on the day. I’ll share some of the thoughts.

      1.     The Anglican Communion service reads, in the Prayer of Consecration, “On the night that he was betrayed . . .” The new Catholic version says “On the night that he entered freely into his Passion . . .” At first I used to trip over this last version, but I have come to agree with it and like it (except rhythmically). It emphasises Yeshua’s willed accord with the Father’s will; his clear understanding that this death, grisly as it was, was the whole point of the Meshiach’s life and activity. Contrary to much Messianic thinking that wanted a new David to deliver Israel from its enemies, Yeshua’s interpretation was that of Isaiah. The Meshiach’s role went infinitely further than that of a political liberator: it aimed to liberate humanity from its Enemy – Satan, sin, and death. And this was possible only through the Meshiach himself becoming the Paschal sacrifice. So, human indeed, he quakes, he grieves, but he nevertheless goes forth. The Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood is doubtless factually wrong but also spiritually right in seeing Christ as a “young hero” voluntarily ascending the Cross.

      

      2.     I am always fascinated by the fact that his last words were two quotations from the Psalms. That shows, to cite Bonhoeffer, the degree to which the Psalter was Yeshua’s prayer-book. Having tried to say Morning and/or Evening Prayer regularly during Lent, I found reading through the Psalter one of the most moving parts of the experience. It is so wonderfully Jewish in its constant dialogue with the Creator: thankful, suffering, indignant (“Up, Lord!”), cursing, adoring and praising, it shows us how to relate to a sometimes distant and almost always (ostensibly) silent God.

      3.     The Crucifixion was necessary, because without it there could be no Resurrection. Perhaps what it teaches us is that our death too is necessary, and that we too follow him in a resurrection: not in the flesh – as his had to be, temporarily, to make people understand – but in the “body” of our post-mortem life, whatever that may look and feel like. No caterpillar, I suspect, has the faintest idea beforehand of what it feel like to be a butterfly.

      4.     Yochanan, St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named, thrills me, not only because of his mystical understanding and his poetic writing but because he was the only disciple not to have fled the Cross. He and the women stayed till the end. Perhaps that is one reason for the depth of his comprehension? It came to equal Miriam’s, which is why it was he who was detailed to look after her.

      5.     “Give us that peace which the world cannot give.” This impresses itself upon me more and more. The world can give suffering; the world can give comfort, and fun. But it cannot give true peace. When I look at those who live without faith, I mostly see a deep underlying sadness; those who live in faith are not exempt from pain and suffering, but they see meaning and coherence, and know that they are loved. 

      6.     The paradox of the Cross is inexhaustible. Its horror is bottomless, its joy is endless.

      7.     What, exactly, is the Good News that Yeshua preached? That you are not bound nor bounded by your self. That the Kingdom, the Reign, of God is here now. That it is the reign of Love, and that what you have to do, all you have to do, is relax and let it take you over. That you need to open the windows, doors and shutters of your soul and let the Ruach, Pneuma, Spiritus in. That if you live from day to day, hour to hour, by what it tells you, the Father, Son, and Spirit will come and live in you. That you are loved as you are, not as you might be if you were a better person. (That is really and truly hard to take on board!) That you can live day by day in subservience, in filial or servantlike devotion to something, Someone, greater than you are without losing your independence or your pride. On the contrary, it will increase your stature by making it irrelevant.  

THE NECESSITY OF HOPE

Charles Péguy

The French daily Le Figaro published this moving meditation on Hope yesterday. I have translated it, and am pleased to publish it here.

EASTER: “HOPE IS NOT THE FORGETTING OF DEATH”
Fr Luc de Bellescize, vicar of St-Germain-des-Prés, Paris.

     In the film Ordet by Dreyer, a young married man sees his wife die. He stops the drawing-room clock. Time stops its flight. The old father speaks the words from the Book of Job, the act of faith in the dark night: “The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the Name of the Lord.” Silence falls, the household falls still in its grief, in its pain, in its love. The shamefastness of silence is the needful frame for the memory of the dead. “Thou tellest my flittings, put my tears into thy bottle,” says the Psalm (56). “One must obtain a proper silence,” said Maria Callas, speaking of her singing. Death requires a proper silence for proper words, for if we have nothing to say in the face of death we have nothing to say in the face of human life.
     In Dreyer’s film, the pastor speaks, the man of God who is called in the morning of one’s life, in the evening of one’s days, in the unforeseen of the good and the evil that weave the inconstant heart of man. “O heart woven of joy on a ground of pain,” wrote Péguy. The old father dares a word that dwells in the silence without breaking its mystery. “Her soul is with God.” But the husband replies, “It was her body I loved.” How true those words are….. For what we love in others is not only their insubstantial soul, it is their fleshly presence, their scent that lives on in their memory, the sound of their voice that echoes in silence, the shining of their eyes after their eyes have closed. Death is goodbye to the face. Such a painful mystery……
     We waste too much time fleeing it. It would be better to learn to live it in order to be fully human. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes (VII:4) We have lost too much of wisdom….. What is typical of our time is the loss of the “memory of death,” said the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément, and with it the forgetting of man’s call to life eternal. Today’s atheism, though, is no longer the fight of the philosophers of suspicion against the hope of Christians, but the idolatry of well-being claimed as a right and pleasure raised up as the supreme idol of happiness. It is TV football, healthy-living.com, a decent retirement plan and the organic guarantee of one’s steak. “One has one’s little joy by day and one’s little joy by night,” wrote Nietzsche, “but one takes care of one’s health.”
     Modern man “feels” a lot, like an apartment Labrador on thick carpet. What counts is “feeling good”. The dictatorship of well-being has replaced the City of Joy. We refuse to “sow in tears” (Ps 126) But what will happen when the drunken boat of my days brings me to the house of mourning? Will I remain on the threshold of my life, stop in the porch of the mystery(1)? Death is the Great Forgotten of men, yet it will always come and jog their memory.
     We are not primarily consumers,  but beings who thirst for genuine life. We taste earthly food, not in the feverish greed of the moment before the coming of unforeseeable Death, but in the eternal flavour hidden within it, which calls us to a life ever higher. “Deep calleth unto deep.”(Ps 42). Through life, love, death we are born into the hope of Heaven. He who has never felt his love to be eternal has never truly loved.

We do not want a life that forgets death,  nor a joy that knows nothing of pain, nor a facile happiness that closes its eyes to the suffering of children, to the death of innocents. It would not be worthy of man. “I would believe in their God if they appeared a little more saved,” said Nietzsche. But Christian joy is not the same as worldly excitement. It is not that unbearable lightness of being that reduces life to the nothingness of youthism pushed to the limit. What we want is a full joy that is everywhere in the richness of man’s life, the great cloak of his night, which accepts all his history and tears for man the veil of the Eternal. Such is the joy of Christ. He has not closed his eyes to Evil, he has let Evil close his eyes in order to fill everything with the joy of Easter. No other religion claims the “death” of God: only the Christian faith. God has entered inito the great silence, the Word made flesh has made his Presence resound in the bowels of the earth. “We proclaim a Messiah crucified, a scandal to the Jews and a nonsense to the pagans,” says the apostle, “ but for us the wisdom of God and the power of God.” (1 Cor. I:23).

Let me ask you this question. What is your hope? Is it to forget death, the Promethean myth of the transhuman? For us who bear the fine name of Christians, it is a well hidden in the desert and which radiates in silence; the empty tomb from which arose, alive, the Resurrected, seen, heard, touched by the apostles; Péguy’s little girl who travels through the shadows, who “shines in the darkness and whom the darkness has not overcome.” (Jn I:5)

(1)   This and “Peguy’s little girl”, below, are references to a moving poetic text published by Charles Péguy in 1916, “The Porch of the Mystery of the Second Virtue”, where Faith and Charity are pictured as grown women, and Hope as a little girl walking between them. 

CHRISTOS ANESTI!

Piero della Francesca

LATIN: A REFLECTING GLORY

I am often ravished by the Latin hymns: the austere and economic beauty of the language and the stately rhythm of the trochaic tetrameters are irresistible. Here is one of the greatest, written originally for the feast of Corpus Christi by Thomas Aquinas, but equally suitable for Holy Thursday (a sung version showing the score is here):

1. Pange lingua gloriosi
Corporis mysterium,
Sanguinisque pretiosi,
Quem in mundi pretium
Fructus ventris generosi,
Rex effudit gentium.

2. Nobis datus, nobis natus
Ex intacta Virgine
Et in mundo conversatus,
Sparso verbi semine,
Sui moras incolatus
Miro clausit ordine.

3. In supremae nocte coenae
Recumbens cum fratribus,
Observata lege plene
Cibis in legalibus,
Cibum turbae duodenae
Se dat suis manibus

4. Verbum caro, panem verum
Verbo carnem efficit:
Fitque sanguis Christi merum,
Et si sensus deficit,
Ad firmandum cor sincerum
Sola fides sufficit.

5. Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:
Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.

6. Genitori, Genitoque
Laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque
Sit et benedictio:
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio.
Amen

Of the glorious Body telling, 
O my tongue, its mysteries sing, 
And the Blood, all price excelling, 
Which the world's eternal King, 
In a noble womb once dwelling 
Shed for the world's ransoming. 

Given for us, descending, 
Of a Virgin to proceed, 
Man with man in converse blending, 
Scattered he the Gospel seed, 
Till his sojourn drew to ending, 
Which he closed in wondrous deed. 

At the last great Supper lying 
Circled by his brethren's band, 
Meekly with the law complying, 
First he finished its command 
Then, immortal Food supplying, 
Gave himself with his own hand. 

Word made Flesh, by word he maketh 
Very bread his Flesh to be; 
Man in wine Christ's Blood partaketh: 
And if senses fail to see, 
Faith alone the true heart waketh 
To behold the mystery. 

Therefore we, before him bending, 
This great Sacrament revere; 
Types and shadows have their ending, 
For the newer rite is here; 
Faith, our outward sense befriending, 
Makes the inward vision clear. 

Glory let us give, and blessing 
To the Father and the Son; 
Honour, might, and praise addressing, 
While eternal ages run; 
Ever too his love confessing, 
Who, from both, with both is one. 
Amen. 

STRANGE RISING

Fra Angelico, 'The Resurrection'

A strange and unusual Triduum paschale – Good Friday without Bach’s St Matthew Passion for once, but also without computer, tablet or screen of any kind, doing physical things in house and garden, meditating and praying while doing them, rather like Brother Lawrence. A halt at 3 pm for a special prayer as the Temple veil tears and the new Temple is inaugurated, bloodstained, hanging on the Cross.

Holy Saturday, a glorious Spring day, again full of busy-ness but full of prayer also – the strange emptyness of that day filled with blossoms and sunshine, yet always the knowledge of the open, empty Tabernacle that always fills me with wordless anguish.

That evening an invitation to supper, accepted because the veillée paschale at the Cathedral last year had left us cold in every sense, and an Easter morning service seemed preferable. The adorable, generous and appreciative hosts overdid the hospitality with groaning platters of seafood and Gewürtztraminer, and kept us talking – about the Church, amongst other things – till midnight. During the deep, still night a sudden wind sprang up, blew open the windows and died down, as if the Resurrection were taking place at that very moment. Then it rained, the gutters gurgling happily with the new life. And in the morning there was no energy of any kind, and once again the tradition had to be abandoned for care to Brother Ass. And yet this Easter has been one of the most profound I can remember.

The reason I post this very personal note is because there may be a lesson in it. For those of us who love traditions, rituals, ceremony and solemnity, it may upon occasion be very salutary to see what remains when one removes them. (Normally, my struggle goes the other way, as our world is removing them or eviscerating them at an alarming rate in any case.) In my case, what remained, I found, was prayer and a quietly penetrating sense of love.

In the course of this two thoughts occurred to me which I will share here. One: in all the prayers I have heard and joined in for the victims of the recent terrorist attacks, I have not once in any Church or Christian context heard a single prayer for the attackers. And yet we are expected, are we not, to pray for our enemies? Two: in every Mass, after the Institution, the priest prays for the Church; invariably he prays for Pope Francis, then goes on to the bishop and clergy; but not once have I heard Pope Benedict included in this prayer. He is still alive, he is still Pope. If I work at it, I can perhaps imagine a reasoning behind it; but I find it shameful.

And finally, I have said it before but will say it again: the finest accompaniment to Holy Week for an educated lay person that I know is that same Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, volume 2: Holy Week, from the Entry into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. He is a great man, ending his life gently in a saintly manner; and I pray for him, and give thanks for him, daily.

GO ON, QUIVER: OR, IN SEARCH OF JOY

In my rural French parish, the Roman Catholic Church’s current trends have varied results. The priest, a charming if hyperactive little Algerian convert, has distinctly charismatic tendencies. These alienate a number of bourgeois parishioners, but to my amusement the elderly peasant folk seem quite to enjoy them. They like the interruption of the Mass at the Peace, and turn cheerfully to each other for a handshake or a kiss; and they sing the rather appalling mock-folk hymns without turning a hair.

Before the current Year of Mercy, the emphasis was on Joy. RCF, the French Christian (officially ecumenical) Radio, changed its signature phrase to “la joie se partage”: joy is (to be) shared. And a week or two ago, a hymn told us “Tressaillez de joie!” (quiver with joy!). It was sung dutifully, rather spiritlessly, by a large and dutiful congregation comprising all ages. And it’s been making me think about Joy ever since.

First of all, there are terms which don’t normally enter our active vocabulary, sometimes for historical reasons. When I taught university courses in literary history, we used to spend some time considering the word, and the concept, “honour”. Unless one comes from the Mediterranean and points East, this is not a word much used except in the odd stock phrase. My students, interestingly, found “dishonour” much easier to understand than its opposite.

Thinking about the quivers of joy, it occurred to me that Joy is perhaps such a word.  We know it mainly in expressions or titles – “the Joy of Cooking” – and C.S. Lewis had the good fortune to be able to play on his wife’s name in Surprised by Joy. But is it part of our active vocabulary? Pleasure, yes; happiness, yes; relief, yes; but joy? It’s a very strong word, a very deep word. Perhaps almost nothing that we feel is strong and grand enough to be called joy; or perhaps it is but we have become unused to employing that particular word for the feeling. Parents, when they first hold their new baby; a lover, when the beloved first returns the emotion; a father, when his drug-addict kid turns up clean for good; a convict, upon hearing that he has been amnestied; a tennis-player, upon quite unexpectedly winning an almost impossible tournament; is it joy?

This leads to a further question: if we are to quiver with joy, what do we quiver about? The answer, of course, is there, in the hymn; it’s there, in the Bible itself. The answer is Salvation. Our Salvation. But how many of us, outside the Evangelical or Charismatic world, really know what that means, and feel as well as know? And yet it is what Jesus talked about, all the time. It’s what He preached, on the lakeshore as in the synagogue. The Kingdom of God – the reign of God – is here and now. The Messiah whom you’ve been waiting for all these centuries, he’s right here. The Chosen People’s relation to their God has been restored.

Yes, well. But we are not Israel; we are the Gentiles, the goyim, the Nations to whom St Paul was sent to preach – what? That they are the new Israel, and that the God who was previously Israel’s alone is now theirs also. And that because of that, Israel’s salvation too is now theirs also. What does that mean, though? Jesus is the Kingdom of God, in-carnate, made flesh and blood, given to us, rejected by us, killed by us, and resurrected to put an end to the definitive reign of Death. That faith in Him is the new Law. The Ark was empty: as a French commentator put it, you cannot put God under house arrest. What was concrete and present was the Law. And in the new dispensation the Law, too, is found to be a hollow container; Jesus is the new Law. He doesn’t give laws; he is the Law. And he has destroyed Death.

Fine; but we die anyway, right? Yes; but not definitively. He went through death – and what a death. We can only follow him there. But he rose again, as the Creed says; and our faith is that we too shall rise again, recognizable but transformed.

Is not this reason enough for a swooping and embracing joy? Well, it would be, if we could believe it from day to day. But in real life, we think about re-ligio, about the binding-together-again between us and God, mainly as a set of moral duties in which we are never up to scratch. Not a new Law; rather an endless catalogue of good deeds we ought to be doing as gratitude for salvation. But it comes to the same thing. And the Church, let us face it, does little to help. Even the remarkable current Pope, in spite of his text’s title Gaudium et Spes (joy and hope), spends much of his time fustigating  not only the world but the faithful for sins of omission and commission, for lack of care, of love, of mercy. In other words, the Church tends to be more John the Baptist than Jesus; yet at the same time the faithful are told that their behaviour must be exemplary and that they must convert the world by the beauty of their lives.   

Parents know that children change their ways for the better more easily when encouraged and praised than when growled at and  punished. The mainstream Churches need, I think, to learn from the evangelicals to concentrate more on both the need for, and the joy of, salvation. Call it Rescue, if you will: we were all drowning on a leaky life-raft in the ocean, until we were plucked out and take to a safe place. As a civilization, we were starting to think that there was Nothing: Life’s a bitch, then you die. (How people can think that and feel cheerful is beyond me.) And then this luminous man turns up to rescue us, and we kill him; and then he turns up again, on a beach, frying fish and smiling. Now do we feel joy?

Tomorrow is not just Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, before the carne, vale, the farewell to meat for forty days; in England it is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent when we are shriven – we confess our sins and receive forgiveness, so that we can start the exercise of Lent with a clean slate and a joyous heart. Whether we confess privately to a priest, publicly in the General Confession during a service, in our own closet or in our own heart, an intelligent confession will leave us both begging for and receiving forgiveness, ab-solutio, the washing away of all that clogging dirt. So we can begin Ash Wednesday shriven, forgiven. And for forty days we can study to be quiet, we can fast a little or even a lot, we can pray and occupy ourselves intensely with the love – received and given, given and received -- that is Joy. 

"Heaviness may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30)

CHRISTMAS AND BEYOND

CAROL

 Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf.

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

Jill Furse (1915-1944)

Jill Furse (granddaughter of the poet Sir Henry Newbolt) was a young actress of great promise who married glass-engraver and poet Laurence Whistler. Their brief but idyllic marriage was cut short by her death after the birth of their second child, and was exquisitely described by Whistler in his book The Initials in the Heart. I was privileged to know both Whistler and his daughter, and have always loved this little poem Jill wrote in their secluded cottage in Devon. 

I used to wonder at the ending, but have come to understand what was doubtless elementary to all but me: that the Incarnation implies the Crucifixion. If the almighty and everlasting God of the entire universe (and possibly of a few others also) decides, in His son, to take upon him, not a human form but human substance, human life itself; if Deus homo factus est; then that human life implies a human death. The rich womb opens the way to the poor cross. 

And the poor cross, of course, is not the end. Et resurrexit tertia die: Christmas points to Good Friday, but Good Friday points to Easter morning. Laurence, who wrote some very moving poems after her death, died in December 2000. It is a good thought that they are now reunited.