FURTHER TO THE KATHAROI

 

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

I wrote a blog post on this as I did on the other Beatitudes, and thought at the time that the “seeing” was through the Spirit. This may be true, but another thought occurred to me. In John 14 (8), Philip the disciple says to Yeshua, ‘Show us the Father and that’s enough for us,’ and Yeshua replies, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don’t know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.’

This stunning reply should make us think, inter alia about the Beatitude. ‘No one has ever seen God’, true: but ‘Who has seen me, has seen the Father.’ Could it be, then, that whoever saw, and sees, Yeshua and believes, is pure in heart? For he, the Meshiach, the Anointed, is, then, the visible form of the Creator. And the cleanness, the purity, of heart that is required to see, really to see, is faith. Because it is the eye of faith that sees through the lean, tough, dark-haired, brown-skinned man, the Father of an infinite majesty, the God of endless, suffering love.

Tricky for Philip. Trickier for us, who do not see him face to face. There are, possibly, three ways through this enigma. 1) First, the icon. Not necessarily an Orthodox icon: it can be a painting or a sculpture, a Gospel scene, a Pietà, or a crucifix. Really to see such an icon, with the eye of faith, is perhaps to come close to seeing Him, and through Him, the Father. 2) Secondly, meditation. In the first part of an Ignatian meditation we are asked to take a Gospel scene and to recreate it as vividly as possible with our own mind, assigning ourselves the place of a minor character. If we do this with complete engagement, we may again, perhaps, come close to seeing Him, and seeing through Him. 3) And finally, we should remember that He also said that ‘‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Mt 25:40) If, then, we are to look on any man and see Yeshua, are we to look on any man and see the Father? The mind not only boggles but rebels. And yet. What does the eye of faith behold? It sees, in the beaten and wounded traveller, a neighbour. It sees, in the down-and-out begging for food, Yeshua. It sees, in the man Yeshua Bar-Yosef, the Father. What have they all in common? Suffering. 

If, now, we go to the end of this trail of learning, what do we find? A Father who suffers. A Father who is denied and rejected, a Father who continually sees his love thrown back in his face. Could it be that that is exactly what Yeshua meant us, through Philip, to learn? We see the Son on the Cross. We see the Father in the Son. How much discernment does it take to draw the conclusion? 

A VISITOR FROM EVERYWHERE

His visits are rare. Always wished-for, hoped-for, longed-for, asked-for; and when he comes, there is a sudden sense of more light in the air, of ambient sound becoming a harmony, of one’s own terrestrial weight lessening. How long he stays depends on his welcome, and on the lodging he is given. 

This morning he arrived, unannounced, at the moment I awoke, and in my mind there was the sudden image of the first half of a bridge, arriving from somewhere and touching down just in front of me. And a flooding sense of pure joy. Lightness of being. It had been such a long time since he was last here!

You will have guessed who he is. He has various names: Ruach HaKodesh, Pneuma Hagion, Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost. It feels impossibly presumptuous, imagining that one is receiving a personal visit from the Third Person of the Trinity; and I am quite prepared to be told, and to believe, that the one who came today is “merely” an angel sent by the Ruach. On the other hand, we are told that we may ask for his presence, and that that is one prayer almost certainly answered; and we even learn that if we manage to prepare a suitable dwelling, he and the other two Persons will come and live there full-time. 

Why is such a thought even possible? Because the God who is the collective name for the Trinity is (as the medieval Liber XXIV philosophorum puts it) “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Because he is both intimate and ubiquitous, holding the Universe in the hollow of his hand and meeting me with absolute love wherever I am and go (Psalm 139). This is conceivable only by learning to unite one’s faith in a Creator with the experience of prayer in one’s inmost closet. It is perfectly and stupendously expressed in the Third Collect for Morning Prayer: “O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day . . .”

It is at such moments that Theology becomes experience, that Divinity becomes real. Up close and personal. Utterly surprising. Especially if one is not a seasoned mystic, a Benedictine hermit, a San Juan de la Cruz, but an ordinary homme moyen sensuel in a French farmhouse in the Age of Bannon. Surprising, and yet not: completely natural, just also completely festive. 

How to react? I think, by deep down letting go – for the time being, letting him occupy the driving-seat and getting on with the day in a quiet and attentive way, peacefully but minutely attuned to where he turns the wheel. And keeping alive the festivity with an astonished giving of thanks. 

THE ATOM OF DIVINITY

Andrei Rublev, icon of the Trinity (1425), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I almost always celebrate Trinity Sunday by showing Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the three Persons sitting round a table, because it is so hauntingly beautiful and also because it corrects one of modern theology’s common faults – a tendency to speak of the Spiritus Sanctus as the relation of love between the Father and the Son. A relation cannot be a person; not even a Person. (Socinius is dead.)

However, one should never simplify the Trinity: it is perhaps the faith’s greatest intellectual mystery. There is an admirable brief outline of its dogmatic history on the Christian History blog, yet it too discusses essentially the Father and the Son, and the relation between the two, but not the Holy Spirit. Let’s try and shed a little glim of light.

First: how can “God” be both One and Three? This is easier for us to understand than it was for our forefathers. We know that what appears like a stable molecule – and is a stable molecule – is also composed of a number of rapidly spinning atoms, and breaking those down reveals protons and electrons. I am not trying to establish an analogy here with the Trinity: merely suggesting that we understand better than previous ages how something can be simultaneously single and multiple.

Tertullian, the first great Church Father to work on the Trinity and defend it against the Arians, explains that when in working through a problem you discuss it with yourself, the ‘other voice’ in your mind is as it were a second person. It is a Logos; and if you are God, it is the Logos. And at some point that Logos may ‘proceed from’ the Father and take on its form as a second Person: the Son. Who is ‘begotten not made’ because no foreign substance is involved from which he would have been made.

The Spirit of God is there from the beginning: it is the Spirit that ‘brooded over the waters’. The Spirit, says one explanation, has a sovereign will comparable to the other Persons; he is free and not, to humans, predictable; he works on humans and creates, in them his own works – he creates, he guides, he strengthens, he advocates, he inspires, he teaches.

So today we celebrate the Ultimate Molecule, or Atom: the Holy Trinity. What holds it together is the Ultimate Energy: Love. This is one atom that cannot be split, though it can communicate its energy, and does so freely, generously and unendingly. We cannot even contemplate the Trinity without the concept of Love.

The Father, who created and creates the entire Universe; the Son, who is the Father’s Other-yet-not, and whose joy it is to do the Father’s will; the Son who came to us, who became for us fully human (Yeshua bar-Yosef of Nazareth with a saw in one hand and a scroll in the other) and died in order that we might be taken back into the divine relation of Love; and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Strengthener, who remains with us always and is always as near as skin, always available, always ready to listen and to help.

What richness, what glory. Where else, said Moses to his people, can you find such a God?

APORIA? ROAD MAP?

James Tissot, "The Last Supper" ca. 1890, Brooklyn Museum

A night of the full moon in the South of France. Awake at 4 a.m., I do not hear but am filled with a group of words, a phrase of a great intensity.

I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE.

I know this, of course: John 14:6. Yet I have never before thought it, meditated it, pondered it, let it echo, and pursue it to its reverberating depths. This time, it presents itself in the context of Benedict XVI’s saying, in his Jesus of Nazareth, that Jesus does not give or proclaim or write or promulgate a new Torah, but that Jesus is himself the new Torah. This is a concept of almost frightening density, rather like a Black Hole that swallows up all light and matter around it. Jesus is fully man; Jesus is fully God; and Jesus is the new Law, the new Torah for mankind. How does one respond to this? A simple WWJD (WhatWouldJesusDo?) in every circumstance is not enough.

I have written recently about the prayer of adoration as a form of energy. If Jesus is the new Torah, our proper response would be one of a focused intensity of which that prayer is only the faint beginning. To a devout Jew, the Law must not only be obeyed but it must be internalised: it must become part of you.

How I love your Torah!

I meditate on it all day. 

I am wiser than my foes,

because your mitzvot are mine forever.

I have more understanding than all my teachers,

because I meditate on your instruction.

I understand more than my elders,

because I keep your precepts.

I keep my feet from every evil way,

in order to observe your word.

I don’t turn away from your rulings,

because you have instructed me.

How sweet to my tongue is your promise,

truly sweeter than honey in my mouth!    (Ps. 119:97-103)

If Jesus is the new Torah, all the laws, the precepts, the ruling, the mitzvot, are all gathered into one – not one sentence but one human figure, just large enough to fill a cross. If we are to meditate on this, keep to it, observe it, not turn away from it, and eventually know it as sweeter than honey in our souls, we need to find a way of condensing all the energy of our spirit into a beam that circles until it suddenly, or finally, meets the opposing beam that is circling seeking us, and the two fuse into one along which angels rise and descend.

So here I was with John 14:6 echoing in my moonlit head.  I AM THE WAY. Whither? He explains it: no one comes to the Father save through me. The way to God the Father. But what this time struck me utterly was the verb. I do not tell you the way, as a philosopher or a theologian might. I do not show you the way, as a spiritual guide, a Christian Vergil, might. I do not even accompany you upon the way, as if you were Clopas trudging to Emmaus.  I AM the way. And the verb is the Name of God. Your mind is kicked smartly and completely off its normal path. If you ARE the way, how do I walk you?

I AM THE TRUTH. I do not tell you, show you, or guide you to the truth: I AM the truth. (And the verb is the Name of God.) One of the great philosophical problems of our age – and perhaps the great one – is that we no longer believe that if A (unproveable) is true, then B (the opposite of A but equally unproveable) must be false. Yet at the same time we have no philosophical theory for reconciling incompatible factors as both “true”. In the normal sense, for instance, Christian theology of the afterlife is incompatible with Buddhist reincarnation; so if one is true, the other is false. Since we now tend to count respect for others human beings as more crucial than being right about metaphysics, we have learnt to fudge such questions and treat them as irrelevant. But if Jesus Christ IS the truth, the whole question is yanked out of its tired ruts and reconfigured as a spiritual laser beam. I AM the truth then means: there is no truth outside me. And when we think about it, we realise that there is no logical opposite to the statement, at least beyond the childish tu quoque “No you’re not.”  The apt response to this saying is Thomas Didymus’ falling to his knees and breathing “My Lord and my God!”

I AM THE LIFE. Again, this stills arguments, not only among theologians but within ourselves. What is the proper Christian life? we worry. Is it active or contemplative? Helping the helpless or praying in a Carmel? Is it compatible with – divorce, abortion, homosexuality, serving in a war, being a banker? What is eternal life? Pie in the sky when you die? The timeless, endless presence of God’s love? Or simply an extra dimension to this life on earth? These are arguments we have with ourselves as much as with others. Yet they are stunned into silence when Jesus says I AM the Life. (And the verb is the Name of God.) No, we are not to live like him. We are to live him. What does that mean? Rationally, we do not know. But there are things that pull us out of rationality: the recent Feast of the Transfiguration was such an occasion. So if we know we are to live him but we cannot get our minds around that, the message is perhaps quite simply that we had better start trying to do so, with all the urgency and focusing we are capable of.

It is all a little beyond us; yet he himself said it clearly and unambiguously to eleven not terribly sophisticated men (and to Thomas in particular). Two codas help. In the first place: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.” And finally: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” That last passage I have always found utterly moving.

PATER, ET FILIUS, ET SPIRITUS SANCTUS. SICUT ERAT IN PRINCIPIO, ET NUNC ET SEMPER.

Andrei Rublev, "The Holy Trinity" (icon, 1400-1425).

The Trinity is a world, not of definition, but of prayer.

You can see how it began. In those years when Yeshua walked the earth, he tirelessly taught everyone who would listen about the Father. Our Father. Not just the Great God who made the universe; not just the jealous God who chided Israel; not just the just God who would one day judge the earth; but a God who was, is, and always will be our Father, our loving Father who may get justly irritated with his children but whose love for them will neither falter nor fail. He even taught us the words to address our Father.

But there was more. We are all the Father’s children, but as time went by and the Cross approached, Yeshua increasingly spoke about his own place in the scheme of things. Presumably trusting the disciples to be a little less thick now than they had been before, he began to tell them, in more than just parables, about the place of the Son in relation to the Father. Not just a pretty face; not just a guy. Not just a man. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Whoa! “All that is the Father’s is the Son’s; and all that is the Son’s is the Father’s.” “You will see the Son of Man [a term from Ezekiel] coming in clouds of glory.”

And then, when he came back to visit them in their loneliness, after the Resurrection when at first they often didn’t recognise him, he spoke of someone else still. “If I don’t leave you, the Comforter cannot come to you.” “I will send you an Advocate.” And he breathed on them, and they received the Spirit – the ruach, the pneuma, the very breath, wind, or spirit that after the Creation brooded over the waters like a gigantic bird. The heilige Geist in German, the Holy Ghost in the original Germanic English, now fallen out of use.

And so, when he had left finally to go back to his (and our) Father, and when the Geist had come upon the motley crowd of Pentecost – the Spirit taking up residence, as it were, in the ecclesia, in the Church, the collective of Christians, and not just in some individuals – one can imagine them sitting around for a few hundred years trying to make sense of all this, even as they prayed. After all, they had to explain it to new converts and interested strangers who wandered in from, say, Hellenistic civilisation where there were lots of gods, and who might say, “Oh, so you have only three gods? Interesting!” No, no, no. Not three gods. One God. “Right,” would say a Jew coming by. “But then what is all this nonsense about three Persons? God is one Person, and one Person only.” No, no, no. Three Persons. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And even the most benevolent would end up saying How does this work?

When I first got to know the Book of Common Prayer, one text I shied away from was the Quicunque Vult, or Athanasian Creed. It always seemed cross and minatory, as well as interminable. Yet reading it again today, on Trinity Sunday, I realised that it is a desperate attempt to understand just that difficult concept, 500 years on. Of course, it also contains anathemas against those who do not believe these essentials to salvation, which were what used to put me off. But it is fascinating in its dogged pursuit of the inexplicable.

The Trinity is a world, not of definition, but of prayer. It is a world of meditation and contemplation. Quicunque, whoever, pursues it in that manner will find a huge glory opening, and welcoming. It is a circle, a dynamic circle, a vast and stately whirl of love. Of a love in relation to which the Universe as we are coming to know it is a mustard-seed.

And Trinity Sunday? My American study of the BCP Collects notes that Trinity Sunday is the border between the season of Christianity’s great Truths and the season of Christianity’s activity and duty in the world. From now on, the liturgical colour is green, as are the fields and the hills beyond my window. Ora et labora: pray and plough. 

And for those who want to be reminded of the hard-edged content of our faith, here is the (pseudo-) Athanasian Creed itself:

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited. The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite. So likewise the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not three Almighties; but one Almighty. So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods; but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord; the Son Lord; and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not three Lords; but one Lord. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity; to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the catholic religion; to say, There are three Gods, or three Lords. The Father is made of none; neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created; but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another. But the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal. So that in all things, as aforesaid; the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation; that he also believe faithfully the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess; that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance [Essence] of the Father; begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance [Essence] of his Mother, born in the world. Perfect God; and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father as touching his Manhood. Who although he is God and Man; yet he is not two, but one Christ. One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood into God. One altogether; not by confusion of Substance [Essence]; but by unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and Man is one Christ; Who suffered for our salvation; descended into hell; rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he will come to judge the living and the dead. At whose coming all men will rise again with their bodies; And shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire. This is the catholic faith; which except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved.

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?

3-IN-ONE

Trinity Sunday is the culmination, in a sense, of the Church’s liturgical year. We move from Advent to Christmas, from Christmas to Epiphany, from Epiphany to Lent, from Lent to the Cross, from Good Friday to Easter, from Easter to Whitsun, from Whitsun to the Ascension, and from Ascension Day to Trinity. Then comes what once described as ‘the long green highway of the year’, the Sundays After Trinity with their noble and varied Collects. But what of Trinity itself?

For the human race, apparently mired in death, the Great Event is the Resurrection. But the Resurrection cannot be taken without the Cross; the two together are the great outpouring of the Son’s love for us; and the Son is not, cannot be, without the Father. “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” (Jn 14:10) And beyond that, there is the Holy Spirit: “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” (Jn 14:16-7)

And so, meditating, thinking and praying (and frequently quarrelling), the Church came eventually (381 AD) to the doctrine of the Trinity: the Triune God, one God, three Persons. The Resurrection is the Event; the Trinity is the great Mystery of the faith. In the view of St Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, as Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God, “the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience . . . It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity. ‘No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.’” 

And yet it is a mystery that Jesus lets us in on, lets us into: because the Spirit dwells with us and in us, and if the Spirit and the Son and the Father are one, we are taken up into that great beating cosmic heart of Love. How do we celebrate it? All (of the Faith) is always present, wrote T.S. Eliot; yet the point of the liturgical year is that we can concentrate on some individual aspects at any one time. When the parable of the Good Samaritan is read, we look on the people we pass in the street in a new way; in Lent, we give a different attention to those who suffer; and on Trinity Sunday we might usefully learn from the Carthusians and other contemplative orders to meditate on the mystery as Gregory did. The more so in that that same Mystery has chosen to dwell with and in us, poor clods that we are.

CONTRA SPINOZAM TRINITAS

 My God, I heard them say

Thy way of being was a Clock of clocks,

A self-perpetuate motion, and that Love

Was, to create by necessary law;

And they reproach’d for Paradox

My words that thou, perfect above,

Didst need no more;

Sure they are blind who do not see

Thy love in this, that being is a gift;

Who do not sense that we

And all the random forms of hill and drift

Are here by no necessity

But by thy lasting Courtesy:

So they forget thy Trinity.

    Out of thy joyous solitude

    And tender in omnipotence

    To shape a world and on it brood,

    Fashioning trees and men of sense;

    From archangelic psalmody

    Mankind having destruction drawn,

    To enter into agony

    And for their healing to be torn;

    And, resurrected, still to dwell,

    Informing our experience,

    Praying in us, Immanuel,

    Unravelling our impotence;

Such thy unnecessary love: can we do less,

Released from death,

Than savour each delight of breath,

Blessing Thy wilfulness?

RK