THE SILENCE

                      

 


When I first attended a seriously Anglo-Catholic church, St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, I shall never forget the effect of the veiled images and especially the empty tabernacle on Holy Saturday. An astonishing sense of desolation. Nobody home. Abandonment. We know it's not so, really, but oh, the feeling of grief. The world, sure, lives as if there were no God; but then, thousands of Romans and even Jews went about their business normally on a certain Friday. But this is what it would be like if there really was no God. Tabernacles empty. Nobody home. Only us, on a spinning ball.

Maranatha . . . . . .

IN THESE EMPTY DAYS

I think I've posted this before, but I'm always struck by the moments between the Ascension and 

Whitsun (Pentecost) - rather like Holy Saturday, when the statues are still veiled and the Tabernacle 

on the altar open and empty. A brief time of - well, almost fright, a sudden chill of aloneness. We 

know better, but even so. I had been reading the glorious Latin hymns and their haunting tetrameters, 

and found myself writing something that sounded like the translation of one. So here it is: a translation without an original:

PATRIS AEDEM REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

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.

ODDLY LENT

Tenebrae: part of a Good Lent

In a longish lifetime I’ve found that I’m never original; so there must be others who have had a peculiar Lent with a shambolic ending. You know who you are. It’s mainly for you that I’m writing this, and of course for myself.

When one gets serious about one’s faith, or mainly so, one of the things one dreams about is a Good Lent. With a little real fasting, with lots of profound prayer, with charity and sharing: a shapely movement of the soul’s days from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  And then reality comes along.

Even when I was young and Lent was not much practiced – except for the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday, a Dutch tradition – I was always exercised about the fact that Christianity had chosen the most glorious time of year, full of bird-song, fields of flowers, trees in bloom, fresh green everywhere, the sap rising, for its gloomiest meditations. As a child and later a teenager I did not feel particularly sinful, so penitence was hardly a topical concept; I was sorry for what those people had done to Jesus, but when I was introduced to the great 17C Dutch poet Revius’s sonnet “’Twas not the Jews who crucified Thee, Jesu . . . ‘twas I, my Lord, ‘twas I did this to Thee”, my reaction was Well, no, it wasn’t.

When you get older you realise, first, that maybe it wasn’t but in the circumstances it might well have been: how do I know that had I been a believing Jew or a routine-bound Roman corporal in Jerusalem on that day I would have had the intelligence and  the courage to stand up against the crowd?

That, however, is not the point of the poem or the meditation it reflects. And as you go deeper into the faith we inherit you come to a new awareness: doing it to anyone is doing it to Him. OK, you and I have not crucified anyone lately, we’re not into torture and murder; but there are many ways of doing the dirty on others, and every one of them comes out of a bag of nails. Giving comfort to a grieving stranger or relative is comforting Him; withholding love from anyone is withholding it from Him.

As you look at your aging self in the mirror of hindsight, you see a decidedly unlovely Dorian Gray. So you acquire the dream of a Good Lent that will maybe, with some serious effort, make you ready for Easter. And then, as I said, reality sets in.

Reality provides us with all sorts of distractions, excuses, and daily messes that really muck up our Good Lent. And when Easter rolls around we know that we have not fasted enough, the theological or devotional texts we were going to read remained untouched beyond Chapter 3, our prayer has been subject to John Donne’s distractions even more than usual, we didn’t go and visit that old person in the next street or village we’d promised ourselves we’d see, we didn’t even go to church on Good Friday, our CD player was on the blink so the St Matthew Passion was out, we ended up feeding passing friends from far away, and here we are, supposedly meditating by the tomb in perfect silence like a Victorian painting of the mourning Marys, but in reality shopping for Easter food, hiding eggs, doing e-mail, and a hundred other unworthy things. What a mess.

And then there comes, at the moment when one does pray, a still small voice that says, “That Good Lent you so wanted to have, supposedly for Me – did it occur to you that that was entirely your idea, conceived by and for you? I do not necessarily want your Good Lent any more than I want smoking bulls’ meat on the altar: if you can look at your life and see the bits that really don’t go with my Father’s love, and if that view makes you miserable enough desperately to want Me, Us, to change it (because you now know that you can’t), then, little lad, you will have had a Lent that’s good enough for Me.” And you realise that you have been given a major lesson in humility. And you get ready for Easter’s celebration, with a rather tremulous joy in your heart. 

UNDER THE PREPARATION, SILENCE. WOMEN.

Holy Saturday is a deeply strange day. In my youth, as a Dutch liberal Protestant, it wasn’t anything much: just the day between Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Good Friday and the sunny festivity of Easter morning, with painted eggs on the breakfast table, flowers everywhere, and church at 10 or 11. So Saturday was mainly the day you prepared Sunday.

The first time  I saw something different was in Toronto, where I had discovered the marvellously medieval Church of St Mary Magdalene, with its bare almost undecorated interior, its two superb choirs (it had been Healey Willan’s church), and its punctilious and quite beautiful liturgy, full of incense and austere plainchant.

They, I found, had something called an “Easter Vigil”. All news to me. So one year I went, and was astonished. What took my breath away was coming into the church on Saturday and finding, first of all, that ordinary parishioners had been kneeling and praying there uninterruptedly since the day before; and then all the statues veiled in purple and (the real shock) on the altar the Tabernacle, open and empty. Never had (or have) I felt so piercingly the sense of abandonment that the first followers must have felt on the day after the Crucifixion.

So Holy Saturday is a time of thinking about that, I find. Of course it’s also the preparations for Easter, cleaning the house, hiding the eggs for the children, ironing that new dress, etc. – a creeping joy. But at the same time that weird sense of emptiness, and thinking back to the way it must have been for them.

Was it a shock? Well, for the ones closest to Jesus it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been told what was going to happen. But that’s the way life works: you are told what’s going to happen, yet you can’t truly believe it and go on as if. (Look at climate change.) And then it happens. So what did they do? First, they took off. Two, we know, came back: Peter until the cock crowed, John to be there to the end, with Mary and the other women. The others we don’t hear of till well afterwards. Joseph of Arimathea was there, and took care of the burial, decent man. John took care of Mother Mary. But on the Saturday, the only people still there, sitting by the tomb, were women. Mary of Magdala, and Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’ sister.

What were their thoughts? Did they remember that He had spoken of resurrection? And if so, were they the only ones who did? All the same, they must have wondered. The death had been so awful: the He could die at all, first; that He had to die in the most beastly and humiliating manner; that He had suffered so excruciatingly; that He – He, the Meshiach! – had cried out that heart-rending opening of Psalm 22; that He had been laid to rest, an emaciated corpse, sadly shrouded in a freshly-hewn tomb; and then? Nothing. The Nothing of silence, while the world continued on its metalled ways of appetency.

It was always the women who laid out the dead, and mostly the women who did the mourning. And on Holy Saturday, it’s the women I think of: the women who, with John, were the closest human beings to Jesus the man. Three women called Miriam, or Mary. The one who had been there at that wedding and told the servants to do what He would tell them, to whom He had upon occasion been extremely rude, and who had had to watch her child die; the one who had attached herself to him as a follower and whose legendary past and voluptuous tresses we may or may not believe in; and that quiet listener, that silent intense friend who taken on board everything He had to say and may have been one of the very few who actually understood.

As we get ready the eggs, the flowers, the tablecloths, the leg of lamb or whatever takes its place; as we dress the house and ourselves; whether or not we go to an Easter Vigil tonight, with its silent meditation and then its sudden flame, its bright lights and its glorious music; let us keep in mind the emptiness of the Tabernacle, and the women. Just for today.

I owe the image of the two Marys to Mr T.V. Anthony Raj, aka Tvaraj, a photographer and a devout and curious layman who is my age and has a fine Gospel blog. The women remind me of Leonardo.