WHAT SORT OF HOUSE

I have, in recent years, found enormous inspiration in reading the writings of Carthusian monks. They are often as learned as Benedictines, but since their life is built entirely around prayer they are as one might say its professionals. Reading them is both humbling and informative: rather as if one owned a decent sports car and did the occasional track day and then comes across a manual written by and for Formula 1 drivers. 

            In one such book – and they are always signed “A Carthusian” – I found a fascinating meditation on Jesus’ whipping the merchants out of the Temple. Rather than pondering whether or not this is a comment on capitalism, the Carthusian author proposed seeing the temple as being our heart. Thus, the words of Jesus, “this is a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves”, take on a new and richer meaning. As I spend my time at my computer, ordering books or clothes, annotating texts, organising meetings; as I go out to dinner parties or restaurants, as I look at advertisements for classic cars – is my house not rather full of merchants? Good merchants, not necessarily thieves; but then the men selling sacrificial doves, lambs and candles in the spacious Temple courtyard were probably perfectly respectable shopkeepers. 

The point is not what they do but where they are doing it. They are pursuing their perfectly proper mercantile calling not in a shop in the city but in “a house of prayer”. And so, transferring the image as did the Carthusian, I arrive at the fact that my heart should be “a house of prayer, where the Son can meet the Father in love.” I found, and find, this thought overwhelming. And it has become my daily, and almost my only, prayer:

LORD, MAKE MY HEART A HOUSE OF PRAYER

            

Because that prayer potentially includes everything else. It is in fact an application of the saying “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” If my heart is made a house of prayer, everything else is secondary but/and will fall into place. 

I share this thought because it occurred to me that others may find it inspiring also. There is such wealth to be found in Carthusian thinking: those Olympic athletes of prayer have much to teach us -- starting with their ancient motto (useful when looking at the news cycle): STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. (The Cross stands, while the world turns.)

FOUR PRAYERS FOR CHURCH CHOIRS

Going over some old papers, I found these prayers which I composed about fifty years ago. To my knowledge they have never been used, so I'm pleased to make them available now to any choir that might be interested. At the time I was working on the prose rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer, so these prayers are composed rather in the manner of the BCP's Collects, which are themselves based on much older Latin prayers from the medieval Sacramentaries. 

I.

Bless, Lord, we beseech thee, our voices to thy faithful service; that singing thy praise in the concord of harmony they may join our hearts in the consonance of love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

II.

Almighty and most merciful Father, who hast made us to know the song of thy holy Angels; grant us so to praise thee in this life, that in the next we may sing in the choir of their company; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

III.

Bless, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, the music of thy faithful children; that they that sing to thy praise may be instruments of thy Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

IV.

Almighty and everlasting God, who gavest us skill to sing of thy glory; give us grace, we beseech thee, to know whereof we sing, and faithfully to embrace the same; that saved at the last by thy redeeming love, we may raise our songs in the day of thy Kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Image: Magdalen College Choir, Oxford

THE NIGHT VISITOR

Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Jesus talking with Nicodemus"

I have always been fascinated by Nicodemus. This Pharisee with the Greek name, who came and visited Jesus by night and discussed the faith with him, who was clearly if discreetly convinced and converted, who spoke up at the planned lynching of the adulterous woman, who may have watched the Crucifixion and who afterwards provided an astonishing quantity of costly spices for the funeral -- "a royal burial" as Pope Benedict XVI calls it --, is someone I should have liked to know.

What, I often wonder, was said that night? We know a little: a couple of gently ironic remarks, one by him and a reply by Jesus, about being born again, lead to a long and magnificent discourse by Jesus, which is often cited separately, without our remembering to whom it was said.  But I suspect it was a longer conversation, there on the roof of a house in Jerusalem. I think they talked for most of the night.  

Nicodemus was either a Judaized Greek (there were quite a few) or a Hellenized Jew, of the Pharisee persuasion, which was that of precise ritual and scrupulous devotion. Jesus calls him a "master of Israel", in other words a prominent man, learned and presumably wealthy. So what would Jesus have said to him, before the exchange noted by John? 

I imagine Jesus explaining the essence of his role, and of his relation to the Jewish scriptures. In the first place, Nicodemus, you know the prophet Isaiah, and you know that in the second part of his remarkable book he draws a gripping picture of someone we think of as the Suffering Servant, often seen as a poetic image of the people of Israel. Secondly, you know that we are living in one of those periods when people talk about the coming of a Meschiach, a royal personage who will save and deliver Israel, God's chosen nation, from all oppression: a descendant of David, who will be the new and possibly the eternal King. 

Now we come to the difficult part, Nicodemus. First, the Meschiach and the Suffering Servant are the same person. Second, he is already here and you are talking to him. He is not a king as you imagine one: he is in appearance, and in reality, a perfectly normal human being, one of millions, with a normal human name and place of origin. Yeshua bar-Yousuf from Nazareth [a real town, as real as Buffalo: my daughter got married there]. 

This means that the salvation of Israel now needs to be reinterpreted. The Meschiach is not going to sweep in on a mighty chariot and drive all Israel's enemies into the sea. Did anyone tell you, Nicodemus, about the image I used the other day to explain how all this is going to come about? I said it was like mustard-seed, one of those tiny, tiny seeds that invariably jump out of any pan in which you try to use them for cooking. You plant it, and you have the impression that you've planted nothing much. Yet it grows, and it grows. That's the way the regnum Dei is happening. Notice my tense: I didn't say it will happen, it is happening. It's here. Now. But it's happening quietly, quietly, in a corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. It will probably take long time -- but then, what is time to my Father?

And another thing, Nicodemus. Since this Meschiach is not politically involved with the nation of Israel, you may need to stretch the envelope of that concept very far. Because if "salvation" comes through a man, and one (incidentally) who is likely not long for this world -- dark clouds are gathering over the city down below --, then "Israel" also will be a new term, not limited to a nation or a people. The Israel the Meschiach saves is open, not only to born and circumcised Jews, but to anyone who recognizes Him and draws the consequences. The consequences include being born anew. 

And that is where John and his Gospel begin -- one assumes that Nicodemus had related the rest to him at or shortly after the burial, and that he omitted the first part because both John and most of his readers already knew that. 

I have known Michelangelo's Pieta since I was a teenager; but I never knew the standing figure (some say the sculptor's self-portrait) was Nicodemus. The thought is deeply pleasing. And that intelligent, discreet and generous man may, somewhere, be smiling.

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)

ADVENT 2 - ODD OPTATIVES

While it is tempting to write about St Nicholas – because the Eve of his feast is a traditional Dutch version of Father Christmas, when children get a visit from the Saint in episcopal robes and receive their presents --, I did promise to pursue the odd optatives in the Lord’s Prayer for a bit.

It has always struck me as peculiar that the first three petitions are couched in the language of a wish rather than in that of a prayer. ‘Hallowed be thy Name, thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done’: may all this happen, we appear to be saying, rather than putting a direct request as is normal in a prayer.

Since I never have an original idea, I assumed that others must have noticed the same thing; and, indeed, when I started looking I found a rich literature on the subject, which I will only touch on lightly here, on the Second Sunday in Advent. Let’s begin with the Catholic Catechism, which is (as one would expect) stoutly declarative on the topic:

2807 “The term ‘to hallow’ is to be understood here not primarily in its causative sense (only God hallows, makes holy), but above all in an evaluative sense: to recognize as holy, to treat in a holy way. And so, in adoration, this invocation is sometimes understood as praise and thanksgiving.⁶⁶ But this petition is here taught to us by Jesus as an optative: a petition, a desire, and an expectation in which God and man are involved. Beginning with this first petition to our Father, we are immersed in the innermost mystery of his Godhead and the drama of the salvation of our humanity. Asking the Father that his name be made holy draws us into his plan of loving kindness for the fullness of time, "according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ," that we might "be holy and blameless before him in love."⁶⁷

2808 “In the decisive moments of his economy God reveals his name, but he does so by accomplishing his work. This work, then, is realized for us and in us only if his name is hallowed by us and in us.”

This is interesting, but no reasoning is given (normal, in a catechism), and no. 2808 seems rather circular.

For a 20^th-century Calvinist view, I went to Karl Barth. In The Christian Life he wrote extensively and brilliantly on the optatives. About these petitions, especially the first, Barth says that a) we can, when praying ‘Hallowed be thy name’, only fold our hands and trust God to fulfil it; yet at the same time b) we cannot escape our own responsibility, as really pressing God with this petition involves being ‘startled and disquieted’ and involving ourselves both in earnest prayer and committed ethical action.

This too is interesting and ethically admirable, but I am not sure why the petition is startling and disquieting, nor why the consequences he lists follow logically.

By this time, I was starting to wonder about the optative, and thought I would pursue it in terms of the New Testament’s Greek. So I found a fascinating and lively Hellenist blog (BGreek), where the subject had also been discussed. The Hellenists concluded that it was not an optative but an imperative (as in ‘Let there be light!’). That, as one of them pointed out, makes the petitions extremely powerful. Then another said that the 3^rd person aorist imperative was standard in Greek prayers. And a further person then pointed out that Jesus uses the same form when he is healing someone (e.g. Mt 8:13). NB: As someone else pointed out, the aorist implies that the object of the prayer is a one-time happening rather than an ongoing process.

This was exciting, though it didn’t really clear up my confusion: the imperative, again, is not obviously a prayer.

However, a Church Father agreed: Origen, in De Oratione (‘Origen On Prayer’ CCLE) in his 2^nd chapter on the Lord’s Prayer (ch. 14), also claims – arguing against Tatian -- that it is an imperative on the order of ‘Let there be light!’.

In the case of the First Petition, there is also the whole subject of the Name, on which the consensus seems to be that God’s Name is coextensive with His nature. Matthew Henry refers to ‘God’s Name, that is, God Himself’. There is also a passage from Ezekiel 36:22ff.: ‘Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. I will sanctify [= hallow] my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord GOD, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land.' (NRSV) This led someone to write that ‘we are making a virtue of necessity’ when we pray this, as God has said He will do it Himself anyway.

Why Jesus put them in the optative we will never know; not down here, anyway. That he did so is, I think, beyond doubt: someone on the Hellenist blog pointed out that Matthew was a Mokhes, or douanier, an excise man, and that as such he was used to making shorthand notes, which he would then later elaborate in Greek and send to Rome with the tax receipts; hence his version of Jesus’ words has good authority, whereas Luke confessedly wrote from hearsay.

So where does this leave us, and the optatives? All the answers above are enlightening in some ways, but do not seem to me to answer the original question: how can such optatives be a prayer? The slightly circular no. 2808 of the Catholic Catechism, I think, comes closest. Perhaps the way in which this first half of the Pater Noster can be a prayer, a beseeching, is in the following sense: ‘Father, grant us the grace to hallow thy Name; grant us the strength to help thy Kingdom come; grant us the discernment to do thy Will on earth -- as the angels and saints do it in Heaven.’

HATE SPEECH?

Cosimo Rosselli, 'The Sermon on the Mount' 

`If any one doth come unto me, and doth not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and yet even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple;  and whoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, is not able to be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26-7; today's Gospel.)

There is no way around it: J.B. Phillips, in his modern New Testament translation, put quotation marks around ‘hate’, but the Greek verb is uncompromising. This is one of Jesus’ more rebarbative sayings, one of those we would rather forget; the more as the current Church insists that every believer should be a mathètès, a disciple. So, we say, what about the man and wife who are to be one flesh? We are to love the little ones, the children – just not our children? We are to honour our parents, yet hate them?

The saying goes, of course, with Jesus’ snarky reaction to his mother and brothers’ coming to visit him: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . These are mother and my brothers’, pointing to the disciples (Mt 12:46-7); and Matthew 19:29, where anyone who leaves everything (home, father, mother, sisters, brothers, wife, and property) to follow him will receive a hundredfold return and eternal life. Extreme, also: still, giving up is less than hating.

How do we deal with such a saying? One way is to say that Jesus, in his humanity, was truly human (in all things, we are told, except sin), and that thus he was capable of impatience and irritation as he was of exhaustion and depression. In that sense, the saying Luke reports comes from a simple, indeed a simplistic, binary ‘love’ and ‘hate’. He does not, in other words, mean the verb literally. (Hence Phillips’ quotation marks.)

Another way of dealing with it is to remember that ‘Matthew’ was part of the early Church, and that his Gospel, like the other Synoptics, doesn’t want only to recount Jesus’s sayings and doings in great accuracy but is engaged, as part of the Church, in building an edifice for those who have not been there, and future generations, to live in. The extreme terms, then, are those of a community that has to deal with members who regularly privilege their private affairs over those of the ecclesia.

Leaving history aside, though, we need to know how we are to deal with these words.  And there, I think, another passage from Matthew comes to our aid. This comes in the discourse on the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, says Jesus: but ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Matthew 6:33)

Here, I think, may be the key to our passage of hate. Hyperbole aside, we need to concentrate on the kingdom (basileia, perhaps better translated the ‘kingship’, the reign) of God: both on recognising it in Jesus, who is the Kingdom, and in bringing it about in the world where he is no longer physically present. ‘Seeking first’ is beginning the day with the prayer that we may do His will that day, and that we may not forget that by lunchtime. (The noontime Angelus is a good reminder.) It’s not a matter of hating A, but of going all out to pursue B – in which case, if A gets in the way, you brush A aside impatiently – which, to A, may feel like hate but isn’t. (And in any case, it only happens if A gets in the way.) 

And, he says, if we do so; if all we consciously care about is doing His will, is living His kingship; why, then our parents, our spouse, our children, our property, ‘will be added unto us’, will be there, but as gifts, not earnings, and thus all the more precious. Not only will we find what we seek, i.e. the kingdom of God, but we will find ourselves showered with all those other good things that we thought we had but didn’t really until now, when we receive them all over again, as God’s gifts. And eternal life as well. 

One final thought: on the way to the kingdom of God, on the way of our pursuit, there may well be a cross. And that we cannot, must not brush aside: for He is the kingdom, and it is from the Cross that He reigns. At the very least there is death, for all of us; for some there is great suffering. But among the gifts we receive there is Resurrection -- Zoèn aionion, eternal life.

MALKUT

(go to 1:25 in this video)

Re-reading Joseph Ratzinger’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth, I am struck by his discussion of the Kingdom of God. I’d long worried about one aspect of it: the fact that in English it is called the Kingdom but in Latin regnum and in French règne, which means reign or kingship. It is not a place, not even in Heaven or in the hereafter. In Heaven, we may hope and trust, God’s kingship, His reign, will be complete, thus making Heaven His kingdom; but meanwhile, there is the regnum Dei, the kingship or reign of God.

Jesus talks about it in varied and often startling ways, of which (says JR) the common denominator is Christocentric: for Israel, and from Jesus on for everyone, the regnum Dei is: following him. In the Sermon on the Mount, which is the new Torah – the Messiah’s Torah --, he keeps saying “You have heard it said . . . but I say unto you . . .” He does not abrogate the law of Moses but “fulfils” it: in him it has reached its full range and weight. He is the embodiment of God’s Law, the incarnation of it.

What he has done is to internalise the Law. At one point he says, “The Kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Mt 12:28) In other words, it is present to his hearers, they can enter it at that moment. How? That depends. You have to fulfil the law and commandments with the inner identification with him that the Sermon suggests; and sometimes you have to do something more in your own individual case. The rich young man kept all the commandments, yet he felt shut out of that regnum. So Jesus said to him, “Go, sell everything you have, and then come and follow me.” Not, sell your stuff and go to Temple regularly, or, sell your stuff and pray more; no, sell it and “follow me”.

For us, JR suggests, the true regnum accessible in this life is described by Paul in his letter to the Galatians: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me:.” (Gal. 2:20) In other words, we have a lot of baggage to get rid of. Which is sometimes a pleasure: many of us have moments of wishing we could see less of ourselves. We need to become hollow, like a water-pipe or a pen. Hollow in order to be filled with the Holy Spirit, like John the Baptist (Lk. 1:15) . And not just for the Spirit to fill us and remain in us: hollow at both ends, for the Spirit to flow through us to reach others. (What others? Any and all: see the Samaritan.)

Lent, as Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau wrote, means learning to stop taking the relative for the absolute, the partially important for the absolutely important. That’s what turning away from idols boils down to. When we do so – whether by fasting, or seeing our cell phone for what it is (and no more: see video, above), or discerning the relative importance of the next board meeting --, and then, set free, internalise not only the teaching of Christ but the person of Christ; then we are in the basileia, the malkut, the regnum, the kingdom, and it is in us.

After that, Heaven is simply a change of dimension, like going from caterpillar to butterfly.