Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

THE CLOUD -- AND THE LADY

Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà

Growing up as a Protestant, however liberal and un-Calvinist, one doesn’t spend much time or attention on the Mother of Christ. Mainly in the Nativity story at Christmas. But Catholic Mariolatry (as Protestants call it) is vaguely distasteful and very, very foreign. I remember exchanging e-mails with a colleague, a former Episcopalian converted to Rome, about this: I told him that as an Anglo-Catholic I could go along with much of what I experience in the Roman churches to which, living in France, I now go, but that the whole BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) business still put me off.

            Yet as one deepens one’s faith, one cannot avoid it for ever. It must be faced and dealt with. And what better day to do it here than “le quinze août” as they call it, secularly, republicanly, in France, i.e. the Assumption of the BVM?

            Myriam, then. Small-town girl from Nazareth, Galilee. 18 or so, engaged to Yosef bar-Ya’akov the builder, perhaps about 25. And then, one day, the Cloud happens to her. Announced by a man-like figure all of light. And in the Cloud, as we know, the Deity very occasionally comes among humans. In this case, she is pregnant; she visits her cousin Elisheva, also pregnant, and poetry happens. And later she gives birth to the Meshiach, the Anointed of God.

            So far, so good. As a scholar and a Christian (Prot or not) I can follow this; and having seen evidence of the Cloud in other places in the Bible I can go along with the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity also. And, of course, she is so very touching. Not just in her small-town innocence, but in her unhesitating Yes to the proposed earth-shaking Event. In that, she is a female Abram. “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” And in her Magnificat, which shows her to be the greatest woman poet since Sappho.

            Now, though, minefields loom. I have serious trouble with the emphasis on her perpetual virginity. Not that it’s impossible; but it’s just so convenient to a Mediterranean civilization (owing much to Indian dualism) that esteems women only when they are virgins or mothers. You put those two categories together, and Wow, a new goddess. It has always struck me as undermining the whole concept of the Incarnation. (C.G. Jung admired it: he said Catholicism was psychologically right to complete the unstable male Trinity with a female fourth. Theologically, though, the problem remains.) Moreover, the Gospel itself mentions four brothers of Yeshua by name – Ya’akov, Yosef, Shimon and Yehuda – and throws in a few sisters (typically unnamed and unnumbered, but let’s assume two and call them Elisheva and Chana). The Church’s centuries-long hemming and hawing on the subject – they were cousins, all sorts of relatives were called “brother”, etc. – would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

            I find the picture of Myriam as a richly-fulfilled Jewish matriarch (Yosef seems to have died in his Forties), presiding over a Friday-night Sabbath dinner with her five sons and two daughters infinitely probable and attractive. And it in no way contradicts anything said later in the Gospels. She was with Yeshua at the wedding in Cana, and (like any mother) whispered to the attendants not to pay any heed to his demurral but to do whatever he told them to. She appears briefly with the others in a story of which the point is not rejection but every believer’s bond to Him. And she appears at the Cross, with a few other women, when everyone else – all those brothers and sisters, all the disciples except Yochanan – has skedaddled. She is the Blessed Mother of the Pietàs, of which Michelangelo’s Rondanini is the most suggestive and heartbreaking.

            Buoyed by Mediterranean virgolatry, the Church for centuries could not bear the idea that the Mother of God could just, like, die, and be eaten by worms. So various alternatives were considered, and spread everywhere in popular devotion. The Dormition, the Assumption, etc. And finally, as late as 1950, Pius XII declared the bodily Assumption of her into Heaven to be a dogma of the Church.

            Do we go along with this? An African priest this morning stated unequivocally – and perhaps rightly – that the Assumption was and is the inescapable accompaniment of the Resurrection. I’m not sure of this, but it is true that if you  can accept the second there is no inherent reason why you cannot accept the first.

            What, now I come gradually to pay much more attention to Our Lady, I find more important is her role as “la première de cordée”, the first on the rope, the one who leads the way of all other mortals in accepting her Son. That I can see, can admire, can even worship. I can pray a Rosary (though I keep forgetting the bits) without any qualm of conscience or scholarly mind. And I rather like the image of her being lifted out of our atmosphere into the glory of her Son and being close to Him for eternity. Where she can say Baruch atta Adonai for, and with, us.  

WHAT KIND OF NEW YEAR?

El Greco, the Blessed Virgin Mary

A new year, for most people, implies resolutions and an attempt to improve one’s life. Yet as a Catholic text I saw this morning said, the beginning of a civic year (the Church’s year, don’t forget, starts with Advent) stands in the sign of the Mother of Christ. It may be useful – and, in a way, a relief – to remember her reaction to the unexpected visit of an archangel: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy word.” Instead of specific resolutions, with their known limited half-life, we might think of making these words, and this thought, our own for 2018: a year to be spent in the silence of listening, whatever the world’s noise around us.

CHRISTMAS

As I do every Christmas, I here post the exquisite little poem by English actress Jill Furse, the wife of glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler and the mother of Robin Ravilious. It moves me as much today as it did fifty years ago.

Jill Furse, by Angus McBean

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.

FOUND IN TRANSLATION?

 

                                                                         Robert Stamps                              Fr Alain Bandelier

It isn't often that a translation, or an adaptation, of a text -- especially a poem -- is as good as the original; and even rarer that it's better. But this is what I discovered when I decided to research a Communion hymn we sometimes sing in our Catholic village Mass here in the South of France, and which is one of the rare ones I love (post-Vatican-II RC liturgies have strange, meandering hymns in minor keys, perhaps as a dim memory of Gregorian chant?). It is called "Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains" -- God has put his body in our hands. And as I pursued it on the Web, I found that it was an adaptation of an American hymn by Methodist minister and theologian Robert J. Stamps, called "God and Man at Table Are Sat Down". As I listened to it sung by Stamps' friend Jeff Ling, I recognised the tune and thought it a fine hymn; but not up to the French version. Researching that, I found that it had been written by Father Alain Bandelier, an elderly priest active in the Foyers de la Charité, a world-wide network of RC lay persons living in community. I think he should have received a modest prize for this quite lovely hymn.

Venez du fond des temps, du bout du monde,
Cœurs transpercés par la soif et la faim, 
Ouvrez la porte de la joie profonde:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Pourquoi creuser le puits des eaux dormantes,
Dans le désert où vous marchez en vain?
Entrez dans le jardin des eaux qui chantent:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Ce soir de l’eau se change en vin de noce,
Sur la montagne on multiplie le pain.
La vigne en fleur nous donne un fruit précoce:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Geste posé au milieu de l’histoire,
Question posée au bord de nos chemins,
Secret posé au fond de la mémoire:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Le cœur se vide au cœur de ce silence,
Le cœur se brûle au feu de ce lieu saint,
Le cœur s’éveille au cœur de la présence: 
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Parole ouverte comme une blessure,
Mots d’un amour qui n’aura pas de fin,
Le Verbe se fait chair et nourriture:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.

Marie nous donne Dieu comme une enfance,
La multitude est le fruit de son sein;
Voici l’Epouse et la nouvelle alliance:
Dieu a mis son corps entre nos mains.


You can find the printed music here.

AND AFTER THIS OUR EXILE

-> (sung version here) <-

Salve Regina, Mater misericordiæ,

vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevæ,

Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes

in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos

misericordes oculos ad nos converte;

Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,

nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.

Hail, O Queen, Mother of mercy,

our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

To thee we cry, Eve’s exiled children;

to thee we sigh, mourning and weeping 

in this valley of tears.

Turn, then, thou who plead'st for us, 

thine eyes of mercy upon us;

and after this our exile show us 

Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb.

O grave and merciful, 

Gentle Virgin Mary.

I have come to love this old (twelfth century) Marian hymn, sung in the clip above by the Benedictines of Santo Domingo de Silos. It was often sung at evening Hours, and at funerals, especially those of priests. And, of course, T. S. Eliot refers to it in 'Ash Wednesday' part III with the last line 'and after this our exile'  . My translation is perhaps a little free: I wanted to avoid too much syrupy sentimentality. Some purists might object to 'grave' for 'pia'; but 'pious' has been degraded almost beyond recovery, and in the memory of 'pius AEneas' there is a kind of gravity respectful of the Divine. Likewise, 'gentle' seemed reasonable for 'dulcis': rather than the Sulpician 'sweet' it was Horace's 'dulce loquentem, dulce ridentem' that came to mind. 

The image is a detail of Michelangelo's last Pietà, the Rondanini Pietà in Milan's Castello Sforzesco, which I have always found profoundly moving.

JOY IN THE DARK

It is interesting that the only two Sundays in the liturgical year that have joyous names fall in the middle of sober, even penitential seasons. In the midst of Lent there is Laetare; the third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday – “Rejoice!”

Today was Gaudete, and the rejoicing was linked to John the Baptist replying to the envoys of the Pharisees. “No,” he said, “no, I am not the Messiah.” “Uh, huh? So, are you the Prophet Elijah?” “No, I’m not Elijah.” “OK, listen. We have to have an answer for the guys who sent us, all right? So who are you really?”

[Long, pregnant silence. Finally the scarecrow in rags with Al Pacino’s face deigns to answer. And he replies with a quotation.]

“I am the voice that cries in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’”

[? ? ?]

“In the midst of you there is Someone you do not know: Someone whose sandals I’m not worthy to undo.”

Temporary end of story. Beginning for us. As someone in France wrote: In the midst of us there is the Someone we do not recognise. He is here, already. He is here, among us. Whose face he has taken, we don’t know. We look around us and see all kinds of people on the train, in the shopping mall. Which one of them is He? We don’t know. Perhaps the best bet is to say, Anyone of them; Everyone of them; All of them.

The presence of God is one of the astonishing mysteries that gets deeper as you live and think about it longer. This morning I was at Mass in a vast and icy cold village church on a mountaintop, where the echo and the sound-system combined to make part of the service and almost all of the sermon incomprehensible. And yet, at the Consecration, at the Peace, and at the Communion, there was a sense of the Presence I have rarely felt. And the awaiting of the Birth became very quiet, and very joyful – an extension of ‘Be it unto me according to Thy word’ and of the Magnificat: the quiet, accepting, awaiting joy of Mary.

So today, three candles: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but all of them burning in Mary’s inner room. Rejoice!