MOVING AND PROFOUND

 The French author Daniel-Rops published, in 1952, a little book called "Missa Est" with very fine B&W photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot and a series of brief texts explaining parts of the Mass followed by short meditations on each part. Here is his meditation on the Offering of the bread and wine (my translation):

If you have nothing else to offer the Lord, lay before Him only your works and your travails:

this piece of bread resting there on the paten cost many men many efforts.

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all you have suffered:

for the wine to be poured into the chalice, did the grapes not have to be trampled and their skin opened?

If all you have inside you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all humanity’s anguish:

let your hands lift up those sad things, for Mercy has received them in advance in His Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to offer and implore, if all inside you is absence and abandonment:

only accept in silence that Another take care of you on your behalf and accept you, so that the Offering and the Offerer may be one gift. 

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.

THE JOYS OF TRANSLATION

My priestly daughter suggested I translate into English the admirable little French book on the Mass about which I wrote here in October 2014, Missa Est by Daniel-Rops with stunning photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot. Little did I think what joy the work would give me. One may read a book, which is already an improvement to skimming it; but when you translate it you read it a far more profound way: you have not only to find the words' equivalents but their meaning, which includes their resonance and their overtones. It is this meaning that must be recreated in the new language.
   (I have since discovered that there exists a 1950s American translation put out under the aegis of the very media-oriented Bishop Fulton Sheen, with photographs by the great Canadian Yousuf Karsh; but I don't want to see it before finishing my own, as you can perhaps imagine.)
   Apart from a whole new appreciation of Daniel-Rops's writing, both in the historical explanations and in the fervent meditations on each part of the ceremony, I've been struck by the intricacy, the structure, the profundity of significance and the potential for spirituality of the 1570 Tridentine Roman Mass. We non-Roman Catholics often grew up with an apprehension of things Papist on the one hand; and on the other, our Roman brethren have now, since the Second Vatican Council, so altered the liturgy that it often bears only the faintest, reminiscent resemblance to its magnificent forebear.

   The intricacy, first: as Daniel-Rops explains in his Preface, not one of its 30 parts can be considered, as the Tridentine Catechism puts it, 'as useless or superfluous'. 'The smallest versicle, the sentence it takes only seconds to pronounce, are an integral part of a whole where are associated and proclaimed the gift of God, the oblation of Christ and the Grace we receive. It is like a spiritual symphony, where all the themes come back, complete one another, and unite in a single intention.'
   The structure, second: we enter with anticipated joy; find our emphatically-imperfect inner mess a block, so confess; are absolved; hear the Church's teaching in readings and homily; include the world in our preparatory prayers; offer the fruits of the earth that will be transformed; assist, in wonder and prayer, at the Consecration; communicate; are brought back to the world in the Postcommunion; are blessed, and go back to our lives. It is as structured as a great play. 
   Profundity of significance. There is not a detail -- as I once explained to student to whom all this was new and fascinating -- that does not have at least six centuries of meaning attached to it; that does not come from years, decades or centuries of intelligence feeding devotion. Take the Confiteor, the General Confession: the priest who leads it, and who is sometimes followed in this by members of the congregation, strikes his breast three times, an ancient sign of humility. These three strikes are knocks: Christ's knocking at the door of our closed and stubborn heart. If we open to them in the Confession, we may be freed from our burden by the Absolution. 
   Finally, the potential for spirituality. If we participate entirely, with our whole being, in such a Mass, we will emerge as from a great tragedy: scoured and cleansed, washed and slightly trembling, but with a renewal of joy, hope and courage for the days to come. 

But where to find such a Mass, today? The international and universal intelligibility of Latin has gone, and visitors can barely follow what is going on. The Mass as I experience it in my cluster of French villages is a travesty; the gestures are hurried if not suppressed, half the words are missing, the atmosphere is that of an amicable chat among friends; the texts are half improvised, the homilies bellowed into an unnecessary microphone --- and yet the villagers are happy. The flow of the liturgy is brutally checked by the exchange of the Peace, as if King Lear were interrupted in the middle of Act IV by a loquacious bumpkin engaging the audience; yet the elderly peasants smile and say 'La paix du Christ' to their neighbours. It is all very Evangelical and sort of Baptist in atmosphere. It is, apparently, what the Council Fathers in the Sixties wanted, and one suspects it suits our present Pope perfectly. 

Yet those who want something else, who need, who crave a true, silent, adoring worship; who need time and stillness for intense prayer but time and stillness not alone but in community; they are short-changed. Those who yearn for worship of the Highest in reverence, in beauty, in quiet, in a movement of the spirit they can join in, in a 'spiritual symphony', are neglected and, if they are not close to some major city where there is an eccentric Church more or less frowned upon by the authorities, have nowhere to go.

   I do not know the answer to this. I simply hope that those of us who have the need for such a Mass (or Eucharist), replete with the history of our faith and of our Church, filled with the wealth of symbolism it carries, will have the courage to make our needs felt and not to let ourselves be treated as antisocial, egocentric and reactionary aesthetes. 
   As for us Anglicans, who have long had good reason to feel dubious (to say the least) about the Council of Trent, perhaps we should look again at this Mass, which our otherwise admirable ancestors dismissed as diabolical flummery: if we look again, with a devout eye and an open mind, we shall find such a wealth of nourishment for the soul as will last us days, weeks, months, and even years.    

NOT THE DEATH OF GOD

Samuel Palmer, "Coming from Evening Church" (ca. 1827)

A few nights ago I heard an interview with a highly intelligent and perceptive woman, Monique Hébrard, who has written on “Twelve Urgencies for the Church”. One of the urgencies, she said, was for the Church to recognise that “Christendom is dead”. Not God, not Christianity: Christendom. Referring to the recent massive demonstrations in France against gay marriage, she said that many of the demonstrators were simply “nostalgic for Christendom”: a time when the Church dictated its morality to society at large. When the interviewer asked, “So, it’s gone? Isn’t that sort of sad? Haven’t a lot of good things gone with it?” Hébrard replied, “Yes, sure. Lots of good things have gone. But what are we going to do? Cry? No: we’re going to live.” A sturdy answer. And I thought she was probably right.

Then today I was preparing for Christmas, around family, after discussing what we were going to do on Christmas Eve, and listening to one of my favourite ancient Christmas vinyls: the glorious Austrian soprano Maria Stader singing German Christmas songs. And I thought of the death of Christendom. The faithful go on being faithful, and find ways to live with the perfectly valid pagan aspects of Yuletide. Angry atheists carry on being Grinches, growling at the season in their lairs. But what is vanishing is the wave that carried some beauty, some thoughtfulness and even some prayer into the ordinary deserts of the year’s dark. Singing “Silent Night” and “O little town of Bethlehem” was never proselytism: it was a way for thousands to touch the hem of a garment.

And it made me think of an urgency different from Hébrard’s: with what are we going to replace “Christendom”? What is the Church going to do for the thousands who are not ready to become active members of the Party, so to speak? In French politics, the parties distinguish between “les militants”, the full card-carrying members, and “les sympathisants” who will probably vote for you at the next election but still maintain some distance. What I see in the mainstream Churches at the moment is a sense that nowadays you need to be “un militant”, and the more militant the better: to be a “sympathisant” is simply not good enough.

But what happened to the five thousand who were fed in Galilee? How many became apostles, enthusiasts, constantly at Temple or synagogue, founding and running charitable organisations to help widows and orphans? Ten per cent., probably. But the other 4500? Did they continue worshipping irregularly, keeping what commandments they could but not scrupulously, and yet – and yet with a new question always behind their eyes, a new presence filling their prayers when they least expected it?

This is what “Christendom” did. I remember it, as I was part of the generation that saw it turn. Many people went to church because, yes, they believed, but also because it was what they were used to and because it was a good thing to do on Sunday mornings. “I don’t know why it is,” said Squire Letterby in Charles Morgan’s Breeze of Morning, “but church and sherry always seem to go together.”

Not good enough, perhaps. But the Church is in danger here of an insidious hypocrisy. The standard justification for “a smaller, poorer Church”, as Pope Francis says he wants, is that people are leaving in droves anyway, and that the Church should respond to that by being both smaller and far more activist, involved in social action and evangelizing at every level. What this justification occludes is the fact that a tight, coherent, highly activist Church may in fact participate in the process it claims to observe: the death of Christendom. Such a Church may in fact be helping to kill what was left of Christendom.

In the Hébrard spirit, facing up to things is a Good Thing. In that case, the Church should perhaps face up to that uncomfortable possibility. Is it what is wanted? Is the ecclesiastical reaction to Christendom’s wasting illness to be simply “Good riddance”? Do we prefer 500 militants on their own to 500 militants plus 4500 people who come for mixed and sometimes unworthy reasons? Would such a reaction be consistent with the claimed evangelical spirit, or even with charity? Or would it be whisking away the garment’s hem from their touch?

What could be done to save that remnant of “Christendom”? The Church can’t get its authority over the secular world back. But part of its claimed evangelism could be a gentler conversation with the “Yes, I used to go, but it’s been so long” people; a listening to their reasons for not going, both the ones they give and the ones they don’t give; a less strident tone in the Church’s pronouncements on itself and the world; a little more attention to prayer and spirituality; a less continual emphasis on change; a great deal more beauty in the liturgy; a recognition that nostalgia is an aspect of human nature that God can love also, and not necessarily a form of sin; and that, contrary to a certain Gospel pronouncement, some old bottles hold new wine quite well.

The villagers in my part of France, even the elderly, have taken to the Vatican II Mass quite well. They like the cheerfulness, and shaking hands at the Peace. But out of 48 villages, each main Sunday Mass (there are 3 in all, a Saturday night and two Sunday) has about 40 people, who drive considerable distances. And I personally know a number of people who stay away yet who might have been retained; those for whom the new régime has neither loaves nor fishes. It seems a pity. 

ANTI-GRAVITY?

"SOLEMN" (Oxford English Dictionary)

1.   a.  Associated or connected with religious rites or observances; performed with      due ceremony and reverence; having a religious character; sacred.

The seruice daylie doon..so deuoute, solempne, and full of Armonye. (Thos. Cromwell)

3.   a. Performed with, accompanied by, due formality or ceremony; of a formal or ceremonious character.

Watching the glorious Kristin Scott Thomas perform Sophocles’ ‘Electra’ recently, I was reminded of the Catholic Mass as practiced in the village churches in my area in rural France. The theatre performance was filled with passion, vast floods of it; there were occasional flashes of humour, but the semiotic of the whole production was “(Greek) Tragedy is Passion” – rip-roaring, throat-tearing, rolling-on-the-ground passion.  The Mass – the modern, post-Vatican-II Mass as presided over by our hyperactive, charming, big-hearted Algerian priest – has, obviously, a different kind of passion, but that is not its main characteristic. Its main feature is upbeat intimacy: the semiotic here is “the Mass is a family get-together – God’s family”. There are flashes of humour, and the moment of the Peace, where the liturgy is interrupted while everyone shakes hands with or kisses neighbours, here is not nearly as invasive an interruption as in some more formal Masses: it preserves the mood that has been there all along.

            Well, so what? In Electra, we are caught up in an uncontrollable hatred and grief; in the village Mass, we are absorbed into a good-humoured communal celebration. And yet, and yet. In both manifestations, something huge and important is missing, and it is the same thing: solemnity. Greek tragedies were solemn occasions, not religious services but performed and beheld with reverence and gravity. The performers wore masks. The ending comprised katharsis, a cleansing, a purification of the emotions of pity and terror that the story had called forth.

            The Mass is a religious service. It is the supreme moment of meeting between man and God, between Man and God-made-Man, between an ordinary person and the Resurrected Christ. Few people have said this better that John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a Roman Catholic – and what he wrote is equally true for Anglo-Catholics:

To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses forever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words -- it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.

Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on, as if impatient to fulfill their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick, for they are all parts of one integral action, for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon, as when it was said in the beginning, "What thou doest, do quickly".

Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass, because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven into the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass, for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the name of the Lord as He passed by, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth". And as Moses on the mountain, so we too "make haste to bow our heads to the earth, and adore".

So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, "waiting for the moving of the water", each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intentions, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly, following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our place with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

There are little children there, and old men, and simple laborers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving, there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one Eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and the scope of it.

What Newman wrote still supposes a congregation, a community; but it is a congregation united in a joy that is solemn, in a solemn hour of celebration. “Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble.” I have seldom if ever attended a post-Vatican-II Mass, or indeed an Anglican Common Worship Eucharist, where this sense was expressed. Solemnity is not boring, nor is it old-fashioned: it is gravitas, the expression of the respect and awe due to what is greater than our sloppy humanity. An expression that picks up and involves our sloppy human selves and catches us up, for all too short a moment, into the portals of eternity. Please, can we have our solemnity back?

OFFERING

In the admirable little book Missa Est by Daniel-Rops (the nom de plume of Henri Petiot 1901-1965) with stunning photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot, which I have had occasion to mention here before, I found a little text that moved me and that I thought I'd share. In the section on the preparation of the bread and the wine -- of the offerings ---, after the explanation of the history of this part of the Mass, he writes the following:

If you have nothing else to offer the Lord, only give him your efforts and your pains:

it took much work by many men, the piece of bread lying there on the paten. 

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all that you have suffered:

for the wine to be poured into the chalice, did the grapes not have to be crushed and their seeds opened?

If you have nothing in you but sin and bitterness, the distress of living and all the anguish of being human,

let your hands lift up those pitiful things to heaven, for Mercy has received them already beforehand, at His Supper.

And if you no longer have even the strength to offer and to beg, if there is nothing in you but absence and abandonment,

merely accept in silence that Another take care of you for your sake and accept you, so that the Offering and the Offerer may be one gift. 

For those who read French, I'll give the original, which is far better than I can translate:

Si tu n'as rien d'autre à offrir au Seigneur, présente-lui seulement tes travaux et tes peines,

à beaucoup d'hommes il a coûté beaucoup d'efforts ce morceau de pain qui repose là sur la patène.

Si ta main est vide et ta bouche douloureusement sèche, offre ton coeur blessé, tout ce que tu as souffert,

pour que le vin fût versé dans le calice n'a-t-il pas fallu que la grappe fût broyée et le grain ouvert?

Si tu n'as rien en toi que le péché et l'amertume, la détresse de vivre et toute l'angoisse humaine,

que tes mains tendent au ciel ces pitoyables choses car la Miséricorde les a reçues par avance à sa Cène.

Et si tu n'as même plus la force de présenter et d'implorer, si tout en toi n'est qu'absence et abandon,

en silence accepte qu'un Autre se charge de toi pour toi et t'assume, pour que l'Offrande et l'Offrant soient un seul don.

OFFERING (AGAIN)

The French author Daniel-Rops published, in 1952, a little book called "Missa Est" with very fine B&W photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot and a series of brief texts explaining parts of the Mass followed by short meditations on each part. Here is his meditation on the Offering of the bread and wine (my translation):

If you have nothing else to offer the Lord, lay before Him only your works and your travails:

this piece of bread resting there on the paten cost many men many efforts.

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all you have suffered:

for the wine to be poured into the chalice, did the grapes not have to be trampled and their skin opened?

If all you have inside you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all humanity’s anguish:

let your hands lift up those sad things, for Mercy has received them in advance in His Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to offer and implore, if all inside you is absence and abandonment:

only accept in silence that Another take care of you on your behalf and accept you, so that the Offering and the Offerer may be one gift.