THE PRAYER OF THE HEART - CONTINUED

In my last post I ended with the Carthusian saying that, in the Prayer of the Heart, the heart itself is eventually transfigured by the Crucifixion and Resurrection: a saying that if it is not simplistic is extremely profound, complex and difficult. So I have been giving it some thought, and prayer, and I think that there is perhaps a way to understand it.

            Let’s begin with that word “transfigured”. it has dictionary meanings, but in the discourse of a contemplative monk it should be taken, surely, in a Biblical, Gospel sense. There is, in the Gospel, that moment when Yeshua goes up on a mountain – traditionally Mount Tabor, on the summit of which my daughter was married – with Peter, James and John. There, all of a sudden, he is “transfigured before them; his face shining as the sun, and his garments became white as the light." Moses and Elijah appear, talking with him (according to Luke, about his fatal journey to Jerusalem); the voice of God is heard, saying “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: listen to him.” When the terrified disciples eventually look up, Moses and Elijah have gone, and Yeshua is there looking normal and telling them not to be afraid.

            So “transfigured” implies a change not only of appearance but of nature: in the Gospel story, Yeshua’s brief and flaming change from human to divine and back again. In what way can our heart, then, be “transfigured” by the Crucifixion and Resurrection? Coming as it does after an astonishingly profound and beautiful chapter on the Prayer of the Heart and the silence that we must learn, not to create but to accept, I think this transfiguration is in a sense a reminder. The prayer of silence, it tells us, is not a cruise. It is not a peaceful, meditative, lengthy polishing of an ideal or higher self we are growing into (as it might be in Buddhism). As we are learning the prayer of the heart, the prayer of silence, the Crucifixion and Resurrection are there to add a necessary dimension of verticality, and a vivid reminder of suffering.

            I have thought a lot recently about the gradual transformation of Yeshua bar Yosef, teknon (builder) of Nazareth, into Yeshua the Meschiach, the Anointed (i.e. crowned) Saviour. Toward the middle or end of this process I seem to see something like a rage of compassion. As he looks around him with new, or gradually renewing, eyes what he sees is an ocean of suffering: I imagine him feeling like the only physician in Aleppo after weeks of bombing. It is of course a suffering he is destined wholly and entirely to share in what is perhaps the acme of his humanity.

            For us, that sharing is a message we cannot and must not evade. Yet in this context that message is not simple: it is not simply telling us to stop being Mary and become Martha. It is telling us that we must, in the midst of pursuing the prayer of the heart, let that very heart be transfigured, first by the Cross and then by Easter. The Cross will enrich our search by the hugeness of its suffering, by the enormity of its sacrifice, by the price of its blood. It will remind us that we are not embarked on a development of our self to greater heights and/or depths. We are embarked on a relationship that will lead us to places unknown and barely guessed at. And Easter, the Resurrection, will remind us that that relationship and the voyage it entails is one of our salvation, and thus of a scarcely imaginable joy.

            Coda:

           So many of these words have become counters in discourse. “Salvation”: what does it mean, really? Literally: to be safe, to end up safe, home free, saved from danger on every side, from the bullet that flies in the noonday, from the bomb that kills in the night, from the cancer that stalks us everywhere, from the inferno to which we consign ourselves daily in our great and small refusals of love. To be plucked from the jaws of peril and set down in a garden of pure raindrop love. But like Yeshua, we can only be resurrected if we go through death ourselves. That it is not eternal, not definitive, we proclaim in every recitation of the Creed. Learning the prayer of the heart may help us actually to believe this incredible promise.

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.

WE MIGHT NOT HAVE LIKED HIM

Today is the feast of St John the Baptist, here portrayed by the immense Florentine sculptor Donatello. I'm not sure we should have liked him. He was extreme in every way. He went off to live in the desert where he ate locusts and wild honey -- the locusts, presumably, raw. In order to preach, he can't have lived entirely alone, unless he preached to the bees that provided his honey. Preaching, he was extreme also. "Repent!" he shouted, in what was presumably a hoarse if stentorian voice: "Repent!" He was a kind of extreme version of an Old Testament prophet, someone who said what God had commanded him to say, to whom God had commanded him to say it (even, sometimes, to the King), and let the chips fall where they may. 
What was he telling people to do? Matthew's original Greek (well, John actually spoke something like Aramaic, but we know about him in Greek) word translated as "repentance" is metanoia, which we might also translate as "changing one's mentality". This is interesting, because "repent" has come to connote feeling sorry, apologising to God and men, grovelling; whereas metanoia lays the accent on changing. And why is this necessary? Because the basileia tôn ouranôn, the "kingship of the heavens" has arrived. Not "will arrive soon": it has arrived. 
An uncomfortable situation; and John did nothing to make it less so. When you go to Luke, you get much more of what he said. Not concerned to flatter his audience, he called them a brood of poisonous snakes: a set of sterile fruit-trees, good only for firewood. He seems to have had a massive presence, for instead of going home or stoning him, they meekly asked him what, then, they should do? And he had simple, practical answers. To the ordinary  folk: if you have two coats, give one to the guy who has none. If you have more than enough to eat, share it. To the collaborationist tax-collectors he said, Don't take a rake-off, just collect what the rules say. To some soldiers he said, Don't do violence to civilians, don't make false accusations, be content with your wages. 
In other words, Shape up. Be decent people. Change your mindset. Simple decency, sharing, taking what you're given and no more. It doesn't seem like a huge program, yet it blew people's minds. Because there was that something more: the Why. The Reign of Heaven has arrived. I just seal your good intentions with water; but there is Someone arriving just after me, and He is the real thing. He won't be using water. He'll be using wind and fire. (Wind: pneuma is breath, wind, spirit.) He'll be bearing a flail and threshing you like corn; and the husks, the empty chaff, will go into the fire. 
In other words: guys, this is serious. It doesn't get more serious, it won't ever get more serious.  
And when the Someone turned up, just quietly standing in the lineup to get into the river and have water poured on his head, John couldn't believe it. You? Baptised by me? 
It seems that John was genuinely staggered. Perhaps not just by the fact that the Someone had really arrived and was standing in front of him, but that the Someone was not breathing wind and fire. And this may have marked a change, a metanoia, even in John himself. He had to learn that Yeshua, the chap he'd more or less known, or known about, from childhood, was a different kind of Meschiach: not an avenging angel but Isaiah's Suffering Servant.
It is interesting that John did not become a disciple. Instead, as far as we know, he went on being a fiery prophet until he admonished one King too many, and was beheaded by Herod. His own capacity for metanoia seems to have gone only so far.