THROUGH THE DESERT

   I have long been fascinated by the lengthy Psalm 119, that curious love-song to the Law. One of its most striking features is the repetition of certain words: "Law", "commandments", "statutes" and "testimonies". They keep turning up in slightly different contexts, and strongly suggest a formal pattern. When I started looking them up on the Web, I found there are eight in all, and
this useful downloadable PDF lists them in Hebrew, in the usual translation, and gives the places and ways they are used by the Psalmist, as well as his responses to each.
 
   The overall impression one gets is indeed that of a formal song, but a formal song of passionate gratitude to God the Lawgiver: the gratitude of a nomadic desert people for a signpost, for a clear path through the wilderness, a path that shows shifting sands to be avoided, oases where one may rest and be refreshed, and at the end a promised land of milk (protein and fat, hard to come by in the Nefud) and honey (the universal sweetener before sugar, giving energy and pleasure). As so often, it teaches a Christian how absolutely the Old Alliance belongs to his own faith as well. I may believe that there is a new Torah, and that a living guide is even more precious than an Ordnance Survey map; studying such a Psalm in any depth explains why the new Torah in no way banishes or replaces the old but fulfils it: not an iota or punctuation mark of the old shall be eliminated, it keeps its full and glorious value.
 
   Moreover, one thing the Fathers teach us is that beyond studying the Psalms there is another approach:  praying the Psalms. For some psalms, this is both simple (though not necessarily easy) and evident: the Penitential Psalms and the Psalms of Praise, for instance. For others, it is much more difficult. Sometimes it's harder because of the spiritual depth and complexity: Psalm 22, even without its immense Christian resonance, has a range of thought and emotion that takes years to absorb fully into prayer. And what about 119? Its very length and insistence makes it difficult to pray: we tend to think, 'OK, enough already, I get the point, no need to go on and on . . .' The change-ringing of the terms for God's Word is alien to our ideas of both poetry and prayer.

   So how to pray Psalm 119? I think the answer lies in the list I cited above, in the notes on the full range of meanings attached to each term; and in a constant application of all these meanings to one's own life and experience. For instance, simply following and meditating upon the mishpatim, to us almost inexplicably glossed as 'judgements, ordinances', leads us to the insight that such judgements are those that express and echo God's loving-kindness by their justice. And that, in turn, sheds light upon on the one hand Angela Merkel's decision to receive positively the greatest possible number of refugees in Germany, and other hand my wife's decision to go and visit our 96-year-old peasant neighbour who lives a placid old age but is happy to be remembered. If one admits to one's reading of Psalm 119 such background and such echoes, praying  the psalm becomes both possible and a delight.

TORAH TORAH, or, THE JOY OF JOY

This is a rambling post; but I was trying to think through some ideas, and react to some things I’d heard, and I thought I’d share the thoughts.

“Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields.” (C.S. Lewis on Psalm 119 in Reflections on the Psalms) It was Lewis who first made me realise that the Torah and the Old Alliance gave the people of Israel the joy of a clear way through a trackless desert – or a firm path through a muddy field or, worse, a bog of quicksand. It was a clear and firm guidance.

Now in his admirable Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI alias Joseph Ratzinger explains that in the New Alliance Jesus is himself the new Torah. So that on the one hand not a jot or tittle of the old Law will be annulled, because it is fulfilled in him; on the other hand the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and whoever believes in him – follows him -- will have eternal life.

If this is so (and it seems to me magnificently plausible), then this new Torah and this New Alliance should give the new Israel, the community of believers i.e. the Church, a similar joy: they are not told how to cross the desert, they are shown. Not a road map but a living guide.

So is this WWJD (What Would Jesus Do)? Up to point, yes: always a good start. But it’s not just a matter of imitating deeds: following him means going much further, and following him – for example – into the High Priestly Prayer, into the heart of God: it means the Transfiguration, it means the forty days in the desert. It means knowing the Old Alliance and its texts almost by heart. And it leads, we mustn’t forget, to the Cross. He is the King of Jews; he is the King of the world, says Ratzinger. But he reigns from the Cross: there is the paradox the Sanhedrin couldn’t accept and that intelligent but cowardly Roman Pontius Pilate could only recognise in irony. Tragedy, then? No: because the Cross, when not avoided but accepted, leads in turn to the Resurrection – “and death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die” (John Donne).

This is a joy far greater even that the path through the desert. So the new Israel should be filled with incredulous happiness, a beacon of alegria throughout history. Its two chief elements have names that begin with the prefix “Good”:  eu-angelion (the authoritative Good Message) and  eu-charistia (the Good Thanksgiving). So why is the New Alliance so rarely communicated, and felt, as joy?

I was listening the other day on French radio to the delightful Cardinal Barbarin (archbishop of Lyon) explaining Pope Francis’ text Evangelii Gaudium (“the Joy of the Gospel”). And time and time again the emphasis – a rather gleeful emphasis – was on how uncomfortable the Faith ought to make us; how it should discombobulate us, shake us up, kick us in the fundament and yank us out of everything we are used to and love. But as Henry Rydal put it in Charles Morgan’s The Empty Room, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you won’t cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” It’s as if the only saying of Jesus we should treasure were “I come not to bring peace but a sword”.

If that had been so, I thought, would thousands have followed him, running, not walking around the whole of the Sea of Galilee to get to the other shore before his boat? Would they have flocked to his teaching? Would the two travellers to Emmaus have felt their hearts on fire within them as he explained the Torah? The five thousand did not come to be fed: they came to hear him speak – the bread and the fish were an afterthought. I’ve always been fascinated by those crowds, who are never mentioned again afterwards. Something must have remained in their very ordinary lives --  something sweeter than the honeycomb, as John Ruusbroec said, following the Psalms.

To hear some current church authorities, Jesus was understood only by twelve men, and that most imperfectly; and we must be like them, only better – eleven of them, after all, ducked Golgotha. We must this, we must that; we emphatically must not the other; doesn’t it sound like the Law all over again? Is this an eu-angelion? We are told we must be disciples, in order to be Christians. But there were only twelve of those, out of all the thousands. What about those who, He said, were saved by their faith but who did not spend the rest of their time following him around – the paralytic, the centurion, the woman with the issue of blood? Their lives, certainly, were changed; they walked in a fog of happiness for some days, then went on living normally, yet with a new sweetness that must have radiated in their little towns and neighbourhoods.

As Ratzinger says, the key to following him lies in the Beatitudes, especially the pure in heart. They shall see God. Like Abraham; like Moses. Perhaps those nameless ones I’m thinking of had their hearts made pure by seeing him, touching his garment, listening to his words. Perhaps they, as much as the Twelve (who, remember, could still argue, and in his presence, about rank and precedence in Heaven!), saw God. After all, they saw, and some of them really saw, Him: and “who has seen me, has seen the Father”.

Good deeds are important; they are humanly important. They come in many different forms, from the Boy Scout’s good deed to the NGO’s aid worker’s, but also from the church-music composer’s motet to the Carthusian monk’s prayer. As C.S. Lewis (him again) put it: “Not nice people, but new men”. Even the hearts of the best of us are pure only in spots, like the Curate’s Egg: our vision of God is blurry and occasional. But even blurry and occasional, it remains to haunt us.

What is it like? What was it like, for those people in Galilee? They saw a man, in some ways ordinary; but there was something. To me, the most convincing imaginary portrait of Jesus has always been Rembrandt’s: a youngish Jewish man with long dark hair – and those eyes. Because when they saw him, the ones who really saw him saw through him. They saw more – this, I suspect, is where the halo comes from.

Contrary to some sentimental portraits, they did not see someone down in the gutter, the Highest of the High having become the Lowest of the Low. Yeshua bar Yosef was at first a respectable Galilean artisan, running the family carpentry firm; then he became a noted itinerant rabbi admired for his learning and followed by crowds, who taught in synagogues and in the Temple. He wasn’t a little weakling because he walked and walked and walked, everywhere. So what they saw was, as E.V. Rieu put it in his Introduction to The Four Gospels, “tremendous power, rigidly controlled”. And the ones who saw through him saw, intermittently and blurred but frighteningly, God. “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” was Peter’s reaction (Luke 5:8). And John – the only disciple who didn’t duck Golgotha – thinking back as an old man, found the words: “The Word was with God; and the Word was God…. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Head of Christ"