BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

 Honoré Daumier, Le défenseur

Thinking, with joy, about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and particularly about Him as the Paraclete. Yeshua tells his disciples that the Father will, when he is gone, send them “another Paraclete” to help them. “Paraclete” comes from the verb para-kaleo, to call to one’s side. One called to one’s side, in usage, became one’s lawyer, one’s advocate, one’s defender. Two interesting points here. In the first place, they will receive  another advocate, which implies that Yeshua was already their advocate. Secondly, what they receive is what we receive also; and it is an advocate, a defender. I wonder how often we think of the Holy Spirit this way. What it means is that the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe, who is also, miraculously, our loving father, detaches a part of Himself to be our Defender. Not just “ours’ in the sense of the Christian community, the church, but even unto “ours’ in the sense of yours and mine. 

            Against whom is he our defender? In God’s universe, there is only one accuser, one adversary, one enemy: Shaitan, “the Adversary”. Whatever his disputed origin, he is there, always. He is against us, he accuses us, he disbelieves our arguments, he wants us dead, he is der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit who always denies. He has his servants: evil spirits for those who believe in those, wholly evil individuals, men who have given themselves over entirely to his way of being, men like Hitler and Stalin who cheerfully order thousands tortured and killed; men like the character Severidge in Charles Morgan’s The Judge’s Story, whose only purpose, whose only joy in life, is to rob others of what they hold most dear, of what symbolises their inmost self.

            Against such individuals, against such powers, we ordinary mortals are almost defenceless. Concentrated, pitiless and intelligent malignity is not something we often meet, which is why we tend not to recognise it when we do. There are some very rare souls who seem naturally armoured against it, but most of us are désemparé, lost and helpless in its presence. Which is why, on and after Whitsun, Pentecost, it is so important to remember that no, we are not helpless. We have a defender. We have a Defender, the Defender: the ruach,the creator spiritus who made the universe, has Himself chosen to be always at our side, our defender – the comrade who battles beside us, the defence counsel who crushes the lies of the prosecutor, the Lord who fights to defend his vassals, the father who fights to the death to save his children. The para-klètos. He is all those things because he is not only the Holy Spirit, he is also, and as such, one Person of the Triune God. 

And why? Why does he bother with little shits like us? Sometimes we think that even at our rare best we aren’t much. And yet. We have to take on board the mind-bending fact that it is for little shits like us that He created at the very least this planet and possibly the Universe. That he did so out of incomprehensible but absolute love. And that all we have to do is accept that love, accept that defence. To realise that however deep the horror or the gloom or the misery we are in, he is there with us, fighting it along with us, fighting for us, never, never abandoning us. We may feel that he is, sometimes: the Psalmist felt it and Yeshua Himself quoted it on the Cross. But that same Psalm ends in reassurance. He is with us because it was for us that he suffered crucifixion. He is with us because that was not the end. And He is with us now because “as at this time”, as the Prayer Book says, He came among us like a mighty rushing wind, and remained with us like a still, small voice – deep in our hearts, speaking words of comfort that each of us understands in our own most private language.   

A DEEP BREATH

Veni, creator Spiritus . . .

I have always had a special feeling for the third Person of the Trinity. Perhaps because I felt he was getting short shrift, always less talked about than the Father and the Son: it seemed unfair. Later, as I finally learnt more about the content of our faith, this feeling persisted, if only because I found him referred to as the loving relationship between the Father and the Son, and I could not figure out how a relationship could be a Person.

There are, of course, all sorts of mysteries surrounding him. For instance, both in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles he is sometimes referred to as if he were a specific, almost physical and delimited object or motion. Yeshua breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Almost like your peace, which you can bestow upon a house but which you can take back if the house does not receive you decently.

In three languages he is the same. In Hebrew, ruach; in Greek, pneuma; in Latin, spiritus; and in each of those languages the word can have the same three meanings: breath, wind, or spirit. It/he is what animates matter: God made Adam of clay, then breathed life into him. It is he who hovered over the primeval waters of the planet, creating differentiated life.

And when the Son approaches his final trial, he promises his friends that he will send them a Defender, an Advocate, someone who will accompany them always and be on their side no matter what the big greebly world will do to them. He is the paraklètos, the one who is on your side. And since he is also God, how can he fail?

Then, when Yeshua has risen and spent some time with them and finally gone to his Father’s house, the pneuma comes to them in a huge way on the feast of Pentecost, seven weeks after Pesach. By this time the followers of Yeshua are many, and from many countries around the Mediterranean; a crowd of them has assembled somewhere, possibly for a liturgy; and suddenly there is a sound as of a mighty rushing wind and tongues of fire appear on everybody’s head (the origin by the way, of the bishop’s mitre). And, amazingly, each person hears the apostles’ sermon in his own language or dialect. The ruach is there in Person,  just as a fiery Cloud appeared in the Temple.

And what the ruach does is in this case fascinating. As a French commentator said, this is the opposite of the Tower of Babel. There, there was uniformity and an ambition to be divine; here there is diversity and a Divinity who comes down. And the lesson, said the Frenchwoman, is that the Spirit allows us to hear the Word each in our own way and still (in every sense) communicate. We do not have to be the same or even much alike. The Word of God comes to us. All we need to do is unlock the door, open our windows, and fling the shutters wide.

And when he comes in, he will not only defend us but teach us. Teach us to pray, teach us to get things right, teach us discernment, teach us how to live in such a way as to make a home for him in our hearts. Coming into us, he breathes, and we are clay receiving life. Awkwardly blindly, we start moving, like a golem or Frankenstein’s monster; gradually we are filled with more of that spiritus until at last we become fully human. Human, that is, in the way we were created and meant to be. He is creator spiritus: he (re-)creates us to be new beings. We leave the caterpillar’s husk behind, marvel at out new colours, and spread our wings.

Illustration: El Greco, "Pentecost" (Madrid)

FOR WHIT MONDAY

To be read aloud, with strong accents:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.                                      Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

IN THESE EMPTY DAYS

I think I've posted this before, but I'm always struck by the moments between the Ascension and 

Whitsun (Pentecost) - rather like Holy Saturday, when the statues are still veiled and the Tabernacle 

on the altar open and empty. A brief time of - well, almost fright, a sudden chill of aloneness. We 

know better, but even so. I had been reading the glorious Latin hymns and their haunting tetrameters, 

and found myself writing something that sounded like the translation of one. So here it is: a translation without an original:

PATRIS AEDEM REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Veni, Creator Spiritus . . . I have always loved the Latin hymns with their stately iambic tetrameters; and this one especially. Since my youth – and an education not given to particular ‘devotions’ – I’ve had a special orientation towards the Holy Ghost (and towards St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named at baptism and who was the poet of the Gospels). The Third Person of the Trinity, so ungraspable, so strange and yet so close: what do we do with him?

The question is of course the wrong way round. What does He do with us? The readings I’ve seen recently give one useful answer, which has doubtless occurred to many. Jesus promises the disciples that he will send them the Spirit to be with them after he has gone up to the Father. So, says Fr Marc Sevin, all the things that Jesus says he still has to tell them but which they ‘cannot bear now’: these are the things the Spirit will tell them – tell us – in and through the community of the Church, from the first Pentecost to the Second Coming. 

So in that sense, the Spirit is the One who continues Jesus’ teaching. What else does he do? Another reading says that the Pentecostal event of the tongues is not about speaking, but about hearing and understanding. Each person heard and understood what was being said, in his own dialect. So the Spirit teaches us to hear and understand both God and our neighbour in our own dialect. First, we can look through and beyond language- and communication-barriers to the heart, and meet one another in the language of love; and secondly, we hear and understand both God and our neighbour in the way we, personally, are capable of doing so. The Spirit, then, removes barriers: the barriers between us and our neighbours are removed by both of us hearing the one who is speaking of God, and the barriers between us and God are removed by our understanding what is being said. 

What else does the Spirit do? Paul says that He prays in us. ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Romans 8:26) – and the Father understands this, says Paul, because the Spirit does so kata Theon, in conformity, in harmony, with God. This goes very deep. If when we pray the vastness of God Himself prays in us; like something holding us up as we learn to swim; then our prayer takes on a trembling confidence we may never have thought of.

I wrote last time that the Spirit is our Paraclete, our Defender, our Advocate. He is also our ‘shield and defender’ against the Evil One. And he is the Comforter – a word we have somewhat trivialised in applying it to blankets and such. And, we are taught, ‘comfort’ in Early Modern English still has the sense of con-fortare, strengthening. He is the Comforter in that sense: he strengthens us when we definitely do not feel up to things. Here again, we should learn to be aware of that as a Presence, and to rely on it: how many people might avoid the clutching quicksand of depression, the knifing of despair, if they knew Who was ready to hold them up and give them that extra ounce of strength they lack?

He teaches us; helps us hear and understand; prays in, with and for us; strengthens us and holds us up. No wonder Pentecost, Whitsun, is a feast. A feast; a festival; a celebration. We can’t earn the Spirit; we can’t work to receive him; we can’t get him by making sacrifices or fasting or doing good. He is given us, as a gift, a present, free of charge. He gives Himself. As the French say, Que du bonheur! What joy.

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

The Church year has two moments of dolorous absence: Holy Saturday and the ten days between Ascension Day and Whit Sunday. I heard a brief recorded homily recently by a Carthusian on the former: he enjoined his brothers not to slide over Holy Saturday but to live it to the full: ‘we must be dead with the God who is dead,’ he said. I remember, when I frequented St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, the powerful impact not just of the shrouded statues and the parishioners’ uninterrupted prayer vigil, but especially the empty tabernacle with its door open. It gave me a sense of complete desolation, worse even than a disaffected church being bulldozed.

The time between the Ascension and Whitsun is in some ways similar. The risen Lord was there: he was there in upper rooms, on the beach, at the dinner table of an inn. He wasn’t a ghost: he was flesh and blood and could be touched. (He did walk through walls, though.)  He explained things to the lads: to a couple of them, on the road, he explained the whole of the Scriptures and their pointing to him as the new Scripture, the new Torah, the new Temple. Their joy must have been a little tempered by uncanniness, but so intense. And then he left, whisked off to heaven, not ‘up there’ as we now know, but ‘out there’ (which from a spherical planet always looks like ‘up’, anyway).

Of course, he had explained to them, patiently, that this had to happen: he had to go back to his (and our) Father, and he had to make room for the Third Person of the Trinity to come and join them, for all time (until the End of Time and his return). But the Paraclete did not come until Whitsun, and for those ten days I imagine them feeling desolate in the extreme. No time-scale had been told them. They had little idea what the Holy Spirit would be like. It must all have seemed vague beside the acute and definite loss.

What can we do with this time of in-between, these days of absence? First, realise that the absence is liturgical, and thus both symbolic and recurring: literally, we live in the time of His (the Spirit’s) presence. Secondly, learn from the desolation we feel what a world without God would be like. ‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.’ An increasing number of otherwise intelligent people are saying the same thing; which to them means Good riddance:  we can now do as we please. We can at last have world without God. And, as Ratzinger says in Jesus of Nazareth: when we look around us, we are beginning to see what that looks like . . .

Third, we can prepare for Whitsun by pondering the Third Person of the Trinity. What – who – is the Holy Spirit? I’m always surprised by the mentions of him in the book of Acts, for example, where he is shown as a very definite, almost physical, event: he can come in an instant and have very obvious manifestations: speaking in tongues, for one. Nowadays, in mainstream churches, one gets taught about him differently if at all. As I have written before, he is now often defined as the relation of love between the Father and the Son; but can a relation be a Person?

We are told he is the Paraclete, the Defender, the Advocate. He is, in other words, on our side. Against whom? The obvious thought is, He will stick up for us when we stand as little guilty children before the stern-browed, loving but terrifying Father. But we could expand that. Against whom do we need defending, really? Mmmmm, right. Let’s not name him, but we know whom we mean. Several authors say that ‘Lead us not into temptation’ means ‘Do not test us beyond what we can bear’, and the kind of test they have in mind is the one inflicted on Job, with the Father’s agreement. If such testing were contemplated again, the Advocate would speak up for us on the one hand, and help us bear any subsequent test on the other.

He is also the Spirit of the divine love. Not himself a relationship, but perhaps the One who incarnates and thus creates the love that circulates eternally within the Trinity. God the Father, we imagine, may be Love but has other attributes also, such as Creation and Justice. God the Son, we imagine, may be Love but also has the experience of being (having been? being?) human as well as divine, with all that that implies of difficulty and suffering. Perhaps the Third Person is pure Love, with no other attributes: the fons et origo, the wellspring of heavenly love, that overflows, first within the Triune Godhead, and then down to us pauvres pécheurs, to help and sustain us, to defend us and deliver us, to be always within our reach, to never let us go: to give us the joy that begins on Whitsun. Pondering this might be a very good way to live the ten days of strange, uncanny, unheimlich absence.

BREATH OF LIFE

²² And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: ²³ whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

We all know this passage from John about the resurrected Christ communicating the Holy Spirit to the disciples; but at the local Mass for Whitsun/Pentecost I heard an interpretation of it that was completely new to me, and very powerful. Our lively Algerian-born priest Fr Jean-Kamel said, in his homily, that this is not primarily a justification of the spiritual authority of the Church. No: it is about us, he claimed. We have received the Holy Spirit at our baptism: and so this statement about the forgiveness or retention of sin is addressed directly to each of us. If we forgive our neighbour his sin, it is forgiven, and (s)he is freed; if we retain it – if we do not, cannot forgive it – (s)he remains its prisoner.

I found, and find, this vertiginous: such power it adds to the Second Great Commandment.

FOR WHITSUNDAY -- OR PENTECOST

I've been reading the magnificent collection of Latin hymns I bought at the Kalamazoo medieval conference (One Hundred Latin Hymns, Ambrose to Aquinas, from Harvard), which is an absolute treasure. Peter Walsh's translations are lovely- metre without rhyme, like most of the hymns themselves. So it occurred to me to try my hand at an unrhymed hymn in the iambic tetrameter the Latin often uses.

AD PATRIS LIMEN REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.