PLENI SUNT

 

·      “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that has faith in me, even though he dies, shall live. And all that live and have faith in me shall never die.” (John 11:25)

·      Why are we believers not in a state of perpetual wonder at the magnitude of the gift we have received? Perhaps because we are not often faced with evidence of it in our daily lives. Getting and spending we lay waste our wonder. Worse, infirmities and blows befall us, and worse befalls the Umwelt, the wider world; all of which the Adversary incites us to parse as counter-evidence.

·      Is there, then, a way back, or forward, into recognition and thus renewal? Yes.

·      Pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua. We live, move and have our being in an ocean of God’s glory. Oh yeah? say our atheist friends. Yeah.

·      Begin at beginners’ level: an April day in the Southern French countryside. Everything is in flower, from the humble campion via pale irises and roses’ intensity to the pouring gold of laburnums and the Tyrian shout of Judas-trees. Bees crawl over the wistaria in an ecstasy of fulfilment. A cuckoo sounds in the distance. Bright golden sunshine touches your eyelids, and a cool breeze murmurs to your hair. Yes, you say to yourself: this one’s easy. Nature doesn’t get much better. Glory is all about.

·      The Spoiler, though, is only briefly embarrassed. Look, he says. You are walking slowly, with two sticks. You discover a new pain every day. You have prostate cancer. Your neighbour has had much of his intestine removed and carries a stroma. One of your friends ended up, too young, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Your mother died of a stroke after five interminable years of Alzheimer’s. Glorious?

·      After a brief prayer you reply, Yes. I am here, giving thanks and praise; not only for Thibault the donkey whose nose I just stroked, but for his lookalike, the young radiotherapist who treated my cancer, and the tireless ladies who tended his machine. My neighbour has kept his huge echoing laugh and every scrap of his fighting soul. My friend was cared for with extraordinary love by his wife, a nurse, and his condition brought his friends and colleagues to organise an entire small conference in his honour, in his own remote city, where he was surrounded by honour and affection in his last year. And my mother’s illness brought out in my father a depth of sacrificial love and self-abnegation neither he nor we dreamed he possessed. All conditions of the earth earthy; but that terra was and is plena also of glory.

·      The Contrarian gnashes his teeth, allowing you at last to hear what that sounds like. As we know, he is expert at teleportation; and he whisks you in a whoosh to another part of the country where the houses are experiencing their fifth flooding in two months, women and men are hopelessly piling furniture and working mops and pumps and discovering that their insurance has found an excuse not to pay up even as their walls crack and peel with the absorbed moisture. Aye, he grins. There’s glory for you.

·      But his eyes darken as the Fire Brigade appears. The young men and women are all volunteers, part-timers, the friends and neighbours of the afflicted, They turn up with boats of several kinds, helped by local farmers with tall tractors that brush aside the water; they help the elderly out of their flooded houses, wrap them in blankets and take them to the high-school gym where other volunteers are already preparing hot coffee, tea and cocoa, as well as comforting hugs. Glory creeps in through the windows and swirls invisibly among the rafters. Level Three, and it’s still there: stronger than ever, perhaps.

·      Now the Enemy switches on the television even as he tunes your smartphone to three different social networks simultaneously. As casualty figures from Sudan mingle with Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Islamist decapitations in the Middle East and teenagers kicking other teenagers to death in a Parisian suburb, he grins. Gloria in excelsis? he hisses.

·      Yes, well, this is the graduate course. Were you ever told it was going to be easy? You go back and pray. Time out: need to work on this one. And yet, and yet, something comes tiptoeing out of the wreckage and the gore. Something difficult at first to identify, but call it Horror. You can see it in the faces of the reporters in Boutcha, in the womens’ eyes behind the niqabs, and in the classmates of the French teenagers as well as their parents. It is a strange glory, this: it crawls with agonizing slowness from Fear to No Complicity to Resistance – and it is a glory, perhaps the greatest even: a glory crowned with thorns.  

·      So: pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua? Indeed they are; but often unexpectedly. Which brings us back to That Man. Yeshua Meshiach. Who was expected to turn up as a new King David, with an army, to take Jerusalem and then make the Romans an offer they couldn’t refuse; and who instead appeared as a tall, bony itinerant rabbi striding through the North Country, preaching in villages an unlikely message of returning the measureless love of an invisible Father and extending risky affection to troublesome neighbours. A supposed monarch who rode into town on a donkey; a holy man who let himself be put to a hideous death with slaves and killers; a dead man who came back and ate fish on the beach with his friends. From his life to his message to his return, everything about him is unexpected. You can’t make this up. This isn’t a religion: gods don’t act like this. Gods drink nectar on mountaintops and flirt with nymphs.

·      So, this being the case, we may expect gloria sua also not always to be probable either. And it works both ways. If we learn to recognize the glory, from the laburnums all the way to the resistance, then perhaps we can begin to understand the Gift – a Gift which, like the glory, lives below and beside our everyday life, an insistent and reassuring heartbeat. A vita eterna that has already begun, coursing silently but mightily through our days, always only the whistle-thin membrane of a prayer away.

THE JOY OF --- WHAT?

In the readings and general exhortations I encounter in my daily Prions en Eglise, there is constant mention of joy. “Shout and dance for joy, people of God!” “Quiver for joy!” For those of us living outside certain evangelical movements and outside Southern US black churches, this is a curious injunction. For Anglicans/Episcopalians, it is virtually unheard-of, the sort of thing to make us seriously uncomfortable. Why?

Well, we are not a culture given to loud displays of emotion, first of all. Secondly, when we assemble and meet together, we tend to do so either as a quiet, well-behaved group of friends and neighbours, with smiles and murmured greetings, or as individuals in search of reverence, silence, beauty in music and in ritual, and prayer. We may have joy in our hearts, but we remember Jesus’ injunction not to show off while performing our religious duties. 

There is another reason, I suspect. We do not glow with joy because we aren’t sure what we are supposed to feel so rapturous about. When we reach down inside us for the roots of our faith, we will probably come up with the Resurrection (cf 1 Cor. 15:14); but from there to quivering with joy on this Tuesday in June the way is not, for most of us, entirely clear. We are happy that Yeshua rose from the dead, for His sake; we know that it means something important for all Christians, and perhaps for others beyond; but let’s face it, the world seems in at least as big as mess as at any other time since, so shout and dance for joy? Is that a joke? Grim fortitude, in faith, hope and charity as among castaways on a large raft in mid-ocean might seem more appropriate.

The Psalmist, and St Paul, saw it differently. Yeshua Meshiach (“Jesus the Anointed”), in his sacrifice, death and resurrection, saved Israel and by (crucial) extension saved humanity. Saved from what? Saved from the consequences of our unbelief and our non-acceptance of God’s love for us. Not the proximate consequences, usually: shit keeps happening, the planet is in danger, and the bad guys often win. But from the ultimate consequences: from the destruction of our immortal souls, from the hell that awaits all those who have made themselves incapable of living eternally near the radiant source of all love. 

If that does not at least inwardly fill us with a certain trembling and incredulous happiness, it may be because we have trouble envisaging what we have been saved from. We need, perhaps, to pay more attention to Shaitan. Not just as an active shooter, drawing a bead on us at all times and in all places, but also as a terrifying example. He is what we will become like if we refuse the gift. Grim and greedy; eaten up with jealousy; racked with the rage and pain that contemplating beauty and love causes us. Incapable of any pleasure not guilty or corrupt. And yes, it lies in wait for all of us, not least because there is Someone always ready to convince us how much braver and more fun it is to walk the edge of the abyss, and even to dive in.

Nobody alive and breathing is beyond being saved from this, unless he refuses to. As a priest I heard the other day said, that is why the Sin against the Holy Spirit is the only one that cannot be forgiven: because it is the Spirit that saves us, that pulls us out of the deep well we fell into, that rescues us by the skin of our teeth. Refusing Him means you’ve left no chink open to be forgiven through, no pulley for the rope. So here we are, wobbling, doubting, lurching, ridiculous: but saved. Saved. SAVED.

In the light of that, a certain joy is in order. Pour the martinis. Light the candles. Sing a silly song. Dance a bit. Yup. Joy. Remember?

JOYS WE FORGET

Rereading an old hymn the other day – humming it, remembering boyhood chapel services – I was suddenly struck by one line that leapt out at me. As Henry Francis Lyte wrote: “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven,/ To his feet thy tribute bring;/ Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,/ Who like me his praise should sing?”

And those past participle adjectives have been haunting me ever since.

            “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” How many of us manage to remember that, and/or live as if it were true? What, in any case, does it mean, exactly? 

            Let’s begin with “Ransomed”. It’s a simpler way of saying “redeemed”, and much more understandable. We humans are all sinners. True, when we’re 16 we resent that thought, but as we grow older we realise that it’s perfectly true. If we were not we should live daily in perfect union with God. Obviously, we don’t. Some people are close; but we all sin, in the sense that we do not perfectly return God’s love. In so far as we sin, we give IOUs to Old Nick, who loves lending us opportunities to sin, as he collects paper from all of us in return. But: what happened, one unique time in Israel? Meshiach came, and bought all our debts, making Old Nick an offer he couldn’t refuse (much as he wanted to). What did he buy them with? His life, no less. So he, the Anointed one, the Son of God, risen from the dead, tore up our IOUs – and still does so, for all who entrust themselves to him. Hence we are bought back: Ransomed.We were hostages; we are free.

            “Healed.” A character in a Charles Morgan novel says to another, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you will not cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” We are sick, many if not all of us: sick unto death. Some of us know it, and awake each morning with a little less vigor, a little less taste for life, a little more gray sadness. Some of us don’t, and live feverish lives “distracted from distraction by distraction”, as Eliot put it. But do we remember that we were baptized? Alternatively, do we realise that we can be baptized? And that that very process heals us, at least begins a cure? A cure that, admittedly, needs to be completed by a daily life of practical thanksgiving, but a cure nonetheless. We are, we really are, Healed.

            “Restored.” Restored to what? Well, if we are both ransomed and healed, we are restored to freedom and health. Anyone who has spent any considerable time deprived of either of these knows what it means to be restored to them. It is the day you walk out of prison and know you can go anywhere in the morning sunshine. It is the day you walk out of hospital, or your sick-room, take a deep breath, listen to the birds, and walk and walk, because you can. Restored indeed.

            And finally perhaps the greatest, or at least the most moving. “Forgiven.” The hardest to remember, because we have been taught that, sinning as we do constantly, we keep needing to ask for forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses.” It seems utterly presumptuous to behave as if we had beenforgiven. And yet. We have been told, have we not, that if we sincerely repent and pray wewillbe forgiven. So we need to remind ourselves that even if the process will likely reoccur, we have beenforgiven. And someone who has been forgiven feels as if a huge weight is removed from bowed and lacerated shoulders. Stretches, curls, sighs, smiles, and leaps. Forgiven. What joy. 

            If we could believe all this, really. If we could live, one, or two, or three days a week as if all four of those adjectives were true and applied to us; would there not be a noticeable change in our behavior? Surely there would. Who, we might say, like us His praise should sing? I we were young enough, we might tattoo on the four fingers of one hand, R H R F . As it is, let us tattoo it in our consciousness.                      

NOT SO TEMPTING

Oscar Wilde said “I can resist anything except temptation.”

In composing the universal prayer he would later teach his disciples, Yeshua had dealt with forgiveness; now he came to closure. Should he let the prayer trail away with just one more petition, reinforcing a downward movement from the grandeur of the Name? Or should he let it climb to a final and different height, a second peak? The daily bread petition was about trust; the forgiveness petition created a parallel of responsibility. Where now? What was the line?

He decided not to pursue the “as we forgive” implication but to continue the theme of trust and need. The opening grandly affirms God’s power; the petitions show our corresponding weakness and our dependence on the gifts of his love. We need, and trust him to provide from day to day, the basics of our life; we need forgiveness, as well as the capacity to forgive. What else do we need?

And suddenly, Abraham swam into his mind. Not the one who welcomed angels; not the Friend of God; the Abraham who was told to cut his only son’s throat and obeyed, up to the very end. Yeshua shivered, as always when he thought of that trial. And look at Job: there the Father himself had allowed Shaitan, the eternal Adversary, by way of a test of faith to have his way with a favoured human almost beyond bearing. There were giants in those days, he thought.

Looking at his brothers, at Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and young Shimon, he knew that they could not stand up to such commands; and the next petition wrote itself. “Do not,” he prayed with great intensity, “force us – little ones, no patriarchs or Jobs -- into [such a] trial”, and almost automatically there followed, “but deliver us from the Adversary”. For ever since Job, it had been he, the fallen angel, who subjects men to the unbearable; he it had been who crows and rejoices when they fall, and receives them gleefully with outstretched claws. His dream of revenge is never-ending; his understanding is cosmic and his wiles devastating. Merely obeying God’s commandments and praying does not put men beyond his reach: only the Father himself, by an active intervention, can deliver the wretched human race from that vile intelligence.

Image: Laurent de la Hyre, "Abraham Sacrificing Isaac" (1650)

DESERT STORM?

Another meditation I found true and helpful in my mid-week e-mail from St Matthias in Somerset N.J.

"Lent has for the most part been understood as a time for us ... spend forty days in the desert like Jesus, unprotected by normal nourishment so as to have to face "Satan" and the "wild animals" and see whether the "angels" will indeed come and look after us when we reach that point where we can no longer look after ourselves.
For us, Satan and wild animals refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face: our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our unresolved hurts, our sexual complexity, our incapacity to really pray, our faith doubts, and our dark secrets.
The normal "food" that we eat (distractions, busyness, entertainment, ordinary life) works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives. Lent invites us to stop eating, so to speak, whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves to the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us.
Lent. It is a season to slowly prepare our souls. It is a time to open ourselves to the presence of God in our lives and let the angels feed us."

Source: Ronald Rolheiser, taken from God For Us