OF HOMESICKNESS AND GOING HOME

Crucifix in the St Crucifix Chapel, Cordes-sur-Ciel, France (sculptor unknown)

This morning – Trinity 3 for us Anglicans, 11^th of Ordinary Time for modern RCs – the second reading was from 2 Corinthians 5:  
“For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.

So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. Yet whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him. For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”

When I saw this I wondered what our little Algerian priest would say about it; and I couldn’t help wondering also about its relation to Luther and sola fide. However, what he said was surprising and, I thought, rather marvellous. “Don’t think, he said, “that ‘standing before Christ to be judged’ is like the courtroom of the Assizes.” And he pointed to the huge and fascinating 17C crucifix after which the chapel we were in was named (see above). “When you stand before him,” he said, “you stand before Love Himself. And it is not he who will judge you. It is your own heart that will judge you, in the face and in the presence of that love.”

I found this a powerful and extraordinary thought. It was, of course, neither his nor new: in the Orthodox faith it is common, and it was uttered in a slightly different way by both St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great. In one sense, it is a comforting thought: as Sergei Komarov puts it, “no one is going to be dragged anywhere like a caught thief.” And Gregory Narekatsi, the Armenian poet, wrote “Isn’t God’s judgement still a meeting with God?/ Where will the Judgement be? I’m going there!” Yet the thought of our standing – you, I, us chickens just as we are – before the Son of God himself, with his eyes of absolute love upon us, is both pure joy and real terror. Even the most faithful and loving among us know that they are going to need a great deal of mercy at that moment.

The greatest thoughts I have read about the Last Judgement are those of C.S. Lewis, scattered about his writings. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.” Moreover, he says somewhere else, Hell is not fire and brimstone: it is cold and dark. Why? Because Heaven is the continual presence of God in light and warmth. But some there are to whom that would be unbearable. For them God has, in his mercy, left a place where they can live Eternity far away from him. It is cold, dark and dreary, but that is all they have made themselves capable of.

This is entirely compatible with the idea of our own heart’s judging us in Christ’s presence. And it should give us furiously to think.

HE SANG THE SPIRIT, 17 CENTURIES AGO

Today is the feast of St Basil the Great and of his friend St Gregory of Nazianze. Basil, a capable 4th-century archbishop, is also a Doctor of the Church, and has been called "the Minstrel of the Holy Spirit". So I thought I would put up here a snippet from his De Spiritu Sancto, to give us an idea of his voice. Here he is defending the glory of the Holy Spirit against those who underestimate Him.

49.  And His operations, what are they?  For majesty ineffable, and for numbers innumerable.  How shall we form a conception of what extends beyond the ages?  What were His operations before that creation whereof we can conceive?  How great the grace which He conferred on creation?  What the power exercised by Him over the ages to come?  He existed; He pre-existed; He co-existed with the Father and the Son before the ages.  It follows that, even if you can conceive of anything beyond the ages, you will find the Spirit yet further above and beyond.  And if you think of the creation, the powers of the heavens were established by the Spirit, the establishment being understood to refer to disability to fall away from good.  For it is from the Spirit that the powers derive their close relationship to God, their inability to change to evil, and their continuance in blessedness.  Is it Christ’s advent?  The Spirit is forerunner.  Is there the incarnate presence?  The Spirit is inseparable.  Working of miracles, and gifts of healing are through the Holy Spirit.  Demons were driven out by the Spirit of God.  The devil was brought to naught by the presence of the Spirit.  Remission of sins was by the gift of the Spirit, for “ye were washed, ye were sanctified,…in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the holy Spirit of our God.” There is close relationship with God through the Spirit, for “God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father.” The resurrection from the dead is effected by the operation of the Spirit, for “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and Thou renewest the face of the earth.” If here creation may be taken to mean the bringing of the departed to life again, how mighty is not the operation of the Spirit, Who is to us the dispenser of the life that follows on the resurrection, and attunes our souls to the spiritual life beyond?  Or if here by creation is meant the change to a better condition of those who in this life have fallen into sin, (for it is so understood according to the usage of Scripture, as in the words of Paul “if any man be in Christ he is a new creature”), the renewal which takes place in this life, and the transmutation from our earthly and sensuous life to the heavenly conversation which takes place in us through the Spirit, then our souls are exalted to the highest pitch of admiration.  With these thoughts before us are we to be afraid of going beyond due bounds in the extravagance of the honour we pay?  Shall we not rather fear lest, even though we seem to give Him the highest names which the thoughts of man can conceive or man’s tongue utter, we let our thoughts about Him fall too low?

3-IN-ONE

Trinity Sunday is the culmination, in a sense, of the Church’s liturgical year. We move from Advent to Christmas, from Christmas to Epiphany, from Epiphany to Lent, from Lent to the Cross, from Good Friday to Easter, from Easter to Whitsun, from Whitsun to the Ascension, and from Ascension Day to Trinity. Then comes what once described as ‘the long green highway of the year’, the Sundays After Trinity with their noble and varied Collects. But what of Trinity itself?

For the human race, apparently mired in death, the Great Event is the Resurrection. But the Resurrection cannot be taken without the Cross; the two together are the great outpouring of the Son’s love for us; and the Son is not, cannot be, without the Father. “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” (Jn 14:10) And beyond that, there is the Holy Spirit: “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” (Jn 14:16-7)

And so, meditating, thinking and praying (and frequently quarrelling), the Church came eventually (381 AD) to the doctrine of the Trinity: the Triune God, one God, three Persons. The Resurrection is the Event; the Trinity is the great Mystery of the faith. In the view of St Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, as Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God, “the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience . . . It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity. ‘No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.’” 

And yet it is a mystery that Jesus lets us in on, lets us into: because the Spirit dwells with us and in us, and if the Spirit and the Son and the Father are one, we are taken up into that great beating cosmic heart of Love. How do we celebrate it? All (of the Faith) is always present, wrote T.S. Eliot; yet the point of the liturgical year is that we can concentrate on some individual aspects at any one time. When the parable of the Good Samaritan is read, we look on the people we pass in the street in a new way; in Lent, we give a different attention to those who suffer; and on Trinity Sunday we might usefully learn from the Carthusians and other contemplative orders to meditate on the mystery as Gregory did. The more so in that that same Mystery has chosen to dwell with and in us, poor clods that we are.

CONTRA SPINOZAM TRINITAS

 My God, I heard them say

Thy way of being was a Clock of clocks,

A self-perpetuate motion, and that Love

Was, to create by necessary law;

And they reproach’d for Paradox

My words that thou, perfect above,

Didst need no more;

Sure they are blind who do not see

Thy love in this, that being is a gift;

Who do not sense that we

And all the random forms of hill and drift

Are here by no necessity

But by thy lasting Courtesy:

So they forget thy Trinity.

    Out of thy joyous solitude

    And tender in omnipotence

    To shape a world and on it brood,

    Fashioning trees and men of sense;

    From archangelic psalmody

    Mankind having destruction drawn,

    To enter into agony

    And for their healing to be torn;

    And, resurrected, still to dwell,

    Informing our experience,

    Praying in us, Immanuel,

    Unravelling our impotence;

Such thy unnecessary love: can we do less,

Released from death,

Than savour each delight of breath,

Blessing Thy wilfulness?

RK

ET IN SPIRITUS SANCTUS

Lately I've been pondering the subject of the Holy Spirit, Le saint Esprit, der heilige Geist, the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Trinity. On one Catholic forum I saw that someone had written, 'We Catholics tend to forget about the Holy Spirit: we have the Father, the Son and the Blessed Mother.' In slightly more sophisticated theological discussions, I have been seeing the Spirit referred to as the dynamic of love between the Father and the Son into which we can be drawn through prayer. In the New Testament, the Spirit is given in curiously specific ways at curiously specific moments, just as 'peace' becomes something very specific: leave your peace in the house you visit, but if it does not receive you well, take your peace back again. Jesus breathes on the apostles and they receive the Holy Spirit. 

It's all very confusing. How can the Spirit be both a spiritus -- a pneuma, a ruach -- a cloud, a wisp, a breeze, present but intangible like a gas or an odour, and a person? Is the Spirit a He or an It? One place this leads us, of course, is to the Creed, which tells us that the Spirit 'proceeds from the Father and the Son'. It did not always do so: the gestation of that phrase in the Creed was a long and horribly difficult one, as the Wikipedia article on the subject shows. 

So I thought I'd look up a Church Father or two -- in our busy lives we tend to ignore them, which is foolish of us. If Christians read the past scholars and thinkers of their faith as carefully and assiduously as devout Jews do those of theirs, our religious life would be less simplistic and infinitely richer. St Basil did not answer my question but he did write something very fine which, through a metaphor, answered another of my constant questions: how can God, creator of the Whole, be present to little me, a speck on a speck, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe? Here is Basil:

Simple in himself, the Spirit is manifold in his mighty works. The whole of his being is present to each individual; the whole of his being is present everywhere. Though shared in by many, he remains unchanged; his self-giving is no loss to himself. Like the sunshine, which permeates all the atmosphere, spreading over land and sea, and yet is enjoyed by each person as though it were for him alone, so the Spirit pours forth his grace in full measure, sufficient for all, and yet is present as though exclusively to everyone who can receive him. To all creatures that share in him he gives a delight limited only by their own nature, not by his ability to give.  . . . .

As clear, transparent substances become very bright when sunlight falls on them and shine with a new radiance, so also souls in whom the Spirit dwells, and who are enlightened by the Spirit, become spiritual themselves and a source of grace for others.

From the Spirit comes foreknowledge of the future, understanding of the mysteries of faith, insight into the hidden meaning of Scripture, and other special gifts. Through the Spirit we become citizens of heaven, we are admitted to the company of the angels, we enter into eternal happiness and abide in God. 

The question of the Spirit's Personhood remains; one keeps looking, and thinking. But meanwhile, we know that He is accessible to us, that He is our Comforter and Advocate, that whenever we pray, it is He that prays in and through us and makes it possible for us to pray at all. Perhaps we have trouble seeing Him clearly not because He is far away but because He is so close. Veni, creator Spiritus.

LEARNED, PASSIONATE, POETICAL

Today is the Feast of St Basil the Great, one of the awesome 4th-century Doctors of the Church. Monks love him for his contributions to the monastic life: St Benedict stood in awe of him. He was a powerful and influential bishop of Caesarea in Pontus: when the emperor sent his prefect Modestus to chastise him, he reduced Modestus to stammering vagueness, and when the prefect complained of being spoken to like that, Basil said crisply, "You seem never to have met a bishop." He was a giant of theology, who wrote a classic work on the Holy Spirit ; and he was a passionate, poetical character who wrote the following in praise of psalms:

"A psalm implies serenity of soul; it is the author of peace, which calms bewildering and seething thoughts. For, it softens the wrath of the soul, and what is unbridled it chastens. A psalm forms friendships, unites those separated, conciliates those at enmity. Who, indeed, can still consider as an enemy him with whom he has uttered the same prayer to God?

So that psalmody, bringing about choral singing, a bond, as it were, toward unity, and joining the people into a harmonious union of one choir, produces also the greatest of blessings, charity. A psalm is a city of refuge from the demons, a means of inducing help from the angels, a weapon in fears by night, a rest from toils by day, a safeguard for infants, an adornment for those at the height of their vigor, a consolation for the elders, a most fitting ornament for women.

It peoples the solitudes; it rids the market place of excesses; it is the elementary exposition of beginners, the improvement of those advancing, the solid support of the perfect, the voice of the Church. It brightens the feast days; it creates a sorrow which is in accordance with God.

For a psalm is the work of angels, a heavenly institution, the spiritual incense."

The illustration is an icon from the Cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev, Ukraine