GHOST

 

 

He is the oddity in the Trinity: like Winnie the Pooh’s East Pole, people don’t seem to like to talk about him. Well, Anglicans and Catholics, annyway. He is an ancient embarrassment: it was he, after all, who was at the origin of the notorious filioque clause, on account of which rival groups of medieval monks came to blows. Does he, did he, “proceed from” the Father, or from the Father filioque “and the Son”? The author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (Luke?), on the other hand, is quite at home with him: Pentecost/Whitsun is his feast. Genesis says that he was there at the beginning: like a vast and formless fowl he “brooded over the waters” of the tohu-wa-bohu, the primeval chaos. “By him, all things were made;” yet at the same time he “bloweth where he listeth” and none can tell whence he comes and whither he goes. 

            St Ephrem of Syria was called his harp. Perhaps his wind-harp, sounding as he passed. And there is always in meditations on him a sense of air moving. He is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin: in each case words of three meanings, “breath”, “wind or breeze” and “spirit”. (Our, or rather Cranmer’s, “ghost” comes from the Old English gast, linked to German geist, always a spirit.) In John 20:22 the resurrected Yeshua gives him to the disciples: “and then he breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost”.

            Theologians tell us that he is the love between the Father and the Son. This ties him closely to both, and reminds us that love is the language, the essence, of the Deity; but in no way does it enable, or even encourage, us to regard him as a person. This is a bother in prayer. Do we pray to him? We can pray to the Father; we can pray to the Son; but can we pray to (someone who is) a relation(ship)?

            Strangely, I think we can. It does, of course, seem presumptuous; but no more so that praying to the Creator of everything the Webb telescope sees as if he were our dad, and no more so than calling upon the Resurrected King of Peace and informing him that I, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe, have sinned today. If we can forget scale, and address him firmly but humbly, experience has convinced me that he listens. If we ask him for such things as he is not only able but willing to give, we shall usually receive them: guidance, for instance; direction; love where we lack it; discernment; and courage. 

            And as this happens, and goes on happening, in our nighs and quiet moments, we do gradually get a sense of a person on the other end of the line. A person who rarely speaks in words, but who sometimes forms a perfectly clear idea or response to the eye of our mind. One surprising example: one night, I asked him to help me, a former Protestant, better to understand the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There was silence, both aural and visual; then, suddenly and briefly, a clear vision of a deep well in time, at the bottom of which I saw a clearly prehistoric, clearly female, hand reach out and make fire, and light some kind of primitive candle or oil-lamp. That was all; but it was a clear response, and equally clearly it was up to me to make sense of it. I should be hard put to it to explain it; but my feeling of having understood was, and is, entire. 

            When I need him, I call upon him; and if his answers are never simple, he has never let me down. 

            Accende lumen sensibus:                    unto our senses strike the light
            Infunde amorem cordibus:                 abundant love pour in our hearts
            Infirma nostri corporis                        shore up our bodies’ weakness now
            Virtute firmans perpeti.                      with virtue that will bend nor end. 

 

(from Hrabanus Maurus’s glorious 9^th-century hymn Veni creator Spiritus)

 

ALMOST THE SQUARE ROOT OF INFINITY

For many thoughtful people hovering on the edges of faith, the Trinity is a stumbling-block. For both Jews and Muslims, it comes perilously close to polytheism. For the philosophic psychologist Jung it was a sign of incompleteness, in the Catholic Church suitably completed by the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even for many of the faithful, it is a puzzlement elevated to a mystery. So it is worth thinking about. 

St Athanasius, that uncompromising Church Father whose Creed is printed in the Book of Common Prayer as the Quicunque Vult, wrote a magnificent letter in which he explains the Trinity. Here are two excerpts:

“We acknowledge the Trinity, holy and perfect, to consist of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this Trinity there is no intrusion of any alien element or of anything from outside, nor is the Trinity a blend of creative and created being. It is a wholly creative and energising reality, self-consistent and undivided in its active power, for the Father makes all things through the Word [the Son] and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly, in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.”

“Even the gifts that the Spirit dispenses to individuals are given by the Father through the Word. For all that belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son, and so the graces given by the Son in the Spirit are true gifts of the Father. Similarly, when the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.” (Letter to Serapion)

I find this admirably clear and wholly convincing. What is still difficult, once one has absorbed it, is the complementary understanding of the Unity. Once one has grasped the identity and the relation of the three Persons of the Trinity, one wrestles with the fact that “they are” One God. In Athanasius’ explanation of the Unity, God as above all things as their principle and source and Creator is understandable. God as in all things as the indwelling Holy Spirit also makes sense. Where it becomes harder is when A. sees God being through all things as the Word, or the Son. What, here, does “through” mean? I think that it becomes easier if we change the verb. God does all things as the Source and Creator of them; He does them through (dia, per, via) the Word; and He does them in the Spirit. This leads us back to the Gospel of St John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And, as Athanasius reminds us elsewhere, Jesus also says, “Who has seen me has seen the Father.”

In the full sense all this is of course well beyond our complete understanding. We see very much as in a glass, darkly. Our window is grubby, and our binoculars ill-focused. But we can get something of a sense of this vast core of our faith. Pater (non) e(s)t Filius (non) e(s)t Spiritus Sanctus. Its dazzling strangeness reminds me of what Tertullian (or someone close to him) wrote of the death and resurrection of the Son of God: et mortuus est dei filius: [prorsus] credibile est, quia ineptum est. et sepultus resurrexit: certum est, quia impossibile. “The Son of God died: this is utterly believable because it is improper. And having been buried, He rose again: this must be true (is certain), because it is impossible.” 

 

A SECRET IMMENSITY

“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

 

This saying is of measureless profundity. We live several lives simultaneously. Our daily life with its tasks and pleasures and frustrations and pains; our emotional life with its joys and griefs; our intellectual life with its searches and discoveries; and our religious life, our life as a child of God. This last is too often neglected as it does not, like daily life, obtrude and trip us up. But it is our absolute life, the breath of ultimate life, love, sin and death. And as we grow, in age but also in the questioning of our place in the scheme of things, it is of this life that the importance swells and increases. And it is there that one day we confront this saying, telling us that our life is hid with Christ in God. 

            At first sight it seems absolutely mysterious and incomprehensible. So, to understand it, let us turn to that Doctor Ecclesiæ, Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI. In the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, he explains the necessity and the immensity of Jesus’ Passion and of the Cross. In the Cross, he says, God opens himself completely to man, makes himself definitively accessible in an act of ultimate love. And this complete and utter gift that took place once, in real historical time and in a real geographical place, is still taking place: it is repeated in each Mass and Communion. 

            This is stupendous and very nearly beyond understanding, if we take it seriously and try to get our mind and soul around it. It explains that other saying, “I am with you till the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). And if we keep it in mind when we reread that saying in Colossians, we realise that this truth is true in both directions: he is with us till the end of time, but we are also with him. 

            After the interim period of his appearances following the Resurrection, he leaves the disciples, and is ‘taken up to Heaven’ in the cloud that always signals the presence of the Deity. He rejoins the Father, and sends the Holy Spirit; but he is still with them, with us, till the end of time. What Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians is that through the gift of the Meshiach, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Him even unto his presence in the Trinity. This, I think, is what it means that our life is hid with Christ in God. If we entrust ourselves completely to him, he draws us up to him within the Trinity, within the presence of God. And that life, then, is our ‘eternal life’, as Ratzinger explains it: a life no longer subject to time and death.

            The more you ponder this in meditation, the more immense and moving it becomes. It turns everything around. That touching verse, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14) now glows in both directions: for we are now also invited to make our home with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

            Finally, our life is hid – it is in the worldly sense a secret life, a hidden life. Although it may shine through our eyes, the world of humdrumlies mostly will not recognise it or comprehend it. So we should probably be ready at least to try to explain it, however difficult that may be. But in the meantime, let us taste and savour fully the mystery and the glory that is offered to us.

Image: the Holy Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 - c. 1430)

 

 

AND THOU CONTINUEST HOLY

 

Periodically, in or after my daily prayers, I think “This is all very well, but one can’t always be asking.” Well, there is the giving of thanks, too, and that is both joyful and healthy; but, something whispers, isn’t it still all about me? Not always – sometimes I give thanks for the healing of a friend or relative; but even that raises nagging questions about whether God micromanages His creation. What one would like is a prayer that isn’t about what happens to us. 

The Church teaches us that there is such a prayer: the prayer of adoration. Here, we do not ask for something; we do not give thanks for something; we simply adore God for what He is, for the fact that He is, for the ways in which He is. The prayer of adoration can fix itself upon an object, a monstrance with a consecrated wafer, or a crucifix, but it doesn’t have to do so: we can contemplate God in our heart and an outpouring of joy and delight can result. 

It is, of course, not the kind of prayer which, as children, we are taught; and so it can be hard at first to get used to it. First of all, it takes time and leisure. I’ve often thought that it would be good to have, as an acquaintance of mine with a château does, a small chapel in one’s house: one could retire there for half an hour at some point during the day or evening and shut out the world to concentrate. But lately I have found that the second part of the night, when sleep is intermittent and lighter, is a good time to point one’s mind to a certain kind of prayer and meditation. 

And in one such moment recently, a prayer of adoration suggested itself. I remembered the “map” of the Universe published by astronomers a few years ago and its immensity, and it made me think of the Creator of all that; and there swam into my mind the moving text from the terrible Psalm 22, the “crucifixion Psalm”: “and thou continuest holy”. In spite of what I may be going through; in spite of the pain in the world, “thou continuest holy”. In spite of our requests, our thanksgivings, “thou continuest holy”.

Putting these two things together, I try to imagine the Creator of that Universe: is He bigger than it? Smaller than it? Non-dimensional entirely and thus unimaginable? Whichever of those, “thou continuest holy”. And then I added the fact that His nature is Love, and imagined that within Himself, in other words, within the Trinity: as a permanent whirlwind of cosmic Love between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And with that imagining, my prayer of adoration came as naturally as water from a spring. What glory!

“Thou continuest holy.”    

"THE SKY IS MARBLE TO MY THOUGHTS"

Those words were written by William Hazlitt in one of English Romanticism’s oddest books, Liber Amoris, the shame-less autobiographical account of his all-consuming passion for a young, uncultured and slightly bewildered shopgirl. But they also reflect the experience of many Christians, in long periods when their prayers seem to be going nowhere, when there is no sense of an answer, an encouragement, a hearing even. One goes on praying because one has been told that that’s important and in any case it has become a habit; but there’s no sense of a conversation any more. Once, there was: we felt that we were being given great spiritual gifts almost every day; we felt privileged, loved, cherished by the Father we were learning to love. And then, gradually more often than suddenly, a curtain of increasing density seems to be drawn between us and Him, and our prayers feel as if they were being absorbed and powdered into dust.

Those who know, the spiritual masters and novice masters, tell us that this is a recognised stage in one’s spiritual education, to which perseverance is the only answer. That’s a slight comfort to know, but it doesn’t help explain the phenomenon; and we feel that somehow an explanation would help us weather it. Should we, greatly daring, try to find one?

Suppose it is we who are the cause ourselves. It might be that, simply, our prayer has become a habit, that repetition has made it routine, that we can recite our prayers without being fully there, and that consequently they arrive in Heaven as a confused mumble hard for even God to hear and decode. On a higher plane, the perceived silence might be the result, the backlash, of a period of intense concentration, a backlash which is telling us to calm down, to give it a rest, to recharge our batteries. And a third reason might be that we have become a little deaf: that we are waiting for a mighty roaring wind, at the least a small earthquake, and that for some reason – ears battered by daily life, eyes glazed over by the Internet, senses numbed by private griefs – we cannot perceive the faint rustle trying to reach us.

Suppose, on the other hand, that it is God who is the cause. If so, the one thing we should not do is take the silence as a rejection: as if God had other things on His mind, as if he didn’t think we were worthy, as if he thought us too ugly or too insignificant to reply to. God rejects nobody who seeks Him: not the sinner, not the idiot, not the creep, not even the saint. So if it is not a rejection, what else might it be? We can take it as axiomatic that whatever His reason, it is meant for our good. Hard, to try to second-guess the Divinity; to plumb the Mind that made us. What might He mean? One possibility is that He wants us to try different kinds of prayer: less formulaic, more spontaneous, or conversely, less ejaculatory and more soberly formal. Or it might be that He wants us to spend more time in action, helping the poor buggers who show us Christ on the bus: action, not words. Or, finally, it might simply be that He is training us for the long haul. The true spiritual life, if we are to believe the masters, is never a sprint and always a marathon.

Every great prayer figure – Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, Hildegard of Bingen – somewhere mentions the silence, which can be as deep and desperate as “the Dark Night of the Soul”. And all of them tell us that we must not give up, that beyond the night, beyond the silence, there is a brightness beyond describing. As a Carthusian put it, we are made to enter into the flow of love that passes from the Father to the Son and into the glory of love that returns from the Son to the Father. By the gentle force of the ruach, the pneuma, the Spiritus Sanctus, we are invited, perhaps destined, into the very life of the Trinity. The marble is not to be broken: if we are steadfast, it will melt.  

THE ATOM OF DIVINITY

Andrei Rublev, icon of the Trinity (1425), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I almost always celebrate Trinity Sunday by showing Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the three Persons sitting round a table, because it is so hauntingly beautiful and also because it corrects one of modern theology’s common faults – a tendency to speak of the Spiritus Sanctus as the relation of love between the Father and the Son. A relation cannot be a person; not even a Person. (Socinius is dead.)

However, one should never simplify the Trinity: it is perhaps the faith’s greatest intellectual mystery. There is an admirable brief outline of its dogmatic history on the Christian History blog, yet it too discusses essentially the Father and the Son, and the relation between the two, but not the Holy Spirit. Let’s try and shed a little glim of light.

First: how can “God” be both One and Three? This is easier for us to understand than it was for our forefathers. We know that what appears like a stable molecule – and is a stable molecule – is also composed of a number of rapidly spinning atoms, and breaking those down reveals protons and electrons. I am not trying to establish an analogy here with the Trinity: merely suggesting that we understand better than previous ages how something can be simultaneously single and multiple.

Tertullian, the first great Church Father to work on the Trinity and defend it against the Arians, explains that when in working through a problem you discuss it with yourself, the ‘other voice’ in your mind is as it were a second person. It is a Logos; and if you are God, it is the Logos. And at some point that Logos may ‘proceed from’ the Father and take on its form as a second Person: the Son. Who is ‘begotten not made’ because no foreign substance is involved from which he would have been made.

The Spirit of God is there from the beginning: it is the Spirit that ‘brooded over the waters’. The Spirit, says one explanation, has a sovereign will comparable to the other Persons; he is free and not, to humans, predictable; he works on humans and creates, in them his own works – he creates, he guides, he strengthens, he advocates, he inspires, he teaches.

So today we celebrate the Ultimate Molecule, or Atom: the Holy Trinity. What holds it together is the Ultimate Energy: Love. This is one atom that cannot be split, though it can communicate its energy, and does so freely, generously and unendingly. We cannot even contemplate the Trinity without the concept of Love.

The Father, who created and creates the entire Universe; the Son, who is the Father’s Other-yet-not, and whose joy it is to do the Father’s will; the Son who came to us, who became for us fully human (Yeshua bar-Yosef of Nazareth with a saw in one hand and a scroll in the other) and died in order that we might be taken back into the divine relation of Love; and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Strengthener, who remains with us always and is always as near as skin, always available, always ready to listen and to help.

What richness, what glory. Where else, said Moses to his people, can you find such a God?

PATER, ET FILIUS, ET SPIRITUS SANCTUS. SICUT ERAT IN PRINCIPIO, ET NUNC ET SEMPER.

Andrei Rublev, "The Holy Trinity" (icon, 1400-1425).

The Trinity is a world, not of definition, but of prayer.

You can see how it began. In those years when Yeshua walked the earth, he tirelessly taught everyone who would listen about the Father. Our Father. Not just the Great God who made the universe; not just the jealous God who chided Israel; not just the just God who would one day judge the earth; but a God who was, is, and always will be our Father, our loving Father who may get justly irritated with his children but whose love for them will neither falter nor fail. He even taught us the words to address our Father.

But there was more. We are all the Father’s children, but as time went by and the Cross approached, Yeshua increasingly spoke about his own place in the scheme of things. Presumably trusting the disciples to be a little less thick now than they had been before, he began to tell them, in more than just parables, about the place of the Son in relation to the Father. Not just a pretty face; not just a guy. Not just a man. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Whoa! “All that is the Father’s is the Son’s; and all that is the Son’s is the Father’s.” “You will see the Son of Man [a term from Ezekiel] coming in clouds of glory.”

And then, when he came back to visit them in their loneliness, after the Resurrection when at first they often didn’t recognise him, he spoke of someone else still. “If I don’t leave you, the Comforter cannot come to you.” “I will send you an Advocate.” And he breathed on them, and they received the Spirit – the ruach, the pneuma, the very breath, wind, or spirit that after the Creation brooded over the waters like a gigantic bird. The heilige Geist in German, the Holy Ghost in the original Germanic English, now fallen out of use.

And so, when he had left finally to go back to his (and our) Father, and when the Geist had come upon the motley crowd of Pentecost – the Spirit taking up residence, as it were, in the ecclesia, in the Church, the collective of Christians, and not just in some individuals – one can imagine them sitting around for a few hundred years trying to make sense of all this, even as they prayed. After all, they had to explain it to new converts and interested strangers who wandered in from, say, Hellenistic civilisation where there were lots of gods, and who might say, “Oh, so you have only three gods? Interesting!” No, no, no. Not three gods. One God. “Right,” would say a Jew coming by. “But then what is all this nonsense about three Persons? God is one Person, and one Person only.” No, no, no. Three Persons. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And even the most benevolent would end up saying How does this work?

When I first got to know the Book of Common Prayer, one text I shied away from was the Quicunque Vult, or Athanasian Creed. It always seemed cross and minatory, as well as interminable. Yet reading it again today, on Trinity Sunday, I realised that it is a desperate attempt to understand just that difficult concept, 500 years on. Of course, it also contains anathemas against those who do not believe these essentials to salvation, which were what used to put me off. But it is fascinating in its dogged pursuit of the inexplicable.

The Trinity is a world, not of definition, but of prayer. It is a world of meditation and contemplation. Quicunque, whoever, pursues it in that manner will find a huge glory opening, and welcoming. It is a circle, a dynamic circle, a vast and stately whirl of love. Of a love in relation to which the Universe as we are coming to know it is a mustard-seed.

And Trinity Sunday? My American study of the BCP Collects notes that Trinity Sunday is the border between the season of Christianity’s great Truths and the season of Christianity’s activity and duty in the world. From now on, the liturgical colour is green, as are the fields and the hills beyond my window. Ora et labora: pray and plough. 

And for those who want to be reminded of the hard-edged content of our faith, here is the (pseudo-) Athanasian Creed itself:

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited. The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite. So likewise the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not three Almighties; but one Almighty. So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods; but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord; the Son Lord; and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not three Lords; but one Lord. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity; to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the catholic religion; to say, There are three Gods, or three Lords. The Father is made of none; neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created; but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another. But the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal. So that in all things, as aforesaid; the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation; that he also believe faithfully the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess; that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance [Essence] of the Father; begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance [Essence] of his Mother, born in the world. Perfect God; and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father as touching his Manhood. Who although he is God and Man; yet he is not two, but one Christ. One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood into God. One altogether; not by confusion of Substance [Essence]; but by unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and Man is one Christ; Who suffered for our salvation; descended into hell; rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he will come to judge the living and the dead. At whose coming all men will rise again with their bodies; And shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire. This is the catholic faith; which except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved.