A MONARCH AND HIS AWKWARD SUBJECTS

The Church tells me that Stir-up Sunday is actually the feast of Christ the King of the Universe, and my unreconstructed mind wonders what to do with that concept. If He is King of the world, the world clearly is unaware of the fact, like South Sea Islanders in the 18th century ignorant of the fact that their island now belonged to King George III. Also, in such a case, He is having a hard time making his laws obeyed and encouraging His subjects to keep the kingdom in good order. If He is King of the Universe it becomes more comprehensible: so many trillions of planets to look after, maybe it’s been centuries since He looked at ours.   

The real point may be to remind us that we are idle if not actually rebellious subjects, and that we may not be able to get away with this for ever. We are, as St Teresa reminded us, the only arms, hands, legs and eyes God has on this planet. It may be, as astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau reminds us, that we are already too far gone in collective suicide for anything feasible to save us; it may be that our race’s evolution since 1600 has been a disastrous mistake; it may be that we really were meant to go on living as hunter-gatherers with a 35-year life expectancy. In that case, what should our reaction be as children of a loving God?

Given the unlikelihood of any government on the planet’s being ready to turn the clock back 500 years, we might simply concentrate on the two commandments to which our King reduced the 613 He inherited: to love our Father with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength; and to love our neighbor as ourself.  

For the first, that means praying more which, as French bishop Olivier de Cagny reminded us recently, means listening more. Solomon, when God offered him whatever he pleased as a new king, asked for a listening heart. We listen to others, if we are wise; but do we listen to Him? More often, we bombard him with requests, as if we were children yelling to Santa. We might learn to shut up and listen more. 

The link between the two commandments is praying for others. Again, though, let’s not make it a wish-list: our loving Father knows perfectly well what we should like for those we love (and perhaps even for those we love less). What praying for others means is helping to place them in the trajectory of the Father’s love, commending them to His attention, and (thus) adding our strength to theirs in their need. 

So now we are in the second commandment which, the Gospel tells us, is “like unto” the first. Not the less for being second, in other words. And yet without the first to order and protect it, it turns the Ekklesia that is the Church into a humanitarian NGO that will eventually succumb to some form of original sin. So we should be as the good Samaritan – do what we can for the needs around us, privileging the hic et nunc, the here and now rather than the distant and mediatised – and then continue our journey, always praying.

For this Kingdom of the Universe, for this kingdom of a fevered planet, prayer is still the most important of all languages, of all sciences, of all music and of all poetry. Even as we work even as we play, even as we suffer, let us be His troubadours: artists and poets of prayer. That is what hope is made of. 

 

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.”    

IN THE CLOUD? (SCARY. COMFORTING.)

Reading about Moses, about the Lord moving into Solomon’s Temple, and about the Transfiguration, there is that sense of Immensity suddenly moving right in. The Cloud, in each case, is hard to imagine: something like ball lightning only MORE, more intense, huger, and not going away. This is how the Creator manifests Himself to very occasional, very chosen and doubtless very terrified little humans. 

It made me think about the insanity of scale. I have shown before, on this blog, the current astronomers’ map of the Universe, above, with its Googols of constellations and Googolplexes of planets. If (and there is no reason to assume it’s not so) the God we woship created all this, how --- the stammering consciousness asks itself --- can this be the same God whom we call Father, to whom we pray about our little souls, and in whose presence Brother Lawrence so cheerfully cooked potatoes? When I think about this, my synapses very nearly short out. Of course, one can say that this is yet one more proof that Christianity is nonsense. Judaism, at least, preserves a sense of scale in that God is concerned more with a people than with individuals; Islam seems to be more about trumpeting God’s infinite greatness than about any interest of His in small human matters; and there is Christianity teaching us to worry about what the Creator of the Universe (see map) thinks of what we said to our spouse last night. When you fully take that on board there is the sound and smell of burning connectors. 

And yet. And yet. Keep thinking. Imagine, not that we Earthlings are merely an accidental breadcrumb on the skirt of the Universe, but that we inhabit something deliberately unique. Perhaps SETI is doomed to failure. Perhaps we really are alone. Is that depressing? Not necessarily. Imagine that this gorgeous tiny blue jewel of a planet was created by a joyous Creator in an outlying corner of the Whole, as an experiment, as a laboratory where, over the millennia, something was made to grow that could think, could react to Him, could create in its turn – Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. 

But He too saw the insanity of scale – well, let’s say the extremity of scale. So first He chose a people, and communicated with them in ways they could (just) understand. And they behaved, of course, as humans will. But/And, in the end, He saw they were ready for a new way to bridge the scale gap. And He created, for and with and out of His Son, the Second Person of His triune Being, the Incarnation. An ordinary human that humans could talk to. Incredible! I remember my colleague Irving Layton, a wonderful Canadian Jewish poet, saying to me, “But Roger, Jesus is my Jewish brother. My brother farts. Does God fart?” What could I say? “Yes, Irving.”

And so, yes, we have the map of the Universe; but we also have Yeshua bar Yosef, the builder and rabbi from Nazareth in Galilee (an ordinary town, now a city, been there, my son-in-law comes from there). And now ordinary fishermen and their wives, Roman sergeants, unpopular tax collectors, quiet scholars and provincial hookers could talk to – to HIM. To YHWH. To the Creator. He healed people. He had moods. He cried for his friend. He was loved by at least one man and one woman. 

Yes, well. And then, being human, they fucked it up. Exactly as he knew they would, they killed him. So much for that experiment. But no. Because in that unimaginable night of Easter, He – now again all of He, one again within the Triune God -- killed Death. Not death – death is still around and will take us all, for a while. But Death. 

And so the experiment continues, at a new level. The Universe is still there, unfolding (as Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said) as it should; our little blue ball is still there, with us humans busily overcrowding it; and (and this is the point) he, Yeshua bar Yosef, Yeshua Meshiach, Yeshua the Anointed, Yeshua Christos, having risen from the dead, is still here also. Here to be talked to. Here to be loved, here to be confided in, here to heal broken hearts. Here as human, here as God. Here to be communicated with in every Communion, in every Mass. Being the little stumbling creatures we are, could we ask for more? The synapses glow again, the energy flows. Gratias agimus tibi, propter magnam gloriam tuam.