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.

A LESSON IN JEWELRY . . .

Breguet chronometer movement

.... and in humility. I thought I would try translating a French Collect back into Latin to see how close I could come to the original (which I hadn’t seen). Oh dear. Humbling for yours truly; but what a joy to see the original’s elegance!

The French: Dieu qui veux habiter les cœurs droits et sincères,donne-nous de vivre selon ta grâce,alors tu pourras venir en nous pour y faire ta demeure. Par.

My Latin: Deus qui vis habitare in cordis sinceris rectisque, da nobis vivere secundum gratiam tuam, ut poteris venire nos colere. Per. 

The real thing : Deus qui te rectis ac sinceris manere pectoribus adseris, da nobis tua gratia tales existere, in quos habitare digneris. Per.

The Collect is from the Gregorian  Sacramentary, and may date from between the seventh and eleventh centuries. It seems not to have clear quantitative clausulae in the Ciceronian tradition.  But it is still an exquisite example of miniature intricacy creating beauty to the glory of God.

SMALL JEWELS: HOW AND WHAT THEY MEAN

Reciting Collects, those intricate small jewels of language and piety, I sometimes make myself slow down and think about the words and their meanings. For example, consider the Second Collect for Morning Prayer:

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is  perfect freedom: defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies, that we surely trusting in thy defence may not fear the power of any adversaries; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

And the original:

Deus auctor pacis et amator, quem nosse, vivere; cui servire, regnare est : protege ab omni oppugnatione suppleces tuos, ut qui in tua protectione confidimus, nullius hostilitatis arma timeamus. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

It’s fascinating, first of all, to see what Cranmer has done with the Acknowledgement, the relative clause naming the relevant qualities of the Deity. The Latin, with its incomparable brevity, says: God, author and lover of peace, whom to know is to live and to serve is to reign… In this case, Cranmer with his “author of peace and lover of concord” expands the Latin, in my opinion for the sake of the rhythm (with the implication, interesting in itself, that peace and concord are perfect synonyms). He then expands the second term to “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life”, thus explaining the bald vivere; and the third term to “whose service is perfect freedom”. This last is where he exercises the greatest liberty: he seems to have found regnarea little too extreme (perhaps with the possible wrath of Henry VIII in mind), and so replaces it with “perfect freedom”, which could, in a pinch, be described as a synonym, as only a ruler is completely free to act. (Incidentally, Milton may have had the Latin Collect and its verbal oxymoron in mind when he wrote that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”.)

In the Petition, he translates supplecesas “humble servants” while the Latin more strictly means “those who beseech” or  “those who humbly request”; and to the danger from which they ask to be protected, the simple oppugnatio, attack or assault, he adds the enemies (implicit in the Latin), again I think for the sake of rhythm. 

Then, in the Aspiration, he emphasizes confidimusby adding “surely” (with 16^th-century overtones of “safely”, “securely”, “loyally”, “steadfastly”, and “confidently”); and changes the “weapons of any conflict” to “power of any adversaries”, generalizing the first term and particularizing the second. And even though he has shown himself sensitive to rhythm, in this case he does not attempt to copy or represent the Latin’s elegant combination of a cursus tardus(protectióne confídimus) with a cursus velox(árma timeámus). 

On the whole, Cranmer’s meaning follows the Latin; and what I find fascinating is what we ask to be protected against, and why: defend us in, protect us against, assaults, but not so that we may have a quiet life but so that we may not fear. The point of the whole Collect, in other words, is a prayer against fear. And in the light of the Acknowledgement, the removal of fear will in turn facilitate the knowledge of God that gives us eternal life, and His service that confers perfect freedom. As so often in the case of these orationesthe text, as compact and elegant as a sonnet, when suitably parsed gives us the spiritual wealth of an entire homily.

THE BEST MEDICINE

Recovering after an operation, I have been reading George Herbert, a sovereign remedy for all ills. And so I share with you this exquisite poem, which has moved me almost to tears for more than half a century.

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean 

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; 

         To which, besides their own demean, 

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. 

                      Grief melts away 

                      Like snow in May, 

         As if there were no such cold thing. 

         Who would have thought my shriveled heart 

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone 

         Quite underground; as flowers depart 

To see their mother-root, when they have blown, 

                      Where they together 

                      All the hard weather, 

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown. 

         These are thy wonders, Lord of power, 

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell 

         And up to heaven in an hour; 

Making a chiming of a passing-bell. 

                      We say amiss 

                      This or that is: 

         Thy word is all, if we could spell. 

         Oh that I once past changing were, 

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! 

         Many a spring I shoot up fair, 

Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; 

                      Nor doth my flower 

                      Want a spring shower, 

         My sins and I joining together. 

         But while I grow in a straight line, 

Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, 

         Thy anger comes, and I decline: 

What frost to that? what pole is not the zone 

                      Where all things burn, 

                      When thou dost turn, 

         And the least frown of thine is shown? 

         And now in age I bud again, 

After so many deaths I live and write; 

         I once more smell the dew and rain, 

And relish versing. Oh, my only light, 

                      It cannot be 

                      That I am he 

         On whom thy tempests fell all night. 

         These are thy wonders, Lord of love, 

To make us see we are but flowers that glide; 

         Which when we once can find and prove, 

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; 

                      Who would be more, 

                      Swelling through store, 

         Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

OCTOBER BEAUTY

The jeweller: Thomas Cranmer

On the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, I often put up a praise to that day’s Collect, the most perfect in the whole Book of Common Prayer. The Collects, for those who are not familiar with the term, are the prayers that in Anglican Matins and Evensong come after the Creed and some responses, and conclude the Office; in the current Roman Catholic Mass, they correspond to the prayer that follows the Absolution and introduces the readings. A Collect is a prayer said, usually, by the priest on behalf of the congregation, and from very early days on Collects were highly developed in form. A typical Collect has five sections: Invocation, Acknowledgement, Petition, Aspiration and Pleading. Moreover, the Latin Collects from the early Sacramentaries were very structured in their sentence rhythms and forms; and this was recognised and adopted by Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer and of the Collects that survive from that 1549 text to this day.

Of all the BCP’s marvellous Collects, the finest is that for Trinity 21:

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace; that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is as beautifully crafted as a sonnet. Observe:

Gránt, we beséech thee,

Mérciful Lórd,

To thy fáithful péople

Párdon and péace;

That they may be cléansed from áll their síns

And sérve thee with a qúiet mínd.

First, four two-stress phrases give the Invocation (‘Lord’), the Acknowledgement (‘merciful’), and the Petition (‘grant pardon and peace’). Then each of the two things asked for is elaborated (in the Aspiration) in a three-stress phrase: pardon results in their being cleansed from all their sins, and peace, in their being able to serve God with a quiet mind. Finally, the usual Pleading: per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ The stress-patterns form perhaps the greatest beauty; but the vocabulary also plays, with the two objects of the petition being alliterative: that and their order relates them and makes it clear that the one must precede the other. There can be no peace without pardon. 

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer – in England still the BCP stipulates that, when Matins or Evensong is said by lay people, this prayer replaces the Absolution; thus recognising its particular power, compact riches, and beauty. We are sometimes told that ‘O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 96:9) should never mentally be inverted to ‘the holiness of beauty’; but it is perhaps not forbidden to suggest that liturgical texts, images, music and rituals of seriously great comeliness are the result of some kind of true blessing or holiness in their creators. Trinity 21 is an annual jewel in the crown of October.

CHRISTMAS

As I do every Christmas, I here post the exquisite little poem by English actress Jill Furse, the wife of glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler and the mother of Robin Ravilious. It moves me as much today as it did fifty years ago.

Jill Furse, by Angus McBean

CAROL

Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf.

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

I came upon this poem again (in my post of 20 October 2014), by the matchless Emily Dickinson, and could not resist putting it up here. It has everything: mystery, beauty, and faith. We sometimes tend to see "the beauty of holiness" as "the holiness of beauty": let this small gem, where the two are in exact and perfect suspension, be a lesson to us. 

The feet of people walking home

With gayer sandals go ---

The Crocus --- till she rises,

The Vassal of the Snow —

The lips at Hallelujah!​        

Long years of practice bore,

Till bye and bye these Bargemen

Walked singing on the shore.

  

Pearls are the Diver’s farthings

Extorted from the Sea ---​        

Pinions --- the Seraph’s wagon

Pedestrian --- once, as we —

Night is the morning’s Canvas

Larceny –- legacy ---

Death, but our rapt attention​        

To Immortality.

  

My figures fail to tell me

How far the Village lies ---

Whose peasants are the Angels ---

Whose Cantons dot the skies ---​        

My Classics veil their faces ---

My Faith that Dark adores ---

Which from its solemn abbeys

Such resurrection pours.