BE VERY CAREFUL

 

Fortunate are the merciful, for they shall experience mercy in return.

Makarioi hoi eleèmones, hoti autoi eleèthèsontai.

 

The Greek text translates with eleos the Hebrew chesèd (ch as in ‘loch’), one of the three words that could become English ‘mercy’. In one sense it can mean ‘kindness’, but not, like praios, as a character trait but rather as a form of action. Chesed is taking care of someone else’s need: Jonathan protects David from Saul in an act of chesed. It is always seen as reciprocal: someone who receives chesed from another is expected to return it. 

 

So this Beatitude does not really introduce something new or unexpected, but rather reminds the audience of the way conventional relationships ought to be. It is really a form of ‘do as you would be done by’. And yet it goes beyond that also. God shows chesed to his people, both collectively, as the people of Israel whom he feeds in the wilderness, and individually in persons such as Abraham, Jacob, David and Job. For human beings it is of course impossible to return this to the Father himself; but He expects them in return to show it to others. So there may well also in this Beatitude be a sense that those who are merciful to others may receive the mercy of the Father, just as in the Lord’s Prayer those who forgive others’ debts to them may receive the forgiveness of their own debts to the Father.

 

In Psalm 85/86:11, ‘Mercy and truth are met together’, it is chesed that is joined to emet; and the ‘truth’ that is also characteristic of the Father is not so much ‘truth’ in the sense of conformity to a factual norm as ‘truth’ in the sense of faithfulness, of being ‘true’ to a loved one, one’s lord, or one’s country. So if that is joined to chesed, it means that Fidelity is joined to Care. 

 

It is both interesting and useful to pursue these words a little, because the English word ‘mercy’ has a connotation of opposition to ‘justice’ which in this case is not present. Our ‘mercy’ is usually closer to ‘compassion’, which translates the Hebrew racham/rachamim. The latter is word that does not imply as much reciprocity as does chesed: its root is linked to the Hebrew word for ‘womb’, hence the otherwise curious English term ‘the bowels of compassion’. So in the case of the fifth Beatitude, one might almost translate the text as ‘Fortunate are those who care, for they shall experience care in return’. And one should always remember that this does not refer merely, or even especially, to human interactions only, but to the very real Care and aid we children receive from our Father in heaven, and which we must pass on.  

ADVENIET!

 German Advent calendar ca. 1930. A shutter opens each day; on Christmas Day double doors open showing the Christ Child in his crib.

My old neighbour in the village (now gone to meet her Maker) had a long shapeless skirt and only one visible tooth. Since her husband’s death she lived alone in a vast crumbling farmhouse with a gorgeous view she did not, I think, take in. She told me once that every November she would go into a deep depression. Here in the South of France winters are not usually severe in the Canadian sense of that word, but they are chill, dank, dark grey and often rainy. Poor Mme Nouviale was clearly suffering from what we would now call Sunshine Deprivation Syndrome; but at this time of year many people (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) feel the cold and the dark in dimensions beyond the physical.

   For some, who still live the agricultural year, it comes with the slowing down of activity, the look back over a (frequently unsatisfactory) year of harvests, the anxious analysis of the accounts; for others, living in cities, there is the pressure of work, difficult relations in the office, family problems that seem to intensify as the nights grow longer; for many living alone there is a growing dread of the dark and the silence.

   Although this unease is often projected onto Christmas, it has little to do with that feast. It is the primeval dark that makes itself felt to humans no longer attuned to it. As such, it calls for the cave-dweller in us to stock up with meat and berries and wood, to light large fires and make loud and joyful noises to drive away the enormous night. Which is perfectly in tune with Christmas, that curious half-pagan half-divine festivity.

   But those of us to whom it is also the feast of the Incarnation, that stupendous and overwhelming surprise, these weeks of darkness leading up to it are more strongly, and differently, charged. As the readings for today – the first Sunday in Advent – point out, we are called to be night-watchmen, vigiles as the French say. We know when He came, but we do not know when He will come again; and Advent celebrates both that past and that future.

   If we are to be good watchers, we must be awake. And so this season is not, as I used to think, a penitential season so much as a thoughtful and a wakeful one. We need to use these weeks to awaken our faith, our hope, and our love. Our faith, which does tend to nod off at times, either through laziness or intellectual incredulity; our hope, which gets overwhelmed by duties, problems, activities and misery; and our love, which sometimes disappears beneath a scrum of tangled irritations and defiant selfishness.

   Today is the day of one candle in the night. ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the dark’ runs the old proverb. The candle has been lit. The night is no longer whole and definitive. Hope is awake, just barely, and sleepily stirring its neighbours Faith and Love. In my little German advent-calendar in the form of a snowy house, one shutter is open, and on the translucent paper window is written, in Gothic lettering, ‘Lord, I await Your salvation.’