FULL OF IT?

     In the Sanctus we sing “Heaven and earth are filled with Thy glory.” It suddenly struck me yesterday how curious that is. Heaven, yes. We know it is filled with His glory. But dear old Earth? I recently attended a conference occasioned by the quincentenary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia: almost all the sessions either were about dystopian subjects or used “utopia” and “utopian” in the sense of daydreams and illusions. At best we are encouraged to regard our blue planet with alarmed compassion, like a seriously-wounded person encountered by a car wreck: possibly dying and direly in need of something we are not competent enough, or not numerous enough, to perform. And this poor wretched miserable planet, the ultimate champion in the Victimhood Stakes, is “filled with His glory”?

     Note that it is not a prayer, a begging, a wish, not even an optative like the first three petitions of the Our Father: it is a statement, bold, absolute, that dares to equate Earth with Heaven. Not the lovely, innocent Earth we think once existed before humanity screwed it up; not the final, redeemed Earth of the Second Coming; no, this same planet in which we live, move, and have our being. Right now.

     First, this should give us furiously to think. Second, it should send us off into our daily comings and goings with fiercely-open eyes, in an exercise to which Pokemon Go is mere flummery. Where is the glory? Where is it hiding? If the Earth is full of it, why can’t I see it? Why aren’t I overwhelmed wherever I go?

     We furiously think because if we are to find it we need to know what it looks like. Clues? Well, it presumably looks like Heaven; and it presumably looks like God. Mmmm. So, an Alpine valley at sunrise? Beethoven’s Ninth? The Northern Lights? Well, overwhelming beauty is certainly an aspect of God’s glory. So, I suspect, are a surprisingly large number of human beings. The truly righteous (note: not “self-righteous”) of all faiths are perhaps the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the glory: but without wood fire cannot burn and without water we die. When I look at a group of small children in a playground, there is kind of pearly spider’s web of glory being made there. When, on a busy street, I see a thoroughly professional beggar woman, with scarf and baby, whining for alms, and someone nevertheless stops and puts something fairly large in her paper cup, it’s as if a quick flash of glory came and went. In the psychiatric hospital where I spent a few hours this year visiting an agèd friend, the sheer kindness of the staff, joking lovingly with those who stared, those who cried inconsolably and those who just looked lost, created a kind of mist of glory that hung, not quite visible, in the ancient cloister.

     The Sermon on the Mount, which Benedict XVI calls the “New Torah”, may help us to find this fullness. Note again, that the Beatitudes are not promises or prayers: they are statements. The pure in heart are blessed. And as such, they are also blessings: each a tiny ray in that immense glory that fills the earth. And usually recognisable when we meet them.

     The Cross, which still and always stat in our orbis, is not a negation of this glory, but the culmination of it. He who was the Living God made man, is now the Living God with man, and in man. Yesterday’s Gospel showed us the two thieves crucified beside him, and his answer to the good thief’s begging: “Amen, I tell thee: today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” After that, the Communion is a wellspring of glory.

“Heaven and Earth are filled with Thy glory.” Perhaps we just need our eyes opening. 

HATE SPEECH?

Cosimo Rosselli, 'The Sermon on the Mount' 

`If any one doth come unto me, and doth not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and yet even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple;  and whoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, is not able to be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26-7; today's Gospel.)

There is no way around it: J.B. Phillips, in his modern New Testament translation, put quotation marks around ‘hate’, but the Greek verb is uncompromising. This is one of Jesus’ more rebarbative sayings, one of those we would rather forget; the more as the current Church insists that every believer should be a mathètès, a disciple. So, we say, what about the man and wife who are to be one flesh? We are to love the little ones, the children – just not our children? We are to honour our parents, yet hate them?

The saying goes, of course, with Jesus’ snarky reaction to his mother and brothers’ coming to visit him: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . These are mother and my brothers’, pointing to the disciples (Mt 12:46-7); and Matthew 19:29, where anyone who leaves everything (home, father, mother, sisters, brothers, wife, and property) to follow him will receive a hundredfold return and eternal life. Extreme, also: still, giving up is less than hating.

How do we deal with such a saying? One way is to say that Jesus, in his humanity, was truly human (in all things, we are told, except sin), and that thus he was capable of impatience and irritation as he was of exhaustion and depression. In that sense, the saying Luke reports comes from a simple, indeed a simplistic, binary ‘love’ and ‘hate’. He does not, in other words, mean the verb literally. (Hence Phillips’ quotation marks.)

Another way of dealing with it is to remember that ‘Matthew’ was part of the early Church, and that his Gospel, like the other Synoptics, doesn’t want only to recount Jesus’s sayings and doings in great accuracy but is engaged, as part of the Church, in building an edifice for those who have not been there, and future generations, to live in. The extreme terms, then, are those of a community that has to deal with members who regularly privilege their private affairs over those of the ecclesia.

Leaving history aside, though, we need to know how we are to deal with these words.  And there, I think, another passage from Matthew comes to our aid. This comes in the discourse on the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, says Jesus: but ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Matthew 6:33)

Here, I think, may be the key to our passage of hate. Hyperbole aside, we need to concentrate on the kingdom (basileia, perhaps better translated the ‘kingship’, the reign) of God: both on recognising it in Jesus, who is the Kingdom, and in bringing it about in the world where he is no longer physically present. ‘Seeking first’ is beginning the day with the prayer that we may do His will that day, and that we may not forget that by lunchtime. (The noontime Angelus is a good reminder.) It’s not a matter of hating A, but of going all out to pursue B – in which case, if A gets in the way, you brush A aside impatiently – which, to A, may feel like hate but isn’t. (And in any case, it only happens if A gets in the way.) 

And, he says, if we do so; if all we consciously care about is doing His will, is living His kingship; why, then our parents, our spouse, our children, our property, ‘will be added unto us’, will be there, but as gifts, not earnings, and thus all the more precious. Not only will we find what we seek, i.e. the kingdom of God, but we will find ourselves showered with all those other good things that we thought we had but didn’t really until now, when we receive them all over again, as God’s gifts. And eternal life as well. 

One final thought: on the way to the kingdom of God, on the way of our pursuit, there may well be a cross. And that we cannot, must not brush aside: for He is the kingdom, and it is from the Cross that He reigns. At the very least there is death, for all of us; for some there is great suffering. But among the gifts we receive there is Resurrection -- Zoèn aionion, eternal life.

IN THE CARMEL OF BANGUI, A NURSERY OF 4,000 REFUGEES

                                                           

This is a translation of a letter of 18 January 2015 that appeared in the French daily La Croix, from Fr Federico, a Discalced Carmelite whose monastery in the Central African Republic is hosting thousands of people fleeing from the civil war. I found it moving and inspiring enough to publish it here – in part as an antidote to the horrors we are daily fed from around the world.

Very dear friends,

     It’s a little late to give you a Christmas story, but here in the Carmel of Bangui, for more than a year now it’s as if it was Christmas all the time.

     In the morning of December 5, 2013, towards the end of the Mass, the sound of artillery mixed itself with the chant of our prayers. That day, apart from the looting and the houses burnt down, 500 people were killed in various parts of the city. Soon afterwards, thousands of people arrived in our monastery. Before we knew what was happening, it was transformed into a huge nursery.

     That nursery is still there. Although the number of little ones has diminished, there are still about 4,000 people, who remain very attached to us. From time to time we remember with some nostalgia those first months when the children slept in our church, the women gave birth in the refectory, and we ate rice and beans in the dormitory corridor.  John of the Cross, the first child born in the Carmel, now walks on his own two feet and is starting to speak a few words. How beautiful it will be, one day, to tell him his own story.

     We are still amazed that so far we have been able to reconcile the demands, more or less rigorous, of a Carmelite monastery with the equally legitimate needs of thousands of refugees.  Today we are so used to their presence that we wonder how we spent our days before they came, when we were a “normal monastery”. We would almost suggest that every monastery or convent host some refugees, if only for a few months, in order to experience the good that their presence does to the life of the community, to recover the enthusiasm and to start over with a fresh liveliness.

     The main change since then has been the new setup of many tents, no longer attached to the monastery but a little further away, about 100 feet. We regret a little not having them as close as before. The refugees have given their new tents grand names, like “Noah’s Ark”, “Solomon’s Temple”, “The White House” . . . The International Red Cross has done a careful census with high-tech methods. Each head of a family has received a card with photographs and a bar-code. According to the census, there are more than a thousand family groups in our camp.

     For December 5 of last year, we thought that the best way to celebrate the anniversary of the events would be to have a Mass for the dead: the victims of the war, those who died to make peace and those who died of sickness here among us, old people and some children. At the time of the offertory, our guests had prepared a beautiful surprise for us, as if they wanted to offer their contribution and to beg us to continue a little longer this miracle of the loaves. All the heads of the various zones of the camp organised a dance and brought gifts for the community: bread and wine, fish, eggs, bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers and coloured fabrics (which would be transformed into twelve shirts – one for each brother) . . .  How this offering tasted of the Gospel!

     Giving a gift to a poor person is a beautiful thing, to which we are accustomed, which gives the feeling of helping to save humanity, and which inculcates peace of the soul; but receiving a gift from a poor person is quite a different thing, which happens when one least expects it and which gives you goosebumps and brings tears to your eyes.

When Christmas approached, the dream of giving a little present to each child almost gave us sleepless nights. Then came the miracle. In the afternoon of December 24, twenty serious well-dressed gentlemen arrived at the monastery. They were part of a Central African association unknown to us. They got out of their cars with five large crates and told us “We have brought you 1,600 toys for the children between 1 and 5 years old. Please distribute them as soon as you can.” Then those distinguished gentlemen, sent by Heaven knows whom, disappeared as they had come. It seemed surreal. In a little over an hour we distributed the presents and wished a Happy Christmas to all our refugees. I have to say that at that moment I would not have wished to be anywhere else in the world than here with my brothers and with these people.

     Afterwards, we celebrated Midnight Mass at 7 PM, which was already a sign of peace, for in 2013 we had had to move it up to 3 PM because of the war. On Christmas morning we celebrated a dozen baptisms. This is exceptional, for our church is not a parish. For me, a rather improvised and autodidact missionary, they were the first baptisms I administered in Africa. Among the baptised, there was a John of the Cross, a Theresa, an Edith, a Joseph . . . the Carmelite heaven can rejoice! Some Italian soldiers, led by Colonel Renna, were present also. After the celebration, they unloaded from their armoured cars balloons, felt-tips, colouring books and crayons, given by soldiers from Casale Monferrato, from Turin and from Como.

     In the night, there was another surprise. It was 1.30 AM and we were all asleep, when I was called to the door. A woman was about to give birth. I ran to wake Aristide, our novice and competent male nurse. After examining the woman, he told me that there isn’t time to get to hospital, as the birth was about to happen. So our roles were reversed: Aristide became the novice-master and I the novice (a little shaken, to be honest). In a few moments, the chapter-house was transformed into delivery room. We even had a wooden trumpet to listen to the baby’s heartbeat.

     An older woman, mother of eight children, sat down beside the woman in labour. While her rough hands told a worn rosary, she gave useful advice on how to push, how to breathe, and other matters I had not learnt during my theological studies. Her serenity was impressive, as if she knew the exact moment when the baby would be born. The mother gave no cry, she uttered only invocations and prayers, as if she did not want to trouble the silence of the monastery. Then a magnificent little girl came into the world. After the cutting of the umbilical cord, the newborn was given to the older woman who cleaned her, dressed her and received her, as if a chain of generations, of wisdom and womanhood needed to look each other in the eyes and hold each other, to continue the cycle of life. At that moment it was the father’s turn. He gather up the placenta and the umbilical cord to bury them: an ancestral rite to encourage fertility.

     It was nearly dawn. In a few moments the bell would call us to prayer. We went to the library where there is a weighing-scale. I put the little girl on the scales. How romantic our Bethlehem is! There are no angels, no shepherds, no Magi from the East; but there are books by Plato, the Treatises of St Augustine, and the Summa theologica of St Thomas Aquinas. Then I looked at the needle of the scales: 3,500 grams of life, of hope and of peace. 

I DON'T DO VOICES

The other night, I awoke around 3 a.m. as one tends to do at my age, for a natural function, and couldn’t get to sleep again. I was turning over in my mind a situation that was deeply bothering and full of complications, and that the hour of night was (as so often happens) making worse. I tried every meditative technique I know to chase it and go back to sleep, but with no success. Then, after about an hour of this, I turned to God and said, “Lord, help me to stop thinking about this”; and on the instant I heard a smiling voice – really: it was a soundless voice, but a voice – in my head that said “What took you so long?” Five minutes later I was asleep, and awoke refreshed at 7:15.

OK, I said to myself, being a fidgety intellectual: what does this mean? Autosuggestion? I know several people who from time to time hear voices, but I never had, and I figure I just don’t do voices. But if it was autosuggestion, why didn’t all the other techniques work that I’d tried? Yoga, breathing, even some Biblical meditations taken from St Francis de Sales -- so it wasn’t a turning to religion that changed things. If one is prepared to accept the existence and the possible presence of the Deity, then the key in this case was perhaps the simplicity.

I think that sometimes we over-complicate the deeps of our life. We twist and turn, mentally; we confuse conscience and consciousness (very easy in French, as they are the same word); we worry about theology, and morality, and the resistible rise of R*ch*rd D*wk*ns; we stress out about never being quite good enough, not being able to explain the ills we see in the world around us, not spending enough time and/or money on the less fortunate, not going to church, so forth. What we forget is the five-year-old who, crossing the road beside her mother, automatically and without looking sticks her hand up, knowing it will be grasped by a large parental one.

This, I think, is what is meant when we are told to be like children. And when, on occasion, we do react with that simplicity in dependence, when we stick our hand up or say “Lord, help me do this, or not do that”, it sometimes happens that we hear a voice saying “What took you so long?”

THE SMILE OF GOD

  I have been much around the very young recently, including a 5-month-old baby; and I have been fascinated by the baby’s smile. It is tiny, fleeting, but of pure delight.  
          Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about the “unless ye become as one of these” passage in the Gospels. Children, after all, are frequently a pain in the arse; they are entirely focused on survival and presents; they are jealous of each other; they are piercingly noisy and they have a capacity for littering that no adult can equal; they often whine. I don’t think Yeshua was a dewy-eyed sentimentalist thinking dreamily about their innocence and cuteness. So what is it in the baby or the small child that makes it the model of Heaven’s citizen?
        In the first place, I suspect, it is single-mindedness. Whatever a child feels, while it feels it it feels it, lives it and expresses it 100%. For adults this is almost impossible and not even considered desirable: our feelings are crossed, shifting, complex, and each one contains its opposite. Singleness of mind, as Charles Morgan wrote in a fine preface to a play on the subject (The Flashing Stream), when we meet it in adults, has a kind of terrifying nobility – and may very well be of the stuff of Heaven. 
Secondly, there is the simplicity of trust. A child about to cross a busy street sticks up its hand without looking, knowing that its parent by its side will take that hand and guide it. Such simplicity, again, is direly hard for adults to come by. It implies knowing that there is someone beside one; that that someone has powers one does not have oneself; and that that someone is dedicated to one’s welfare and will take the proffered hand. It also implies putting away cynicism, suspicion and doubt.
Thirdly, there is the confidence of the loved child that it need not always feel guilty. Sometimes it does things right, and when it does, the adults smile with real pleasure. How many of us are prepared to think of God smiling fondly at us because we have done something right?
There are other things: the child’s delighted capacity for observation, of the almost inumerable things that are new, strange and fascinating in its universe; its lack of embarrassment at feelings; its pleasure at learning a new skill and showing it off. If we look at these with some care, we may be able to triangulate some sense of what Heaven expects of us. Starting with a smile: “a condition of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything.” (T.S. Eliot)