OH DARK DARK DARK

Ho luchnos tou sōmatos estin ho ophthalmos, ean oun èi ho ophthalmos sou haplous, holon to sōma sou phōteinon estai; ean de ho ophthalmos sou ponèros èi, holon to sōma sou skoteinon estai. Ei oun to phōs to en soi skotos estin, to skotos poson.

²² `The lamp of the body is the eye, if, therefore, your eye is plain/simple/pure, all your body shall be bright,

²³ but if your eye is bad, all your body shall be dark; if, therefore, the light that [is] in you is darkness -- the darkness, how great?

 

This is a curious little interlude in the Sermon, not often paid attention to, but worth examining. First comes the premise: the eye is the lamp of the body. Luchnos here is simply a lamp: what would have come to the mind of the audience is a small lamp with a wick in a little bowl of oil. It is the thing that gives light in darkness. Interestingly, here, the eye is a lamp. We might say a “window”, but of course in Yeshua’s Middle East windows had no glass. Here, the eye is a lamp that lights what’s behind and below it: the body’s interior, imagined as a dark space like a dwelling unlit. And for that space to be properly lit, the eye has to be haplous, a word with many meanings but mainly “clean, unsullied, pure”. If the lamp is in good condition, the wick trimmed, the oil fresh and sufficient, it can light the whole of the body. However, if the lamp is ponèros --- We remember ponèros from the Lord’s Prayer: it was what we pray to be delivered from. And the fact that a lamp too can be ponèros reminds us that we are not necessarily dealing with metaphysical “evil” (though it may mean that in the prayer): here it just means that the lamp’s wick is untrimmed, that the oil is sparse and rancid, and that it smokes. So if your eye is ponèros, the body isn’t lit by it as it is meant to be.

            So if your eye is ponèros, what does that mean? The last sentence tells us, not the manner but the result. It drops the element of the eye and goes straight to a much greater metaphor. “The light that is in you” – right, now we begin to get it. In the terms of Yeshua’s discourse, we can sense what that light is that is in us. It is the light of the Spirit, or rather, of our spirit enlightened in its turn by the hagion pneuma, the Holy Spirit. If our spirit is not so enlightened, if it has refused the light that is offered to it, if it ends up being, not just “dark” but darkness itself --  how great, how impenetrable, such a darkness! It reminds me of a passage in a novel of Charles Morgan’s: Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude ? Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même. And at that point, the simple ponèros’s deeper and more frightening meaning rushes back. If we refuse the light that the new, completed Torah offers us, not only will we be lightless, we risk becoming Darkness itself – and we know who is the Prince thereof. 

DARK, HARD, SILENT ----

                                                                                                             advent four



                                                                                                             Dark darker, cold
                                                                                                             colder, movement
                                                                                                             freezes. In night, lighted
                                                                                                             doors close and go
                                                                                                             dark. Streets gleam
                                                                                                             houseless, hard.
                                                                                                             Where is entry?



                                                                                                             Four candles.



                                                                                                             On bare hills, on
                                                                                                             camel roads, something
                                                                                                             has cracked open. Clouds
                                                                                                             reveal stars. Stillness
                                                                                                             is everywhere. A huge
                                                                                                             holds its breath.

THE EVEN AND THE HALLOWS

Now that Hallowe'en is spreading like an oil-slick across the Atlantic and filling Western Europe with 8-year-old ghouls and wrapped sweets, it may be useful to remind the ignorant, and even the uncaring, about its morrow. In France, All Souls Day, November 2, has long been known as le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead, marked by visits to churchyard and cemetery and by a tidal wave of small-flowered chrysanthemums, bought at the local grocery shop or florist's to be placed on the tombs of the faithful departed. Now, even in the land of laïcité (state-sponsored secularism), Hallowe'en is spreading irresistibly; and so the two slices of the sandwich are in place, but the ham is absent and forgotten. And even in America the Religious, I'm not sure how many people remember that the scary fun of Hallowe'en is intended to scare the Powers of Darkness and not the populace.  For those Powers, the old folk wisdom said, walk the earth on this even, and we light candles in grinning heads to keep them away.
They walk the earth partly because the year's dark days are here, now after harvest, and partly because the morrow is a feast they hate with all their might. For it is the celebration of All the Saints: the entire community of those who have returned God's love with a power and might that is exceptional; an intensity the rest of us can venerate but likely not attain; and in whom we rejoice because they inspire us and, many believe, pray for us because they know our need as even we do not.
We have all met, upon occasion, someone of real and transparent goodness, and from such persons something like a light shines forth that is doubtless at the origin of the halo with which painters endow them. Such a gentle light surrounds a person simply good. What of a saint? I don't think I've ever been in the physical presence of one; but I have seen on photo and on film, and read the writings of, some I canonise in my heart and the Church may soon if it has not already. And from such persons there comes a power, a penetrating influence that is like a vast radiance: quiet often, unassuming even, not always uncontroversial but impossible to ignore.
Now imagine a room, a palace, a firmament full of such singular intensities. Can our minds and hearts even begin to encompass the light and the cosmic joy of it? It would intimidate us; it would frighten us. And if it would frighten us, think of what it must do to those sad souls and spirits who cannot abide the love of God and have chosen endless night rather than have to encounter it. No wonder that at the mere approach of its mere commemoration they gibber and howl and stalk our streets in despair. They want our blood, or at least our happiness: they are mad with jealousy and bent on our destruction. So we light fires and candles, we sing songs, we eat and drink and pray, and we hug our children in their small disguises; because we are creatures of hope, and tomorrow comes the light of all God's darlings, united for our good.

THE TEST OF HOPE

In The Wound of Love, the admirable collection of Carthusian writings, one author describes what happens to a new monk. “In the first days of the monastic life, heaven is very near, and the road that leads there seems short.” Then, as time goes by, the way becomes longer and more sinuous, and the goal further and further away. Gradually, “God withdraws the sensible consolations of the first days and hides himself the mystery of absence.”

This happens, I think, not only to monks: it seems true of almost all believers who take their faith seriously. Most people who would not call themselves atheists or retreat into the often mendacious cover of “agnosticism” spend years being what Matthew Arnold memorably called “light half-believers of our casual creeds”. Then something happens that changes them and makes them decide to take their faith seriously. At first, this turns out to be brilliant and exciting. One wonders where it has been all one’s life. It seems as if each day is a conversation with God: one asks questions, and receives answers.

Then, gradually, this too becomes a routine. Prayer is more frequent and more intensive, but there is less and less sense of being answered. The “sensible consolations” seem to have disappeared except on rare occasions. One is increasingly aware of the total indifference to faith of the world around one, and even one’s own mind begins to ask awkward questions. Death is less and less distant: what does happen afterwards? “I have a sin of fear,” wrote John Donne, “that when I have spun my last thread, I shall perish on the shore.” Has it not all been an illusion, a centuries-old structure of wishful thinking?

If we can allow ourselves a metaphor, this state is like the increasing dark of the year as it moves into winter. Days get shorter; and while there is a certain comfort “when melancholy autumn comes to Wembley,/And electric trains are lighted after tea” (Betjeman) the air is cold and dank, clothes seem heavier and comfort harder to find. In other words, we are moving into Advent.

Today is Advent II, and it teaches us a hard lesson with which the Carthusians can help us. When God hides, as the sun seems to hide, in the mystery of absence, it is to us a lesson that we must rely solely upon Hope. Hope instructed by Faith; Hope fed by the Word of God – a daily diet of “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”; Hope that continues to bear the fruit of Charity, nevertheless. Never the less.

Hope, the second great theological virtue. Not blind hope; not Micawberish trusting that “something will turn up”; not betting on an outsider to win at 20 to 1. Informed Hope, instructed Hope, intelligent Hope. Hope as trust, Hope as the Force that is with us, that allows us to get up the twenty-seventh time after we have fallen twenty-six; Hope that keeps us hanging in there when all seems lost; Hope that sees beyond foolishness, beyond crime, beyond sin. Hope that lights two candles as the world goes dark and very, very cold.

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.’

DARK: TWO SMALL FLAMES

I wrote this poem many years ago when I was living in New Haven, Connecticut (New Haveners will recognise East Rock). I feel much more positive about Advent now, and wouldn’t write it in this form again; but its wariness and reluctance “not to turn again” echo what I know many others do feel. So, as it may strike some sympathetic sparks, I print it again, as I did last year on a previous blog.

This is the penitential season:

walking home gingerly amid thaw’s debris

you will be met by snuffling, mournful winds,

doubtful travellers from lands

they have not understood, and bearing

rumours that do not inform, serving

only to disquiet. The melting rock

above the city holds no surer news

among its fissures; and altogether

the only certainty is a growing conviction

that soon, soon, the sins you have forgotten

will visit you, settling themselves in your chairs with the thin

worn faces from the pages you turned over.

Is a mind finely attuned

to minor comforts evidence of prison?

If so, this is the day the gates close

behind you; bewildered among the well-aimed spring

of traffic, you stand in an ill-cut suit of thoughts

outside. Free.

And as you meekly walk the way

they pointed out, to your ordained salvation,

the crinkly face of a warder shines

out of a shadow, and for an instant

the workshop’s warmth is curled around your shoulders.

The punishment is freedom.

And as the days crawl on

the sponge looms that will wipe your slate

of all the small warm sins you have committed

and place you, in your salvation suit –

in which, you suspect, you will look ridiculous –

on uplands made for angels, alone.

There really is no other way, it seems;

the rumours the wind mongers are probably true;

and all you can pray for as your home,

unsuited to heaven, crumbles under the lash,

is (mean to the last) that it will be worth it:

meaning, somehow, that what you were told

will all be true and that the land to which,

a shivering refugee, you must embark

will be as good as it seems featureless.

And pray, of course, that if so –

if, naked, you stumble, pierced and pinned

by pains of joy too great for your wretched frame –

your new, untested, fledgling salvation

will bear you at such heights.

The light we have enshrined

and intertwined with pagan hopes

may yet explain this fearful overturning:

but today there are only two small flames

alight – which is not much

to travel by.