THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

 Tomorrow is the glory of all the saints. The grand saints, who are known to millions: St Mary Magdalen, St Francis, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Teresa of Avila, Ste Thérèse of Lisieux, and my beloved patron saint St John (Yochanan), the only disciple who didn’t skedaddle from Golgotha but stayed at the foot of the Cross.  But also the little saints whom nobody knows except their neighbours, their family members, or the customers of the store or restaurant or gas station where they serve, or the passengers of the taxi they drive. The people who are always there when you are ill and feeling down, who give you a smile on a grim day, who make you feel for a moment that life is not so bad after all. The people of whom you know that they feel your pain – and the knowing already calms it a little. 

            Tomorrow, then, is their feast. Worth celebrating hugely. Buy them a beer, or just lift your glass and think of them with love.

            But tonight: the Eve. What is the Eve? La veille, as the French say. And in that word is the verb veiller, to watch, to stay awake and alert. Because, said the ancients, on the Eve of such a feast, a feast of so much sheer goodness, the forces that cannot bear the goodness, that find it intolerable, will come out and torment. They will flly and slide and whisper around our houses; they will try to enter our minds and persuade us that the world is lost, that Evil has allready won, that there is no hope, and that we all are just killers without a gun. 

            And that – tell your children – that is why we carve pumpkins into grimaces, why we parody evil in silly costumes, why we celebrate goofy trick-or-treats, why we have drunken parties: to taunt the evil spirits, to show them that we are not afraid, because All the Saints are with us, and tomorrow we will celebrate them with dignity and style, and be thankful for their prayers and their protection. We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the universe, but we are also children of God, and we are loved. We are never alone under a black sky; we are never delivered utterly unto hate; we are loved, and the Evil One cannot defeat our faith. 

Happy Hallowe’en!

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. 

DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?

 

 

Houtōs oun proseuchesthe humeis: pater hèmōn ho en tois ouranois, hagiasthètō to onoma sou; elthetō hè basileia sou; genèthètō to thelèma sou, hōs en ouranōi kai epi tès gès; to arton hèmōn ton epiousion dos hèmin sèmeron; kai aphes hèmin ta opheilèmata hèmōn, hōs kai hèmeis aphèkamen tois opheilètais hèmōn; kai mè eisenegkèis hèmas eis peirasmon, alla hrusai hèmas apo tou ponèrou. Ean gar aphète tois anthrōpois ta paraptōmata autōn, apèsei kai humin ho patèr humōn o ouranios. Ean de mè aphète tois anthropōn ta paraptōmata autōn, oude ho patèr humōn aphèsei ta paraptōmata humōn.

 

⁹ thus therefore pray ye: `Our Father who [art] in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name.

¹⁰ `Thy reign come: Thy will come to pass, as in heaven also on the earth.

¹¹ `Our bread for the day give us to-day.

¹² `And forgive us our debts, as also we forgive our debtors.

¹³ `And do Thou not force us into a testing, but deliver us from the evil, because Thine is the reign, and the power, and the glory -- to the ages. Amen.

¹⁴ `For, if ye forgive men their false steps He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;

¹⁵ but if ye do not forgive men their false steps, neither will your Father forgive your false steps.

 

What is there to say about this prayer that has not been said a million times or more? That it is useful to remember that basileia reflects a condition (“reign”) more than a place (“kingdom”); that Greek readers would have read “may [what is] thy will come to pass” rather than “be done”; that they would have read epiousion as a very rare word for “for the coming day”; that opheilèmata are debts while paraptomata are false steps or payment errors; that peirasmos is more a test, an assay, than a seductive temptation; that, once again, ponèron is “bad” or “wicked” rather than “evil”, and that the genitive case after apo, “from” may refer to a person or to a thing: “from the wicked one” or “from what is wicked”.

            On the other hand, it is interesting to put it in the context of the Sermon on the Mount so far. In the immediate context, it is the outcome of the discussion on prayer, and may thus be thought of as a blueprint for what we should murmur to the Father behind the closed door of our inmost room. And yet notice that throughout it is placed in the first person plural: even alone, we are part of the Father’s family, and even our singular prayer reflects our siblinghood therein.

            In the context of the Sermon as the new Torah, the completed Torah, the most salient aspects of the prayer are perhaps its inwardness and its polyvalence. Inwardness, because it gladly recognises our weakness and our dependence, for forgiveness and even for simple nourishment (the daily bread reminds us also of the manna that Israel received in the wilderness); polyvalence, because unlike many prayers in the Old Testament, this prayer is not a request for one specific thing but covers every aspect of our relation to our Father: adoration (hallowing), hope (the reign), obedience (His will), dependence (bread), penitence (forgiveness), weakness (do not test us as Thou didst the great ones like Job), protection (the wicked one, wickedness).

            No wonder that it has remained the prayer for Christians. It was very surprising to a number of us to see Pope Francis’s boldness in changing the wording of the penultimate petition to “let us not enter into temptation”, and doing so in a way that neither restored the original nor made the translation any clearer. In the Greek, the act we ask to be spared is an action by God, not merely a permission by God for an act of our own. It is God who might eisenengkein us to a testing, and roots of that verb are those of “forcing” and “into”. It would have been better for His Holiness to have concentrated on the peirasmos rather than on the verb.

            And for those who thrill to the idea of reading, and hearing, the original words Yeshua pronounced, above is the reconstructed written version in Jewish Aramaic of the 1^st century; below is the transliterated Aramaic text; and a reading can be heard here. 

Abbun d'bishmayya

yitqadesh shmakh

titey malkhutakh

tihey re`utakh

heykhma debishmayya

keyn af be’ar`a

lachman deme’ar`a

hab lan yoma deyn umachra

ushbaq lan chobayn

heykhma de’af shebaqnan lechayyabayn

we’al ta`eylan lenisayuna

ela atseylan min bisha

 

NOT SO TEMPTING

Oscar Wilde said “I can resist anything except temptation.”

In composing the universal prayer he would later teach his disciples, Yeshua had dealt with forgiveness; now he came to closure. Should he let the prayer trail away with just one more petition, reinforcing a downward movement from the grandeur of the Name? Or should he let it climb to a final and different height, a second peak? The daily bread petition was about trust; the forgiveness petition created a parallel of responsibility. Where now? What was the line?

He decided not to pursue the “as we forgive” implication but to continue the theme of trust and need. The opening grandly affirms God’s power; the petitions show our corresponding weakness and our dependence on the gifts of his love. We need, and trust him to provide from day to day, the basics of our life; we need forgiveness, as well as the capacity to forgive. What else do we need?

And suddenly, Abraham swam into his mind. Not the one who welcomed angels; not the Friend of God; the Abraham who was told to cut his only son’s throat and obeyed, up to the very end. Yeshua shivered, as always when he thought of that trial. And look at Job: there the Father himself had allowed Shaitan, the eternal Adversary, by way of a test of faith to have his way with a favoured human almost beyond bearing. There were giants in those days, he thought.

Looking at his brothers, at Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and young Shimon, he knew that they could not stand up to such commands; and the next petition wrote itself. “Do not,” he prayed with great intensity, “force us – little ones, no patriarchs or Jobs -- into [such a] trial”, and almost automatically there followed, “but deliver us from the Adversary”. For ever since Job, it had been he, the fallen angel, who subjects men to the unbearable; he it had been who crows and rejoices when they fall, and receives them gleefully with outstretched claws. His dream of revenge is never-ending; his understanding is cosmic and his wiles devastating. Merely obeying God’s commandments and praying does not put men beyond his reach: only the Father himself, by an active intervention, can deliver the wretched human race from that vile intelligence.

Image: Laurent de la Hyre, "Abraham Sacrificing Isaac" (1650)

PATER, FILIUS ET SOPHIA?

Today's reading in Prions en Eglise was the following entirely beautiful passage from the Wisdom of Solomon. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have irresistibly thought, while reading it, of the Holy Spirit.

Within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, shrewd, irresistible, beneficent, friendly to human beings, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying, penetrating all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits. For Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things. She is a breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; so nothing impure can find its way into her. For she is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power, and image of his goodness. Although she is alone, she can do everything; herself unchanging, she renews the world, and, generation after generation, passing into holy souls, she makes them into God's friends and prophets; for God loves only those who dwell with Wisdom. She is indeed more splendid than the sun, she outshines all the constellations; compared with light, she takes first place, for light must yield to night, but against Wisdom evil cannot prevail. Strongly she reaches from one end of the world to the other and she governs the whole world for its good. 

(Wisdom 7:22-8:1)

O MY PEOPLE

(7)It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter [or: the Defender] will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. 8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: 9 of sin, because they believe not on me; 10 of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; 11 of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. (John 16)

Deliver us from evil. And then a youngish man detonates his backpack filled with a nail-bomb, and takes with him to some imagined martyrs’ paradise the lives of 22 children, the health and cheerfulness of 60 others, and the life’s joy of countless parents and siblings. And the eternal question knocks, like the Gestapo, at the door of our hearts: how can a loving God permit this?

Change optics, as we say nowadays. Try to get into God’s mind. How can men do this to each other? I gave them life; I gave them love; I gave them my Son, who healed them and died for them; and still they do such things. What more can I give them?

They say I can do anything. They are wrong: I can do almost anything but I cannot be other than I am. I cannot go against my own nature. My deepest self is Love. The Life my creation imagined for them is a lifelong, sustained and sustaining love between them and me. Such a love cannot exist if it is coerced. If love is what we are to have; if love is what we are to be; it must be freely given and freely returned.

I teach them this, and they turn away. I urge them this, and they hate. I show them this, and they kill. They crucify. They torture. When my Son was with them, he healed them by taking their grief upon himself. He identified with them, by choice. He taught them that when they fed, watered and helped each other, they were doing it to him. Now, when they torture, bomb and kill, they are still doing it him. And to me.

This is Love’s vulnerability; this is my vulnerability, my only one. Every child they wound is my child. Every innocent they kill is my child, crucified. Can they not see my tears that fall like galaxies?

The Prince of this world, the Prince of Darkness, is judged. Is judged always already, now and for all time. But he is not yet utterly defeated. Just as we are needed for love, so are we needed for battle. The Spirit, that marvellous third Person, is our Defender. Why is not believing in Him a sin? Because it is the refusal of ultimate Love. Because it leaves the way open for the Prince of Darkness. Not just into my soul, but into all the souls my soul touches, that might have been pulled out of the drowning-ocean by my help. Yes, we are free. Free to return Love, or not. But it is not all one.

The Spirit, our Defender, is the Spirit of Love. If he reproves the world, if he judges and condemns the Prince, it is simply by being here, by manifesting the hideous contrast. The Prince kills twelve-year-old girls before their parents’ eyes, and smiles. And reproves us thereby. Love is here, it exists, it died for us, it was resurrected for us, it showed us that it is immortal and eternal and, in the end, victorious. Whose side are we on?

Whose side are we on? It is no longer a game. If it ever was. It is no longer an intellectual debate. If God says who is not with me is against me, he is not being a bully: he is stating the most painful truth about Love. Love is victorious; Love is powerless. He has given us his Son; he has given us his Spirit to be our Defender. But without us the job canot be done. He is not bullying us: he is begging us. Whose side are we on?

PRAYING FOR ANASTASIA, OR, FISH-HOOKS REVISITED

"Human freedom is an essential, aspect of God's creation and as such [J.R.] Lucas argues that there must be an infinity of possible plans. He likens God's providence to the Persian rugmakers who start at one end of a carpet while their children start at the other: the skill of the father is able to accommodate the children's work to create a rug of great beauty." (James Wood, "The Theology of Prayer and Intercession")

 I have written earlier on what to me is the perennial problem of intercessory and petitionary prayer: what can one properly ask for, and what is the meaning of praying for others? The answer to the second question must depend on the way the first is answered; and both, as Lee Rayfield suggests, depend on one’s concept of, and one’s relation to, God. Several theologians have pointed out that early in the Old Testament, petitions to God played out in the language of commerce, of the market-place: the great example is the irresistible story of Abraham’s bargaining with God for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha. (What is sometimes left out is the sequel: even though God acceded to Abraham’s final request to be merciful if even ten just men were found there, the cities did end up being destroyed. Clearly there was no minyan. But more relevant is the fact that Abraham did stop at ten, and did leave the decision up to God.)

            Since the coming of Jesus, however, the language of petition has been the language of love. Jesus taught us to call God Abba, Father: not obvious, when you think of Him as the Creator of the entire universe now revealed by Hubble. He taught us how to pray, how to ask, and suggested we do it as simply as a child asks its father for a bun. He also told us that if and when we ask, and ask insistently, we will receive (though he did not go into detail about what and how we will receive). Moreover, he showed us how he himself prayed: and, as one theologian pointed out, the most relevant of his prayers for this question is in Gethsemane, when he prayed God to let the cup of the Cross pass from him – “yet not as I will but as Thou wilt”.

            Which, of course, leads us to micro-management, and to Huck Finn’s fish-hooks. Does God micro-manage the world? In one sense I don’t think so. Jesus tells us that He sees the fall of every sparrow; but He doesn’t prevent it. Magic may stop the arrow dead in its flight; but God does not. On the other hand, I don’t think God stays aloof from the beautiful watch He has made and wound up. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and theologian, has reminded us that the Deist (and sometimes atheist) view of God is based on a mechanistic universe, and that in a quantum universe, where uncertainty plays a major role, a far more dynamic and subtle view of God is possible.

            We do not, usually, receive fish-hooks if we pray for them, though sometimes we do – which should make us think seriously about the relation between petitionary prayer and thanksgiving. But what interests me more today is prayer of intercession for others. We pray for a sick acquaintance. What do we pray? The simplest version is, “God, heal Anastasia (or Mrs X) and make her well again.” This may or may not happen. If it does, we give thanks, usually without questioning what that implies. If it doesn’t, there are several explanations: our faith wasn’t strong enough; or her healing at this time was not part of God’s will for her. The former, though in some places Jesus seems to sanction it,  almost reduces prayer to magic. The latter is very hard for us, with our love for the patient, to understand.  Some theologians solve the problem by saying that God’s sense of time is not ours; others, that God moves in mysterious ways.

            Yes, well, did we think we would grasp God and His ways? Does the child understand all its father’s circumstances and considerations? We are told that the great theological virtues are Faith, Hope, and Love. So why not apply those to our prayer of intercession? We pray that she may be healed. In that prayer, we do not attempt to bind God’s Will. We do apply Faith – we trust in God’s love, we trust Him to act out of the love He has for her. We do apply hope – the true Hope, which is itself a form of faith, a faith that points to a future, to an outcome. And we do apply Love, for the very fact of our praying for her is a putting into motion of the energy of Love. And that is enough. We cannot do more; we need not do more. As my mother, old and deep into Alzheimer’s, said to me one night before going to sleep, when I asked her what she thought about death and after: “I don’t think we’re meant to know, or to think about that. That’s what faith is for. You go into the dark, trusting.”

            But we have a restless and a questing mind, and some things I think we are allowed, indeed encouraged, to think about. If intercessory prayer “works,” how does it work? If a hundred people pray for Anastasia, what happens? And a couple of things I read recently gave me an idea about that. First, a sermon I heard said that God’s love for us is poured out constantly – not only at certain times of His choosing or our asking. It pours down upon us like the sun’s light. And if it does not efficaciously reach us, it is because we are blocking it. So what we can and should pray for is help to stop blocking God’s love. My second reading was the interview with Jean Vanier, and his insistence that we regard those unregarded by everyone else or the world in general.

            Those two ideas produced, in my mind, a third: that apart from my blocking the flow of God’s love for me, there may be more general and/or objective blocks that prevent that love from reaching me – or you, or Anastasia. And that praying for her, by one person but especially by more persons, may create a metaphysical energy that helps dissipate those blocks. What sort of blocks might they be? Well, as Vanier says, in a class, look at, regard, the kid everyone else makes fun of. Or, he mentions a 40-year-old paraplegic who has always so far been treated like something thrown out with the garbage. So one block might be the world in general, a person’s environment. Or a person’s circumstances. Or, indeed and startlingly often, a person’s own nature and its idiosyncrasies. I know several elderly women living alone, of varying prosperity but none of them poor. All of them have the physical problems that come with age. Three of them live rich, satisfying lives; two are profoundly and enduringly miserable, in spite of intelligence, education and talent. 

            Intercessory prayer for such people may create or fuel and augment an energy, deeply pleasing to a loving God, that helps to remove the screens blocking His love from pouring into their hearts and souls. We can only ever pray that He may lead them to the knowledge and love of Him, and that His will be done; but we are asked to do that often and insistently and also, I believe, smilingly (on His part) allowed to wonder, and ponder, how.