AVECARNE

 

Advent, when I was young, was a penitential time, a sort of milder Lent. You gave up something and were encouraged to search your soul. The darkness of the season was also, perhaps, the darkness of your sinful self; and the awaited light of Christmas announced itself with a very cautious and meagre growth of candles. Christmas, that hybrid feast of salvation’s birth, light’s return and Saturnalia, would be the explosive reward after four to five weeks of deepening gloom. 

            There are things in today’s Church I do not like: the decline of solemnity and reverence; the frequent implication that the tired, the sad and the melancholy in the pews are bourgeois rentiers who need to be shaken out of what peace and comfort they have found; the relentless pursuit of the Second Commandment, in its NGO simplification, over the First. But among the good tendencies I cherish is the new interpretation of Advent. We are now encouraged to see it as a time of waiting: waiting for, and waiting upon. Waiting for the Coming that has always already come and is always still to come; waiting upon the holy, the silent, the infinitely vulnerable love of the infinite who waits upon us. 

            Lent is introduced by Carne-vale: a farewell to meat; but also a farewell to the flesh, to sarx in one Biblical sense: to the insistence of the bodily, the daily, the worldly. And in that, our farewell of course anticipates and echoes His farewell: His farewell to the flesh that He had taken on to be part of what He loved and wanted to save: our precious but lurching human race. The Passion and Resurrection are his carne-vale, a gradual one completed in the Ascension. 

            Seeing this helps me to understand Advent better. Not a carne-vale; but the gradual anticipation of an ave-carne – an in-carn-ation. A taking-on of the too, too sullied human flesh; the flesh that, whatever the spirit’s willingness, is always so movingly weak. The flesh that gives us pleasure, that accords us sometimes a foretaste of ecstatic joys; but that lets us down, that attacks, that suffers, that dies. In R.S. Thomas’s “The Coming”, the Son, peering down at the thin yearning arms on a small polluted globe, says, “Le me go there.” And in going, to us he comes. He takes on that carne, he in-carnates. 

            And we? By Isaiah and other seers, we have been given notice that this coming is coming. That is it is true and will be real. Knowing that, we wait. Waiting is different from the daily round: it is the daily round pointed toward something. But for what? We have been told that at “the end” there will be a Parousia, a final Second Coming; and as a whole and in the long run, we wait for that. Vigilantly, because we have been told that it, that He, will come silently and suddenly, like a thief in the night or like a most peculiar bridegroom. 

            But for now, in this Advent, what we immediately wait for is the ceremonial mini-Coming that annually renews the Great Promise. Soon, we shall re-enact the Nativity, but at the same time we shall light candles, celebrate Santa Lucia, eat massive meals in a season of no natural food, defy the darkness, sing of Yule, imitate a silly fake-Santa-Niclaus by giving each other things; in fact, we shall celebrate not only light but the Flesh: the Flesh that He honoured, and will honour again, by taking it on, by settling into it; by an Ave-Carne.

Image: Edward Weston (1886-1958) "Neil [his young son] Nude" (1925)

Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

RICH AS A SUNRISE, DEEP AS LIFE - TRINITY 12

I am shamefully late in discussing this magnificent piece of dense and glorious prose, but we still just in the twelfth week after Trinity, so I will allow myself to print his now.

Leonine>Gelasian Sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, qui promptior es semper in audiendo quam nos in orando, et abundantia pietatis tuæ et merita supplicum excedis et vota; Effunde super nos misericordiam tuam; ut dimittas quæ conscientia metuit, et adjicias quod oration no præsumit nisi per merita Mediatoris nostri Jesu Christi Filii tui et Domini nostri. Amen.

1549

ALMIGHTIE and everlastyng God, |which art alwayes more ready to heare then we to praye,| and art wont to geve more than eyther we desyre or deserve; | Powre downe upon us the aboundance of thy mercy; | forgeving us those thynges wherof our conscience is afrayde, | and gevyng unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to aske,| through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire, or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer, as usual, translates closely and beautifully, even finding an English alliteration to reflect the Latin ‘et merita . . .et vota’; but he has difficulty with the compact Latin ‘quæ’, translating it first as ‘those things’ and second ‘that’ – which is awkward with the other ‘that’ that immediately follows (and which we would translate as ‘which’). However, he does get the strength of ‘præsumit’ by adding ‘dare’. Notice that what he leaves out entirely is God’s abundantia pietatis. Perhaps because for Englishmen piety was proper to men but not to God.

The 1662 revisers didn’t like the ‘that that’ either, and expanded it to ‘those good things which’; and expanded  the ‘dare not presume’ to the original's statement about our unworthiness and its palliation through the merits and mediation of Jesus. Nevertheless, as so often, I prefer Cranmer’s version, which (given the prose rhythms in the Latin) may reflect an earlier form of the original.. 

This is a favourite collect, and rightly so. People react to the parallelisms of rhythm and alliteration, and these bring us to consider the content. It is both joyful and humbling to know that our Father is readier to listen than we are to pray; and the same is true of his habit (the ‘wont’) of giving us not only more than we deserve but more than we thought we wanted! 

The psychology is profound all through. In the first place, we are reminded that even taking prayer in the very restricted sense of asking, we simply do not pray enough. As Wordsworth said, the world is too much with us: late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. We ask too much of the world – prosperity, friendship, happiness – and not enough of God. Meanwhile, He is always ready to hear. One does not have to make an appointment, say on Sunday morning: He is always there, waiting, loving, listening. 

Secondly, God is “wont” – it is His custom, His habit – to give us not only more than we deserve, but more even that we desire. That’s a two-edged statement: it reminds me of the old saying that the only thing worse than not getting what you wished for is getting it. So in one sense, God’s giving us more than we desire may appear at first to be unwelcome: the lesson is that we have to learn to desire what, and how much, He gives us. In Huck Finn’s phrase, He doesn’t give us fishhooks, even though we asked for them.  He gives us something much bigger that we didn’t hink of asking for, and so magnificent that we couldn’t remotely deserve it. 

Now, since we are here in a prayer, what are we asking for now? We ask Him to pour down upon us– abundantly, streamingly, like a downpour – and what? His mercy. Such a wonderful word, mercy. It is – not the opposite but the pendant of justice, without which justice is cold and brutal. And since we are sinners who consistently fuck up in life and in our relation to God and man, mercy is what we desperately need: more mercy than even we think we need, and certainly more mercy than we, in justice, deserve. 

And if God does this – if we get the mercy we ask for – what will that accomplish? What is the goal of our prayer? First, to be forgiven for “those things whereof our conscience is afraid”. Oh yes, we have a conscience, and it talks to us; and what it so authoritatively says is all too often not pretty. It makes us afraid – afraid of justice: unlike the Psalmist, we do not long for justice because we know all too well where it would leave us. We long for mercy.

And since we know all too well who and what we are, there are so many Divine gifts – Divine love, mercy, the beauty of holiness, the joy of heaven – that we “dare not presume to ask”. Only after the downpour of mercy, after the forgiveness, can we ask them. And so this wonderful Collect, this “treasure-chest” as Barbee and Zahl call it, comes full circle, and in its end is its beginning. 


Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Eerdmans, 2007)

AWAITING A FAVOURITE GUEST

I have been thinking about Advent, which this year has come in with a rush, slightly before I was ready for it. The admirable web clip “Advent in 2 minutes” reminds us, as do churches everywhere, that for Christians the season is one of awaiting a beloved guest whose coming is imminent. And in their naming of all the things Advent is not I was reminded that Christmas is of course also Yule: Yule with its perfectly pagan but enjoyable solstitian festivities, its eating, drinking and huge log fires, its exchange of gifts, its loud and happy Wassail songs, its evergreen tree and its colours of red and green. And I was reminded also that next to the notorious “War on Christmas” (from the curmudgeons who are annoyed by “Happy Holidays”) there exists also a continuing “War on Yule”, pursued by the faithful and the sensitive who every year feel their blood pressure rising at all this pagan commercialism. 

            Just as English is a hybrid language, composed in almost equal parts of Germanic and Latin roots, so the late-December holiday is a hybrid feast: part Dionysian Yule, part hushed and adoring attention and delicate celebration. Integrating the two is possible, indeed relatively easy, in a traditional society where both churchgoing and the Christmas goose are comfortable traditions, observed with care and happiness if not with excessive zeal and piety. It becomes much harder in a world where every tradition is systematically questioned and usually overturned, whether for reasons of impatience or from desire for novelty.  In such a world polemic tends to rear its unlovely head and conflict to ensue. If “peace on earth” is to begin at home, how to solve this difficulty?

          My own instinct would be to stop calling “Christmas” all that is really Yule, and vice versa. Unbelievers could happily wish one another “God Jul” as the Scandinavians do, and shops could sell Yule cards alongside Christmas cards. Christians who hate Yule could banish from their hearths as many of its characteristics as their children will allow; unbelievers could celebrate the Yule Dinner as they could the Yule Log. Christians who find that the culture of gift-giving interferes with the coming of the Saviour could give and receive their presents on the Eve of St Nicholas (December 5), as do the Dutch. The Christmas Tree could become the Yule Tree, and take its place among older English traditions of the season, like the Kissing Bough.

            For believers, Advent has moved – and I think happily so – from a minor penitential season, a sort of semi-Lent, to a season of waiting, awaiting, hope, and at least prospective joy. We await a favourite guest; so a little house-cleaning is in order. But to me the best preparation is to look around with care and attention and observe the sheer grinding, raging need of a world without faith: the misery of meaninglessness is piled on top of that of poverty, of illness, of solitude, until it is a wonder that vulnerable bodies and souls are not crushed by the peine forte et dure of unbelief.

            We are always being told by our churches to be missionaries: the thought seems to most of us outlandish. But when we look at the tragedy of indifference all around us, we can glean from it at the very least a motivation. This in no way diminishes the dilemma of action: we all know how those loudly proclaiming their faith and/or, worse, trying uninterruptedly to convert their friends produce new unbelievers as if by magic. So what can one do to counter the dark tide?

            An old spiritual adviser, wise in the ways of the soul, would probably tell us This is where ‘discernment’ comes in. And repeat the parable of the Good Samaritan. This last is a two-edged sword. In the first place, we are asked to identify, not with the Samaritan but with the victim: however secure we feel, in God’s eyes we are poor robbed and bleeding travellers, greatly in need of help. On the other hand, we may identify with the Samaritan himself, well-off but looked down on by the Chosen People as a Jewish tradesman might have been in the Paris or Vienna of 1900; and we might remember that he was not sermonising about the mounting number of robbery victims along the highways each year. He went about his business but kept his eyes open; and when he saw a bleeding figure in the bushes he did something. That is discernment. When life confronts us in a specific situation with someone suffering from unbelief (and yes, for many it is a suffering) as well as from other privations, then it may be possible to help in every way. Keep our eyes open; discernment.

            And, of course, there is Hope. Advent is par excellence the season of Hope. Surrounded by darkness and freezing fog and bone-piercing cold humidity, we do not give up, we do not give in to the night. Surrounded by the idiocy of Clown A and the venal rapacity of Clown B, not to mention the self-righteous demagoguery of Clown C, we do not give up on the prophecy, we do not surrender to the tempting idols that preen in every window and catalogue, nor to the bel canto of Cynicism and Despair singing in seductive harmony. We do not join the tempting troops of Anger, nor yet the raffish rakehelly rout of Entertainment. As we carefully tend the little oil-lamps of our vigil, we have our love to keep us warm.

And a glorious Christmas as well as a merry Yule to us all.

A TIME OF GIFTS

Mosaic in the church of Sant'Apollinare, Ravenna

Another text from my favourite hermit, Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau, this time a meditation on the Beatitudes --
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

THE CHARTER OF THE KINGDOM

The Beatitudes point us to a favoured road to the kingdom of God. The road of those who let themselves be inhabited and profoundly worked upon by the Holy Spirit, for that is where the wellspring of all joy is found. A paradoxical joy of which no one can rob us (cf. Jn 16:22).

Preparation

“O God, thou art my God: early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsteth for Thee.” (Ps. 63:1-2)

Observation

The evangelist gives the proclamation of the Beatitudes a solemn introduction, by a redundancy that attracts the reader’s attention: “And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying . . .”. Everyone familiar with the Bible will quickly see the link with the gift of the Torah on Mount Sinai. And that only emphasises the differences all the more, for we are now at another stage of the history of salvation. God no longer speaks from on high and in fire, but face to face; no longer to one man, Moses, charged with transmitting His message, but to the multitude. And what does Jesus say? That the road to the Kingdom goes via places one does not automatically expect it to cross: inner poverty, gentleness, tears . . . In short, it goes via the Cross, i.e. via a death of self-sufficiency, of the dream of omnipotence, and via a consent to human vulnerability. The first beatitude, that of the poverty of spirit, is, clearly, the key that opens all the others, because it allows us to receive the gift of God.

Meditation

Perhaps we may reread the Gospel in its entirety to see how Jesus lived these beatitudes: in receiving everything from the Father, in forgiving his persecutors, etc. That way we will find that the Beatitudes offer us a way of conforming ourselves to Christ, he who “became Man that man might become God” (St Irenæus). For we do need to become like him in order to be resurrected with him (cf Ph. 3). So it is up to each of us to incarnate these words in our own life, including the necessary looking toward Jesus, listening to the Spirit, being personally imaginative. The unquestioning openness of Zacchæus, the tears of Mary of Magdala, may also inspire our practice. By whatever opening, let us allow the Beatitudes to enter our life, to evangelise our concept of happiness and to stimulate our pilgrimage toward God.

Prayer

“Praise the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, praise His holy Name!” (Ps. 103:1) 

SOME INTELLIGENT WISDOM

Faith, Charity, and Hope

This morning, the French Prions en église collection showed, as the collect for today’s Mass, something I recognised. It was a French version of the Collect Anglicans know as Trinity 12, from the Leonine Sacramentary, revised in the Gelasian; of which the original, 1549 Book of Common Prayer version is this:

Almighty and everlasting God, which art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It’s one I’ve always loved; and the commentary on it in Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl’s The Collects of Thomas Cranmer is so good I thought I’d reproduce it here:

This Collect is a treasure chest, truly overflowing, of uplifting insights drawn from our religion:

·       God is more ready to hear than we are to pray. We pray too little, too timorously, and too pallidly. We seldom pray for what we really need and while we are unceasingly preoccupied with our perceived needs, we simply pray too seldom! God is a listening ear, waiting for communications which too infrequently arrive. God is the more active dialogue-partner in the “I-Thou” conversation.

·       God wills to give us more than we want and certainly more than we deserve. Can we for one second comprehend that? God does not work on the principle of distributive justice, i.e. “we get what we deserve”. On the one hand, He wants to do more for us, in our impoverished frangibility, than we can conceive. On the other hand, He wants to do good to us rather than judge us according to our deservings. If He gave us what we deserve, who could stand? His grace is neither Aristotelian and distributive, nor quixotic and mercurial. He blesses – with abundance – and does not curse.

·       We ask Him to forgive us the things that weigh on our conscience and cause us to fear to look Him in the eye. Even what seems to us, humanly speaking, unforgivable, can be forgiven by God. The reach of His mercy is further than our insight at its most layered and Freudian.

·       We ask Him to give us what we cannot even imagine asking Him to give us. Again the Collect presents the overwhelming idea that God is able and desires to give us things that we cannot fathom even suggesting: such as change within an unchanging character fault, love when we have long given up hope of it, opportunity which we have stopped even seeking, and open doors when every door has slammed shut.

KINGS FOR A DAY?

I have from time to time in this blog translated meditations by the French Benedictine hermit Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau; and I found her remarks on this Sunday's Epiphany celebration particularly perceptive. So I offer them here in my own translation, in the hope that others will find them as helpful as I do.

Matthew 2:1-12

THE OFFERING THAT PLEASES GOD

The Epiphany liturgy gives us a coherent collection of prayers and readings to meditate, centred on Christ, the light of nations. It invites us to note the universality of salvation, which is the basis of our unconditional acceptance of ourselves and others.

Preparation

‘You wanted neither offering nor sacrifice, you have opened my ears: you asked for neither holocaust nor victim, so I said, ‘Here I am: I come.’ (Ps 40:7-8)

Observation

Let us look at the Magi’s response to the proposed salvation discerned in the sign of the star, to the hope it awoke in them, to the point of committing them to an adventure upon unknown roads. Men of open mind, seekers after truth, humble enough to ask men far less cultured than themselves for what they did not know, they are not unlike a fair number of our contemporaries in their quest.

            Their gesture of adoration and offering particularly draws our attention. The diversity of their gifts represents the unique something that each person can bring to God. And let us not forget the Church Fathers’ interpretation which identifies the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh as the recognition of, respectively, the royalty, the divinity and the humanity of a Christ destined to death.

Meditation

Let us ask ourselves what we offer the Lord and in what spirit we do it. Are we Christians who are rooted in the thankfulness of being in the world, conscious of receiving everything from God and having only loving to do? Or are we like those who want to lay hands on him, to justify themselves in his eyes – and in their own --, proving to the whole world their value and their superiority like the Pharisee in Luke’s Gospel (Lk 16)? Are we able to give ourselves to the Lord just as we are, in the truth of our being at the same time sinners and made in his image: clay vessels bearing a treasure, the valuable mixed with the vile? If our response is negative, let us not be discouraged. Let us rather ask to be granted the inward freedom of those who know themselves unconditionally beloved in their singularity and who, consequently, are able to receive others with that goodness of which the wellspring is in God.

Prayer

‘Blessed be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! He has blessed and filled us with the blessings of the Spirit in Heaven, in Christ.’ (Eph. 1:3)