ITE, MISSA INLICITA EST?

Pope Francis’s recently-published limitations on the use of the Tridentine (Latin) liturgy for the Mass appear to have occasioned exactly the reactions he was doubtless expecting and may have hoped for: joy among the modernists, outrage among the “tradis”. It is useful to remember that he has not cancelled the Latin Mass, or Benedict XVI’s decree permitting its use. He has merely subjected its use in any parish or community to the authority of the local bishop. 

            Apparently, Francis decided on this measure out of alarm at what he saw as being an incipient schismatic cleavage in the Church, especially in America where the increasing political polarization of society is now seen as augmenting the existing divisions within the Catholic community – to the point where liturgy was being weaponized in the struggle about other things such as abortion, the role of women in the Church, gay marriage and so forth. What he either did not realise or weighed but found worth while is that he hemself, with this decree, is doing exactly the same thing, and thus in a sense already conceding a victory to his adversaries. 

            Exceedingly interesting in this regard is the 2018-9 study of Fr Donald Kloster, a Connecticut priest from the Diocese of Bridgeport who specialises in the study of the traditionalist movement, and who found that 99% of the those favouring the Tridentine Mass attended every week, whole of those favouring the modern Mass only 22% did so. Moreover, he found that the Tridentine Mass was particularly favoured by the 18-39-year-olds – which contradicts precisely the arguments of those who think that vernacular, familiar, happy-clappy liturgies will appeal to the young. Of the reasons given by the Millennials and Gen Z lovers of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) by far the most important (35%) was “reverence”.

            One of the rules of life that were dinned into me at an early age was “It’s rude to say ‘I told you so’”. Yet it is very tempting in this case to utter those words. I have been trying to tell people for decades that the continual modernizing and de-solemnizing of the liturgy, so far from counteracting the emptying of churches, encourages and increases it. Certainly, some people prefer a jolly, informal, cheerful Mass or Eucharist; but at least as many, if not more, people of faith love and long for a sense of reverence, or solemnity, of significant form. And this is every bit as true for Anglicans/Episcopalians as it is for Roman Catholics. 

            What seems to me of crucial importance is that, first, we should abandon the terminology of “modernists” vs. “traditionalists” when referring to liturgy and replace it with something like “informalists” vs. “formalists” or “proponents of togetherness” vs “proponents of reverence/solemnity”. Second, and even more important: all sides should be brought to agree to divorce discussions of liturgy from discussions of other aspects of religion in society. It is perfectly possible to love solemnity and reverence and tradition in a celebration of the Eucharist while accepting that such a celebration may be performed by a female priest or a gay priest, either or both of them married, and believing that abortion, while always sad and often traumatic, is permissible and not a sin. 

            Finally, a word to Anglicans and Episcopalians. While we do not use the ancient Latin liturgy, we have an equivalent. Like the Latin texts, the sixteenth/seventeenth-century words of the Book of Common Prayer (1662) are in a language that, while comprehensible, is distant from everyday modern usage and was specifically designed to convey the reverence of the older Latin. Moreover, even more than Latin, this liturgical language has shaped English usage for over three centuries: “to have and to hold”, “till death us depart”, “we are as the beasts that perish”, “devices and desires”, “peace in our time”, “sudden death”, “the kindly fruits of the earth”, “our bounden duty and service” – centuries of worshippers have repeated and loved these words so that they have acquired the patina and glow of handed-down family treasures. And thus and so, they allow us to combine reverence and solemnity with familiarity in a way that destroys and cancels neither.

            

 

SEEING ON A WINDY DAY

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

 

This Beatitude seems simple. Katharos means, at bottom, simply ‘clean’ but goes on to a host of further kinds of cleanliness: ‘purified’ as in water or grain, ‘free of pollution’, ‘free of additions’. And it quickly goes on to the human, where it can mean ‘free of debt’, ‘free of defilement’, ‘honourable’ and even, as for a priest, ‘ceremonially pure’. Kardia is the heart, the seat of feelings and passions, but also the inclination, desire or purpose, and the kardia of wood is its core or pith. And opsontai is the future of horaō, which means ‘to see or behold’.

 

So just as those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth, so those whose heart is clean, pure, free of pollution, honourable, will see God. Simple.

 

Yet the Gospel of Yochanan, John, says ‘No one has seen God at any time’. (John 1:18) Has there never been one who is pure in heart? If this were so, the Beatitude would not be a joyous promise but at worst a savage criticism and at best a Yeshuan hyperbole, like ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Surely this is not what is meant here.

 

I suspect that we have to ponder and probe the seeing. We know that here on earth we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, and that sin, the lack of love, can make us blind to many things. We also know that in such a condition grace may help us: ‘I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.’ Note that we do not help ourselves: Christianity is not like Buddhism, a constant activity of scrupulous self-help to eliminate the dross, to make oneself pure. We are dependent, even for our daily bread. Only grace can make us pure, only the Spirit, the pneuma, the ruach, can make us katharoi. What we can do, what we need desperately to do, is to clear away the junk blocking the doors and windows, and to open them as wide as we can to let the pneuma (which is breath, wind, and spirit) in.

 

And when we do that, when He, that third person of the Trinity, does enter, when the wind blows where it listeth in our soul, then it brings with it the sun: the sun that is also the Son, and the glorious sun that is the emblem of the Father. And then we see God. Not with the eyes of our lurching, rebellious body, perhaps; but with the inward eye that is the bliss, not only of solitude but of faith.

 

 

 

SPRINT OR MARATHON? TRINITY 11

Could this be the origin of "runner's high"?

Latin Collect (<Gelasian Sacramentary)

DEUS, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserendo manifestas, multiplica super nos
misericordiam tuam, ut ad tua promissa currentes cœlestium bonorum facias esse participes. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.

Prayer book of 1549

GOD, which declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewyng mercy and pitie; Geve unto us abundauntly thy grace, that we, running to thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Prayer book of 1662

O GOD, who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(It's interesting that the Latin “parcendo et miserendo” is translated by “showing mercy and pity”. The mercy is the furthest from the Latin: “parco” means to spare. And “misericordia” is translated as “grace”.)

This is a curious Collect, and an attractive one. The attraction lies in the “currentes”: we run to God’s promises of heavenly treasure. But it is also odd: what is the relation between that running and God’s power shown in mercy and pity?

So we start thinking. Usually, in a Collect, the relation between pts 2 and 3 is somehow causal: so here we ask God to multiply upon us his mercy, so that we may run to his promises and thus may be made partakers of his heavenly treasure. In other words, we need his mercy to start running. We cannot run toward God without his mercy; and there we see the genius of Cranmer as a translator – here he has understood that what we need even to be able to start running toward God is God’s own grace.

We can do nothing good of ourselves. We are stuck in the mud of our own little barnyard, and our feet can barely suck themselves out of it to take a single step. Yet when we hear what God promises us, we are on fire with enthusiasm: we want to go, to run even, toward him and toward the treasure he promises us. But the world is too much with us: getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. So we pray for mercy, we pray for grace, to free us, to pull us out of the mud so that at last we can run.

And the interesting thing is that the essence of the promise itself is grace. What is the heavenly treasure? Eternal life: a life without time, lived in the permanent presence, in the glorious ambient grace, of the Triune God. We need his grace to run to his grace. A wonderfully virtuous circle.

THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"

AND NOW FOR THE HARD BIT

In English, “give us today . . .” might have suggested “and forgive us …”, just as the French “donne” might have suggested “et pardonne”; but in Aramaic the words are quite different from each other. Nevertheless, the need for the daily gift of simple food seems to have suggested to Yeshua another need, perhaps an even greater one. Forgiveness is a human subject so huge that many books have been written about it, yet on our simple daily level it is raw and basic.

Let’s look first at its place in the prayer, and how the daily bread may have suggested it. The prayer for bread may have been suggested by the daily blessing of bread at every Jewish table; and the daily prayer later called the Amidah, most elements of which date from the Pharisaic and Sadducaic time, contains the Selichah, a prayer for the forgiveness of sins. What is perhaps original in Yeshua’s version is the order on the one hand, and the linking of God’s forgiveness with our own on the other: both were standard elements in Jewish spiritual life, but the link here is striking. 

What this encourages us to look at is a) what does it mean to be forgiven? And b) what does it mean to forgive? Everyone who has ever felt genuine guilt – and children feel that a lot –knows the real torture it brings. You have donesomething (which includes having saidsomething, for interpersonally words are actions) which has clearly and strongly hurt someone in some way. You see the other person’s pain, and you piercingly want time to roll back to before you did it. But it doesn’t. Oh God,whydid I do/say that? How could I have been so stupid, insensitive, wicked? I wish I could undo it/unsay it. But Time is pitiless, and leaves us pilloried. The person I hurt would be totally justified in retaliating. And in a way, I almost wish (s)he would. Then balance would be restored, and life could go on. If the person we have hurt has real power, we may even feel rather nervous or frightened. 

And then – perhaps not right away, perhaps the next day, or the next week, the next time we meet -- the person I have genuinely and wickedly hurt comes up and puts an arm around my shoulders and says, softly, “It’s OK, I know you didn’t mean it.” And changes the subject. How do we feel? Well, thoroughly discombobulated, for a start. That was the last thing we expected. 

And then, a huge wave of pure relief flows through us, and we may start to cry. Genuine, unexpected and overwhelming magnanimity teaches us what being forgiven feels like. 

When we ask God for this, what are we asking Him to forgive? The probable Aramaic word was hóba, which can mean both ‘sin’ and ‘debt’. So it has been variously translated as ‘sin’, ‘debt’ and ‘trespass’. One might perhaps translate it ‘Forgive us what we owe You’, because we owe Him infinitely more than we might ever hope to repay. In fact, we owe Him everything – all we are and have is a gift. So to ask Him to forgive us that life-including debt is to ask Him to accept us WAF – ‘with all faults” – just as we are, and to restore us to our proper relation to him, that of loving and grateful children to a loving and provident Father. As part of that, we are also asking Him to forgive our sin(s), obviously: the times we screw up that relation in one of the many well-known ways. 

Now comes the interesting part. Because unlike most known Jewish prayers like the Amidah, this prayer adds to the penitent request for forgiveness the rider “as we forgive (or: have forgiven) those who owe us”.An instant challenge.Have we forgiven? Whom? What this does is remind us how absolutely crucial forgiveness is between humans. I know two families, formerly good friends, who have not spoken to each other for six years because of what one family-s five-year-old said to the other family’s four-year-old. The opposite of forgiveness is rancour, and the result of rancour is humiliation and resentment. 

We have seen what being forgiven means and feels like. What about forgiving? The saying goes ‘forgive and forget’. Depending on what has been done to us, forgiving may be easy or very hard indeed. If a drunken oaf driving a defective car ran down and killed one of my daughters or grandchildren, I do not know if, or how, I should be able to forgive him, and I know I should never forget. The answer, if there is one, is perhaps that forgiving is possible only with, and in, prayer. We are not a forgiving race. But uniting ourselves to the God whose very nature is love and who has forgiven the human race more than we can begin to image – that may enable us to share in some of that mighty love. If we can imagine what we, as humans, regularly do to God; if we can imagine all that we ask, and hope, for Him to forgive; then perhaps we can be enabled by that imagination and the resulting prayer of humility to share in the outpouring of His grace. 

Eventually, then, this double-sided petition, as Yeshua imagined it and set it in His prayer, is one for restoration. For restoration of us humans in our relation to one another, and for restoration of our relation to our infinitely loving Father – a restoration which we can’t accomplish but which He can, and will.  

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS

“Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20).  This text had long fascinated me, like its counterpart “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). And then, recently, I got an inkling of its meaning, or at least of one of its meanings. Life, in its daily round, had been weighting me down, and it was all beginning to feel like one of the grimmer bits from Ecclesiastes. I prayed, as usual, to be taught the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer that prays even when we are not praying; and then, in a few moments, I remembered what I had written about a long time ago: our doors and shutters.

In the Angelus, we pray that God may “pour Thy grace into our hearts”. I’ve always loved that verb and that image. And it occurred to me that in fact that pouring is going on all the time. We live in a perpetual monsoon of grace: pouring out grace upon those He loves is what God does. And when we feel deprived of it, it is usually we who are, with a complex system of shutters and barriers, keeping it out.

If, for once, you don’t, you wake up in the morning and, as a Carthusian put it, you savour the immense gift you are being given, at this precise moment: one whole day. A whole day, of life, of love, of work, of thanksgiving. You give thanks, and you pray that you may not in this day close off your heart and keep out the outpouring that is heading for you. And as you do so, you can hear the faint creak of shutters opening. Some of them are old, fairly massive and jammed shut: they need real effort to dislodge. Some are charming, and part of you opens them with regret: they let through just the tiniest ray of light, in which dust motes danced so prettily; but they too can and must be flung wide.

And as they open, the tide of grace flows in, and you are suddenly filled with a morning sunshine of joy – which will last you all day, if you keep strong winds from closing the shutters again. And as this happens and you revisit that joy from hour to hour, you realise that the less of “you” gets in the way of the flood, the happier the real you will be.

It is “I” that keeps God out all the time. So if I can get “I” out of the way, then grace, i.e. God, can come in. And the result will be, in at least one sense, like Galatians 2:20: “Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me.” If I can empty the clutter and open the shutters, there will at last be room for Him.

LAETARE: IT'S GRACE, STUPID.

The fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare from the Psalm that begins "Rejoice". It is a pause, as it were, when we may breathe in the midst of our intense self-discipline -- yes, well. Most of us are not very good at intense self-discipline, and so we can feel mildly guilty at not having earned Laetare.
Which brings us to the whole topic of Lenten guilt. Somewhere around Ash Wednesday many of us fully intend this year to "do a good Lent", fasting, praying and giving alms with sincerity, assiduity and regularity. By the time of Laetare for many of us this lovely plan lies in ruins, and we feel guilty.

It is worth stopping to reflect on the similarity of this experience with that of New Year's Resolutions.  And with that of weight-loss plans. For these last, the permanent success rate, it has been proved, is between 2 and 5 per cent: the figures may be the same for New Year's and Lenten resolutions. Even if we consider slimming to be a form of vanity (which it is, health excuses notwithstanding) and Januarius to be a pagan idol (which he is), we are still left with the shards of our Lent.

 The key, of course, lies in the possessive pronoun. Our Lent. My Lent. Not selfishness: I wanted to bring God the offering of a "good Lent", because I love Him and want to do something for Him, as one does for a loved one. Uh, huh. Niet. Time and again, with a divine smile or a heavenly tear, God raps us over the knuckles and says "You've done it again! You've misunderstood me again! I don't want your immolated oxen, your roasted rams, nor do I want your good Lent!"

Right, Lord: what do you want, then? "I want you to realise, once and for all, that contrary to what you humans keep saying it is more blessed to receive than to give, and also a great deal more difficult. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my complete love. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my only-begotten son. I was under no illusion as to what you would do with him. But I knew that once you had done that, I could turn precisely that horror, that evil so typical of y'all, into the greatest good, for you. So look at what my Son said to Nicodemus, that intelligent believer. 'God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but so that it might be saved through him. He that believes in him is not condemned; he that does not is already judged. The world did not accept the Son because men of evil deeds prefer the dark to the light.'"

So we should work at doing good deeds? "Yes and no: what He went on to say was 'but whoever does truth comes into the light.'" Doing truth. Not doing good deeds. Doing truth. It sounds odd and illogical. Is truth something you do?

Here we are with the shards of our Lent. But Lent is still going on. And we have failed. Again. So we smile, say "Thank you, Lord, for the lesson," and get up and go on. Knowing that we can do absolutely nothing; that we have been given the gift of God's love free and without charge, and that it does not matter a tinker's fart whether we fast or eat, write cheques or save, and go to Church or not. God did not check up on all those things before deciding whether we were worthy of his love. What we do, being loved like that, is work at fully realising it, taking it in, letting ourselves be overwhelmed. That, I suspect, is what "doing truth" is. Being love, God's love is always the same as our love, which is why we can love him back. Being God's, it is always also different. Always a little unsettling. But not -- pace much modern church rhetoric of the "naught for your comfort" kind -- demanding. I'm not sure God ever demands. I think he gives, and waits for us to receive and accept. Learning to do that is "doing truth". And it results in rejoicing. Laetare, indeed.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD RELAX . . .

Here, in the middle of summer, it would be nice to give our minds a break. But today's reading comes from Paul's letter to the congregation in Rome, whose intelligence and alertness he never underestimates. And accordingly, the awesome Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau, Benedictine hermit in Provence, has provided a "meditation" to comment on it which equally refuses to underestimate us. How refreshing. I've chosen J.B. Phillips's New Testament translation to represent the current official French one, which mostly fits. Read with care, because this is not easy. But very, very rewarding.

“Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good. God, in his foreknowledge, chose them to bear the family likeness of his Son, that he might be the eldest of a family of many brothers. He chose them long ago; when the time came he called them, he made them righteous in his sight, and then lifted them to the splendour of life as his own sons.”

(Romans 8:28-30; tr. J.B. Phillips)

GOD, GREATER THAN OUR HEART

Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau, Benedictine hermit

In the space of three verses of extreme density, Paul sketches our ultimate destiny. Thus he opens up for us a horizon that goes far beyond what our spirit can conceive. Moreover, he deals cleverly with the experiences where we have trouble understanding that everything contributes to our good.

Preparation

Lord, “let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be for my comfort” (Ps. 119:76)

Observation

Right from the start, Paul sets us on another plane than that of feelings, even religious ones. To speak of those who love God he chooses, from among the words available to him, the verb corresponding to “agapè”: the love that has its wellspring in God and has been “flooding through our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us.” (Rom. 5:5) So it takes on a level of depth and stability that allows it to withstand storms. Then, Paul mentions those whom God “chose long ago”, thereby expressing his conviction that our being in the world did not happen by chance: we were thought and willed by God before our creation. Finally, there are those whom he “made righteous”: a specifically Pauline approach to salvation, seen as the opposite of condemnation, in other words as reconciliation with God (cf Rom. 5). Hence the restoration of the image and of the resemblance; hence our participation in the very glory of the God who calls for our response of faith.

Meditation

By means of these words we understand that our “good” is not only that which is “pleasant” to us, but also that which is “useful” and “salutary”, in a view that goes beyond the limits of our present horizon and of our singular person. It is not that Paul passes over the sufferings of our current state, but by the standard of this ultimate future he sees them as labour pains (cf Rom. 8).  This connotes a dynamic of life awaiting its fullness. This dynamic we can already experience in our existence when, like Job, we move from a hearsay knowledge to a personal knowledge of God as a result of a drama in our life. Or when, like Paul, we find that our murky ways can, by God’s grace, end up in the light: yes, “though sin is shown to be wide and deep, thank God his grace is wider and deeper still.” (Rom. 5:20)

Prayer

“I called upon the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me, and set me in a large place. The Lord is my strength and song, and is become my salvation.” (Ps. 118:5,14).

NOVEMBER 9, 2016: DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS

Stat crux, dum volvitur orbis

It was a privilege for me, a European, to be present at this, the most important American election for a number of years, and in its result the most startling for many decades. One thing that strikes unprejudiced observers from my continent is the idealism of the American people, which shows so strongly in their national events, in their collective enthusiasm, in their warmth, in their communal kindness, and even in their anger. Idealistic, patriotic, they are the products of a nation that invented itself instead of just growing, and thus is obliged periodically to reinvent itself.

It is now accepted among many that during the recent campaign the vilification was all on the Trumpian side; but I must say that rarely in peacetime have I heard a politician so consistently an comprehensively abused as Donald Trump. We may say, in schoolyard mode, that "he started it", but the fact remains that he got as good as he gave, and that not only his opponent's team but much of the political establishment and the media returned the fire with interest. Yes, he said many reprehensible things no candidate for high office should say; but equal and worse (whatever the justification) was said about him. It was a savage and uncivilised campaign; and even those who initially wanted "when they go low, to go high" were soon convinced that highmindedness would get them nowhere.

Then came Election Day, and (for us, the right-thinking ones) it all went pear-shaped. All the polls were proved wrong, and the Great Beast was elected in what one commentator called "a primal scream" of an election. In the subsequent 24 hours, hindsight provided many valuable and even sensitive insights: it was race, it was gender, it was the economy, it was millions who felt left behind, ignored and unheard and who had provoked what one pundit called a "whitelash". It was finally realised that (as Tina Brown, former New Yorker editor, said) a lot of people had been feeling that on certain subjects conversation was closed, taboo. And the Great Beast alone had sensed the pent-up energy of disappointment and anger, and had realised it contained enough nuclear energy to propel him to the goal.

Why am I writing about this here, in a blog that deals with faith, prayer, and such things? Perhaps because the experience has taught us that ambient opinion, social and unsocial media and a culture of vituperation, in solving nothing, may teach us a profound lesson. The lesson is that, in politics -- local, regional, national and even international -- the one unpardonable sin is humiliation. The humiliated all too often cannot and do not forgive, but seek for revenge. The revenge may take the form of an assault rifle fired upon innocent bystanders, or of an electoral slap in the face for hated "élites": revenge it is, and it curdles the blood.

The ordinary citizen, indeed any individual, can do little but can and must do something: needs to know that the television has its own world and agenda, that social media are hollow vessels open to any filling, and that one's own small world, the few dozen humans with whom one actually interacts, is the terrain one is given, the place where, for you or me, the world turns: volvitur orbis. Here we live, here we act, adiuvante gratia tua, with the help of Thy grace; never forgetting that, for us as for our neighbour, while the world turns, dum volvitur orbis, stat Crux: the Cross stands, the Cross remains. Not as a memento mori, to speak of death, but as a reminder how far love can go. "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

Perhaps we should turn off the TV, the computer and the smartphone from time to time and look, really look, at the few square miles of the orbis in which we can and must act, react, and interact, with the few people upon whose lives we can truly have an effect. He did this; he loved us, he did his Father's will; he died for love of us, he rose again for love of us, he humiliated no one, he rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar's and unto God what was God's, he showed us the way love works.

Adiuvante gratia tua: with the help of Thy grace. A wise man I knew long ago told a woman who came to him for counsel, "Your problem is that you are trying to live a sacrificial life without the grace to do so." At the time this seemed to me harsh: now I realise its kindness and its wisdom. Only with grace can we live in this turning world under the Cross; and only through prayer can grace reach us.

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.