GOOD GRIEF

 Makarioi hoi penthountes, hoti autoi paraklèthèsontai. ”Fortunate are they that mourn: for they shall be consoled.”

            Very different from the first Beatitude, this one. It refers, not to the nature or character of the fortunate ones, but to a condition arising from a specific situation. 

 

            The situation involving the verb pentheō is usually death; and the root of the consoling verb is the same as that of the Paraclete: the Defender sent to help us when we are the prisoner at the bar: the Holy Spirit. This may help us understand what is meant. All of us are mortal; hence all of us except the loneliest will at some time be mourners. Mourning is not the same as grief: it is a reaction to grief. Psychologists speak of the “work of mourning” – a task that needs to be undertaken and accomplished before life can go on. And in traditional societies it is a very outwardly-evident work, undertaken collectively by family, friends and acquaintances; visible and audible in wearing black (or, in the Far East, white) and keening or wailing, in keeping vigil, in sitting Shiva: a work of the community of which the deceased was a part. This is added to, and partly absorbs, the individual grief of the nearest and dearest, thus already providing a level of consolation: a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved or at least reduced.

 

            Beyond this comes the Paraklètos. Why, here, a Defender? A friend summoned to help us in court? In the modern, psychological sense because guilt is always a part of mourning. We feel we could have, should have, been closer, more supporting, more positive, a better friend, lover, spouse to the deceased. In mourning, a part of us is always the prisoner at the bar. And the Judge is He ‘in whose sight no man living is justified’. As always, for now, He is silent, which only increases our apprehension. Someone once wrote that Hell is the confirmation of all our worst thoughts about ourselves as  definitively true.

 

            But here comes the Defender. As invisible to earthly eyes as the Judge, he wraps himself around us and brings to remembrance all that is good in us, and notably the fact that we have been bought back – at a high price. Bought back: “redeemed”, like a pledge, or a hostage. And bought back by that other Person of the Trinity: the Judge’s own Son. If we were worth buying back, redeeming, by him at the cost of his own life, and if we recognise and accept that, then surely, says the Defender, we are free? Free, and consoled. For moreover, those for whom we mourned are now in the direct presence and care of Him who loves them as He loves us. 

 

            “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted” says the Authorised Version. And perhaps here that version of makarioi is truly a good one.

 

THAT LITTLE WORD AGAIN

In my previous post I looked at the prayer that God’s will may be done on earth AS it is in Heaven; today we might glance at the prayer that we may be forgiven AS we forgive others.

It seems, at first, much simpler than the previous AS:  a simple case of do as you would be done by. If you want to be forgiven, the least you can do is do some forgiving yourself. Let’s start with what’s to be forgiven. In all Gospels except Luke it is “debts”;  but many scholars think that the word Jesus used was the Aramaic hoba, which means both debt and sin. If this sounds odd, remember that in both Dutch and German the same word, schuld, is used for a monetary debt and to mean ‘guilt’; and in Dutch, therefore, the relevant line of the Lord’s prayer says: forgive us our schuld as we forgive our schuldenaren – literally our debtors, but in fact those who have schuld toward us. And let’s remember also that only a little over a century ago debt was considered so serious that an inability to pay it sent you to gaol. (Those who borrow from the Mafia are even to this day reminded forcefully of the need to pay both debt and vig.)

Are we God’s debtors? It seems odd: if God is love, and our relation to him is one of love, is it decent to express that in terms of debt? In the Old Testament, God put it very clearly to Israel: if you (plural: y’all) will love and honour me and keep my commandments, you will be my people and I will be your God. If you will not, I will turn my back on you and nasty things will probably happen to you. So it’s in one sense a transaction; and a transaction, agreed to by both sides, creates a debt. If this sounds one-sided, you can still find traces of the other side in the Psalms, when the Psalmist cries “Up, Lord, and do something!” And in Judaism arguing, even indignantly, with God is not considered outrageous.

With the coming of Christ there is a subtle change. It is no longer merely a matter of keeping commandments, but of a relation of profound intimacy with God: with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit. This is still simple, but where keeping commandments is simple on this side of complexity, the new relationship is simple far, far beyond complexity.

So what does that do to debt and schuld? It transforms it, or is meant to. Just as between great lovers the very thought of “owing” is inconceivable, so in the new relation of love between God and the soul it is (meant to be) inconceivable. Right, says God: but if you accept this, and you also accept that “what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me”, then the thought of “owing” between you and your brother must also become inconceivable.

But. But we still live in a sublunar and greebly world. So in the meantime, in the mean time – the time in the middle between promise and Parousia, the mean and ungenerous time of Auden’s “low and dishonest decade” --, there is forgiveness. It is the way-station to inconceivability. And we learn the HOW of forgiving by looking at the way we hope God will forgive us. Not a mean forgiving, that will go on reminding the forgiven of their nasties and my virtue; not a forgiving accompanied by stern lectures, demanding promises never to do it again; no, joyful forgiving with open arms, with a clean soft garment and a feast of rich veal from the fatted calf.

This takes a bit of learning. Most of the time we don’t even pray for our enemies, let alone forgive them. When did you last hear prayers in church for ISIS and its members? Forgiving is hard; forgiving and forgetting even harder. But the joy it brings is so enormous that the learning is worth every effort. Another of the Joys of Lent? 

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "The Return of the Prodigal Son"   

THE FIFTH PETITION

A couple of posts ago, I said that I’d write something about forgiveness. One of my reasons for doing so is that I’ve been rereading Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) Jesus of Nazareth, one of the most gloriously intelligent books on Christianity I have seen for a long time. And in his section on the Lord’s Prayer, his chapter on the Fifth Petition (“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”) is a model of perceptive and noble insight. I will try to repeat here what he says, partly in quotation, partly in précis, because it is very much worth pondering.

            First, there is trespass – we all know that. ‘How to overcome guilt is a central question for every human life’. What does one do about offence? The first human reaction is to retaliate. As the old Marines’ saying has it, ‘Yea, I shall walk through the valley of death and fear no evil, because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.’ In real life, of course, retaliation has no logical end and becomes vendetta. But ‘with this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation.’

           And it is God, not we, who has taken the initiative. ‘We should keep in mind that God himself – knowing that we human beings stood against him, unreconciled – stepped out of his divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us.’ He washed his disciples’ feet; he told the story of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:25-35).

            So what do we do? Here I have to quote at slightly greater length, because the argument is dense and pertinent. First, if we want to get into this properly, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place?

Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more that a matter of ignoring, or merely trying to forget. Guilt must me worked through, healed, and thus overcome.’

            (Notice that he treats ‘guilt’ not as a feeling, but as a fact. Not ‘I feel guilty’ but ‘I am guilty.’ That is already a biggish step, in a lot of situations.)

            ‘Forgiveness exacts a price – first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself.’ (My emphasis.) This I find extraordinary in its profound perception. The sentence is worth copying out and meditating on.

            ‘As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil, are made new.’

            Sounds wonderful, we say. But does it work in real life? Damned hard. Offence is offence; evil is evil. (It may not help that ‘bad’ and ‘wicked’ have become compliments . . .) We are not good at confronting evil, because when we do we discover how powerful it is. It is bigger than us: as Reinhold Schneider says, ‘it lives in a thousand forms; it occupies the pinnacles of power . . .it bubbles up from the abyss.’ And then he says (to God): ‘Love has just one form – your Son.’

            This is where one the one hand the solution lies, but where on the other hand it gets difficult. ‘The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today.’ For two reasons: one is that, even while we take the horrors of history as proof that God can’t exist, we trivialize evil: we don’t see the horrors as emanations of something. (‘Shit happens.’) The other reason is that we tend to see the human being as being solely an individual, ‘ensconced in himself alone’. We find it hard to think of all human beings as deeply interwoven, and as all in turn being encompassed by ‘the One – the Incarnate Son.’

            Perhaps, says JR, an idea of John Henry Newman’s (the Victorian Anglican who became a Catholic and a Cardinal) my suffice. ‘Newman once said that while God could create the whole world [read: universe] out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender.’

As such, we have a model we can follow: however hard it is, we aren’t pathless. ‘The overcoming of guilt has a price. We must put our heart – or better, our whole existence – on the line. And even this act is insufficient: it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all . . . who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross.’ We need first to give thanks for that, ‘and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love.’ We are not terribly good at this, and we keep falling down; but we are held within the power his His love, which means that our puny attempts ‘can still become a power of healing.’

In all honesty, I’ve never read such a profound and powerful analysis of what it means to forgive – not just the little things, the friend who forgot my birthday or the teacher who gave me an unfair mark, but the big things: they know what they are. To forgive and to be forgiven: it means, inevitably, a relationship, a coming together in a challenge. Without prayer, it’s all but impossible; with prayer, it’s hard, but we are not alone. The Force is with us.   

        

Thanks to Rick McNary at rickmcnary.me for the image.    

LEVEL CROSSING?

 

I awoke with the peculiar sentence in my head, “There are trains everywhere – and they all go to the Cross”. Something to ponder, I thought as I dressed. It reminded me that indeed all our ways go to the Cross, and that the implications of that are rich enough to fill centuries of theology. Here are a few of the ones that came into my mind that morning.

1.        The Cross is our Cross. It is the death we cannot avoid, toward which we are headed, that may meet us on a highway or in a hospital room, but meet us it will.

2.        As such, it is our Cross in the sense that we can elect, at least in principle, how to meet it and undergo it. It may be with courage; that is admirable, but a purely pagan virtue. It may be with surrender to God’s Will: that is probably the best way. It may be in sacrifice, for another; before that is up to us, it depends on circumstances.

3.        The Cross is the symbol of our guilt: it is where we, as humanity, crucified the Son of God. It is unavoidable: all trains go there, whether we like it or not.

4.        The Cross is the symbol of our forgiveness: He died there to accomplish that. Is that, too, unavoidable? We can avoid it only by refusing it, which is the only absolute sin.

5.        The Cross, because it is our Cross and His Cross, is the meeting-place where we come together with Him, where our paths cross. Taking the train thither before we have to – in prayer, in meditation, in sacrifice -- is one of the finest ways to be united to Him.

6.        The Cross is a crossroads, a place of choice, a place of crisis in the original sense of the word. When we go to it, we cannot avoid difficult thoughts, and often hard options. Because it is real, it disallows or at least questions our comfortable fantasies.

7.        The Cross is peopled or not, a crucifix or empty, the Cross of Good Friday or the Cross of the Resurrection. Most Catholics are used to the former, most Protestants to the latter. The richest thought is that it is both, and so focuses both meditations.

8.        The Cross is both horizontal and vertical: as the Germans say, both waagerecht and senkrecht: both weighing-scale straight and plumbline-straight. As such it both weighs our soul and plumbs it: a magnificent image.