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"

A VISITOR FROM EVERYWHERE

His visits are rare. Always wished-for, hoped-for, longed-for, asked-for; and when he comes, there is a sudden sense of more light in the air, of ambient sound becoming a harmony, of one’s own terrestrial weight lessening. How long he stays depends on his welcome, and on the lodging he is given. 

This morning he arrived, unannounced, at the moment I awoke, and in my mind there was the sudden image of the first half of a bridge, arriving from somewhere and touching down just in front of me. And a flooding sense of pure joy. Lightness of being. It had been such a long time since he was last here!

You will have guessed who he is. He has various names: Ruach HaKodesh, Pneuma Hagion, Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost. It feels impossibly presumptuous, imagining that one is receiving a personal visit from the Third Person of the Trinity; and I am quite prepared to be told, and to believe, that the one who came today is “merely” an angel sent by the Ruach. On the other hand, we are told that we may ask for his presence, and that that is one prayer almost certainly answered; and we even learn that if we manage to prepare a suitable dwelling, he and the other two Persons will come and live there full-time. 

Why is such a thought even possible? Because the God who is the collective name for the Trinity is (as the medieval Liber XXIV philosophorum puts it) “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Because he is both intimate and ubiquitous, holding the Universe in the hollow of his hand and meeting me with absolute love wherever I am and go (Psalm 139). This is conceivable only by learning to unite one’s faith in a Creator with the experience of prayer in one’s inmost closet. It is perfectly and stupendously expressed in the Third Collect for Morning Prayer: “O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day . . .”

It is at such moments that Theology becomes experience, that Divinity becomes real. Up close and personal. Utterly surprising. Especially if one is not a seasoned mystic, a Benedictine hermit, a San Juan de la Cruz, but an ordinary homme moyen sensuel in a French farmhouse in the Age of Bannon. Surprising, and yet not: completely natural, just also completely festive. 

How to react? I think, by deep down letting go – for the time being, letting him occupy the driving-seat and getting on with the day in a quiet and attentive way, peacefully but minutely attuned to where he turns the wheel. And keeping alive the festivity with an astonished giving of thanks. 

THE WORDS AND THE MUSIC

I used to teach Dryden, but somehow always missed this grand and glorious composition. It should remind us that the Restoration could do lyric very well when it tried; and never better than this, which I am happy to share on the Feast of St Cecilia, martyr and patron of music.

A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony 

               This universal frame began. 

       When Nature underneath a heap 

               Of jarring atoms lay, 

       And could not heave her head, 

The tuneful voice was heard from high, 

               Arise ye more than dead. 

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 

       In order to their stations leap, 

               And music's pow'r obey. 

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony 

               This universal frame began: 

               From harmony to harmony 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 

       The diapason closing full in man. 

What passion cannot music raise and quell! 

                When Jubal struck the corded shell, 

         His list'ning brethren stood around 

         And wond'ring, on their faces fell 

         To worship that celestial sound: 

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell 

                Within the hollow of that shell 

                That spoke so sweetly and so well. 

What passion cannot music raise and quell! 

         The trumpet's loud clangor 

                Excites us to arms 

         With shrill notes of anger 

                        And mortal alarms. 

         The double double double beat 

                Of the thund'ring drum 

         Cries, hark the foes come; 

Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat. 

         The soft complaining flute 

         In dying notes discovers 

         The woes of hopeless lovers, 

Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute. 

         Sharp violins proclaim 

Their jealous pangs, and desperation, 

Fury, frantic indignation, 

Depth of pains and height of passion, 

         For the fair, disdainful dame. 

But oh! what art can teach 

         What human voice can reach 

The sacred organ's praise? 

Notes inspiring holy love, 

Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways 

         To mend the choirs above. 

Orpheus could lead the savage race; 

And trees unrooted left their place; 

                Sequacious of the lyre: 

But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; 

         When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, 

An angel heard, and straight appear'd 

                Mistaking earth for Heav'n. 

As from the pow'r of sacred lays 

         The spheres began to move, 

And sung the great Creator's praise 

         To all the bless'd above; 

So when the last and dreadful hour 

   This crumbling pageant shall devour, 

The trumpet shall be heard on high, 

         The dead shall live, the living die, 

         And music shall untune the sky. 

Dryden, by Sir Godfrey Kneller

PAX VOBISCUM

We have all heard about the "peace of God, which passeth all understanding", and we are used to hearing "peace be with thee/And with thy spirit" in the Eucharist. But what is this peace the Bible talks about? There is an exhaustive lexical and contextual analysis here: http://biblehub.com/greek/1515.htm, which I won't attempt to reproduce. But it's a huge word, with a range of meaning as wide, but also as coherent, as a rainbow.

First, there is, well, peace. Not war. Those of us old enough to have been born before or during World War II have a visceral feeling about, and for, peace in that sense. In his novel The Empty Room (1942), Charles Morgan shows some people in England talking about the distant past and a hoped-for future. One evening, says one of them, some friends will sit together, talking in a garden, and one of them will say, with wonder and contentment, "A June night, and no war." Perhaps there are people in Syria today who feel the same way. It is eirènè, the fundamental meaning of that lovely Greek word, and the reason that the Dutch princess born during WW II was named Irene. Peace as a public condition, a condition of not-war, is never to be taken for granted. It is huge, a privilege, and should be savoured daily by those fortunate enough to live in it.

Then, there is peace as a condition between people. Here, the meaning is closer to harmony: an absence of strife, of quarrel, of awkwardness, of hostility. It is an emotion elevated to a condition, which means that it is felt by the heart rather than, or prior to, being understood by the mind. It is the peace sometimes seen in very old long-married couples whose love has over the decades been distilled to a fine and almost silent essence. It is the peace between true friends engaged together in some activity long known, long practiced and long loved. And notice that both these examples remind us that peace between individuals often has time as a component element.

There is the peace of science, or of scholarship. This is a peace experienced individually. It is the peace found by someone working tranquilly at some project within one's competence and which, again, requires time to mature and complete. It is a peace I have experienced while working in great research libraries: Duke Humphrey's 15th-century library in Oxford's Bodleian, the 17th-century Manuscript Room of Paris's Bibliothèque nationale. It is a peace composed in part of a going out of one's self, of losing oneself in a subject, in the life of another age, in the patient search for a clue. A similar peace is found, we are told, by writers, novelists for the most part, when they are engaged upon a lengthy task in propitious surroundings. The great Dutch poet Adriaan Roland Holst experienced it during the six long winters, in the1930s, when, in his little thatched cottage behind the North Sea dunes, he worked concentratedly on his masterpiece, the long, dense poem known as A Winter By The Sea.

Such peace  touches, and sometimes becomes, a peace of the spirit. This peace is known by some philosophers, by some contemplatives, by those who in one way or another have reached a true wisdom. In some societies such men and women are revered as sages; in others, they live unknown in corners of the world, sometimes with a small group of pupils, sometimes alone, quietly engaged in some trade and encountered by chance. I have known a watchmaker like that; a former paratrooper; a retired journalist who studied mysticism; and a professor of Indian philosophy. In some, this peace of wisdom can be and is expressed in words; in others, it communicates itself intangibly, mysteriously but unmistakeably.

All peace that is not cowardice is good. But it does not really, not truly, not completely pass oour understanding. It is not the peace of God. What, then, is?

Reading the Bible, Old Testament and New, one sees little peace. Humanity seems always at war with itself; Israel with its neighbours; Israel with its God; heroes with other heroes or with bloodthirsty monsters; brothers with brothers, fathers with sons; and the Serpent with everyone. Where, then, is the Peace of that God the Scriptures describe, explain, and adore? We find it, sometimes, in the Psalms. The Psalmist, nominally King David, finds peace in the Law,  which shows him a way through a trackless desert. He finds peace in adoring God, in being, as he says, an olive tree in the house of the Lord. And above all, remember that the term we are seeking occurs in a blessing; may the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7). One translation has guard for keep, which helps us understand. The peace of God, then, is something that keeps us, that guards us, that protects us from harm. It does so in Christ Jesus: which is a whole story unto itself. We are in Christ when we are a part of him; for since the Resurrection he is present wherever those who love God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are present -- as a congregation especially, in the Eucharist especially, but in prayer, in meditation, in contemplation also. And since he is Love, in the Spirit he not only neighbours us with his presence, but he surrounds us, he enfolds us; and when this happens, each time it happens (because in this mortal life it is never once and for all, not yet), we have come home. That is the peace of God: our homecoming to the relation he always intended, to the hearth of the Father's house.