THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

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

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

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

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

Happy Hallowe’en!

OCTOBER BEAUTY

The jeweller: Thomas Cranmer

On the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, I often put up a praise to that day’s Collect, the most perfect in the whole Book of Common Prayer. The Collects, for those who are not familiar with the term, are the prayers that in Anglican Matins and Evensong come after the Creed and some responses, and conclude the Office; in the current Roman Catholic Mass, they correspond to the prayer that follows the Absolution and introduces the readings. A Collect is a prayer said, usually, by the priest on behalf of the congregation, and from very early days on Collects were highly developed in form. A typical Collect has five sections: Invocation, Acknowledgement, Petition, Aspiration and Pleading. Moreover, the Latin Collects from the early Sacramentaries were very structured in their sentence rhythms and forms; and this was recognised and adopted by Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer and of the Collects that survive from that 1549 text to this day.

Of all the BCP’s marvellous Collects, the finest is that for Trinity 21:

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace; that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is as beautifully crafted as a sonnet. Observe:

Gránt, we beséech thee,

Mérciful Lórd,

To thy fáithful péople

Párdon and péace;

That they may be cléansed from áll their síns

And sérve thee with a qúiet mínd.

First, four two-stress phrases give the Invocation (‘Lord’), the Acknowledgement (‘merciful’), and the Petition (‘grant pardon and peace’). Then each of the two things asked for is elaborated (in the Aspiration) in a three-stress phrase: pardon results in their being cleansed from all their sins, and peace, in their being able to serve God with a quiet mind. Finally, the usual Pleading: per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ The stress-patterns form perhaps the greatest beauty; but the vocabulary also plays, with the two objects of the petition being alliterative: that and their order relates them and makes it clear that the one must precede the other. There can be no peace without pardon. 

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer – in England still the BCP stipulates that, when Matins or Evensong is said by lay people, this prayer replaces the Absolution; thus recognising its particular power, compact riches, and beauty. We are sometimes told that ‘O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 96:9) should never mentally be inverted to ‘the holiness of beauty’; but it is perhaps not forbidden to suggest that liturgical texts, images, music and rituals of seriously great comeliness are the result of some kind of true blessing or holiness in their creators. Trinity 21 is an annual jewel in the crown of October.

PATER, FILIUS ET SOPHIA?

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

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

(Wisdom 7:22-8:1)

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

I came upon this poem again (in my post of 20 October 2014), by the matchless Emily Dickinson, and could not resist putting it up here. It has everything: mystery, beauty, and faith. We sometimes tend to see "the beauty of holiness" as "the holiness of beauty": let this small gem, where the two are in exact and perfect suspension, be a lesson to us. 

The feet of people walking home

With gayer sandals go ---

The Crocus --- till she rises,

The Vassal of the Snow —

The lips at Hallelujah!​        

Long years of practice bore,

Till bye and bye these Bargemen

Walked singing on the shore.

  

Pearls are the Diver’s farthings

Extorted from the Sea ---​        

Pinions --- the Seraph’s wagon

Pedestrian --- once, as we —

Night is the morning’s Canvas

Larceny –- legacy ---

Death, but our rapt attention​        

To Immortality.

  

My figures fail to tell me

How far the Village lies ---

Whose peasants are the Angels ---

Whose Cantons dot the skies ---​        

My Classics veil their faces ---

My Faith that Dark adores ---

Which from its solemn abbeys

Such resurrection pours.

ANOTHER WORLD

THOUGHTS AFTER MASS CHEZ THE PIUS X FRATERNITY

The Church of St Nicolas de Chardonnet in Paris. It was truly extraordinary. First of all, the crowd. There must have been close to a thousand people in the magnificent early 18C church. There were old people, young people, middle-aged people, white people, black people, and everything in between. There were priests in cassocks and a tonsured Benedictione monk with a long beard. There were Sea Scouts, cubs, and girl guides.

            After a while, I realised that this was a special celebration, beyond the usual Quinquagesima Sunday: the Confraternity was celebrating the fourth decennium of their takeover of this church, and so it was a proud affirmation of their separate and schismatic identity.

            The Mass, in Latin of course, and accompanied by an enthusiastic orchestra and choir (who have much to learn from Oxford Anglicans, I might add), was quite beautiful, and gave me furiously to think. Hardened Vatican-Twoers loathe this kind of Mass and are still cross with Benedict XVI for having permitted it. Living  in the normal way of things with a moveable village Mass led by a charismatically-inclined Algerian, whom I have come to love for his huge heart if not for his chatty-cum-handclapping liturgy, I find myself breathing-in the sheer beauty and age-old ritual of such a glorious service.

            What this means is that all the gold, the gilt, the vestments, the grandeur, the incense, the candles, and the ritual movements, not to mention the Gregorian and polyphonic singing, is not flummery. It is a way of giving all the best and the most beautiful of our humble human creations to God, to honour Him. Yes, we are perfectly aware that He loves the poor widow’s mite more than all the glory; but giving Him all that we can best create has also to be an acceptable sacrifice. Solomon put much of the best work by his day’s craftsmen into the Temple. I agree that ‘worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ should not be reversed to ‘the holiness of beauty’; and yet there is a real and true holiness in beauty that can and should be offered to God rather than worshipped in idolatry (stay tuned: we will get back to that in a minute).

            So it was all very grand and very moving. The readings were done in Latin and in French, which was decent of them; and then we got to the homily, or sermon. It was a pontifical Mass, so there was a Bishop present, even if to Rome he is a schismatic and thus not real bishop. And his sermon: O boy. His theme was the Immaculate Heart of Mary: not a topic given to exciting a Protestant-educated heart like mine, but I’m willing to make allowances. Except that after a very few sentences it became clear that he was using the Immaculate Heart of Mary as a baseball bat with which to club and batter everything that reeked even faintly of modernity, liberalism, etc. I swear this is this the first time I have ever heard the Second Vatican Council referred to as ‘une cloaque immonde’, a vile and unclean sewer. In a light, proud and arrogant tenor he whipped and fustigated, he lashed and battered, without even the faintest whisper of humility, doubt, or brotherly love. At the very best it was amusing; at worst it was appalling.
            And then the Mass resumed and was beautiful; I went up and received Communion from a schismatic bishop, upon my tongue (in this crowd you wouldn’t dare hold out crossed hands), and realised that God is here too, and that Yeshua lunched with Pharisees.

            Thinking about it afterwards I realised several things. 1) These are the people whose spiritual ancestors started the St Bartholomew’s Massacre, killing around 2-10,000 Parisians in a week in 1572; 2) I deeply believe they are wrong, because they quite literally and explicitly consider ‘la tradition’ to be a theological and indipensable element of the Christian faith, which is quite simply idolatrous: they believe that the merest adiaphora of liturgy, vestment and gesture are essential to the Faith; 3) I understand and feel for them, because they feel much same as my American Democrat friends would feel if a Trump Presidency had lasted for 40 years, i.e. “the bad guys say they won and have been running the show authoritatively and vilify us as horrible creeps” – so they need to feel that they are in the right, that they are the keepers of the True Flame, and that eventually the Church will get back to the true Faith and reconcile itself with them; 4) this said, I deplore utterly their lack of charity and humility, their arrogance and their self-satisfaction.

            None of this has anything to do with the glories of the Tridentine Mass at its best, which is a wonder and which it was a folly of Vatican 2 to prohibit, until Benedict XVI re-allowed it. (Anglicans who casually toss away the Book of Common Prayer for the awful Common Worship should take note: there is a surprising number of people who really and truly do love awesome, awe-inspiring, awe-inspired liturgy in age-honoured language, and who should not be fobbed off with brief non-musical “OK, if you absolutely must” 8 AM Mattins.) The priest facing the grand altar is not “turning his back on the people”; he is joining with the people, leading them in facing Christ on the altar. If the priest in question should, moreover, ascend into the pulpit instead of farting around with a microphone and a squeak-bellow sound system, (s)he would find that pulpits are intelligent early sound systems in themselves and that, no, the congregation does not think you are coming it the toff  and looking down on them, it actually finds you easier to listen to, and might even like to look up to its priest.

            So there we are: it is a pleasure occasionally to visit a different Christian culture. This particular bit of Catholic France is special: I suspect there were a lot of people there who not only disapprove of Pope Francis but who think the Revolution of 1789 was a grave mistake, and who are not 100% sure France was wrong in capitulating in 1940. On the other hand, I have rarely seen an immense church so chock-to-bursting-full of totally committed and enthusiastic and faithful Christians in recent years, and my heart responded to the liturgy like a flower to a shower of rain.  Go figure.

SOMETHING TO BRIGHTEN YOUR DAY

I put this up a couple of days ago from an iPad, and my lamentable techo-incoherence created a monster. Here, I hope, is a better version. 

  In the Book of Common Prayer, this is this morning's second Psalm; and its infectious joyfulness seemed a good thing to share. The "beauty of holiness" is often interpreted by Anglican liturgophiles as if it meant the holiness of beauty; but reading Juliana of Norwich or St John of the Cross suffices to show that the original holds a deeper, and not incompatible, truth. I do like the rejoicing trees.

Psalm 96. Cantate Domino
O SING unto the Lord a new song : sing unto the Lord, all the whole earth.
2 Sing unto the Lord, and praise his Name : be telling of his salvation from day to day.
3 Declare his honour unto the heathen : and his wonders unto all people.
4 For the Lord is great, and cannot worthily be praised : he is more to be feared than all gods.
5 As for all the gods of the heathen, they are but idols : but it is the Lord that made the heavens.
6 Glory and worship are before him : power and honour are in his sanctuary.
7 Ascribe unto the Lord, O ye kindreds of the people : ascribe unto the Lord worship and power.
8 Ascribe unto the Lord the honour due unto his Name : bring presents, and come into his courts.
9 O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness : let the whole earth stand in awe of him.
10 Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King : and that it is he who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that he shall judge the people righteously.
11 Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad : let the sea make a noise, and all that therein is.
12 Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it : then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord.
13 For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth : and with righteousness to judge the world, and the people with his truth.

THE EVEN AND THE HALLOWS

Now that Hallowe'en is spreading like an oil-slick across the Atlantic and filling Western Europe with 8-year-old ghouls and wrapped sweets, it may be useful to remind the ignorant, and even the uncaring, about its morrow. In France, All Souls Day, November 2, has long been known as le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead, marked by visits to churchyard and cemetery and by a tidal wave of small-flowered chrysanthemums, bought at the local grocery shop or florist's to be placed on the tombs of the faithful departed. Now, even in the land of laïcité (state-sponsored secularism), Hallowe'en is spreading irresistibly; and so the two slices of the sandwich are in place, but the ham is absent and forgotten. And even in America the Religious, I'm not sure how many people remember that the scary fun of Hallowe'en is intended to scare the Powers of Darkness and not the populace.  For those Powers, the old folk wisdom said, walk the earth on this even, and we light candles in grinning heads to keep them away.
They walk the earth partly because the year's dark days are here, now after harvest, and partly because the morrow is a feast they hate with all their might. For it is the celebration of All the Saints: the entire community of those who have returned God's love with a power and might that is exceptional; an intensity the rest of us can venerate but likely not attain; and in whom we rejoice because they inspire us and, many believe, pray for us because they know our need as even we do not.
We have all met, upon occasion, someone of real and transparent goodness, and from such persons something like a light shines forth that is doubtless at the origin of the halo with which painters endow them. Such a gentle light surrounds a person simply good. What of a saint? I don't think I've ever been in the physical presence of one; but I have seen on photo and on film, and read the writings of, some I canonise in my heart and the Church may soon if it has not already. And from such persons there comes a power, a penetrating influence that is like a vast radiance: quiet often, unassuming even, not always uncontroversial but impossible to ignore.
Now imagine a room, a palace, a firmament full of such singular intensities. Can our minds and hearts even begin to encompass the light and the cosmic joy of it? It would intimidate us; it would frighten us. And if it would frighten us, think of what it must do to those sad souls and spirits who cannot abide the love of God and have chosen endless night rather than have to encounter it. No wonder that at the mere approach of its mere commemoration they gibber and howl and stalk our streets in despair. They want our blood, or at least our happiness: they are mad with jealousy and bent on our destruction. So we light fires and candles, we sing songs, we eat and drink and pray, and we hug our children in their small disguises; because we are creatures of hope, and tomorrow comes the light of all God's darlings, united for our good.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER -- A GREAT WOMAN

Thinking about something to write today, I realised that I had completely forgotten June 15, the feast of the Anglican saint Evelyn Underhill. I use the term “Anglican Saint” gingerly but confidently: the Anglican Church officially has no saints of its own, only those shared with the Roman Catholic Church from before the Reformation; but the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music has created a very decent Calendar of “Holy Men, HolyWomen”, and when, a number of years ago, I went to Mass at my old Toronto Church of St Mary Magdalene I heard, in the Litany, among a long list of other saints asked to pray for us, “Saint George Herbert”! So I have little reluctance in calling Evelyn Underhill an Anglican saint, and indeed a Doctor of the Church. I first heard about her from my late mother-in-law Noel Wynyard, a rather saintly woman in her own right about whom my daughter Tessa Kuin Lawton wrote a very fine biography, and who greatly admired Underhill as a teacher of Anglican spirituality.

Reading her famous book Mysticism, first published in 1911, I am struck by the civilised ease of the style and the enduring freshness of her intellectual approach. An example, from the introduction:

“All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But other remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream; some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen, declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.”

And a little further: “the mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or the courage necessary to those who would prosecute such explorations themselves.”

And it occurred to me that in this current age, when Islamist terrorism has given rise to a whole new materialist atheism that (in order not to seem to discriminate) now considers all religion not only as ridiculous but as inherently toxic; reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting sages such as Underhill – who includes Muslim and Buddhist mystics in her considerations – may be a crucial antidote.