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)

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY

At a chilly and quiet Mass on Saturday evening (in an exquisite old chapel built after an epidemic  centuries ago), I found myself very forcefully struck by the power of the Communion – what the President of the United States called ‘the little cracker’. And meditating on it afterwards, it occurred to me that that power comes from a threefold source (quite proper for a Trinitarian Godhead).

In the first place, Lord, here it is I who dare to confront Thee, to come into Thy presence. In the old days you came to Communion only if you were properly and officially shriven, and you were told that if you took Communion in an unworthy state, you would ‘eat and drink unto yourself damnation’. For reasons I’ll explain below, this is quite properly not insisted upon nowadays, but the coming into the Presence as, after all, a bit of a worm and no man, a somewhat wretched specimen all things considered, is pretty good cheek, or would be if Thou hadst not specifically invited us in our full decrepit creepitude. So here I am, before Thee, Lord, and Thou givest Thyself to me. I take Thee and I am redeemed – by the skin of my teeth. Completely overwhelming.

Secondly, here am I and – as Thou promisedst to those who have real faith, however wobbly and bumpy – Thou comest to take up Thy dwelling within me, even in the most basic physical dimension. I as Thy cottage in the South of France? I am fulfilled beyond imagining.

Thirdly – and here I come to a good reason not to insist too strongly on being in a ‘worthy’ state – what I am given is waybread, manna: a strange food unlike any other, that will strengthen me, uphold me, and see me through the next bit of wilderness on my winding wilful way to Thee. Astounding. I am fed. I can go out of here and go on.

And all of this at once, in ten seconds, in something the wind could blow away. I came out trembling. With the winter cold, but mainly in awe.

CHRISTMAS AND BEYOND

CAROL

 Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf.

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

Jill Furse (1915-1944)

Jill Furse (granddaughter of the poet Sir Henry Newbolt) was a young actress of great promise who married glass-engraver and poet Laurence Whistler. Their brief but idyllic marriage was cut short by her death after the birth of their second child, and was exquisitely described by Whistler in his book The Initials in the Heart. I was privileged to know both Whistler and his daughter, and have always loved this little poem Jill wrote in their secluded cottage in Devon. 

I used to wonder at the ending, but have come to understand what was doubtless elementary to all but me: that the Incarnation implies the Crucifixion. If the almighty and everlasting God of the entire universe (and possibly of a few others also) decides, in His son, to take upon him, not a human form but human substance, human life itself; if Deus homo factus est; then that human life implies a human death. The rich womb opens the way to the poor cross. 

And the poor cross, of course, is not the end. Et resurrexit tertia die: Christmas points to Good Friday, but Good Friday points to Easter morning. Laurence, who wrote some very moving poems after her death, died in December 2000. It is a good thought that they are now reunited.

BATTLEFIELD?

Last week we travelled over 500 miles to see Peter Brook’s new production, Battlefield, a brief (70-minute) excerpt from the immense Mahabharata – which last he produced as a 9-hour stage performance 30 years ago. Battlefield is set after a vast battle that left “millions dead” and brought a new king to power after a bitter struggle between two clans. In the aftermath, the new king confronts his predecessor and uncle, his mother, and a variety of other characters that include the god Krishna and the personification of the River Ganges. All is done on a virtually empty stage with four actors and a Japanese virtuoso drummer. The review in Singapore’s  Straits Times gives a good idea of it.

What interested me particularly was the grave fatalism expressed. Man has no choices, but (and) must accept the full weight of responsibility. The new king is told that he will reign virtuously and happily for 36 years, and will then pass on the kingdom to a youth who will be the only survivor of a battle. At the play’s end, 33 years have passed, and the dreadful signs and omens are massing for a new apocalyptic battle – and we learn that the succession will be like the former one, and that there is nothing that can be done about this. Death rules every man; fate rules the life of humanity. Nevertheless, responsibility is all.

It is like a strange related version of existentialism. There, absurdity rules all; yet again one must accept responsibility and act with courage and virtue. The universe is, for the existentialist, nonsensical; for the mournful kings on the corpse-littered battlefield, entirely closed. “This victory is a defeat” says the winner, with infinite sadness.

It brought home to me, in this third week of Advent, the utter astonishment of what we are preparing for. That the closed, ineluctable universe of Fate should be cracked open by God is one thing; that God should decide to do so by entering into human life is another; that He should do so, not in glory or power or cosmic war or starring on CNN but as an anonymous infant in a remote pub’s stable on the East coast of the Mediterranean, cared for by a slip of a girl and a carpenter and visited by a few shepherds; that is completely astounding. Et incarnatus est, de spiritu sancto, ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. And with that, the terrible cycle of fate, the unyielding melancholy of the kings on the battlefield, is broken. Light floods in. Angels sing.

In paganity, Yuletide celebrates the return of the light; but there will always be a return of the dark. The glass is half full, but half empty also. There is no escape, no opening in the pagan universe. We can celebrate, briefly, but the cycle is unending.

Et homo factus est announces Emmanuel, “God with us”. Not to depart again. It announces the Cross; but the Cross issues in the Resurrection. Death does not rule all. We may celebrate cyclically; but what we celebrate is done. It happened, once and for all, in specific, knowable and known, points of time and space.

Right now, it’s still dark, in every sense of the word. Days are short, horrors happen, hate and foolishness abound. But there is a glimmer of light, and in the distance, very faintly, a sound as of angels rehearsing.

FISH AGAIN

“And while they were still talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said, “Shalom!” They shrank back in terror for they thought they were seeing a ghost. “Why are you so scared?” said Jesus, “and why so confused? Look at my hands and feet—it is really I!  Touch me and see; ghosts don’t have flesh or bones as you can see that I have.” But while they still could not believe it through sheer joy and were utterly bewildered, Jesus said to them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of grilled fish and part of a honeycomb which he took and ate before their eyes.” (Luke 24:36ff.)

I love these Resurrection stories. They are so unlike what one would expect from a God in a Holy Scripture. Here is the Risen One, walking along a country road with a couple of his former followers who don’t recognize him, explaining the scriptures to them and pointing out that Deutero-Isaiah had it right about the Messiah; letting himself be persuaded to come into the inn with them and have a meal; disappearing as he said the Baruch Atta Adonai blessing over the bread and leaving them with “burning hearts”. Here he is again as they are telling that story to the others in Jerusalem: just standing among them and saying “Hello!” Staggered they are, as we would be. We know about ghosts: this has to be one. He shows them his hands and his feet – with ragged holes in them and traces of blood. OK, an apparition would have the right visual detailing. But no: he goes on and asks if they’ve any food. And lo and behold, there’s that grilled fish again, this time with a bit of honeycomb. I’ve never tried fish with honeycomb, though I like both; but that is obviously not the point here. The point is that he sits down and eats them, then looks at them with a grin and says “So -- do ghosts eat?”

The sheer beauty of this, of Jesus, is that combination of the absolute majesty that rises out of the tomb in huge silence on the one hand, and the down-to-earthness that comforts a woman delivered from stoning, that talks Zacchaeus down from his tree, that discusses Heaven in terms of vineyards and mustard-seeds, that goes to dinner with a collaborationist (un collabo, as the French called it, ‘someone who was wrong in the war’ as my parents used to say), and eats grilled fish on the beach or in a city apartment.

The other point, though, is that both here and on the road to Emmaus what he came to do was explain the Scriptures, i.e. the Old Testament. And as Benedict XVI points out in Jesus of Nazareth, what is it that he teaches them? Not that they should be good charitable progressive citizens: “No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality,” wrote C.W.F. Smith. Not that the Kingdom of Heaven will arrive like the eschaton, the End of Time, with a cosmic bang in the next few weeks or even years. No, what he teaches is that with him the Kingdom has come: that he is the regnum, the reign of God, literally incarnate. Not only does he explain the Word of God in terms of a mustard-seed, he himself is also the mustard-seed, which must die in the earth to rise and become the tree that shelters and gives fruit.

That thought is so stupendous that we tend to avoid it instinctively, either by not thinking about it or by accepting it easily in words and then, and thus, avoiding it. It makes us understand the force of “where two or three are together in my name, I will be there with them”; it makes us understand the power of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. There may or may not be pie in the sky when we die – it may, in fact, be grilled fish, get used to it --, but the Kingdom of God is right here whenever we seriously link, with heart and mind and soul, to the one who said, and says, “Shalom!”

                    Image: "Christ appears to the Apostles at Table" by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319). 
Note the bread, the fish, and the honeycomb in pots!