SIMPLE BUT STRONG

O Lord, from whom all good things do come: Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration, we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same, through our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Deus, a quo bona cuncta procedunt, largire supplicibus tuis, ut cogitemus te inspirante, quæ vera sunt, et te gubernante, eadem faciamus. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

This week’s small jewel is compact and simple, as if it were a quick reminder of basics before the major moments of Ascension Day and Whitsun. Cranmer as usual expands a few Latin nouns and verbs with adjectives and adverbs: te inspirante loses its verb strength but adds “holy”, and te gubernante, in the same way, adds “merciful”. The only real change, though, lies in what, inspired by God, we may think: in the Latin it is quæ vera sunt, things that are true; Cranmer changes that to “those things that be good”. A Platonic equation of the true and the good? A Protestant emphasis on daily life and its moral exigencies? Or simply an echo of the good things in the Acknowledgement?

As for the rhythms, by Classical quantities most would not make clausulæ, and it is interesting that while Cranmer follows the elegant parallelisms, he does not create clausulæ in English either; which, inview of his other perfect ones, I consider supporting evidence of his recognition of, and sensitivity towards, those carefully-constructed rhythmic endings. 

A TWO-LETTER WORD

Thinking about the infinite depth and variety that is the Lord’s Prayer, I was struck by the two appearances in it of the word “as”.

‘Thy will be done, on earth AS it is in Heaven’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses (or: debts) AS we forgive them that trespass against us’.

Extraordinary. I’ve written earlier about the curious use of the optative in the Lord’s Prayer’s first three petitions; and the AS brings home the full mysteriousness. Let God’s will be done here on earth; let us help God’s will be done here on earth; let us do God’s will here on earth; but how? ‘AS it is [done] in Heaven.’

Thinking about this makes one realise that AS can have two different if related meanings: ‘to the same extent’ and ‘in the same manner’. Which is meant here? Possibly both; but it can surely never be done here, on grubby old Earth, to the extent that it is done in Heaven? So we are forced back to ‘in the same way’. And the question that arises at once is: how do we know the way God’s will is done in Heaven? We can only know this by various forms of extrapolation.

The first is by extrapolation from Earth, and us, in all our incompleteness, spoiltness (in every sense), and bloody mess. Without fantasising, we do I think rightly assume Heaven to be the opposite of those conditions. So when we look at the way God’s will tends to be ‘done’ at all here, we can look at that doing’s incompleteness, its spoiltness (in every sense) and its bloody mess, and weep. The bloody mess is that of those who assume God’s will to be the massacre of all they consider as His enemies. The spoiltness is that of those who assume God’s will to be their own comfort and prosperity, and/or those who spoil and deform other’s attempts to do God’s will out of anger, envy or cynicism. The incompleteness is that of all of us, who invariably ‘leave undone that which we ought to have done, and do those things which we ought not to have done.’

Battlefield of Verdun, 1916

The beauty is that God has given us the gift of imagination. Although we cannot reach perfection, we can imagine it. Although by our own efforts and on earth we cannot reach Heaven, we can imagine it. As Keats wrote in a letter: ‘I believe in . . . the truth of imagination. The imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it true.’ If the imagination is joined to the humility of prayer, it may help to save us.

So if – knowing that we cannot accomplish anything by our own efforts – we consider doing God’s will AS it is in Heaven, we know that such a doing is complete, unspoilt and clean. We also know that we can’t do that. Hence, perhaps, the optative, with its deliberate ambiguity and passive voice. ‘Let (or: may) thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.’ By whom? Not by us, messy little sinners that we are. Not directly by God himself: he doesn’t work that way much as we’d like him to. No: if it gets done, it will be done only by him, through us. And if so, we should work at learning two things: opening our doors, windows and shutters to let the ruach, the pneuma, the spiritus sanctus in; and constantly imagining Heaven.

Heaven imagined: Carlo Carloni

There is of course another help we have: the one who taught us the prayer in the first place. He is the Law; we do God’s will by following him. The two ways are not contradictory; but following Yeshua Meshiach is full of contradictions, as anyone who has closely read the Gospels knows. WWJD never has an easy answer. So the first way I suggested may complement the second. Prayer is, in any case, the one constant essential.

I will write my next post on the second AS in the Lord’s Prayer. Stay tuned.

UNSENTIMENTAL AND ABSOLUTE

The feast of St Bruno is particularly interesting. This ecclesiastical administrator from Cologne who went from Rheims to the Alps and founded the Grande Chartreuse was one of those admirable people, so unlike most of us, who went all the way, but also created a structure (and what a structure!) in which later people inspired by his example could go all the way too. The idea of combining the hermitage – which had worked for the Desert Fathers but may not have left much in the way of locusts and wild honey for their successors – with the monastery, where essential tasks could be shared and in part performed by Brothers, was a brilliant one, and still works today. The Charterhouses and their inhabitants, the Carthusians, are a magnificent example of pure spirituality. They have never been reformed (unlike the Cistercians, the Franciscans, and other orders) because they have never needed reform.

‘But what do they do?’ They pray. They also read, and study, and chop firewood, but essentially they pray. Their job, their function, is to pray for the world. To most of us today this probably seems either a cop-out or arcane beyond belief; but if you take prayer seriously, then they are the cutting edge. What’s more, there is a secondary benefit to what they are and do: to be visible, if only just, to the rest of us as an inspiration. I remember, when I first read one of their books, The Wound of Love, thinking ‘I’ve been part of this faith, off and on, most of my life, but these guys make me feel the way Reinhold Messner makes a weekend limestone-climber feel. Or Roger Federer a member of the local country club.’ Even having read some medieval and Renaissance mystics, I simply wasn’t prepared for the sheer – what would one call it? the French word envergure comes to mind: wing-span, range, sweep – of these minds and souls, writing in our own time.

A Carthusian, when he takes his final vows, dies to the world. All religious do this to some extant, but the Carthusian goes further. If one of them publishes a book -- and some do, to the great joy of many of us – it is not signed ‘Joseph Winnicott’ or even ‘Brother James’, but ‘a Carthusian’. I do not know if they still maintain the tradition of having the bottom plank of their bed become the base of their coffin when they die, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t be so, and it fits perfectly into the Carthusian life.

At the same time, they seem a remarkably cheerful lot. Within the monastery, each has a little house, with a main floor where he eats, sleeps, and prays; and a basement where he stocks and prepares wood for his wood-stove and stocks other needments. Often it also has a postage-stamp garden. The monks meet for services and certain meals, and once a week go for a walk of several hours in the countryside.

In 1984, German director Philipp Gröning proposed to the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse that he make a film about them. They thought about it, then answered that they weren’t ready for that. ‘Come back in 15 years,’ they said. So, fifteen years later, he came back, and this time they said Yes. But no crew, no intrusive equipment: just Gröning with a handheld camera. So he lived there for six months in 2002 and 2003, filming quietly with no artificial lighting, then spent two years editing the film. The result, Into Great Silence, is stupendous and wholly surprising. No music, no tricks, just a record of the daily lives of these quiet, good-humoured absolutists.

In celebrating St Bruno, let us celebrate also the ones who follow his lead a thousand years later, and who still go all the way, into great silence, to inspire us and pray for us.