OH DARK DARK DARK

Ho luchnos tou sōmatos estin ho ophthalmos, ean oun èi ho ophthalmos sou haplous, holon to sōma sou phōteinon estai; ean de ho ophthalmos sou ponèros èi, holon to sōma sou skoteinon estai. Ei oun to phōs to en soi skotos estin, to skotos poson.

²² `The lamp of the body is the eye, if, therefore, your eye is plain/simple/pure, all your body shall be bright,

²³ but if your eye is bad, all your body shall be dark; if, therefore, the light that [is] in you is darkness -- the darkness, how great?

 

This is a curious little interlude in the Sermon, not often paid attention to, but worth examining. First comes the premise: the eye is the lamp of the body. Luchnos here is simply a lamp: what would have come to the mind of the audience is a small lamp with a wick in a little bowl of oil. It is the thing that gives light in darkness. Interestingly, here, the eye is a lamp. We might say a “window”, but of course in Yeshua’s Middle East windows had no glass. Here, the eye is a lamp that lights what’s behind and below it: the body’s interior, imagined as a dark space like a dwelling unlit. And for that space to be properly lit, the eye has to be haplous, a word with many meanings but mainly “clean, unsullied, pure”. If the lamp is in good condition, the wick trimmed, the oil fresh and sufficient, it can light the whole of the body. However, if the lamp is ponèros --- We remember ponèros from the Lord’s Prayer: it was what we pray to be delivered from. And the fact that a lamp too can be ponèros reminds us that we are not necessarily dealing with metaphysical “evil” (though it may mean that in the prayer): here it just means that the lamp’s wick is untrimmed, that the oil is sparse and rancid, and that it smokes. So if your eye is ponèros, the body isn’t lit by it as it is meant to be.

            So if your eye is ponèros, what does that mean? The last sentence tells us, not the manner but the result. It drops the element of the eye and goes straight to a much greater metaphor. “The light that is in you” – right, now we begin to get it. In the terms of Yeshua’s discourse, we can sense what that light is that is in us. It is the light of the Spirit, or rather, of our spirit enlightened in its turn by the hagion pneuma, the Holy Spirit. If our spirit is not so enlightened, if it has refused the light that is offered to it, if it ends up being, not just “dark” but darkness itself --  how great, how impenetrable, such a darkness! It reminds me of a passage in a novel of Charles Morgan’s: Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude ? Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même. And at that point, the simple ponèros’s deeper and more frightening meaning rushes back. If we refuse the light that the new, completed Torah offers us, not only will we be lightless, we risk becoming Darkness itself – and we know who is the Prince thereof. 

SALT AND LIGHT

 

Humeis este to halas tès gès: ean de to halas mōranthèi en tini halisthèsetai? eis ouden ischuei eti ei mè blèthen exō kai katapateisthai hupo tōn anthrōpōn (Matthew 5:13-16)

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt becomes flat, insipid, in what will it be salted? It will be good for nothing except be thrown outside and trampled under foot by people.

In this passage of the Sermon Yeshua gives his talmidim two metaphors of compliment and responsibility that describe them and their function: salt and light. They are the salt of the land, and/or the light of the world. Let us think about those elements and their contexts.

 

Salt was not only that which gave food flavour, it was also the only known and reliable preservation agent for food. As such, it reduced the dependence on seasons and, as late as the 19^th century, sailing-ships carried barrels of salted meat for months, sometimes years, of the sailors’ rations. So that when the disciples are compared to salt, they are shown to be essential: essential for life’s flavour, essential for its preservation. 

    They give flavour to life. Life without faith, without God, is tasteless, meaningless, and flat. With God, meaning springs up everywhere, hours and days are tart, are savoury, are nourishing. Human beings are made to enjoy strong flavours, lively experiences, powerful emotions. 

    They preserve, also. Those who spread the eu-angelion, the good and authoritative message, are essential for preserving it and its values in the community. They preserve nourishment against moments of drought, of famine, of darkness, of need: at such times, the community can count on them for spiritual food.

    Moreover, they are the salt of the earth. The Greek word Gè is not the planet but the soil, the land, the country, where people live, move, and have their being; where men carry on their activity, where children are born and the dead are buried. The ‘real world’.

   We don’t usually think of Christians, of those that follow Yeshua, as being those that give savour, spice, to life; so it is useful and interesting here to be invited to do so. But at once, the talmidim are given a warning. Because when salt itself goes flat, when it loses its saltiness, when it can no longer keep food edible, what’s the use of it? Throw it out into the street, walk all over it. 

    How could a disciple of Yeshua lose his flavour? By losing the intensity of his commitment. ‘The excellence of every art,’ wrote Keats, ‘lies in its intensity.’ If they become lukewarm, if they put God on the back burner, they are not redeemable transgressors: they are simply useless, and good only to be thrown out and walked upon.

Humeis este to phōs to kosmou. ou dunatai polis krubènai epanō orous keimenè

You are the light of the world. A city that lies on a mountain cannot be hidden.

Oude kaiousin luchnon kai titheasin auton hupo ton modion all’epi tèn luchnian kai lampei pasin tois en tè oikia

 

Neither do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel tub, but on a lamp-stand; and it gives light unto all that are in the house.

 

But this is not all. They are compared also to light. ‘You are the light of – not of the Gè but of the Kosmos.’ Not of the earth, but of the world. The Gè is the earth in the sense of solid belonging; the Kosmos is the world in the sense of space. And this space (which was originally the universe, the cosmos as we still call it) is dark by default, unless and until light arrives, is lit. The world’s light is of course the sun; and by calling his pupils the ‘light of the world’, Yeshua is comparing them to the sun, and to whatever source brings light. Essentially, light is brought by fire. The sun is fire: daylight comes from its fire. The light of the moon is reflected fire. And when men learned how to make fire, they could light up the night. At first with a bonfire; later with a wick steeped in, and fed by, a flammable material like oil.

     If the disciples are likened to light, that implies a world of darkness. Not an optimistic view. The world is a dark room. But when a man of God[1] comes into it, he lights it up like a well-trimmed oil lamp. ‘I,’ implies Yeshua, ‘am lighting you up like oil lamps: you will lighten the dark places that for the inhabitable world.’ More than that, now that I have lit you, you will continue to light yourselves. And as lamps lighting the world’s habitats, you will enable people to see: to see the point, the meaning, the path, the direction, the sense, the purpose, of life. 

    And light shows: a city (a place full of light in the evening) that moreover lies on a hill or mountain can’t be hidden. Nor should it be: there follows a hypothetical and ridiculous negative. If people light a lamp, they do not put it under a nine-gallon tub; they put it on a lamp-stand so that it lights up the house. 

     There is a subtle difference in the negatives of the two metaphors. Salt can lose its saltiness: if the supply is not maintained and renewed, it just naturally goes off and is useless. In the case of light, he might have used the same image: if a lamp is not periodically fed with oil it will go out and the room be plunged back into night. And indeed he did use that image, in the parable of the foolish girls going to the wedding. Here, though, he uses a more peculiar one: an idiot lighting a lamp and putting it, deliberately, under an upturned bowl or vat. This is hard to grasp: why would anyone do that? The only thing I can think of is, out of a crazy desire to protect and preserve it. But the point is clear: if you have the faith that creates light, don’t hide it but let it shine and be useful to all. 

Outōs lampsatō to phōs humōn emprosthen tōn anthrōpōn hopōs idōsin humōn ta kala erga kai doxasōsin ton patera humōn ton en tois ouranois

 

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your lovely deeds, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

     And the next sentence makes it clear: let it shine in front of, in full view of, people, so that they may see your kala erga, the beautiful things you do; and since they know you do them out of faith, their reaction will be, not to praise you but to glorify your father in heaven.

     So when combined, the salt and light images tell the talmidim that their faith must remain tasty and lively to be useful, and that it must be out in the open, creating beautiful actions.

     Again, we need to interpret this in the light of the new Torah, the Torah of inwardness, the fulfilled Torah. It culminates in the kala erga, but it emphasises the inward and spiritual work that needs to be done in order that such beautiful deeds may be produced. This work consists, first, of prayer, because that is what keeps faith lively and full of flavour; and secondly of courage, to put it on a lamp-stand and let it shine in front of all kinds of people who may neither like nor think they want it, but who may be helped by your actions and won over by your transparent faith and end up praising the Author of that faith.   

 

---

[1] I know. But the disciples were all men.

OF WATER AND LIGHT

“For with thee is the well of life: and in thy light shall we see light.” (Psalm 36)

Coming upon this while reading through the day’s psalms, I always feel a thrill run down my spine: the sure sign of true poetry. The well of life reminds me of Spenser’s characterization of Chaucer as “the well of English undefiled”. The well, of course, is not un puits but une source, a wellspring, a spring in the grass from which water flows unceasingly. God, says the Psalmist, is not the well: the spring is with him. It is near him, in his proximity; it is complicit with him, on his side, part of what God creates and wants us to recognize. 

We may imagine – as God always lets us imagine – himself, the Ancient of Days, seated in a meadow of his own creation, perhaps on the Seventh Day, tired but content, contemplating a new and unspoiled planet, and at his foot, in the unimaginably lovely fresh grass, a spring bubbling, its water coursing in rivulets down the hill. The water is life. Which is very insightful of the Psalmist: we now know that the sine qua non for a planet to support life is the presence of water. And the spring of that life is with God.

He created it, after all; but the beauty is that he kept it with him: close to him, never far away. He does not let the bubbling up of life out of his sight. Whatever it becomes later; whatever mud weighs it down, whatever filth pollutes it, whatever cruel droughts dry it up; if we trace it to its source, we shall find God, watching over it.

Life and light, in the good fortune of English, are alliterative twins; and the image of life is followed by an even more puissant one of light. Light allows us to see: to see things, to see the world, to see our neighbours. But what allows us to see light? In one sense, light is invisible; but what the Psalm tells us us that that is only one sense. In another, we see light; but we see it “in thy light”, in the light of God. No easy image of the Ancient of Days here. Can we get our mind round this? “In thy light shall we see light.” Light, the very essence of our consciousness, the primary element that allows us to see everything else, is itself secondary. We see it in, in the context of, as part of, as an emanation of, His light. 

How do we adjust this to our known and felt experience? We think we see light all the time, whether we ‘believe in’ God or not. We live, move and have our being in a world where light is an everyday occurrence. So in what way can it be secondary? Perhaps we should entertain the possibility that only when we see light in His light do we see light pure, light as it was created to be when God said “let there be light.” Any light, then, which we see on our own, without first adjusting our mind’s eye to God, is a polluted light, a light subtly touched by original sin. An uncomfortable thought; but those who have known conversion can tell you that it changes even your way of seeing – i.e. light. Perhaps they, for the first time, are seeing light in His light.

And finally, both life and light together spurred the Psalmist – unknown to us, but he must have existed as a real person, King David or no – to compress them together and so make a flash of pure poetry. Which in itself is always a new way of seeing.

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS

“Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20).  This text had long fascinated me, like its counterpart “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). And then, recently, I got an inkling of its meaning, or at least of one of its meanings. Life, in its daily round, had been weighting me down, and it was all beginning to feel like one of the grimmer bits from Ecclesiastes. I prayed, as usual, to be taught the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer that prays even when we are not praying; and then, in a few moments, I remembered what I had written about a long time ago: our doors and shutters.

In the Angelus, we pray that God may “pour Thy grace into our hearts”. I’ve always loved that verb and that image. And it occurred to me that in fact that pouring is going on all the time. We live in a perpetual monsoon of grace: pouring out grace upon those He loves is what God does. And when we feel deprived of it, it is usually we who are, with a complex system of shutters and barriers, keeping it out.

If, for once, you don’t, you wake up in the morning and, as a Carthusian put it, you savour the immense gift you are being given, at this precise moment: one whole day. A whole day, of life, of love, of work, of thanksgiving. You give thanks, and you pray that you may not in this day close off your heart and keep out the outpouring that is heading for you. And as you do so, you can hear the faint creak of shutters opening. Some of them are old, fairly massive and jammed shut: they need real effort to dislodge. Some are charming, and part of you opens them with regret: they let through just the tiniest ray of light, in which dust motes danced so prettily; but they too can and must be flung wide.

And as they open, the tide of grace flows in, and you are suddenly filled with a morning sunshine of joy – which will last you all day, if you keep strong winds from closing the shutters again. And as this happens and you revisit that joy from hour to hour, you realise that the less of “you” gets in the way of the flood, the happier the real you will be.

It is “I” that keeps God out all the time. So if I can get “I” out of the way, then grace, i.e. God, can come in. And the result will be, in at least one sense, like Galatians 2:20: “Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me.” If I can empty the clutter and open the shutters, there will at last be room for Him.

Cry aloud, spare not,
lift up thy voice like a trumpet,
and shew my people their transgression,
and the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet they seek me daily,
and delight to know my ways,
as a nation that did righteousness,
and forsook not the ordinance of their God:
they ask of me the ordinances of justice;
they take delight in approaching to God.

3 Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?
wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?
Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure,
and exact all your labours.
4 Behold, ye fast for strife and debate,
and to smite with the fist of wickedness:
ye shall not fast as ye do this day,
to make your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is it such a fast that I have chosen?
a day for a man to afflict his soul?
is it to bow down his head as a bulrush,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
wilt thou call this a fast,
and an acceptable day to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
to loose the bands of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free,
and that ye break every yoke?
7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,
and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?
when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him;
and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning,
and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee;
the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward.
9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer;
thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.
If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke,
the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
10 and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,
and satisfy the afflicted soul;
then shall thy light rise in obscurity,
and thy darkness be as the noonday:
11 and the Lord shall guide thee continually,
and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones:
and thou shalt be like a watered garden,
and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

Isaiah 58

GAUDETE?

The text below comes from a few years ago, when Gaudete seemed joyless because of child shootings. This year, there are other reasons. There always are. Gaudete is a challenge we need to meet. 

advent three



Questions

from prison cell. Outside

blind see, lame walk. Yet

beauty of guns
betrays. Kills. Rapid
rattle cracks. Child's blood
flows into tears
of mothers. Crosses
loom. What hope, what

solace?


Three candles.


Camels stamp
and snort. A winter
dawn looms. Three
old men saddle up.
silent, intent, not quite
sure why.

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.

THE TEST OF HOPE

In The Wound of Love, the admirable collection of Carthusian writings, one author describes what happens to a new monk. “In the first days of the monastic life, heaven is very near, and the road that leads there seems short.” Then, as time goes by, the way becomes longer and more sinuous, and the goal further and further away. Gradually, “God withdraws the sensible consolations of the first days and hides himself the mystery of absence.”

This happens, I think, not only to monks: it seems true of almost all believers who take their faith seriously. Most people who would not call themselves atheists or retreat into the often mendacious cover of “agnosticism” spend years being what Matthew Arnold memorably called “light half-believers of our casual creeds”. Then something happens that changes them and makes them decide to take their faith seriously. At first, this turns out to be brilliant and exciting. One wonders where it has been all one’s life. It seems as if each day is a conversation with God: one asks questions, and receives answers.

Then, gradually, this too becomes a routine. Prayer is more frequent and more intensive, but there is less and less sense of being answered. The “sensible consolations” seem to have disappeared except on rare occasions. One is increasingly aware of the total indifference to faith of the world around one, and even one’s own mind begins to ask awkward questions. Death is less and less distant: what does happen afterwards? “I have a sin of fear,” wrote John Donne, “that when I have spun my last thread, I shall perish on the shore.” Has it not all been an illusion, a centuries-old structure of wishful thinking?

If we can allow ourselves a metaphor, this state is like the increasing dark of the year as it moves into winter. Days get shorter; and while there is a certain comfort “when melancholy autumn comes to Wembley,/And electric trains are lighted after tea” (Betjeman) the air is cold and dank, clothes seem heavier and comfort harder to find. In other words, we are moving into Advent.

Today is Advent II, and it teaches us a hard lesson with which the Carthusians can help us. When God hides, as the sun seems to hide, in the mystery of absence, it is to us a lesson that we must rely solely upon Hope. Hope instructed by Faith; Hope fed by the Word of God – a daily diet of “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”; Hope that continues to bear the fruit of Charity, nevertheless. Never the less.

Hope, the second great theological virtue. Not blind hope; not Micawberish trusting that “something will turn up”; not betting on an outsider to win at 20 to 1. Informed Hope, instructed Hope, intelligent Hope. Hope as trust, Hope as the Force that is with us, that allows us to get up the twenty-seventh time after we have fallen twenty-six; Hope that keeps us hanging in there when all seems lost; Hope that sees beyond foolishness, beyond crime, beyond sin. Hope that lights two candles as the world goes dark and very, very cold.