NOT NICE

“We are reminded once again that France is at war!” So said Christian Estrosi, the president of France’s Southeast region, this morning after the Nice massacre. He was, of course, both wrong and right.

Wrong, in that this is not a war in any accepted sense, even the asymmetric: there is no national entity facing France, there is no coherent enemy, there is no enemy command, there is no clear war aim, and there is no realistically imaginable moment when one could declare victory.

But right in another, stranger, sense. And in that sense all Western countries are part of the war. We did not declare it. Curiously, a series of unofficial persons and groups have been declaring it repeatedly for decades, but the communicosphere was not active or developed enough to make it work beyond local outbursts. Now that that sphere is humming 24 hours a day on a planetary scale, several detonators have come dangerously close to an explosive mass.

The mass consists of several million young men between 15 and 35 with hormones raging, frustrated by the cards life dealt them and without the knowledge, means or even sometimes motivation to change the hand. And gradually, their condition can mutate to Hatred.

The detonators are 1) jihadist Islam (an evil stepchild of Wahhabism), 2) a cable-social-network-and-smartphone culture that enables one to find and attend to only sympathetic voices all too glad to pour oil on small flames, 3) a society that constantly weakens the intermediate structures of responsibility between the individual and The State or The Church or The Deity, 4) continued discrimination in hiring and other career-forming processes, and 5) the siren song of the goddess Violence, flattering and seducing the testosterone trolls that live in young men’s brains. Her answers are simple and exciting, flavoured with adrenalin. Any or all of these can bring the mass to explosion.

So far, I have said nothing new. How, though, do we react to a condition that allows, even encourages, an anonymous petty criminal to hire a truck and mow down more than a hundred celebrating people, thus giving him passing fame and (he thinks) eternal glory? The point is that this is not coordinated and commanded as the earlier assassinations were. This is more like the American shooting rampages (except that it shows that a determined assassin can use anything as a weapon): unforeseeable and virtually unpreventable.

In one sense, the conclusion is that we must learn to live as people do in Israel or other toxic environments punctuated by death: i.e. not let the killers win by living terrified but accept that we are all mortal and that, just like a fatal traffic accident, it can happen at any time and in any place. That is passive courage, and it relates to Stoic philosophy.

Do we, though, have weapons of our own? I believe that Christians, Jews and Muslims have two common weapons: our belief in a loving God and our resultant conviction that hatred of other humans is corrosive and evil. (Some may oppose certain verses of the Koran to this, or certain passages from the Old Testament; but I am conviced that on the whole Allah loves the human race, as does YHWH.) We may hate forces that draw people deliberately away from a God who loves them, but we must not hate those who have been drawn into becoming such forces’ instruments.

Our weapons, then, are the recognition that Hatred is the key; that hatred corrupts its desired instrument but that the instrument in question is still human and thus someone (to speak as a Christian) Christ died for and was resurrected for. We do not necessarily have the power to root out the original causes of hatred; but Hatred itself is our business.

Contemplate it. Try to understand where it comes from, and how it works. Study it: it has habits, just as wasps and vultures have habits. Learn its habits and behaviour. Find out where it lives and what it eats. Discover which human beings are its chosen breeding-ground. And look very, very carefully at the people you personally know. Do any of them show any signs of the disease? Not of “radicalisation”; not of “Islamism”; not of “racism”; of the early stages of Hatred.

If you see that X and Y do, make friends with them. Unobtrusively, but do things for them. Go the extra mile. Help them get jobs. Uninvasively, see if you can help them straighten out tangles. Ease them away from drugs, depression or despair. Get them through a relationship breakup. Take them to dinner. Smile and touch (uninvasively, but a hug is often as good as a therapy session). Show them the good things you like and respect in them. If you find yourself discussing politics or public matters, ease them away from rancour, resentment and rage, and toward something or someone they admire for generosity. Ask them to help you, sometimes.

Like cancer, Hatred can sometimes – often, even – be beaten if it is diagnosed early. For Christians, perhaps this is the best interpretation of what Pope Francis means by a Year of (dedicated to) Mercy.

If we can all become alert and aware to the individual (often the lonely) humans around us, frequently young and male but not always and not only, if we can discreetly but generously act, we may have found the one weapon that can eventually win this war.   

IN THESE EMPTY DAYS

I think I've posted this before, but I'm always struck by the moments between the Ascension and 

Whitsun (Pentecost) - rather like Holy Saturday, when the statues are still veiled and the Tabernacle 

on the altar open and empty. A brief time of - well, almost fright, a sudden chill of aloneness. We 

know better, but even so. I had been reading the glorious Latin hymns and their haunting tetrameters, 

and found myself writing something that sounded like the translation of one. So here it is: a translation without an original:

PATRIS AEDEM REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

FOR WHITSUNDAY -- OR PENTECOST

I've been reading the magnificent collection of Latin hymns I bought at the Kalamazoo medieval conference (One Hundred Latin Hymns, Ambrose to Aquinas, from Harvard), which is an absolute treasure. Peter Walsh's translations are lovely- metre without rhyme, like most of the hymns themselves. So it occurred to me to try my hand at an unrhymed hymn in the iambic tetrameter the Latin often uses.

AD PATRIS LIMEN REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

LIFT-OFF, LONELINESS AND LOVE

"The Ascension" by Giotto (1266--1337)

“O GOD the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.” This is the Collect for the Sunday After Ascension Day, and there is great pathos is the “leave us not comfortless”.

            Before I write about that, I wanted to say something about the Ascension, a feast Thomas Cranmer intended to be major but which is much neglected today, probably because of vague embarrassment about its verticality.

1) "And when he had said these things, as they were looking, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight." (Acts 1:9)

2) "And he led them out until [they were] over against Bethany: and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven." (Luke 24:50-1)

3) "[Jesus,] after he had spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God." (Mark 16:19)

I’ve put the three accounts of the Ascension in this order because of the point of view. In Acts, we are seeing it through the disciples’ eyes: they are looking at him, he rises and disappears into a cloud. That’s all they see and know. Luke goes further and says where he went, though still implicitly seeing it from below: he is “carried up into heaven”. And Mark goes right to the end, as if he was present in Heaven at Jesus’ arrival: he was “received up into Heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.”

We, in our modern knowledge, however imperfect, of what is “up there”, could of course sneer at that vertical take-off into the cloud. And yet, does knowing that “up there” is really “out there” change anything, really? We know there was what they saw as some kind of lift-off, and that he went from them into what we might call another dimension. Each generation describes it in terms in understands. He sits at the right hand of the Father. We need not inquire upon what kind of armchair. We know what is meant. If we pretend otherwise, we are being disingenuous.

More or less from the start of his resurrected period, he had warned them that it was going to be limited. He had, after all, come from Heaven; he had walked on earth, he had died, been buried, and risen again; but back to Heaven at some point he had to go. And in these passages, the moment has come. Notice their reaction: they do not mourn. As Luke says, they worshipped him, and went back to Jerusalem with great joy.

Nevertheless, as the days went by, it must have been hard. They’d had him back, eating grilled fish and honeycomb with them, joking with Thomas, explaining to them the infinite goodness that had overcome death; and now he’d gone away for good.

It’s out of that feeling that today’s Collect comes. “Leave us not comfortless.” Yes, he had said something about sending someone else to help them; but it had never been very clear and was now perfectly fuzzy in their minds. There was still a lot of hostility about; they were still the weirdos who maintained that Yeshuah Ben-Yousuf, a provincial carpenter, born suspiciously early in his parents’ marriage and eventually executed as a troublemaker, had been the centuries-long-awaited Meschiach; and now they were starting to feel exceedingly alone.

The rest of the Collect refers to Whitsun, which happens next week. For the moment, let’s think about his departure and the ensuing loneliness. The Catholic Church,  nowadays, places into today’s Gospel reading the High-Priestly Prayer from John 17; and I find that both entirely right and deeply moving. This text, which my parents loved above almost all Bible texts, is Jesus’ testament before his crucifixion. It can stand also as his prayer just before being “received up into Heaven”. So I will end with it, in the KJV.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.  I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.

And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.  And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.

 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;  that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.  And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.  O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.”