KIDDING?

 

We all know the Gospel story of Yeshua calling up a little child, pointing to it, and telling the disciples and passers-by that whoever is not ready to accept the Kingdom (read: kingship) of God like such a child cannot enter there. But what does he mean? Those who have small children love them desperately but in no way and at no time idealise them. They are adorable, selfish, slobby, brattish, quarrelsome and difficult at meals. Yeshua, as a 31-year-old bachelor, might have idealised the child in question; but as one who was Divine as well as very human, it’s doubtful. So, knowing everything about children, how could he say that that is what we should become to be citizens of the Kingdom?

            I think he was thinking first of all about a child’s simplicity. If a little girl is standing by the roadside with her father, waiting to cross, she sticks up her hand without looking, knowing that it will find the big strong secure hand beside her. A small boy who wants something from his parents asks for it. (He may or may not get it, but that doesn’t stop him asking.) Children, in relation to adults they trust, are simple and direct.

            Secondly, children naturally and necessarily experience love as a gift. They know that adults are powerful in ways that they themselves are not, and so they know that love is something they receive. Not necessarily in the form of concrete gifts, but in the form of hugs, comfort, bedtime stories, occasional treats, and Winnie-the-Pooh. If they are fortunate enough to have such love on a daily basis, they take it for granted. One day, if they meet other children who do not have it and are miserable, they will begin not to take it for granted. But meanwhile, they regard it as natural. And return it, naturally. 

            Thirdly, how do they love? First of all, it’s a love of belonging. My Daddy’s mine. My Mummy’s mine. Jackie is my brother. Lucy’s my sister. This is my house. Bingo is my dog. They all belong to me – this I know. What I don’t know, or can’t put into words,  is that I belong to them, and that thus we belong to each other.

 Then, it’s without question. Sometimes they hate Daddy, sometimes they love him, but they don’t doubt him. 

 

            Here, surely, there are lessons for those of us who wondered what the man across from us was talking about when pointing to the little kid. In relation to our Father (who is in heaven), be simple. Be direct. When you receive blessings in whatever form, recognise them as gifts from that large being who loves you. Give him a hug in return. Then go on with your day, and learn to live the  same way with those around you. If it moves, hug it. If it hits you, hit it back smartly and then hug it while you both cry. If you break something, confess and say you’re sorry (and mean it), and He will forgive you. Don’t be clever and doubt him; don’t be clever and try to outsmart him; if you want to be clever, find new ways of loving him and loving your neighbour. Channel your inner 7-year-old.

 

[What, a friend’s voice whispers in my mind, if you have never known this kind of loving happy childhood? If yours was miserable, violent, poor, and abusive? Well, I think that he would tell you a) to realise that you are now loved for real, b) that you can therefore know that trust is possible, and that c) you can therefore tell him all your past miseries, knowing that he will never tell anyone and that he will love you all the more for having told him.]

[And if you are handicapped or sick or in pain, tell him that and listen. You may hear him whisper that he knows what pain is like, he’s been there before you, and that he hopes you’ll remember what he said to the Good Thief on the cross next door. He may not be able to make it all go away, but he will give you without stint, give you strength and endless love.]

ALL VOLTAIRE"S FAULT? (OR, COME BACK, WILL BLAKE)

(A friend reminded me of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Blake: this conversation is hardly new. And in France, “C’est la faute à Voltaire” is an old expression, probably as old as the Revolution.)

The award-winning French daily La Croix, reporting on the current meeting at Lourdes of the French Catholic Church’s bishops, mentioned how different the situation now is from that of 50-100 years ago. Then, the problem was anticlericalism: the Church was seen by many as the Enemy, to be reviled, resisted and refused. Now, on the other hand, the problem is indifference.

After a month’s travelling in the United States and Canada, and now returned to la République française, I find myself agreeing ruefully with this statement. Quite apart from political situations and the public personæ driving them – a play with strong characters, a chaotic plot and no visible playwright – I see everywhere human situations of need, urgency, grief, pain and sorrow that cry out for faith where no faith is.

Let me be clear. I do not mean that faith is, in the simple and especially in the simplistic sense, the solution. Where grief strikes or pain, faith will not make them go away. But faith will let such moments, such events, be lived in another fashion, another context, another dimension. Faith lets them be lived in a context of prayer – perhaps even of rebellious and angry prayer, but prayer: which means the context of a relation. In a number of languages there exists a proverb like “A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved”; and it is true that sharing a grief with a true friend lightens the burden. Hence, might sharing it with the loving Father of All not lighten it dramatically?

And yet when I look around me I find that increasingly (and more perhaps in France than in America), having faith is looked upon benignly as an idiosyncrasy, a hobby or what the French call une passion: X does old cars, Y collects stamps, Z does religion. Doubtless such pursuits give X,Y, and Z profound satisfaction, but they are best kept to oneself and not shared with (“forced on”) others. Faith is emphatically not seen as something one needs, still less something the world needs. One gets along perfectly well without it, and looking at Islam gives one less than perfect sympathy for those who live by it, let alone a desire to do so. At best, one is sometimes told, “Yes, well, you have faith: I don’t. That’s just the way it is; sometimes I wish I had it, but I just don’t.” End of subject. Faith, in other words, is something you have or you don’t, like blue eyes: the condition, whether of having or lacking, is definitive and beyond one’s control. And (it is intimated) much the best that way. 

What is one to answer to this? The Church tells us, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly, that we must be disciples and missionaries; but it carefully stops there. And all of us know that in the fairly sophisticated and utterly indifferent world in which we live, move, and have our being, trumpeting the Good News to one’s neighbours will be neither welcome nor efficacious.

There is another way, also favoured by the Church. Be merciful, it says; tirelessly do good to and for others; and even without your mentioning your faith, people will start asking themselves and others what on earth makes you tick? And that can be an opening into the subject.  Unfortunately, I have never seen this happen in real life: the indifferent are not indifferent to good works, but do not question their fons et origo. “She is a truly good woman,” they will say; but they don’t ask what makes her so.

On the other side of the picture you have those who do have faith but give it a bad name. These are to be found in many denominations, from Pentecostal to Roman Catholic. They are absolutely sure of their dogma, which they use as a sledge-hammer to beat their opponents with. They relish combat because it is, as they see it, for Christ. In analogy with “Islamists” I call them Christianists. They do untold harm. They insult and injure for Christ; they threaten and malign for Christ; and sometimes they kill for Christ and gleefully urge their government to do so. They create scornful atheists wherever they go.

So those of us who have faith -- though never enough: “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief” – faith riddled with doubt, faith skating on uncertainty – walk very quietly on the whole, between the Christianist cannon on the one hand and the Indifferent desert on the other, hoping against hope that somehow, sometime, God will do something --  appear on CNN, call Time, throw Kremlin, Tienanmen and White House into the ocean and declare Playtime Over. When disaster happens – Irma, Maria, terrorist attacks, high-rise fires – we react with surprising and touching kindness and even, sometimes,  efficiency; but overall we don’t give the impression of believing that faith and prayer are either essential or a Good Thing in this world.

Perhaps we need to feel more confident. Perhaps we need to stop confusing attitudes to religion with attitudes to sex. Perhaps we need to speak up more. Not to yank others by the shirtfront and yell at them, but to tell the world that we are eyewitnesses – not to that Event two millennia ago, but to the mercies, the spiritual gifts, the joy even in grief, that we personally have received. Eyewitnesses to the good that intelligent charity, discerningly directed love, does. Eyewitnesses to the evil that humiliation brings, whether humiliation of persons or of countries.

After all, those of us old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin Wall know that we had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to Russia and to one Vladimir Putin, and we threw it away. Our great-grandparents had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to a defeated Germany in 1918 and instead gave it the Treaty of Versailles. Even today, we have the chance to approach with discernment, charity and brotherhood the millions of young Iranians who look to us and their sometimes approachable government; we perhaps have a tiny chance left to approach that strange young man in Pyongyang to deal with him without naiveté but without humiliation.

And always, always, the basic force that moves our world – our micro-world and our macro-world – is prayer. With prayer, anything is possible. Without it, nothing profound or lasting is. Shit still happens; God does not micromanage; but we need not be helpless in the face of it.

OFFERING

I found this meditiation from the 'Offertory' section of Daniel-Rops's Missa Est moving. All too often, while the priest prepares the bread and the wine, the congregation fumbles for coins and treats this moment as an interval; yet the Offering is that of both the 'kindly fruits of the earth' (much more present in a country parish among fields of wheat and vineyards), and of what we bring, in matter and/or in spirit, and which the priest's preparing of bread and wine represents.  

If you have nothing else to offer to the Lord, simply present your work and your pains;

it has cost many men much effort, this piece of bread lying on the paten.

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all that you have suffered;

for the wine to be poured into the chalice did the grapes not have to be crushed and the skin torn?

If all you have in you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all the anguish of humanity,

let your hands lift those pitiful things up to heaven, for Mercy has already received them in advance at his Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to present and to implore, 

if all that is in you is absence and abandonment,

simply accept, in silence, that Another take care of you for you and take charge of you, 

so that the Offering and the Offerer may be a single gift.