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)

SOME ARE BORN LENTEN, SOME ACHIEVE LENT....

And yes, some have Lent thrust upon them. I have never been good at fasting and generally at self-denial and other outward and visible signs of penitence. The only time I remember having renounced something successfully for Lent, what I had decided to give up was anger. Prayer and sharing come somewhat more easily. But each year the beginning of Lent is a moment of crisis and difficulty. One is told that it must not be like New Year’s resolutions; that the hope of “making a good Lent” is a form of pride; and so what one is left with is a mess of confusing, and confused, thoughts and prayers and the hope that somehow it will all come out right.

This year, though, the general feeling of vernal well-being and bouncing energy that always used to feel so contradictory to a season of penitence and introspection was providentially removed. In the first place I was recovering from surgery, having had a knee replaced and still learning to walk. I can assure those friends who haven’t had this done that the verse “At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow” takes on a whole new, and conflicted, meaning. Then, as walking was going better, off on a 3-day birthday trip to Barcelona, I tripped over a suitcase on a station platform, measured my length and broke two ribs. This ensured discomfort if not actual pain for another four weeks. And when that was finally settled, on a conference trip to North America, I contracted what I thought was a particularly vile cold but what turned out (as diagnosed in a New York hospital) to be authentic flu. 

My medical experiences are of no interest; what is curious is the coincidence with Lent. It truly did feel as if one was having Lent thrust upon one. And yes, it made me read more, pray more, and meditate more – most particularly as, returning home, I found among the held-over mail, a present from my daughter that blazingly illuminates each remaing Lenten day: Malcolm Guité’s Words in the Wilderness, a daily companion to Lent and Easter by way of poetry, ranging from his own (remarkable) poems to those of C.S. Lewis, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Tennyson, Donne, and of course the indispensable and durably glorious St George Herbert (as I have heard him invoked in an Anglican litany). With Guité and Benedict XVI’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth vol. 2 Holy Week, my Lent is moving toward a deeply satisfying close, for which I can only give continuing thanks. Mind you, the fast is still slow……  

ASH WEDNESDAY

I posted this a few years ago, and came across it as I was hunting for the text of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday; it still seems appropriate, if uncomfortable, so I'll re-post it now.

In a longish lifetime I’ve found that I’m never original; so there must be others who have had a peculiar Lent with a shambolic ending. You know who you are. It’s mainly for you that I’m writing this, and of course for myself.

When one gets serious about one’s faith, or mainly so, one of the things one dreams about is a Good Lent. With a little real fasting, with lots of profound prayer, with charity and sharing: a shapely movement of the soul’s days from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  And then reality comes along.

Even when I was young and Lent was not much practiced – except for the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday, a Dutch tradition – I was always exercised about the fact that Christianity had chosen the most glorious time of year, full of bird-song, fields of flowers, trees in bloom, fresh green everywhere, the sap rising, for its gloomiest meditations. As a child and later a teenager I did not feel particularly sinful, so penitence was hardly a topical concept; I was sorry for what those people had done to Jesus, but when I was introduced to the great 17C Dutch poet Revius’s sonnet “’Twas not the Jews who crucified Thee, Jesu . . . ‘twas I, my Lord, ‘twas I did this to Thee”, my reaction was Well, no, it wasn’t.

When you get older you realise first that maybe it wasn’t but in the circumstances it might well have been: how do I know that had I been a believing Jew or a Routine-bound Roman corporal in Jerusalem on that day I would have had the intelligence and  the courage to stand up against the crowd?

That, however, is not the point of the poem or the meditation it reflects. And as you go deeper into the faith we inherit you come to a new awareness: doing it to anyone is doing it to Him. OK, you and I have not crucified anyone lately, we’re not into torture and murder; but there are many ways of doing the dirty on others, and every one of them comes out of a bag of nails. Giving comfort to a grieving stranger or relative is comforting Him; withholding love from anyone is withholding it from Him.

As you look at your ageing self in the mirror of hindsight, you see a far from beautiful Dorian Gray. So you acquire the dream of a Good Lent that will maybe, with some serious effort, make you ready for Easter. And then, as I said, reality sets in.

Reality provides us with all sorts of distractions, excuses, and daily messes that really muck up our Good Lent. And when Easter rolls around we know that we have not fasted enough, the theological or devotional texts we were going to read remained untouched beyond Chapter 3, our prayer has been subject to John Donne’s distractions even more than usual, we didn’t go and visit that old person in the next street or village we’d promised ourselves we’d see, we didn’t even go to church on Good Friday, our CD player was on the blink so the St Matthew Passion was out, we ended up feeding passing friends from far away, and here we are, supposedly meditating by the tomb in perfect silence like a Victorian painting of the mourning Marys, but in reality shopping for Easter food, hiding eggs, doing e-mail, and a hundred other unworthy things. What a mess.

And then there comes, at the moment when one does pray, a still small voice that says, “That Good Lent you so wanted to have, supposedly for Me – did it occur to you that that was entirely your idea, conceived by and for you? I do not necessarily want your Good Lent any more than I want smoking bulls’ meat on the altar: if you can look at your life and see the bits that really don’t go with my Father’s love, and if that view makes you miserable enough desperately to want Me, Us, to change it (because you now know that you can’t), then, little lad, you will have had a Lent that’s good enough for Me.” And you realise that you have been given a major lesson in humility. And you get ready for Easter’s celebration, with a rather tremulous joy in your heart. 

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

 (The upward way and the downward way are one and the same)

ASH WEDNESDAY

It is that time again. And Ash Wednesday without Eliot would be poor in all the wrong ways.

I

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is

  nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care 

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

It is this which recovers

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions

Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn

In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten

And would be forgotten, so I would forget

Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences

Calm and distressed

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory

Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment

Of love unsatisfied

The greater torment

Of love satisfied

End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and

Word of no speech

Grace to the Mother

For the Garden

Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

There were no more faces and the stair was dark,

Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,

Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

Lilac and brown hair;

Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind

over the third stair,

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy

Lord, I am not worthy

                              but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,

Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand

In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,

Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing

Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream

While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke

  no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

    O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,

For those who walk in darkness

Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and

  deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,

  time and time, between

Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait

In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray

For children at the gate

Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

    O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

In the last desert before the last blue rocks

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert

Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

    O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit

  of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

With her permission I reproduce here the column my daughter the Rev. Tess Kuin Lawton, an Anglican priest and chaplain of Magdalen College School in Oxford, put on Facebook yesterday. I found it the most moving and pertinent comment I have seen.

It is rare to have an item of news so appalling that the instinctive human reaction is not to listen, watch or read about it at all; but in the story of the murder of 140 school children by the Taliban in Pakistan on Tuesday, that is what has been thrust into the heart of the pre-Christmas glitter and sparkle and the juxtaposition is impossible to bear.

Yet, the religiously minded among us cannot help hearing the echo of both Pharaoh and Herod and we find ourselves once more taking off our shoes as we wait for the Theophany. The religious narrative of our souls has shown that when God has come into the world, it has been a world of violence and horror. These things are not new. They are part of the human condition every bit as much as hope and anticipation and joy.

The Fall is not simply a colourful myth we can weave into carol services and set to beautiful music. It is reality of human nature which allows each one of us to sink to untold depths of depravity and paint a picture which can nevertheless justify our actions. There is a rationale behind every act of moral evil; a way to explain it, make sense of it. We seem to need to be able to do that somehow, in order to comprehend the darkness. So we have heard about revenge for the West honouring a teenage girl who champions education, we have heard of children bearing the punishment for the sins of their fathers in the army, we have even heard some try to suggest that education is un-Islamic.

Pharaoh feared the growing numbers of Israelite slaves and gave orders that the midwives kill all new-born boys. When the midwives could not do this, Pharaoh ordered that new-born boys be drowned in the Nile instead. The words used in Exodus for Pharaoh’s dealings with the Israelites are ‘shrewd’ and ‘ruthless’. Today, in a society where we are protected from reality by a screen, we are used to hearing these words used in a response to a budget report, not as a way of dealing with people. In the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Herod works ‘in secret’ to ‘search for the child and destroy him.’ When his plan is thwarted and the holy family flee into the same Egypt of their ancestors, Herod’s fury leads him to ‘kill all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under.’

We read it out, we remember it in the Church’s calendar, but until this week, we have had no idea of the absolute horror of such an act. Turn off the radio, turn your faces away from the front page of the newspaper, change channels on the television. This blood is too much, these teenage faces caught in a moment of terrifying death is too awful for us.

How do we respond to the depths of sin in this world? What words can explain? None, of course. This is the season of watching and waiting. And sometimes what we watch is too much for us. ‘Maranatha’, come Lord. We have taken off our shoes, we have covered our heads, we have rent our clothes. Come into the heart of this evil. Gather into one, in your kingdom, the pain of all these broken lives. Lift up the souls of each child and never let them go.

This is what Christmas is about. The true light, which enlightens everyone is coming into the world. What we may have forgotten is how extreme the task of the Word really is. We know, because we hear it every year, that he is in the world but the world does not know him. This week, we have been reminded how far away from the light we have strayed. The reading which begins our carol services is not a nostalgic nicety, it is the painful and gritty truth. There is no health in us.

Advent is about facing this. In ourselves and in the world around us. We dress the Church is purple because it is a season of penitence. Have mercy on us, miserable sinners. At times, we forget it in the glittery rush for Christmas and in our desire to lift our spirits in a season of grey skies and long nights. At school, we were singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in joyful parts as King and page, as soon as December 1st arrived. But for another school, the slaughter of the innocents was just around the corner.

One commentator on the radio shed some light on the subject when she pointed out that this act of murder by the Taliban was a sign of their weakness rather than strength. Like Pharaoh and Herod before them, they are fearful of the power which (in this case) one young girl might have. Luke’s Gospel begins each of his first three chapters with a ruler: King Herod, Emperor Augustus, Emperor Tiberius. Yet we know that in not one of these cases does the power really lie here and we urge the reader to tell us about John the Baptist, Mary, the shepherds.

The horror of the murdered schoolchildren must make us reflect deeply on our own sin, our own culpability in this world, in a way which perhaps the familiarity of the readings and carols have inured us to. It must take us back to the raw power of God as we await the greatest theophany of history and, in humility and awe, we must pray.