SCANDALOUS AND IDIOTIC

I was struck, again, by the text of today’s reading in the French Prions en Eglise, which really is very powerful, and also touched by one of the commentaries on it, which seemed to me extremely perceptive. (I have retranslated the Pauline passage from the French, because it comes across strongly that way, but not without rechecking it against a few English versions and the Greek.)

“Brothers, Christ did not send me to baptise but to announce the Gospel, and that without having recourse to the language of human wisdom, which would make vain the cross of Christ. For the language of the cross is folly to those who perish, but to those who are saved, to us, it is the power of God. Indeed, the Scripture says, I will make the wisdom of the wise to perish, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the rational man of earth? As for the wisdom of the world, has God not made it folly? Indeed, since -- by a disposition of God’s wisdom -- the world, with all its wisdom, was not able to recognise God, it has pleased God to save those who believe by the folly that is the proclamation of the Gospel. While the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, we proclaim a Messiah crucified: a scandal for the Jews, a folly for the pagans. But for those whom God calls, whether Jews or Greeks, this Messiah, this Christ, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the folly of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”  (1Corinthians 1: 17-25)

Commentary by Roselyne Dupont-Roc, Hellenist and Bible scholar:

The text operates a series of reversals, from folly to a higher wisdom, from weakness to a higher strength. This reversal Paul had himself experienced on the road: an encounter had made the persecutor, sure of his rights and of his power, into the passionate disciple of the Crucified, announcing the Good News in the midst of the dangers and the sufferings of the voyage.

How can one say, faced with the Cross, that object of horror and disgust, that the wisdom of God and his power are at work? Only, surely, by experiencing in our deepest self that His love comes to us and sustains us in our distress and anguish, and by bearing witness toward those who have not known this experience, through an attentive and loving accompaniment of their crucified lives.

Image: the Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470-1528)

A CONDITION OF COMPLETE SIMPLICITY

. . . costing not less than everything, wrote T.S. Eliot. And here is a moving illustration, by Francesco at his best. Seventeen minutes very much worth listening to. (I tried to embed it properly, but Blogger wouldn't let me. Do follow the link: you won't, I think, regret it.)

           

ANATOMY OF PRAYER?

This is a long post on prayer – a subject that gets more mysterious and more fascinating the longer you study and practice it. The nature of its power is what interested me here, as well as the extent and nature of its denial.

In the first place, what is the “power” of prayer? It is a form of spiritual energy. As energy, it has potential power but it also has laws: you cannot, for example, usefully power a computer with coal. For those who accept its laws, it is as accessible as wind-power to a sailboat; more, in fact, because unlike the wind, the energy prayer taps into is there 24/7. Much depends on the person praying, just as much depends on the person sailing the boat.

            What are the laws? First, no fishhooks. Praying for things is on the whole useless: not because God deliberately refuses them, but because the energy doesn’t normally work that way. Second, prayer is always answered, but the time-lapse and the modality of the response are to us unpredictable. God answers in His own time and manner, which are by definition mysterious to us. Third, prayer is a spiritual energy that works on, and in, a spiritual dimension.  This is where it gets difficult, not to understand but, for many, to accept. God does not micromanage the world. He sees, it is true, every sparrow that falls, but He does not stop it falling. Deists got it half right: God created the world and set it going, and He does not normally interfere with the process. Only half, though: because He is present in the world at every moment, He does care for his human creatures, and He does try to guide them toward Him and toward His love.

This leaves two problems: catastrophes and hatred. Why does God not stop an earthquake that will kill 500 people? Answer: because it is part of the physical creation, and that creation’s processes He does not interfere with. Why does God not stop massacres and other loathsome deeds? Answer: because God’s nature is love, and the one limit to His omnipotence is that He cannot be untrue to His own nature. Since that is love, He is bound by love’s law, which holds that one cannot command reciprocity: if one could, it would kill love instantly. The nature of love is that it can only be returned freely or not at all. And when it is not, when it is trodden in the dirt, the lover may weep, but he cannot command. There are times when one feels the earth must be drenched in the tears of God.

How does the power of prayer, this extraordinary energy, work? Much of it, it must be said, remains mysterious. The eighteenth century was skilled in the ways, and in the use, of wind for locomotion, but its understanding of the physics was more rudimentary than ours. One thing that can be said is that casual prayer is no more effective than renting a sophisticated sailboat for an afternoon without even the minimum knowledge of its operation: the inevitable failure may even have a negative effect.

Further, prayer for specifically spiritual goals is likely to be more effective. If I pray to be enabled to give up smoking, it may or may not be granted: the objective is still very much anchored to the physical world. But if I pray, long and steadfastly, for the power to become a more generous person, this may well, gradually and over time, be granted.

Moreover, experience has found that petitionary prayer of that kind is augmented in its power if it is liberally combined with the other kind of prayer: thanksgiving. One cannot always be asking. Cultivating a keen sense for things that are gifts to be thankful for is in itself a form of healing.

All prayer is subject to God’s Will. In fact, one might say that the one purpose and effect of all good prayer is to align our being with His will, so that the former may become the unresisting instrument of the latter. As Dante put it, in la sua volantade e nostra pace: in His will is our peace.

Much of this is illustrated by Christ’s Passion. As it looms, in Gethsemane, Jesus prays for this cup (understood: this bitter cup, this cup of hemlock) to be taken from him: he is human enough to quail at the prospect. Yet at once he continues: “But not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” But, we say, did God will this? Does God will – intend, want, and cause – the nailing of an innocent to a cross? If so, He would be a malignant God, a God who could will the extermination of millions of Jews and of Russian farmers, the massacre of thousands of Syrians, and the torture of prisoners everywhere. If, in the face of catastrophe or atrocity, we say “Thy will be done” what we mean is that we pray for the strength and the grace to undergo such things in the manner that His will intends us to and hopes we will. His will is not that we be nailed to a cross; His will is that if we are we will undergo it as Jesus did.

All prayer for ourselves is contained in the Lord’s Prayer. What about prayer for others? This is an area much more difficult to understand than prayer for ourselves, if only because prayer for others is always already by definition generous and altruistic; this being so, we cannot understand why it is so often not (or not in any obvious way) granted. If my beloved, or my child, has cancer, or Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s, or motor neurone disease, and I pray eight hours a day for that person to be healed, and that person is not healed, it is understandable if I feel rebellious. What, I ask myself, or God, is the point?

This problem is made worse, in some ways, by what appear to be occasional exceptions that look like miraculous healings. My own belief is that these are probably “sports”: oddities in the process which are sometimes enabled by a particularly powerful spirit. We cannot, and should not, expect these to occur and be offended or cast down when they do not.

Prayer for others, I believe, is a way of adding to their store of spiritual energy, the energy that emerges in their own prayer. If it is directed to a specific situation, it augments their own prayer energy for undergoing, or dealing with, such a situation. True to the laws of prayer energy, we may pray for their increase in discernment, in wisdom, in charity, in patience, in love. A multitude of such prayers may, and probably does, create an energy field of great force that the beneficiary may tap into.

Nevertheless, the laws of prayer hold. My friend with motor neurone disease will not be healed by my prayers, i.e. his disease will not go away. The prayers of Mary and John and the others present did not make the Cross go away or allow Jesus to come down from it. But their power very certainly helped him, in this most human of his hours, to bear what had to be borne.

Another law of prayer appears to be that the prayers of a community are more powerful and effective than those of an individual. I can see that this might be so: six generators connected in sequence will produce more energy that one solitary one. Moreover, it means that a whole community with its energy is advancing God’s hope and plan for the world. This should not, however, prevent the individual from praying, and the longer and deeper the better.

Given all this, I find it very curious to see how many people who do not deny climate change and its roots in human activity are quite comfortable with denying the power, the efficacy, and even the interest, of prayer. Climate-change denial is rightfully decried; God-denial is accepted without a blink. It must, one feels, come from a fundamental misprision as to the nature of the energy. It is not electricity: you cannot get a bunch of experts to produce it in a form that lets a small child press a switch and light a room. It is more like the power of the wind to a sailboat, or the power of growth to a farmer: it has its own laws and rhythms that must be attended to and cannot be forced. Yet why that should call into question its existence is peculiar. Perhaps it is because many do not want it to be true. Why? Do they think it would limit their liberty? Ten thousand things already do so, from traffic regulations to polio. You can get from London to Athens quickly, by spending a great deal of money, using vast amounts of petroleum, and causing a fair mount of pollution, by taking an aeroplane. Or you can get from London to Athens by using a skill you have patiently learned, working with the wind (that, we know, bloweth where it listeth), in silence and cleanly, by taking a sailboat.

Finally, what are the rewards of prayer? If it does not normally change the physical progress of things; if it does not bring Huckleberry Finn his fish-hooks; if it does not make my friend’s cancer go away; what does it bring me? You can read the answer in a hundred books written by experts. Experts such as Augustine of Hippo, Juliana of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Juan de la Cruz, George Herbert, John Donne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton. Very simply: it brings you (into) the company of God. The God who is Love.  The lone sailor crossing the Pacific had to spend many years learning the ways of the wind and the water; but he would tell you that it was all worth it. Prayer also takes time to learn; to adapt a proverb, God’s will often moves slowly, but it moves exceeding well.

Image credit: thanks to Zack Hunt.

PATRON OF CHEFS AND BARBECUES

St Lawrence is thought to have been born in Huesca, a town in the region of Aragon in Spain. He encountered the future Pope Sixtus II, who was of Greek origin, and eventually, both left Spain for Rome. When Sixtus became the Pope in 257, he ordained St Lawrence as a deacon, and though Lawrence was still young appointed him first among the seven deacons who served in the patriarchal church. He is therefore called "archdeacon of Rome", a position of great trust that included the care of the treasury and riches of the church and the distribution of alms among the poor.
Roman authorities had established a norm according to which all Christians who had been denounced must be executed and their goods confiscated by the Imperial treasury. At the beginning of August 258, the Emperor Valerian issued an edict that all bishops, priests, and deacons should immediately be put to death. Sixtus was captured on August 6, 258 at the cemetery of St Callixtus while celebrating the liturgy and executed forthwith.
After the death of Sixtus, the prefect of Rome demanded that St Lawrence turn over the riches of the Church. Lawrence asked for three days to gather together the wealth. He worked swiftly to distribute as much Church property to the poor as possible, so as to prevent its being seized by the prefect. On the third day, at the head of a small delegation, he presented himself to the prefect, and when ordered to give up the treasures of the Church he presented the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the suffering, and said these were the true treasures of the Church. One account records him declaring to the prefect, "The Church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor." The prefect was so angry that he had a great gridiron prepared, with coals beneath it, and had Lawrence's body placed on it (hence St Lawrence's association with the gridiron). After the martyr had suffered the pain for a long time, the legend concludes, he made his famous cheerful remark, "I'm well done. Turn me over!" From this derives his patronage of cooks and chefs. He was martyred on August 10, 258.
St Lawrence is one of the most widely venerated saints of the Roman Catholic Church. Legendary details of his death were known to Saints Ambrose and Augustine. The church built over his tomb, San Lorenzo fuori le Mure, became one of the seven principal churches in Rome and a favorite place for Roman pilgrimages. Devotion to him was widespread by the fourth century. Since the Perseid meteor shower typically occurs every year in mid-August on or near his feast day, some refer to the shower as the "Tears of St Lawrence."

The image above is a detail from Fra Angelico's "Lawrence before Valerianus."
Thanks, as always to St Matthias' Church, Somerset NJ.

A GOOD ASKING

This mosaic of St Ephrem is the oldest image I could find: an 11C mosaic from the Nea Moni monastery 
on the Greek island of Chios. He looks as if he has just seen the ghost of Mani threatening him. 

I was looking up the 4th-century St Ephrem of Syria, nicknamed "the harp of the Holy Spirit" for his Syriac hymns, and came across "the Prayer of St Ephrem" which is part of the Orthodox liturgy and which I found simple and touching:

O Lord and Master of my life, give me not the spirit of idleness, meddling, lust for power and idle talk.

But grant unto me, Thy servant, a spirit of wisdom, humility, patience and love.

Truly, Lord and King, grant me to see mine own faults and not to judge my brother. For blessed art Thou, world without end. Amen.

The "wisdom" in the second line is sophrosunè in Greek, which is a kind of general intelligent sanity of life: it is traditionally translated as "chastity" but in modern terms something like "wisdom, discernment, integrity, simplicity" and/or a mixture of all of those seems more accurate.