HOPE AND STRENGTH?

“God is our hope and strength : a very present help in trouble.” (Psalm 46)

If one has faith, this is stirring; and instinctively one feels it’s true. But it it? And if so, how? 

First of all, the Psalm says that God is our, not my, hope and strength. As always, the original referent is the people of Israel; as always, for a Christian, the Psalms’ people of Israel is now the Church. 

As members of the Church, then, we can say that God is our hope. Between faith and charity; between our belief in the Resurrection and our active love for our neighbour, there is hope. Hope is symbolised by an anchor: it is what prevents us from drifting on to a lee shore. Hope is what permits us not to give up. Hope is what sustains us when we see the decline of Christendom, when we are depressed by the oceans of complete indifference to religion around our battered fleet. And our hope is – God. Is it our hope that He will, magically, act? that he will come flying into history on the wings of a divine wind and take over? We may daydream of such a dénouement, but we are pretty sure it will not happen. If our hope is God, it is perhaps rather that He will give us the strength and the stamina to carry on regardless; that He will continue to be the well of life, where we can go to draw the living water of renewed faith and energy.

As members of the Church, again, we can say that God is our strength. He is our strength, the strength of the Church: and the Church, in turn, is the strength of its members. There are times when our belief in this is sorely tested: when the Church, through its leaders, singularly fails to cope with the travails of modern life; when the Church, through some its visible groups or individuals, shows itself foolish or sinful or both. And yet – anyone who has tried to maintain an active and lively faith for a long time on his own knows how much the strength needed for that surpasses his little private store of resources. Within the Church, through the liturgy, through the Eucharist, but also through the sharing of thought and feeling in both theology and devotion – within the Church there is strength in abundance, available to all. 

A help in trouble. That is where it comes to the nub. Trouble is always with us, and may emerge from any shadow at any moment: for the community and/or for the individual. In what way is God our help in trouble? First, as hope: it is our hope in God that gives us strength and stamina. That hope is what is expressed in prayer. When we beg and beseech, we do so hoping. Because we know that, if we do not ask for fishhooks but for the force that will allow us to do His will whatever befalls, He will not let us down. 

Second, as strength. In trouble, God is our strength. Our strength. If we face trouble as a body, as members of the Church, as the Church, we will have the strength needed to survive and overcome trouble. This means unity. This means solidarity: not (only) in the now usual sense of helping the poor, but of knowing how to bury our differences and metaphorically link arms, watch each other’s back, and deal with it, whatever it is. And if God is our strength, that means that we receive it through prayer.

Finally, God is a very present help. Present, here; present, now. Not absent, not future. I often find it hard to remember, to realise, that God is with me here and now. As air is. As radio waves are. As light is. So, in trouble, prayer does not have to be elaborately organised and anticipated. It can be hurried, panted, cried, whispered; and if there are more of us, physically, it can be remembered and recited, or improvised, together. 

If I am in trouble, let me remember that I am not alone, but that I am a member of a body, the Church, the new people of Israel. And let me remember that as such, I have at all times the ear of our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God. Through – per, by means of, by way of, through the mediation of -- Jesus Christ our Lord. 

A POET AND A FRIEND

He has always been my favourite saint. Not only was he the poet among the disciples; Yeshua loved him particularly, doubtless for a reason. And – perhaps as a result of that – he was the only one who stuck around right to the very bloody end. He almost always pictured standing by, under, the Cross, together with Myriam. All the others had skedaddled, even Peter, who had been ashamed of denying Him and had wept bitterly. He had wept, but not remained. Only young Yochanan was still there. It was to him that Yeshua entrusted His mother, a (presumed) widow and thus to be cared for. He and his brother Ya’akov (James to us Anglophones) had in their teenage years been nicknamed Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder”, presumably because of their fiery temperament. And he wrote his memoirs of his friend at the end of a long life, thinking back to those magical years and distilling from them, through the alembic of his memory, the finest and loveliest of all testimonies. He may or may not have written the apo-calypsa, the revelations or visions of the Last Things, but he may well have done --  he was a poet, after all, and as poetry the Bible’s last book is as vast, as fireful and as moving as the Northern Lights.

            What has John to teach us? How to think of him? What seems to unite all the things we know about him was that a) he was a man of heart, not a sophist or a calculator, and b) he was one who went all the way. The first should teach us that in dealing with Yeshua, as with the Father and the Spirit, we should first of all check the various locks and blocks and painted-shut windows of our hearts and open them. We tend to think of our duty as believers as being oriented to our neighbours, but the first Commandment has to do with loving God, all three of Him. Loving Him, not just respecting, fearing, being awed by: loving. Not always easy; but if we want help along that road, Yochanan is the one to go to. And he can help and teach us not only to love, but in that love to have the courage and the patience and the sticktoitiveness to go all the way. Not to run away when the big hairies come and things go pear-shaped. Not being Sons of Thunder, we may not have the sheer guts he did, but we can at least think of him when the going gets tough. 

            And also we can learn from him to express in words what our souls go through, if our talent runs that way. There is in the whole of the New Testament perhaps not a more poetic passage than the opening of Yochanan’s memoir. And then the extraordinarily moving declaration with which he begins his first letter, slightly breathless and incoherent because retrospectively overwhelmed:

That which was from the beginning -- which was from the beginning – and yet which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we beheld, and our hands touched -- the word of life; 

² and the life was shown. And we saw, and we witness, and we tell to you the everlasting life, that was with the Father, and appeared to us. 

³ And we tell you that thing that we saw and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us, and that our fellowship may be with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. 

⁴ And we write this thing to you so that you may have joy, and that your joy may be full.

He still has trouble getting his mind around it: that the hugeness, the unimaginable brightness that is the Sun, the Son, that was, is, and will be with the Father, that that was here, in Galilee, in Yorkshire, in Picardy, in Connecticut, and appeared to us; that we actually saw him with our own dim eyes, that we touched him with our own hands that scale fish and cook dinner: and why are we going to tell you what we saw and touched? so that you can be part of it too, so that we may all of us together have “fellowship” with the Father and the Son, and so that that being the case you may have joy and our communal joy may be full.. 

I can think of no more attractive simply human person – Myriam excepted – in the New Testament. I feel privileged that my second Christian name is his. 

MELTING MARBLE

Illustrating George Herbert: a Carthusian brother

           “The sky is marble to my thoughts.” So wrote William Hazlitt in that strangest of confessional works, Liber Amoris; and Christians often feel the same. We pray; we avoid praying for fishhooks;  we pray for those things we are promised shall be granted us; and not only does nothing seem to change, we have the discouraging impression that there is nobody on the line.

            We know the answer any reasonable spiritual director would give us. Do not despair; soldier on with the daily round; remember that God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform; and God’s time is not our time. What is much harder, at such times, is to realise fully that our spiritual director, in saying so, is right.

            It is encouraging to read the experiences of Carthusian monks, those professionals of the extreme, those Alpinists of the soul. Nancy Klein Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order is a wonderful account of the way quite ordinary but devout young men try to adapt to the (Parkminster) Charterhouse. In the end, only one of the five stays the course.

            I have had occasion to cite the Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love. In it, the role of the Brothers is also discussed: those dedicated men who do the physical work of the Charterhouse and live a limited version of the Fathers’ life. What helps the Brothers to sustain their life and their faith is, amongst other things, Work. Work, if not too absorbing and not undertaken in a feverish manner, is a steadying and organising influence, and can easily be accompanied by brief prayers and a belief in God’s presence. In George Herbert’s sublime poem “Teach me, my God and King” he says “Who sweeps a room as for thy Laws/ Makes that [the room] and the action, fine.”

            So when we find ourselves in that space where the sky seems marble to our thoughts and prayers, one answer is Work. Get on with it, and remember Brother Lawrence, who in The Practice of the Presence of God told his interlocutor that he certainly was no theologian or even a Father of saintly devotion, but that while cooking, baking and cleaning pots and pans in his monastery kitchen he simply talked to God all the time. One suspects that his pots shone.

            One of my mother’s rules in life was When in doubt, clean something or tidy something. Not only do necessary things get done that way, but you will inevitably end up feeling better.

            Another solution (not alternative but complementary) is reading: reading something that will help your knowledge of your faith, and thus often your faith itself. At the moment I am reading – in French, because I found it in a French bookshop – Aidan Nichols’ The Thought of Benedict XVI. Having read Benedict’s three compact volumes on Jesus of Nazareth I thought this looked interesting, and indeed it is teaching me a great deal, not only about that great Christian scholar but about the faith itself, its structures and its expressions.  

            Thirdly, helping others is a tried and true way to where we need to be. A friend of mine spends quite a lot of time teaching conversational French to migrants and refugees; another single woman I know works for and with elderly people, not only in domestic work like vacuuming and laundry but also conversation, gardening, or accompanying them to exhibitions or receptions.

            In such ways, even though at times there seems to be nobody home when we pray, we may eventually find that what we were praying for has been creeping up on us unnoticed, and that the shutters, doors and windows of our soul have quietly been opening to let in the Third Person of the Trinity. It is a way of becoming, as the famous prayer wrongly attributed to St Francis says, “an instrument of Thy peace”. And as we do such things, interspersed with brief prayers, we are – perhaps unconsciously --obeying His commandments, and one day we may wake up to new lodgers: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” (John 14:23).

Brother Epifanios, head chef of Mt Athos monastery

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

For those who, despite the coming of the Paraclete, feel obscurely bereft after the Lord’s Ascension because He is no longer with us in the flesh:

Perhaps He has left it up to us to be Him in the flesh.

In compassion for the widow whose only son died;

In the forgiveness of the woman about to be stoned;

In the thought that produced those memorable images we call the Parables;

In the constant, unceasing prayer to the Father;

In the patience with the well-intentioned who act like idiots;

In the occasional flash of real anger at those who blaspheme the sacred;

and in the readiness to go the whole way if the world insists and it cannot be avoided;

Perhaps He has left it up to us to be Him, here, in the flesh.

OMG.