FISH FOR BREAKFAST

One of the things I perennially love about the Resurrection narratives is the emphasis on food. And it doesn’t usually come from the disciples: it comes from Yeshua himself. First, there’s Cleophas and his friend, trudging to Emmaus. (In fact, they may be going further, but Emmaus is a useful day’s walk from Jerusalem, so they’re going to overnight there in a pub.) On the way they meet this fascinating stranger who at first appears clueless as to what’s been happening but who then, when they remind him, fills them in on the Why of it all, citing Scripture as is only proper between good Jews. They like him so much that they persuade him to stay at the pub with them, at least for the evening meal. And at the moment he takes the bread and intones the blessing – Baruch atta Adonai Elohenu etc. – they look at him and say OMG, it’s Him! And he disappears, whoosh.

Then, they race back to Jerusalem and we next see them with the other disciples, somewhere undefined – indoors? outdoors? a rooftop? a courtyard? – nattering away in a state of high excitement about the Blessing Man, when suddenly, there he is again, in the midst of them. Shalom, he says. Yes, it’s me. Really. See? Hands with holes in them. Feet with holes in them. Not a ghost, not even a Holy Ghost. And when they still look astonished: Got something to eat? He eats a chunk of fried fish. Ghosts eat fish? Nah, course not.

Next scene: the shore of the Sea of Kinneret, alias Lake Tiberias. Dawn. (The scene is of extraordinary beauty, still. I’ve been there.) Two or three fishing-boats full of tired, irritated, frustrated young men – a whole night’s fishing, no fish. To Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire with it, says Peter, let’s go home. So they head for shore, and there is this bloke. Got anything? he shouts. Nowt, says Peter, crossly. Drop your net one more time, over starboard. Grouchily, Peter does. OY! Hey guys, help me lug this bugger up, it’s full! They manhandle it to shore and there are 153 bloody great big musht (St Peter’s Fish) in it, or possibly mixed with few enormous carp. Pant. Sweat. So come and have breakfast! says the bloke. And sure enough, he’s got a little fire going and is frying fish – a tantalising smell in the crisp air of dawn. And once again, they take a second look – or maybe he’s blessing the fish, Baruch atta Adonai Elohenu Melech ha’Olam – and once again, OMG, it’s him!

As my mother used to say, the reason the Gospels are so convincing is that nobody, but nobody, would have made this kind of Resurrection up. Gods often do things on earth: they seduce nymphs, they help warriors, they mark special children, so forth. But never, never do they stand on a beach eating fried fish. The Power and the Glory. And fried musht for breakfast.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER -- A GREAT WOMAN

Thinking about something to write today, I realised that I had completely forgotten June 15, the feast of the Anglican saint Evelyn Underhill. I use the term “Anglican Saint” gingerly but confidently: the Anglican Church officially has no saints of its own, only those shared with the Roman Catholic Church from before the Reformation; but the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music has created a very decent Calendar of “Holy Men, HolyWomen”, and when, a number of years ago, I went to Mass at my old Toronto Church of St Mary Magdalene I heard, in the Litany, among a long list of other saints asked to pray for us, “Saint George Herbert”! So I have little reluctance in calling Evelyn Underhill an Anglican saint, and indeed a Doctor of the Church. I first heard about her from my late mother-in-law Noel Wynyard, a rather saintly woman in her own right about whom my daughter Tessa Kuin Lawton wrote a very fine biography, and who greatly admired Underhill as a teacher of Anglican spirituality.

Reading her famous book Mysticism, first published in 1911, I am struck by the civilised ease of the style and the enduring freshness of her intellectual approach. An example, from the introduction:

“All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But other remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream; some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen, declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.”

And a little further: “the mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or the courage necessary to those who would prosecute such explorations themselves.”

And it occurred to me that in this current age, when Islamist terrorism has given rise to a whole new materialist atheism that (in order not to seem to discriminate) now considers all religion not only as ridiculous but as inherently toxic; reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting sages such as Underhill – who includes Muslim and Buddhist mystics in her considerations – may be a crucial antidote.

ODDLY LENT

Tenebrae: part of a Good Lent

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 aging self in the mirror of hindsight, you see a decidedly unlovely 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. 

THE FORGOTTEN VIRTUE?

I’ve been thinking about hope. It is curious that there are two great commandments but three theological virtues. Faith, obviously, corresponds to the first great commandment; charity to the second. So where does hope come in?

French has two words for hope: espoir and espérance. The former is the more common, and applies to simple things as well as to profound ones. J’espère gagner à la loterie: I hope I win in the lottery. I hope my kid passes his exams. I hope there won’t be another jihadist attack in Paris. In this sense of the word, “hope” is close kin to “wish”. It implies goodwill but no sense of personal empowerment or responsibility.

So what about espérance? The verb it is linked to, nominally, is also espérer; in fact, it is almost never used. Espérance is the noun used for the theological virtue (and also for the Cape of Good Hope, incidentally). And just as in English, one doesn’t use the verb much in this sense, probably because of its association with the more trivial meanings.

Then, in this morning’s reading in my little monthly booklet Prions en église, I was struck by its version of Hebrews 11:1: Frères, la foi est une façon de posséder ce que l’on espère, un moyen de connaître des réalités qu’on ne voit pas. “Brothers, faith is a way of possesseing what one hopes, a means of knowing the realities one does not see.” And, as the commentator, the Hellenist Roselyne Dupont-Roc, noted: this shows us faith as the hypo-stasis, the basement and foundation, of hope.

If this is true, then true hope is inseparable from faith, and presupposes it. This sense of hope is not (only), as I have written before, the force that lets us get up for the forty-seventh time after we have fallen forty-six: it is rather the projecting of faith upon our life in the world. Abraham had faith in God; when he was told to sacrifice Isaac, it was hope in this sense that allowed him to obey. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had faith in God; it was hope in this sense that empowered him, and the rest of the Bekennende Kirche, the “Confessing Church”, to speak up in the furnace of Nazism.

One of the curious things about spirituality is that, negatively put, you need faith in order to have faith; but positively put, once you feel your lack of faith, you in fact have faith. Perhaps this is what it means to possess what one hopes. Contrary to what many people say, faith is not something arbitrarily given to some, withheld from others. It’s a great deal more complex than that. It’s a reality that has many more dimensions than four or five. But it is also the surprising force that allows us to enter that reality and then to live in it; and when we do, hope – espérance -- takes over. We possess what we hope; we know the reality that is unseen. Dazzling.

THE FIFTH PETITION

A couple of posts ago, I said that I’d write something about forgiveness. One of my reasons for doing so is that I’ve been rereading Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) Jesus of Nazareth, one of the most gloriously intelligent books on Christianity I have seen for a long time. And in his section on the Lord’s Prayer, his chapter on the Fifth Petition (“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”) is a model of perceptive and noble insight. I will try to repeat here what he says, partly in quotation, partly in précis, because it is very much worth pondering.

            First, there is trespass – we all know that. ‘How to overcome guilt is a central question for every human life’. What does one do about offence? The first human reaction is to retaliate. As the old Marines’ saying has it, ‘Yea, I shall walk through the valley of death and fear no evil, because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.’ In real life, of course, retaliation has no logical end and becomes vendetta. But ‘with this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation.’

           And it is God, not we, who has taken the initiative. ‘We should keep in mind that God himself – knowing that we human beings stood against him, unreconciled – stepped out of his divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us.’ He washed his disciples’ feet; he told the story of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:25-35).

            So what do we do? Here I have to quote at slightly greater length, because the argument is dense and pertinent. First, if we want to get into this properly, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place?

Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more that a matter of ignoring, or merely trying to forget. Guilt must me worked through, healed, and thus overcome.’

            (Notice that he treats ‘guilt’ not as a feeling, but as a fact. Not ‘I feel guilty’ but ‘I am guilty.’ That is already a biggish step, in a lot of situations.)

            ‘Forgiveness exacts a price – first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself.’ (My emphasis.) This I find extraordinary in its profound perception. The sentence is worth copying out and meditating on.

            ‘As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil, are made new.’

            Sounds wonderful, we say. But does it work in real life? Damned hard. Offence is offence; evil is evil. (It may not help that ‘bad’ and ‘wicked’ have become compliments . . .) We are not good at confronting evil, because when we do we discover how powerful it is. It is bigger than us: as Reinhold Schneider says, ‘it lives in a thousand forms; it occupies the pinnacles of power . . .it bubbles up from the abyss.’ And then he says (to God): ‘Love has just one form – your Son.’

            This is where one the one hand the solution lies, but where on the other hand it gets difficult. ‘The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today.’ For two reasons: one is that, even while we take the horrors of history as proof that God can’t exist, we trivialize evil: we don’t see the horrors as emanations of something. (‘Shit happens.’) The other reason is that we tend to see the human being as being solely an individual, ‘ensconced in himself alone’. We find it hard to think of all human beings as deeply interwoven, and as all in turn being encompassed by ‘the One – the Incarnate Son.’

            Perhaps, says JR, an idea of John Henry Newman’s (the Victorian Anglican who became a Catholic and a Cardinal) my suffice. ‘Newman once said that while God could create the whole world [read: universe] out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender.’

As such, we have a model we can follow: however hard it is, we aren’t pathless. ‘The overcoming of guilt has a price. We must put our heart – or better, our whole existence – on the line. And even this act is insufficient: it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all . . . who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross.’ We need first to give thanks for that, ‘and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love.’ We are not terribly good at this, and we keep falling down; but we are held within the power his His love, which means that our puny attempts ‘can still become a power of healing.’

In all honesty, I’ve never read such a profound and powerful analysis of what it means to forgive – not just the little things, the friend who forgot my birthday or the teacher who gave me an unfair mark, but the big things: they know what they are. To forgive and to be forgiven: it means, inevitably, a relationship, a coming together in a challenge. Without prayer, it’s all but impossible; with prayer, it’s hard, but we are not alone. The Force is with us.   

        

Thanks to Rick McNary at rickmcnary.me for the image.