MOVING AND PROFOUND

 The French author Daniel-Rops published, in 1952, a little book called "Missa Est" with very fine B&W photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot and a series of brief texts explaining parts of the Mass followed by short meditations on each part. Here is his meditation on the Offering of the bread and wine (my translation):

If you have nothing else to offer the Lord, lay before Him only your works and your travails:

this piece of bread resting there on the paten cost many men many efforts.

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

for the wine to be poured into the chalice, did the grapes not have to be trampled and their skin opened?

If all you have inside you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all humanity’s anguish:

let your hands lift up those sad things, for Mercy has received them in advance in His Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to offer and implore, if all inside you is absence and abandonment:

only accept in silence that Another take care of you on your behalf and accept you, so that the Offering and the Offerer may be one gift. 

EASTER WITHOUT MARKERS

For a variety of reasons, this Easter season has been very different. No church services, much busyness, absolutely nothing conducive to quiet, ritual, or contemplation. What to do in such a case?

What it has done is make me think more deeply about the Passion and the Resurrection, quite apart from ritual and in ways more individual than ecclesial. On Good Friday I awoke at 5 and spent two hours meditating on the day. I’ll share some of the thoughts.

      1.     The Anglican Communion service reads, in the Prayer of Consecration, “On the night that he was betrayed . . .” The new Catholic version says “On the night that he entered freely into his Passion . . .” At first I used to trip over this last version, but I have come to agree with it and like it (except rhythmically). It emphasises Yeshua’s willed accord with the Father’s will; his clear understanding that this death, grisly as it was, was the whole point of the Meshiach’s life and activity. Contrary to much Messianic thinking that wanted a new David to deliver Israel from its enemies, Yeshua’s interpretation was that of Isaiah. The Meshiach’s role went infinitely further than that of a political liberator: it aimed to liberate humanity from its Enemy – Satan, sin, and death. And this was possible only through the Meshiach himself becoming the Paschal sacrifice. So, human indeed, he quakes, he grieves, but he nevertheless goes forth. The Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood is doubtless factually wrong but also spiritually right in seeing Christ as a “young hero” voluntarily ascending the Cross.

      

      2.     I am always fascinated by the fact that his last words were two quotations from the Psalms. That shows, to cite Bonhoeffer, the degree to which the Psalter was Yeshua’s prayer-book. Having tried to say Morning and/or Evening Prayer regularly during Lent, I found reading through the Psalter one of the most moving parts of the experience. It is so wonderfully Jewish in its constant dialogue with the Creator: thankful, suffering, indignant (“Up, Lord!”), cursing, adoring and praising, it shows us how to relate to a sometimes distant and almost always (ostensibly) silent God.

      3.     The Crucifixion was necessary, because without it there could be no Resurrection. Perhaps what it teaches us is that our death too is necessary, and that we too follow him in a resurrection: not in the flesh – as his had to be, temporarily, to make people understand – but in the “body” of our post-mortem life, whatever that may look and feel like. No caterpillar, I suspect, has the faintest idea beforehand of what it feel like to be a butterfly.

      4.     Yochanan, St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named, thrills me, not only because of his mystical understanding and his poetic writing but because he was the only disciple not to have fled the Cross. He and the women stayed till the end. Perhaps that is one reason for the depth of his comprehension? It came to equal Miriam’s, which is why it was he who was detailed to look after her.

      5.     “Give us that peace which the world cannot give.” This impresses itself upon me more and more. The world can give suffering; the world can give comfort, and fun. But it cannot give true peace. When I look at those who live without faith, I mostly see a deep underlying sadness; those who live in faith are not exempt from pain and suffering, but they see meaning and coherence, and know that they are loved. 

      6.     The paradox of the Cross is inexhaustible. Its horror is bottomless, its joy is endless.

      7.     What, exactly, is the Good News that Yeshua preached? That you are not bound nor bounded by your self. That the Kingdom, the Reign, of God is here now. That it is the reign of Love, and that what you have to do, all you have to do, is relax and let it take you over. That you need to open the windows, doors and shutters of your soul and let the Ruach, Pneuma, Spiritus in. That if you live from day to day, hour to hour, by what it tells you, the Father, Son, and Spirit will come and live in you. That you are loved as you are, not as you might be if you were a better person. (That is really and truly hard to take on board!) That you can live day by day in subservience, in filial or servantlike devotion to something, Someone, greater than you are without losing your independence or your pride. On the contrary, it will increase your stature by making it irrelevant.  

OH SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

It is an old, a classic, and indeed even on occasion a Biblical saying that God is invisible. But maybe He fixed all that.

First of all, He sent His only-begotten Son among us in the form – indeed in the fleshly reality – of an ordinary bloke, Josh the carpenter from Slough. Who gradually became known to more an more people as Josh the Preacher, as Josh the Healer, as Josh the Holy Man, and finally as the Son of God. So in him, God had made Himself visible, touchable, talkable-to. (As a fine Canadian Jewish poet once said to me over dinner, “Come on, Roger, Jesus is my brother. But God??? My brother farts. Does God fart?” And I said, “Yup.”)

But then, He went a stage further. This same Jesus said, on several occasions, “Whatever you do to, or for, any of these people, you do to, or for, me.” The Samaritan did it for the traveller: he did it for Jesus. And Jesus is (the Son of) God. The second Person of the Trinity. So here is the new syllogism: Premise 1 – Whatever you do for a person in need, you do for Jesus. Premise 2 – Jesus is God. Conclusion – every human being, at least in the mode of need, is Jesus, i.e. (the Son of) God.

The mode of need is the key. On the lowest level, it means that those in the greatest need, those suffering most, have priority. The stockbroker down the street doesn’t need my fifty Euros: the old woman who can’t pay her electricity bill and shivers, does.

But there are other levels, and simultaneously. The stockbroker may be well off financially, but he may have just learned that he, or his beloved wife, has cancer. As he drives distractedly to work, in a dense fog of misery, he too is in the mode of need; he too, for you or me, is Jesus, i.e. (the Son of) God.

There are harder levels still. The stockbroker may be a shit. He may behave vilely to others, he may be odious politically, he may be a homophobic anti-Semite who insults Africans (or a gay African Jew who defends ISIS), he may beat his wife and cheat his clients. What made him that way? Is he beyond hope? Perhaps he is; perhaps he has built for his own soul the Hell it will spend eternity in. God (as we say) knows. But do we? Do we know for certain that there is not a corner of his miserable being that is in raging need-mode? If there is, that tiny corner of him is Jesus, i.e. (the Son of) God.

These are extrapolations, of course. But Jesus started it: he it was who originally made the equivalence. And in doing so, he invited us to make it also.

And he didn’t tell us at what level, if any, to stop. Look at his own behaviour. The look of infinite sadness he gave Judas as Judas got up from the dinner table and made for the door. The look of profound, if ironic, sympathy he gave Pontius Pilate, standing before him in a ridiculous bloodstained cape with a circle of thorns on his head. And the prayer he made for the bored, tired and depressed soldiers hammering nails through his hands and feet. (“Another day, another cross. Get me out of this horrible country. Get me out of the army.”) He doesn’t seem to have acknowledged limits.

An Internet meme I’ve shared says, “Every stranger you meet is going through a terrible battle you know nothing about.” That seems to sum it up. Paradoxically, the mode of need is what makes God visible. Every day. On the bus. In the shop. Waiting to be clothed, fed, helped, respected, loved. What a curious faith we Christians have.

OF CASH, OF CAMELS, AND OF TIGHT PLACES

A Needle's Eye in Jerusalem

Today’s Gospel reading in the now-combined Roman Catholic and Anglican Lectionaries was St Mark’s rather touching story of the young man who came to Jesus and asked what he should do to obtain eternal life. Jesus told him that as a good Jew, he ought to know the answer: keep the Commandments. Yes, but I’ve done that faithfully all my life, said the youth sadly; implying that he felt there was still some essential ingredient missing. Jesus, says Mark, looked at him, and loved him. I’ve always imagined Jesus previously occupied with something else, and as it were replying over his shoulder, almost mechanically. And only now turning and looking at him, and ‘loving him’. There aren’t a lot of places in the Gospels where we are told that Jesus loved someone. John, of course; Martha, Mary, and Lazarus; and this anonymous young man, who thus finds himself in very select company. Jesus looked at him, and loved him, and saw at once what the lack was. Go sell your possessions, give what they bring to the poor, and come and follow me – sensing perhaps already that the Twelve would become Eleven?

            This, clearly, was not what the youth had been prepared for. He thought for a minute, then with infinite sadness shook his head and walked slowly away, ‘because he had many possessions’. And Jesus, equally sad, turned to his disciples and said, How hard it is for someone who has much to get into the Kingdom of Heaven! It is harder than it is for a camel to get through the Needle’s Eye.

            We were reminded that Needles' Eyes were particularly narrow gates in Jerusalem, used by pedestrians after the great gates were shut, and that even a very young and skinny camel would have a hard time getting through, let alone a plump or laden one. (Also, apparently, the rich and grand wouldn't use them because it mean stooping and squeezing, most undignified.)

            What I found interesting in both the homily that followed and in the commentaries in Prions en Eglise, by Emmanuel Schwab and Marc Sevin, was the way they all pointed up a lesson, a moral, that had not occurred to me. The obvious moral is depressing to all but the dispossessed; but as Fr Jean-Kamel pointed out, we are all rich in something. As Fr Schwab wrote, if selling all your possessions was the point, you would be buying your way into the kingdom. No, the point is that any riches you have – money, goods, talent, sophistication, intelligence, culture, beauty, strength, generosity, what you will – any wealth you have that serves to make you feel secure and stops you a) helping those who need it and b) pulling up sticks and following Jesus – this is what you have to learn to distance yourself from. Not to get rid of, necessarily; but to regard with equanimity and to give. To give to those who need it; to give to Him who is the Kingdom.

            Again, the point is not necessarily to donate everything to the local food bank or to create an association helping leukemia-patients in Angola. As someone else wrote, what is asked of us is being there. Not to be in our parallel world of Facebook or Twitter or Nintendo; not to dwell in a cherished past; not to strain toward a hoped-for future; but to be there in God’s time: the present. As a wonderful Sixties book put it: Remember Be Here Now. If you wear your riches lightly, you can be there for whoever needs you right now, at any time, and all your riches will be available at once. If you wear them lightly, you can be there and follow when He calls, right now, at any time. If each of us is the rich young man, then each of us is on the receiving end of that look of Jesus’s, and of that loving. In very select company.    

CODA: How not to walk away grieving. 
After publishing this, I remembered that there was another point to the commentaries I had read. The way not to be 'rich' is to be poor.  To be poor in spirit is to be blessed. How does one become poor in spirit? By realising, in the bottom of one's heart, that one can give oneself nothing. That everything is given by God, and that we need to ask for everything. If the real riches are those of the spirit, then we are all poor. Seek, and you shall find. Ask, and it shall be given to you. Given to you, not earned by you. Quæsumus, Domine. Gratias agimus tibi.

IN CASE YOU WONDERED

For many of us, prayer has its moments of frustration, mechanicalness, even tedium. Just in case we wondered what, in the end, was the good of it all, I found a little text by the 13th-century beguine Mechtild of Magdeburg (who knew a thing or two about it) that picks us up by the scruff of the neck and firmly reminds us what it's all about. 

The prayer of him that prays with all his might

has great power.

The embittered heart it softens,

the saddened heart it lightens,

the impoverished heart it turns to riches,

and the foolish heart to wisdom.

The timid heart it emboldens,

and the afflicted heart it relieves.

To the blinded heart it gives light,

and to the chilly heart a fiery warmth.

It calls down great God into the narrow heart,

and lifts the starved into God's plenty.

It reunites two lovers,

God and the soul,

in a wondrous place where they converse of love.

SAVING LIVES

I was struck, this morning, by the brief sermon of our new (Catholic) parish priest, a small, bouncy Algerian enthusiast (in the complete sense of the word). His liturgies are a little happy-clappy for my liking, but he is utterly sincere and suffused with real joy – which is both unusual and hard to resist.

   His sermon was, appropriately, about joy. As I continue my journey of faith, he said, and it’s been 27 years now, I find myself more and more filled with happiness and light. A happiness and a light that need to be shared.

   There are still, beloved (he said), religious – monks and nuns – and priests, and lay people too, who are steeped in Jansenism. They wear long gloomy faces, and they act as if they were called to bear the whole world and its misery on their shoulders. Well, let me tell you something, he continued: we are not called to bear the world and its misery on our backs. It is God Who bears the world and its misery! And meanwhile, He gives us what is most precious to Him: His own Son, Whom we are about to receive here in the communion. Those two facts alone should make us dance with joy! (I told you he is exuberant.) If we can let that joy flow through us and touch those we come in contact with, healing will take place. Sometimes a smile can save a life.

   Beyond Father Jean-Kamel’s enthusiasm, I was struck by the resemblance of some of this to my own recent thoughts about “flowing through”. I’m increasingly aware that what we can pray for, ultimately, is to be filled with the Spirit. As I said not long ago, aches and pains and contrarieties can open small shutters and windows that will let the Spirit into our carefully-protected egos. And a prayer for that is almost always answered. But then what? As it, as He, fills us, do we just swell like the bullfrog and pop? The point, of course, is that as we are filled with the Spirit, through all those shutters and windows, that same Spirit should flow through us and out of us again. Both upward – back to God – and outward, to all those people around us who are stressed, irritated, miserable, frustrated, exhausted, lonely and – as the French say – “ill in their skin” (mal dans leur peau).

That doesn’t mean that we should necessarily go out looking for sad people. To me, one of the interesting features of the Parable of the Good Samaritan has always been the fact that the Samaritan (we might call him the Moroccan, or the Bulgarian, or the Mexican) was on a business trip; when he found the beaten traveller, he took him to the nearest inn, paid the landlord to patch him up and treat him well, and went on his way. He did not set up a foundation to help robbed and beaten travellers; he didn’t go all over looking for them. He just did what needed to be done for a guy he stumbled upon. The lesson here is that bringing joy to others isn’t a life-changing occupation: it’s a small but enormous sea-change in our daily humdrumlies. As the Facebook sign I shared not long ago said: Be kind, the person you meet is engaged in an enormous battle you know nothing about. But if there is a Spirit flowing through and out of you, it will touch those persons in the middle of their battle, and (to quote Spenser) add faith unto their force. And, your smile having perhaps saved a life, you go on with your trip.

Thanks to Roona-MBH for the image.