HELP!

On this Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, and very suitably following the feasts of Michaelmas and of the Guardian Angels, we ask to be protected.

Latin original

CUSTODI, Domine, quæsumus, Ecclesiam tuam propitiatione perpetua; et quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas, tuis semper auxiliis et abstrahatur a noxiis, et ad salutaria dirigatur ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum Amen. 

1549

KEPE we beseche thee, O Lorde, thy Churche with thy perpetuall mercye: and because the frailtie of man without thee, cannot but fall: Kepe us ever by thy helpe, and leade us to al thynges profitable to our salvacion; through Jesus Christe our Lorde. Amen.

1662

Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy : and because the fraily of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the rare occasions when the 1662 revisers were more faithful to the Latin original, in restoring its a noxiis. One wonders why Cranmer left it out. He may have thought it self-evident and considered that its omission would lead the sentence more swiftly and elegantly to its conclusion. The Latin is, as usual, a jewel of compact form and shapely rhythm, employing no less than four cursus tardus and ending in a cursus velox (which, in spite of its name, I always suspect was seen by the writers as slower and more dignified).

The Latin original of Cranmer’s “perpetual mercy” is propitiatio, “an appeasing, atonement, propitiation” – which is very odd. One might translate it as “Keep,, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church in perpetual atonement”; and one wonders if the perpetual atonement may not belong rather to the church than to its keeping: so that God may be being asked to take care of a Church that lives in perpetual atonement. I suspect, though, that it is rather an unusual medieval use of the word, which makes it rather a peace-offering on God’s behalf, and which thus comes a little closer to Cranmer’s “mercy”.

It is a prayer for protection: custodi, Domine. Take care of us, Lord: protect us. And the rest of the prayer makes specific both the protection and the threat. We ask to be protected from “all things hurtful”, and if Cranmer had used 18^th- or 19^th-century punctuation instead of Tudor, he would have put a second comma after “profitable”. Because what dismays us here is not the threat of things hurtful in general, but the threat of things hurtful to our salvation. 

What are those? What can hurt our salvation? Not the horrors of the world: as St Paul put it in his letter to the Christians in Rome, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” No: the only things hurtful to our salvation can come from ourselves. And the Collect understands this: it makes this request because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall. Not the nastiness of man; not his inherent evil; no, his frailty. He is weak. He wants to do everything right; but on his own, on a daily, hourly basis he falls, he screws it up and scuppers his own salvation. So we ask Him to protect us from doingall things hurtful, and to lead us to doingall things profitable, to our salvation.

Again, a close reading of, and meditation on, a brief prayer shows how rich it is in meaning and how it helps us increase our understanding of ourselves in our relation to our loving but doubtless frequently exasperated Father.

THE NIGHT VISITOR

Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Jesus talking with Nicodemus"

I have always been fascinated by Nicodemus. This Pharisee with the Greek name, who came and visited Jesus by night and discussed the faith with him, who was clearly if discreetly convinced and converted, who spoke up at the planned lynching of the adulterous woman, who may have watched the Crucifixion and who afterwards provided an astonishing quantity of costly spices for the funeral -- "a royal burial" as Pope Benedict XVI calls it --, is someone I should have liked to know.

What, I often wonder, was said that night? We know a little: a couple of gently ironic remarks, one by him and a reply by Jesus, about being born again, lead to a long and magnificent discourse by Jesus, which is often cited separately, without our remembering to whom it was said.  But I suspect it was a longer conversation, there on the roof of a house in Jerusalem. I think they talked for most of the night.  

Nicodemus was either a Judaized Greek (there were quite a few) or a Hellenized Jew, of the Pharisee persuasion, which was that of precise ritual and scrupulous devotion. Jesus calls him a "master of Israel", in other words a prominent man, learned and presumably wealthy. So what would Jesus have said to him, before the exchange noted by John? 

I imagine Jesus explaining the essence of his role, and of his relation to the Jewish scriptures. In the first place, Nicodemus, you know the prophet Isaiah, and you know that in the second part of his remarkable book he draws a gripping picture of someone we think of as the Suffering Servant, often seen as a poetic image of the people of Israel. Secondly, you know that we are living in one of those periods when people talk about the coming of a Meschiach, a royal personage who will save and deliver Israel, God's chosen nation, from all oppression: a descendant of David, who will be the new and possibly the eternal King. 

Now we come to the difficult part, Nicodemus. First, the Meschiach and the Suffering Servant are the same person. Second, he is already here and you are talking to him. He is not a king as you imagine one: he is in appearance, and in reality, a perfectly normal human being, one of millions, with a normal human name and place of origin. Yeshua bar-Yousuf from Nazareth [a real town, as real as Buffalo: my daughter got married there]. 

This means that the salvation of Israel now needs to be reinterpreted. The Meschiach is not going to sweep in on a mighty chariot and drive all Israel's enemies into the sea. Did anyone tell you, Nicodemus, about the image I used the other day to explain how all this is going to come about? I said it was like mustard-seed, one of those tiny, tiny seeds that invariably jump out of any pan in which you try to use them for cooking. You plant it, and you have the impression that you've planted nothing much. Yet it grows, and it grows. That's the way the regnum Dei is happening. Notice my tense: I didn't say it will happen, it is happening. It's here. Now. But it's happening quietly, quietly, in a corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. It will probably take long time -- but then, what is time to my Father?

And another thing, Nicodemus. Since this Meschiach is not politically involved with the nation of Israel, you may need to stretch the envelope of that concept very far. Because if "salvation" comes through a man, and one (incidentally) who is likely not long for this world -- dark clouds are gathering over the city down below --, then "Israel" also will be a new term, not limited to a nation or a people. The Israel the Meschiach saves is open, not only to born and circumcised Jews, but to anyone who recognizes Him and draws the consequences. The consequences include being born anew. 

And that is where John and his Gospel begin -- one assumes that Nicodemus had related the rest to him at or shortly after the burial, and that he omitted the first part because both John and most of his readers already knew that. 

I have known Michelangelo's Pieta since I was a teenager; but I never knew the standing figure (some say the sculptor's self-portrait) was Nicodemus. The thought is deeply pleasing. And that intelligent, discreet and generous man may, somewhere, be smiling.

GO ON, QUIVER: OR, IN SEARCH OF JOY

In my rural French parish, the Roman Catholic Church’s current trends have varied results. The priest, a charming if hyperactive little Algerian convert, has distinctly charismatic tendencies. These alienate a number of bourgeois parishioners, but to my amusement the elderly peasant folk seem quite to enjoy them. They like the interruption of the Mass at the Peace, and turn cheerfully to each other for a handshake or a kiss; and they sing the rather appalling mock-folk hymns without turning a hair.

Before the current Year of Mercy, the emphasis was on Joy. RCF, the French Christian (officially ecumenical) Radio, changed its signature phrase to “la joie se partage”: joy is (to be) shared. And a week or two ago, a hymn told us “Tressaillez de joie!” (quiver with joy!). It was sung dutifully, rather spiritlessly, by a large and dutiful congregation comprising all ages. And it’s been making me think about Joy ever since.

First of all, there are terms which don’t normally enter our active vocabulary, sometimes for historical reasons. When I taught university courses in literary history, we used to spend some time considering the word, and the concept, “honour”. Unless one comes from the Mediterranean and points East, this is not a word much used except in the odd stock phrase. My students, interestingly, found “dishonour” much easier to understand than its opposite.

Thinking about the quivers of joy, it occurred to me that Joy is perhaps such a word.  We know it mainly in expressions or titles – “the Joy of Cooking” – and C.S. Lewis had the good fortune to be able to play on his wife’s name in Surprised by Joy. But is it part of our active vocabulary? Pleasure, yes; happiness, yes; relief, yes; but joy? It’s a very strong word, a very deep word. Perhaps almost nothing that we feel is strong and grand enough to be called joy; or perhaps it is but we have become unused to employing that particular word for the feeling. Parents, when they first hold their new baby; a lover, when the beloved first returns the emotion; a father, when his drug-addict kid turns up clean for good; a convict, upon hearing that he has been amnestied; a tennis-player, upon quite unexpectedly winning an almost impossible tournament; is it joy?

This leads to a further question: if we are to quiver with joy, what do we quiver about? The answer, of course, is there, in the hymn; it’s there, in the Bible itself. The answer is Salvation. Our Salvation. But how many of us, outside the Evangelical or Charismatic world, really know what that means, and feel as well as know? And yet it is what Jesus talked about, all the time. It’s what He preached, on the lakeshore as in the synagogue. The Kingdom of God – the reign of God – is here and now. The Messiah whom you’ve been waiting for all these centuries, he’s right here. The Chosen People’s relation to their God has been restored.

Yes, well. But we are not Israel; we are the Gentiles, the goyim, the Nations to whom St Paul was sent to preach – what? That they are the new Israel, and that the God who was previously Israel’s alone is now theirs also. And that because of that, Israel’s salvation too is now theirs also. What does that mean, though? Jesus is the Kingdom of God, in-carnate, made flesh and blood, given to us, rejected by us, killed by us, and resurrected to put an end to the definitive reign of Death. That faith in Him is the new Law. The Ark was empty: as a French commentator put it, you cannot put God under house arrest. What was concrete and present was the Law. And in the new dispensation the Law, too, is found to be a hollow container; Jesus is the new Law. He doesn’t give laws; he is the Law. And he has destroyed Death.

Fine; but we die anyway, right? Yes; but not definitively. He went through death – and what a death. We can only follow him there. But he rose again, as the Creed says; and our faith is that we too shall rise again, recognizable but transformed.

Is not this reason enough for a swooping and embracing joy? Well, it would be, if we could believe it from day to day. But in real life, we think about re-ligio, about the binding-together-again between us and God, mainly as a set of moral duties in which we are never up to scratch. Not a new Law; rather an endless catalogue of good deeds we ought to be doing as gratitude for salvation. But it comes to the same thing. And the Church, let us face it, does little to help. Even the remarkable current Pope, in spite of his text’s title Gaudium et Spes (joy and hope), spends much of his time fustigating  not only the world but the faithful for sins of omission and commission, for lack of care, of love, of mercy. In other words, the Church tends to be more John the Baptist than Jesus; yet at the same time the faithful are told that their behaviour must be exemplary and that they must convert the world by the beauty of their lives.   

Parents know that children change their ways for the better more easily when encouraged and praised than when growled at and  punished. The mainstream Churches need, I think, to learn from the evangelicals to concentrate more on both the need for, and the joy of, salvation. Call it Rescue, if you will: we were all drowning on a leaky life-raft in the ocean, until we were plucked out and take to a safe place. As a civilization, we were starting to think that there was Nothing: Life’s a bitch, then you die. (How people can think that and feel cheerful is beyond me.) And then this luminous man turns up to rescue us, and we kill him; and then he turns up again, on a beach, frying fish and smiling. Now do we feel joy?

Tomorrow is not just Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, before the carne, vale, the farewell to meat for forty days; in England it is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent when we are shriven – we confess our sins and receive forgiveness, so that we can start the exercise of Lent with a clean slate and a joyous heart. Whether we confess privately to a priest, publicly in the General Confession during a service, in our own closet or in our own heart, an intelligent confession will leave us both begging for and receiving forgiveness, ab-solutio, the washing away of all that clogging dirt. So we can begin Ash Wednesday shriven, forgiven. And for forty days we can study to be quiet, we can fast a little or even a lot, we can pray and occupy ourselves intensely with the love – received and given, given and received -- that is Joy. 

"Heaviness may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30)

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.

SCHRODINGER'S CROSS

   Last night I emerged from a dream of an utterly confusing party in Oxford, full of lean intelligent women talking loudly, into its opposite, which presented itself as the Carthusian motto STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. The Cross stands – remains, stands still – while the world turns (lit. is turned). It’s a marvellous motto, and in my mind I saw the Nazareth Village cross, surprisingly small, maybe 7’ high, of unsquared logs, very crude, and on the other hand the Universe as we now know it via Hubble, immense, crowded with heavenly bodies, most of which turn. And the centre of that immensity is that little crude cross, which alone does not move – like Vladimir and Estragon.

      

     As I moved gradually from dreaming to thinking, all this came together with Benedict XVI’s passages, in Jesus of Nazareth, on the Cross as the centre of our faith, Christ the King who reigns from the Cross, etc. Yet then something in my mind asked, ‘But which Cross? The crucifix, the cross with a man on it? Or the empty cross of the Resurrection?’ This, I remembered, was one of the controversies I grew up with, between Catholics and Protestants: the latter refused the crucifix, saying that after the Resurrection any cross imaging our faith should be an empty one.

     The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is a true aporia. On the one hand the Protestants are right: the Resurrection empties the Cross. On the other, the Catholics are right: Christ reigns from the Cross. One needs to imagine the Cross as both occupied and empty at the same time. Schrödinger’s Cross.

     Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. The Cross is central. And yet, was it planned? Only a rigid predestinationist could assert that. When Jesus walked in Galilee, when he taught and healed, was the Cross already inevitable? So many were converted, among them some of the religious ruling class, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. And he spoke ‘with authority’. It would have taken only a few more converts, like Caiphas and Annas, for his message to have succeeded.

     Uh, oh. That sends us straight back to Peter saying stoutly that no, that horror was damn well not going to happen, implying that he wouldn’t let it. And what did Jesus answer? “Get thee behind me, Satan!” So yes, it did have to happen. In the first place, it was really inevitable – which tells us something about Jesus’ message. As someone Benedict XVI quotes put it, a man merely proclaiming that people should love one another would not have been crucified. It was his clear announcement that he was God that made the Cross inevitable.

     So the Cross was necessary. Was it also sufficient? No: it had to be completed by the Resurrection. It had to happen for the New Covenenant to be activated. For only the Cross could lead to the Resurrection; and the Resurrection is the very basis of the New Alliance. ‘If Christ did not rise from the dead, all we preach is stuff and nonsense,’ said St Paul unambiguously (I Cor. 15:14; the whole passage is salutary).

     So the Cross that stands while the world turns is Schrödinger’s Cross. It is to that the Carthusians have turned. It is Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’. So what about that turning world? Have they turned their back upon it? Yes, because a Carthusian lives in cell, having died to the world. No, because his whole life is spent in unimaginably intense prayer for that world – which, after all, is the orbis for love of which God Himself took flesh and offered Himself as the sacrifice for sin.

     We are not Carthusians; yet we might usefully carry Schrödinger’s Cross in our hearts, to remind us of both that immense love that was, and is, given to and for us, and of the victory over Death that has made us free, free to love, for ever.

     The text at my baptism was “Stand then in the freedom wherewith Christ has made you free.”  (Gal. 5:1)

SO NOW WHAT?

Four weeks; four candles; four winds; four? Jung said that Catholicism was the most psychologically adequate form of Christianity because it had completed the Trinity (three: unstable, tense, male) with a fourth, and a female: the Blessed Virgin Mary. And today, Advent Four, in the RC church is a reprise of the Annunciation. We are so close to Christmas that one is unsure quite to do with Advent Four. Cranmer’s 1549 Collect simply reprises the whole of lurching, blocked human life and its need for direction:

LORDE rayse up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our synnes and wickednes, we be sore lette and hindred, thy bountifull grace and mercye, through the satisfaccion of thy sonne our Lord, may spedily deliver us; to whom with thee and the holy gost be honor and glory, worlde without ende. 
 

I like the “raise up thy power and come among us”; yet we mustn’t forget that when He did just that it was to an utterly unimportant couple in inadequate lodgings on a winter’s night far too close to the Solstice for comfort of any kind. He did succour us with great might, but surely not as we would have expected. His bountiful grace and mercy did indeed deliver us and will go on doing so; but once again, not the way we’d expect and probably not the way we should have chosen.

He did and does so per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. I have written on that “per” before and may soon do so again; for now, the point is that His intervention on our behalf happens, and only happens, by the mediation of His only-begotten Son, whose birthday we are about to celebrate. Which means that it can come to us only by our focusing our entire being on that person in whom God came into our stupid, fucked-up, messy, criminal world in order to begin setting it right in the only way worth doing.

No, the coup d’état we sometimes long for wouldn’t work. Try to imagine it. There would be mammoth opposition immediately, with media blitzes, tanks, and possibly nukes. No: He looked at what we had made of his experimental little jewel of a planet; He wept; and He decided the only way to rescue us was the hard way. Hard for us; far, far harder for Him. Tiny bit by tiny bit. A million relapses; a million and one gettings-up. Costing, said T.S. Eliot, not less than everything. The point is, He paid the everything first. Doing so, he showed us such staggering, such scary, such disconcerting love that we quickly killed him and have been embarrassed for over 2,000 years since.

As Fr Jean-Kamel said, the good guys among us keep wanting to do something for God. What we have to get used to is that He’s not interested in our gifts: He’s interested in us. He doesn’t want what we can give him: He’s richer than that already. But He wants us. He just wants us to shut up, stop prancing, and let ourselves be loved like the useless, miserable, incorrigible, repellent, only-a-father-could-love-them dickheads we are. And once we get to that remarkable point – knowing we are less than zip, yet flooded with His love -- then we can do something: not for Him, but for the idiot next door, who oddly enough is carrying His image.

Four candles: it’s coming awfully close. Up to us to let it be real: not a rough beast slouching to be born.