KIDDING?

 

We all know the Gospel story of Yeshua calling up a little child, pointing to it, and telling the disciples and passers-by that whoever is not ready to accept the Kingdom (read: kingship) of God like such a child cannot enter there. But what does he mean? Those who have small children love them desperately but in no way and at no time idealise them. They are adorable, selfish, slobby, brattish, quarrelsome and difficult at meals. Yeshua, as a 31-year-old bachelor, might have idealised the child in question; but as one who was Divine as well as very human, it’s doubtful. So, knowing everything about children, how could he say that that is what we should become to be citizens of the Kingdom?

            I think he was thinking first of all about a child’s simplicity. If a little girl is standing by the roadside with her father, waiting to cross, she sticks up her hand without looking, knowing that it will find the big strong secure hand beside her. A small boy who wants something from his parents asks for it. (He may or may not get it, but that doesn’t stop him asking.) Children, in relation to adults they trust, are simple and direct.

            Secondly, children naturally and necessarily experience love as a gift. They know that adults are powerful in ways that they themselves are not, and so they know that love is something they receive. Not necessarily in the form of concrete gifts, but in the form of hugs, comfort, bedtime stories, occasional treats, and Winnie-the-Pooh. If they are fortunate enough to have such love on a daily basis, they take it for granted. One day, if they meet other children who do not have it and are miserable, they will begin not to take it for granted. But meanwhile, they regard it as natural. And return it, naturally. 

            Thirdly, how do they love? First of all, it’s a love of belonging. My Daddy’s mine. My Mummy’s mine. Jackie is my brother. Lucy’s my sister. This is my house. Bingo is my dog. They all belong to me – this I know. What I don’t know, or can’t put into words,  is that I belong to them, and that thus we belong to each other.

 Then, it’s without question. Sometimes they hate Daddy, sometimes they love him, but they don’t doubt him. 

 

            Here, surely, there are lessons for those of us who wondered what the man across from us was talking about when pointing to the little kid. In relation to our Father (who is in heaven), be simple. Be direct. When you receive blessings in whatever form, recognise them as gifts from that large being who loves you. Give him a hug in return. Then go on with your day, and learn to live the  same way with those around you. If it moves, hug it. If it hits you, hit it back smartly and then hug it while you both cry. If you break something, confess and say you’re sorry (and mean it), and He will forgive you. Don’t be clever and doubt him; don’t be clever and try to outsmart him; if you want to be clever, find new ways of loving him and loving your neighbour. Channel your inner 7-year-old.

 

[What, a friend’s voice whispers in my mind, if you have never known this kind of loving happy childhood? If yours was miserable, violent, poor, and abusive? Well, I think that he would tell you a) to realise that you are now loved for real, b) that you can therefore know that trust is possible, and that c) you can therefore tell him all your past miseries, knowing that he will never tell anyone and that he will love you all the more for having told him.]

[And if you are handicapped or sick or in pain, tell him that and listen. You may hear him whisper that he knows what pain is like, he’s been there before you, and that he hopes you’ll remember what he said to the Good Thief on the cross next door. He may not be able to make it all go away, but he will give you without stint, give you strength and endless love.]

STORMS AND THE HEART - TRINITY 8

Mitch Dobrowner, 'Storm Over Field'

Deus, cuius providentia in sui dispositione non fallitur, te supplices exoramus ut noxia cuncta submoveas et omnia nobis profutura concedas. Per.

O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Collect for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity)

For a devout person, the Acknowledgement of this collect is self-evident: since God is omnipotent, His providence orders all things in heaven and earth, and cannot fail. For one who lives in the world with open eyes, however, it seems at first little short of monstrous. For taken literally it means that everything that occurs is intended so to happen by God: which would then include earthquakes, tsunamis, the St Batholomew’s Massacre, Passchendaele, torture, lynchings, Chernobyl and homo homini lupus.

            How, then should  we take it? For the dogma of Divine omnipotence is not in doubt. With one exception, I have always said. God can do anything, except go against his own nature. And since His nature is Love, and Love cannot include compulsion, He cannot force men to return His love. Hence, they are free; and when they choose the Adversary, who delights in cruelty and revels in blood and suffering, God weeps hot cosmic tears. It is not up to Him, it is up to us to return His love for us, and to persuade others that (to quote another Collect) ‘in knowledge of Him standeth [their] eternal life, and that in His service is perfect freedom’.

            That leaves the earthquakes and the tsunamis, which even insurance companies call Acts of God. We have learnt, over the ages and with the growth of science, that in fact they are acts of nature and the elements. Can God prevent them? Technically, perhaps He could: Exodus tells us that He intervened at the Sea of Reeds. But as I have said elsewhere, it seems unlikely that God micromanages His creation. He may see each sparrow that falls, but He does not stop its falling. It seems more probable that what matters to Him is the human heart. It is the heart that He loves; and if it knows and loves Him in return, then it, and all it touches, is ‘ordered by His never-failing providence’. It can still, as a child to a loving father, ask Him to put away from us all hurtful things and give us what will do us good; but it trusts Him to do so according to His will and insight, which may not be the same as our wishes and desires.

            But among the earthquakes and tsunamis are also the hideous medical afflictions that blight some lives. And here it is all at its hardest: these are the real tests of our re-ligio.  The only decent response to these, for those of us untouched by them, is humility and silence: to do what we can to help when we come into contact with them, but in no way to preach to their victims. We can and must pray for them; and what we can pray is that they may come to, or remain in, the knowledge and love of God, and that if it be His will, their infirmities may be relieved. For history is full of the stories of extreme sufferers whose faith nevertheless so shone about them as to bless and comfort their entourage. We may admire and be inspired by them; but if we are moderately healthy, humility and silence is still our watchword. God’s providence never fails: His grace always prevents and follows and accompanies us, and we have access to it in all times and in all places; but His ways are, it is true, sometimes dark to our understanding. Hence humility; silence; and prayer. Always and everywhere: prayer.

MIRACLES

Fr Alexis Helg

 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment than for you.…” (Luke 10:13-14)

This, today’s reading in the Catholic (and now Anglican also) Lectionary, received an excellent comment in the admirable Prions en Eglise booklet from Fr Alexis Helg, a Swiss religious in the Order of St John. He writes about reacting to miracles, which clearly the cities St Luke mentions got wrong. Do we, he wondered, get it right? Can we discern miracles when we see them?

This got me thinking. First: as we know, the Age of Miracles is over. What that means I doubt if anyone is quite sure. I suppose, in a way, they were (or were seen as, or were – as in Chorazin -- not seen as) a sort of Close Encounters of the First Kind: something overwhelming and against all we know of the laws of Nature. Six large amphorae of water suddenly turn into Chambolle-Musigny; a blind man suddenly becomes sighted; a paralytic takes up his camp-bed and dances down the road singing; a man several days dead comes lurchingly to life. And hundreds of ordinary bystanders see it happening, and the news goes viral. That was then; this is now. I don’t want to go into the 19^th-century style rationalist “explanations” of the miracles; if I can believe Christ rose from the dead I can believe the others. But that was then, this is now. Why did that Age end?

Perhaps a better question is: why did it happen in the first place? If, as we now believe, God does not suddenly appear on all the world’s video screens, overwhelming the planet, because He is love and that is not the way love works; if love can work only in freedom of response; then why bother with all those miracles back then?

One possible explanation is that they were a result of the Hypostatic Union, i.e. of the unique combination of divinity and humanity in Yeshua Bar-Yousuf, the carpenter from Nazareth alias Son of God. Imagine his very human burst of feeling upon seeing an exhausted paralytic begging in the dust and 110º heat, or upon  hearing that one of his best friends, still young, was dead. We can share that; what we can’t share is that in God, Will is Act: so when he feels it, something happens: the poor bugger gets up and walks, Lazarus stumbles forth, blinking.  

(One of the alarming but often likeable things about Jesus’ humanity is his fits of sheer temper: the passage from Luke above surely is one, as, I suspect, is the terrifying passage about bringing not peace but a sword, and the Great Whupping of the merchants in the Temple.)

This explanation of the miracles would explain why they ceased (though not why one or two generations of Apostles still managed them). Now, says Fr Helg astutely, we need to look more closely around us to see miracles, and when we do see them, we need to learn to connect them with God as we live in a world that does not do so naturally. But – I would ask Fr Helg – how should we so connect them? If we do not believe that God micromanages creation – and we need to not believe this in order to stay sane: does God allow Daech? does God allow the suffering of terminal Parkinsons patients? is sickness punishment for sin? --, then how should we connect the miracles we may observe with Him?

I don’t have an answer for this, or not a reasonable one at least. The one thing that occurs to me is that our unconscious sometimes understands things for which our (and I mean our collective) reason is not ready. When we see a miracle, something in us may connect it with God, and if that happens, we instinctively give thanks. That instinct may some day be justified by a new understanding that our minds can confirm; meanwhile, it may be a deep truth implanted in our human spirit by a Spirit rather more Divine. 

ASTONISHING

As a pendant to my recent post on the importance of thought in faith, I thought I would mention a recent experience of quite another kind. I had been thinking about prayer and what it can legitimately request; and as so often, more and more of the things we tend to ask for came in my mind to resemble Huck Finn’s fish-hooks. To me this is still one of the great mysteries of faith. We are encouraged to pray for others; and if we love them or even merely wish them well, we quite naturally pray for their healing if they are sick, for their joy if they are miserable, for their victory if they are in any kind of battle. And yet such results may or may not come to pass, according to what seems either blind chance or materially explicable results. Clearly to any such prayer we must add a te Deo volente, ‘if it please thee, Lord’. 

For what, then, can we pray unconditionally? For ourselves to come, for others to be brought, to the (greater) knowledge and love of God, was my conclusion. For an increase in these may take place in sickness as in health, in unhappiness as in joy, in defeat as in victory. 
And as, in consequence, I made this prayer, feeling (and saying) that such an increase would be a great blessing for me, I had a sudden and vivid sense of the Risen Lord himself at my side, who said, “Oh, and such a blessing for me!” And who then left.

An extraordinary thought, which I suspect others than myself may also find new and inspiring. We know that from the Incarnation to the Passion, his life was a constant gift of love and humility. But how often do we stop to think that our coming (closer) to the knowledge and love of him may be experienced as a blessing by him? It is of course the point of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and such points we often understand as it were at a distance; but here it was present, personal, and immediate. If you, Aardvark Zygote, in any way increased your openness to his love yesterday, you have given him a day of pure happiness and thanksgiving. Imagine a spontaneous smile of pleasure on his face as he puts another fish on the fire. “Shalom, Aardvark! I was so hoping you’d come! What joy!”


The image is of a crucifix in the castle of  Javier in Northeast Spain, known as 'the smiling Christ'. Probably 15th century.