GHOST

 

 

He is the oddity in the Trinity: like Winnie the Pooh’s East Pole, people don’t seem to like to talk about him. Well, Anglicans and Catholics, annyway. He is an ancient embarrassment: it was he, after all, who was at the origin of the notorious filioque clause, on account of which rival groups of medieval monks came to blows. Does he, did he, “proceed from” the Father, or from the Father filioque “and the Son”? The author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (Luke?), on the other hand, is quite at home with him: Pentecost/Whitsun is his feast. Genesis says that he was there at the beginning: like a vast and formless fowl he “brooded over the waters” of the tohu-wa-bohu, the primeval chaos. “By him, all things were made;” yet at the same time he “bloweth where he listeth” and none can tell whence he comes and whither he goes. 

            St Ephrem of Syria was called his harp. Perhaps his wind-harp, sounding as he passed. And there is always in meditations on him a sense of air moving. He is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin: in each case words of three meanings, “breath”, “wind or breeze” and “spirit”. (Our, or rather Cranmer’s, “ghost” comes from the Old English gast, linked to German geist, always a spirit.) In John 20:22 the resurrected Yeshua gives him to the disciples: “and then he breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost”.

            Theologians tell us that he is the love between the Father and the Son. This ties him closely to both, and reminds us that love is the language, the essence, of the Deity; but in no way does it enable, or even encourage, us to regard him as a person. This is a bother in prayer. Do we pray to him? We can pray to the Father; we can pray to the Son; but can we pray to (someone who is) a relation(ship)?

            Strangely, I think we can. It does, of course, seem presumptuous; but no more so that praying to the Creator of everything the Webb telescope sees as if he were our dad, and no more so than calling upon the Resurrected King of Peace and informing him that I, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe, have sinned today. If we can forget scale, and address him firmly but humbly, experience has convinced me that he listens. If we ask him for such things as he is not only able but willing to give, we shall usually receive them: guidance, for instance; direction; love where we lack it; discernment; and courage. 

            And as this happens, and goes on happening, in our nighs and quiet moments, we do gradually get a sense of a person on the other end of the line. A person who rarely speaks in words, but who sometimes forms a perfectly clear idea or response to the eye of our mind. One surprising example: one night, I asked him to help me, a former Protestant, better to understand the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There was silence, both aural and visual; then, suddenly and briefly, a clear vision of a deep well in time, at the bottom of which I saw a clearly prehistoric, clearly female, hand reach out and make fire, and light some kind of primitive candle or oil-lamp. That was all; but it was a clear response, and equally clearly it was up to me to make sense of it. I should be hard put to it to explain it; but my feeling of having understood was, and is, entire. 

            When I need him, I call upon him; and if his answers are never simple, he has never let me down. 

            Accende lumen sensibus:                    unto our senses strike the light
            Infunde amorem cordibus:                 abundant love pour in our hearts
            Infirma nostri corporis                        shore up our bodies’ weakness now
            Virtute firmans perpeti.                      with virtue that will bend nor end. 

 

(from Hrabanus Maurus’s glorious 9^th-century hymn Veni creator Spiritus)

 

SEEING ON A WINDY DAY

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

 

This Beatitude seems simple. Katharos means, at bottom, simply ‘clean’ but goes on to a host of further kinds of cleanliness: ‘purified’ as in water or grain, ‘free of pollution’, ‘free of additions’. And it quickly goes on to the human, where it can mean ‘free of debt’, ‘free of defilement’, ‘honourable’ and even, as for a priest, ‘ceremonially pure’. Kardia is the heart, the seat of feelings and passions, but also the inclination, desire or purpose, and the kardia of wood is its core or pith. And opsontai is the future of horaō, which means ‘to see or behold’.

 

So just as those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth, so those whose heart is clean, pure, free of pollution, honourable, will see God. Simple.

 

Yet the Gospel of Yochanan, John, says ‘No one has seen God at any time’. (John 1:18) Has there never been one who is pure in heart? If this were so, the Beatitude would not be a joyous promise but at worst a savage criticism and at best a Yeshuan hyperbole, like ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Surely this is not what is meant here.

 

I suspect that we have to ponder and probe the seeing. We know that here on earth we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, and that sin, the lack of love, can make us blind to many things. We also know that in such a condition grace may help us: ‘I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.’ Note that we do not help ourselves: Christianity is not like Buddhism, a constant activity of scrupulous self-help to eliminate the dross, to make oneself pure. We are dependent, even for our daily bread. Only grace can make us pure, only the Spirit, the pneuma, the ruach, can make us katharoi. What we can do, what we need desperately to do, is to clear away the junk blocking the doors and windows, and to open them as wide as we can to let the pneuma (which is breath, wind, and spirit) in.

 

And when we do that, when He, that third person of the Trinity, does enter, when the wind blows where it listeth in our soul, then it brings with it the sun: the sun that is also the Son, and the glorious sun that is the emblem of the Father. And then we see God. Not with the eyes of our lurching, rebellious body, perhaps; but with the inward eye that is the bliss, not only of solitude but of faith.

 

 

 

ALL IS REVEALED (?!)

In an ecclesiastical calendar not obsessed with Sundays, today is the Feast of the Epiphany. In France, people have to be reminded that it is not just the feast of the marzipan-filled cake with a bean in it: they come together all through the month of January “pour tirer les rois”, i.e. to draw the kings – to see who gets the bean (invariably a child, who gets a cardboard crown and gets to choose his queen or her king).
    Epiphany, as the local priest reminded us, is Revelation. Not in the sense of the Apocalypse: it is not the opening of a secret book, but the making clearer of something already partly known. It is, for once, a feast of and for scholars: the Three Kings were three Wise Men or Magi: they were scholars, probably from Persia, whose study of the constellations (the distinction between astronomy and astrology came later) had told them that a new king would be born in Judea. One wonders why that news was important enough to make them assemble strange gifts and mount their camels in the dead of winter. Something in their studies must have told them that this would be more than a new monarch in a foreign state: they clearly came prepared for something out of the ordinary. One almost wonders if they had read Isaiah.
    In any case, they were the first goyim, the first Gentiles, to see the new-born Meshiach. And so their feast celebrates the revelation of the Meshiach’s importance for people beyond the Jews, which was to be one of the keys of Yeshua’s preaching, of St Paul’s, and of the whole orientation of the early Church. If the Meshiach had just been a new King of Israel, he might have been important to the region but hardly beyond. Even if he had been an Isaic Meshiach strictly within the Jewish faith, his reputation might have filtered through to a Jewish diaspora throughout the Middle East, but Greeks, Turks and Romans would hardly have thought him relevant.
As it was, though, they ended up listening. And what they heard convinced a surprising number of them that this man, who had healed bodies and souls, who had loved Jews and Samaritans equally, and who had risen from the dead and eaten grilled fish with the living, was a) the Son of God and b) the incarnation of God’s love for the human race in its entirety; that he was the new Alliance, a rainbow that now extended over all the earth; that he was the new Torah, one that embraced not only Jews but any and all who welcomed it/him in faith.
    It also meant that unlike a second King David, who would syllogistically have been mortal and thus temporary, this Meshiach was and is still here: a forgiveness still accessible, a love and a healing still present, right here and now.
    And for those of us who are scholars, this feast is a comforting reminder that even the learned are not excluded from the New Alliance. For the Beatitudes mention the “poor in spirit”, ptochi to pneumati; but those are not necessarily poor in mind or learning: they are those who have humility, who realise that they have nothing to contribute to God and everything to receive from Him. And that, curiously, is something true scholars understand: for over a lifetime of study, the more one learns, the less one feels one truly knows. If we can learn to apply that humility to our humanity, we too my find a narrow gate and slip into the Kingdom of Heaven where we may meet, not only (as Eliot ironised) Sir Philip Sidney but the Three Magi themselves – who would have much to tell us.

THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"

LATE AND SOON

In a time when many are shaken; in the winter season when sunshine is rare; at moments when ways ahead are unclear or menacing; one aid -- never easy, but always there -- is the existence of the Carthusians. Above is their symbol: the seven stars are St Bruno and the six companions with whom he founded the Order; the motto explains the image: "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis" -- "the Cross stands, while the world turns". To their writings, always anonymous, we can turn when the world is too much with us. And from one of their books,  The Wound of Love: a Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 1994), I share this magnificent passage of consolation.

           The encounter that love desires, between God and me, involves my whole being. Its rendezvous will be the truth, communion between my true self and the true God. But who am I? I enter into the deep caverns of my spirit in order to discover myself and then to be able to give myself. I encounter my demons, the dark forces that dwell in me. I name some of them, but they are legion. I try to determine my interior face, but it dissolves into a thousand changing masks. I want to offer my heart, but my freedom shows itself host to innumerable determinisms, the majority of which elude me. So, am I only the ephemeral confluence of impersonal and obscure forces?

            No, even if all the ‘matter’ of my being were such, my spirit can look at it from outside and say yes or no to it. Seeing what little light I have, I can trust in the light that comes from God and receive from his word the ultimate knowledge of myself. So I know, in faith, that I am made in the image of God, a subject endowed with freedom, called by God to a communion of love, son of the Father in the Son, by the gift of the Spirit. It is the Spirit alone who can tell me my name in the silence of my heart. So let me be silent in prayer in order to hear who I am. My chastity is humble attention before the mystery that dwells in me, that transcends me.

'It is the Spirit alone who can tell me my name in the silence of my heart. So let me be silent in prayer in order to hear who I am.'