PLENI SUNT

 

·      “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that has faith in me, even though he dies, shall live. And all that live and have faith in me shall never die.” (John 11:25)

·      Why are we believers not in a state of perpetual wonder at the magnitude of the gift we have received? Perhaps because we are not often faced with evidence of it in our daily lives. Getting and spending we lay waste our wonder. Worse, infirmities and blows befall us, and worse befalls the Umwelt, the wider world; all of which the Adversary incites us to parse as counter-evidence.

·      Is there, then, a way back, or forward, into recognition and thus renewal? Yes.

·      Pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua. We live, move and have our being in an ocean of God’s glory. Oh yeah? say our atheist friends. Yeah.

·      Begin at beginners’ level: an April day in the Southern French countryside. Everything is in flower, from the humble campion via pale irises and roses’ intensity to the pouring gold of laburnums and the Tyrian shout of Judas-trees. Bees crawl over the wistaria in an ecstasy of fulfilment. A cuckoo sounds in the distance. Bright golden sunshine touches your eyelids, and a cool breeze murmurs to your hair. Yes, you say to yourself: this one’s easy. Nature doesn’t get much better. Glory is all about.

·      The Spoiler, though, is only briefly embarrassed. Look, he says. You are walking slowly, with two sticks. You discover a new pain every day. You have prostate cancer. Your neighbour has had much of his intestine removed and carries a stroma. One of your friends ended up, too young, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Your mother died of a stroke after five interminable years of Alzheimer’s. Glorious?

·      After a brief prayer you reply, Yes. I am here, giving thanks and praise; not only for Thibault the donkey whose nose I just stroked, but for his lookalike, the young radiotherapist who treated my cancer, and the tireless ladies who tended his machine. My neighbour has kept his huge echoing laugh and every scrap of his fighting soul. My friend was cared for with extraordinary love by his wife, a nurse, and his condition brought his friends and colleagues to organise an entire small conference in his honour, in his own remote city, where he was surrounded by honour and affection in his last year. And my mother’s illness brought out in my father a depth of sacrificial love and self-abnegation neither he nor we dreamed he possessed. All conditions of the earth earthy; but that terra was and is plena also of glory.

·      The Contrarian gnashes his teeth, allowing you at last to hear what that sounds like. As we know, he is expert at teleportation; and he whisks you in a whoosh to another part of the country where the houses are experiencing their fifth flooding in two months, women and men are hopelessly piling furniture and working mops and pumps and discovering that their insurance has found an excuse not to pay up even as their walls crack and peel with the absorbed moisture. Aye, he grins. There’s glory for you.

·      But his eyes darken as the Fire Brigade appears. The young men and women are all volunteers, part-timers, the friends and neighbours of the afflicted, They turn up with boats of several kinds, helped by local farmers with tall tractors that brush aside the water; they help the elderly out of their flooded houses, wrap them in blankets and take them to the high-school gym where other volunteers are already preparing hot coffee, tea and cocoa, as well as comforting hugs. Glory creeps in through the windows and swirls invisibly among the rafters. Level Three, and it’s still there: stronger than ever, perhaps.

·      Now the Enemy switches on the television even as he tunes your smartphone to three different social networks simultaneously. As casualty figures from Sudan mingle with Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Islamist decapitations in the Middle East and teenagers kicking other teenagers to death in a Parisian suburb, he grins. Gloria in excelsis? he hisses.

·      Yes, well, this is the graduate course. Were you ever told it was going to be easy? You go back and pray. Time out: need to work on this one. And yet, and yet, something comes tiptoeing out of the wreckage and the gore. Something difficult at first to identify, but call it Horror. You can see it in the faces of the reporters in Boutcha, in the womens’ eyes behind the niqabs, and in the classmates of the French teenagers as well as their parents. It is a strange glory, this: it crawls with agonizing slowness from Fear to No Complicity to Resistance – and it is a glory, perhaps the greatest even: a glory crowned with thorns.  

·      So: pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua? Indeed they are; but often unexpectedly. Which brings us back to That Man. Yeshua Meshiach. Who was expected to turn up as a new King David, with an army, to take Jerusalem and then make the Romans an offer they couldn’t refuse; and who instead appeared as a tall, bony itinerant rabbi striding through the North Country, preaching in villages an unlikely message of returning the measureless love of an invisible Father and extending risky affection to troublesome neighbours. A supposed monarch who rode into town on a donkey; a holy man who let himself be put to a hideous death with slaves and killers; a dead man who came back and ate fish on the beach with his friends. From his life to his message to his return, everything about him is unexpected. You can’t make this up. This isn’t a religion: gods don’t act like this. Gods drink nectar on mountaintops and flirt with nymphs.

·      So, this being the case, we may expect gloria sua also not always to be probable either. And it works both ways. If we learn to recognize the glory, from the laburnums all the way to the resistance, then perhaps we can begin to understand the Gift – a Gift which, like the glory, lives below and beside our everyday life, an insistent and reassuring heartbeat. A vita eterna that has already begun, coursing silently but mightily through our days, always only the whistle-thin membrane of a prayer away.

THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

 Tomorrow is the glory of all the saints. The grand saints, who are known to millions: St Mary Magdalen, St Francis, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Teresa of Avila, Ste Thérèse of Lisieux, and my beloved patron saint St John (Yochanan), the only disciple who didn’t skedaddle from Golgotha but stayed at the foot of the Cross.  But also the little saints whom nobody knows except their neighbours, their family members, or the customers of the store or restaurant or gas station where they serve, or the passengers of the taxi they drive. The people who are always there when you are ill and feeling down, who give you a smile on a grim day, who make you feel for a moment that life is not so bad after all. The people of whom you know that they feel your pain – and the knowing already calms it a little. 

            Tomorrow, then, is their feast. Worth celebrating hugely. Buy them a beer, or just lift your glass and think of them with love.

            But tonight: the Eve. What is the Eve? La veille, as the French say. And in that word is the verb veiller, to watch, to stay awake and alert. Because, said the ancients, on the Eve of such a feast, a feast of so much sheer goodness, the forces that cannot bear the goodness, that find it intolerable, will come out and torment. They will flly and slide and whisper around our houses; they will try to enter our minds and persuade us that the world is lost, that Evil has allready won, that there is no hope, and that we all are just killers without a gun. 

            And that – tell your children – that is why we carve pumpkins into grimaces, why we parody evil in silly costumes, why we celebrate goofy trick-or-treats, why we have drunken parties: to taunt the evil spirits, to show them that we are not afraid, because All the Saints are with us, and tomorrow we will celebrate them with dignity and style, and be thankful for their prayers and their protection. We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the universe, but we are also children of God, and we are loved. We are never alone under a black sky; we are never delivered utterly unto hate; we are loved, and the Evil One cannot defeat our faith. 

Happy Hallowe’en!

IN THE BREACH

In reaction to the events in Israel, we feel intolerably weak, helpless, and uncomfortably near to despair. Yet, thinking of this in the small hours, I was drawn to contemplate the Carthusians. If we believe, as several Popes have said publicly, that the contemplative orders have an important part to play in the life of the Church, we must recognise that that function can only be based on the power of prayer. Their sole business is to pray for the world; given that fact, the combined force of 450 professional prayer generators (to count only the number of Carthusians at present in the world) must be enormous. And if we add to that all the other orders for whom prayer is their central occupation, we arrive at a vast concentration of power. Such power is of the utmost importance when the hounds of Hell are loosed upon the world. The media speak of counter-offensives upon the battlefields in Ukraine; in the chaos unleashed in the Middle East military and propaganda weapons cancel each other out and atrocities are joined and compounded by vengeance. At such times diplomacy is an indispensable component; but, like all adult acts of civilisation,  it is slow to start and almost imperceptible in its successes.

A Godless world has no more to offer and no other remedies to try. But faith has armies reason knows not. Legions of angels, to be sure; but while they are mentioned in Scripture, they have not often been perceived in earthly action. No; as St Teresa of Avila said, we need to remember that God has on earth no hands, no eyes, no ears other than ours. This may be enough for what is known as humanitarian aid; but there is more. For there is in this world a vast army that works and fights in alliance, in joint command, in communion, with the forces of Heaven: the immense, international, millions-strong army of prayer. And of this army, the contemplative orders are the commandos, the special forces, the shock troops. 

What can we do to support them? We are their reservists, their Territorials, their National Guard. We pray for them, we study them, we make them known, we help them, we do some recruiting for them: they do none for themselves. 

And finally, let us not forget that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God, a God who singled out this tiny out-of-the-way planet in His vast creation for a special environment of shalom, salaam, peace, and a malkut, a kingdom, a reign, of love between Himself and the humanity He drew out of its oceans. A God Whom we, as a race, repeatedly drive to hot tears of near-despair; but a God Who never gives up on us as long as prayer – the language of love He taught us in our infancy – persists and thrives.  

  

 

OF HOMESICKNESS AND GOING HOME

Crucifix in the St Crucifix Chapel, Cordes-sur-Ciel, France (sculptor unknown)

This morning – Trinity 3 for us Anglicans, 11^th of Ordinary Time for modern RCs – the second reading was from 2 Corinthians 5:  
“For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.

So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. Yet whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him. For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”

When I saw this I wondered what our little Algerian priest would say about it; and I couldn’t help wondering also about its relation to Luther and sola fide. However, what he said was surprising and, I thought, rather marvellous. “Don’t think, he said, “that ‘standing before Christ to be judged’ is like the courtroom of the Assizes.” And he pointed to the huge and fascinating 17C crucifix after which the chapel we were in was named (see above). “When you stand before him,” he said, “you stand before Love Himself. And it is not he who will judge you. It is your own heart that will judge you, in the face and in the presence of that love.”

I found this a powerful and extraordinary thought. It was, of course, neither his nor new: in the Orthodox faith it is common, and it was uttered in a slightly different way by both St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great. In one sense, it is a comforting thought: as Sergei Komarov puts it, “no one is going to be dragged anywhere like a caught thief.” And Gregory Narekatsi, the Armenian poet, wrote “Isn’t God’s judgement still a meeting with God?/ Where will the Judgement be? I’m going there!” Yet the thought of our standing – you, I, us chickens just as we are – before the Son of God himself, with his eyes of absolute love upon us, is both pure joy and real terror. Even the most faithful and loving among us know that they are going to need a great deal of mercy at that moment.

The greatest thoughts I have read about the Last Judgement are those of C.S. Lewis, scattered about his writings. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.” Moreover, he says somewhere else, Hell is not fire and brimstone: it is cold and dark. Why? Because Heaven is the continual presence of God in light and warmth. But some there are to whom that would be unbearable. For them God has, in his mercy, left a place where they can live Eternity far away from him. It is cold, dark and dreary, but that is all they have made themselves capable of.

This is entirely compatible with the idea of our own heart’s judging us in Christ’s presence. And it should give us furiously to think.

NOT NICE

“We are reminded once again that France is at war!” So said Christian Estrosi, the president of France’s Southeast region, this morning after the Nice massacre. He was, of course, both wrong and right.

Wrong, in that this is not a war in any accepted sense, even the asymmetric: there is no national entity facing France, there is no coherent enemy, there is no enemy command, there is no clear war aim, and there is no realistically imaginable moment when one could declare victory.

But right in another, stranger, sense. And in that sense all Western countries are part of the war. We did not declare it. Curiously, a series of unofficial persons and groups have been declaring it repeatedly for decades, but the communicosphere was not active or developed enough to make it work beyond local outbursts. Now that that sphere is humming 24 hours a day on a planetary scale, several detonators have come dangerously close to an explosive mass.

The mass consists of several million young men between 15 and 35 with hormones raging, frustrated by the cards life dealt them and without the knowledge, means or even sometimes motivation to change the hand. And gradually, their condition can mutate to Hatred.

The detonators are 1) jihadist Islam (an evil stepchild of Wahhabism), 2) a cable-social-network-and-smartphone culture that enables one to find and attend to only sympathetic voices all too glad to pour oil on small flames, 3) a society that constantly weakens the intermediate structures of responsibility between the individual and The State or The Church or The Deity, 4) continued discrimination in hiring and other career-forming processes, and 5) the siren song of the goddess Violence, flattering and seducing the testosterone trolls that live in young men’s brains. Her answers are simple and exciting, flavoured with adrenalin. Any or all of these can bring the mass to explosion.

So far, I have said nothing new. How, though, do we react to a condition that allows, even encourages, an anonymous petty criminal to hire a truck and mow down more than a hundred celebrating people, thus giving him passing fame and (he thinks) eternal glory? The point is that this is not coordinated and commanded as the earlier assassinations were. This is more like the American shooting rampages (except that it shows that a determined assassin can use anything as a weapon): unforeseeable and virtually unpreventable.

In one sense, the conclusion is that we must learn to live as people do in Israel or other toxic environments punctuated by death: i.e. not let the killers win by living terrified but accept that we are all mortal and that, just like a fatal traffic accident, it can happen at any time and in any place. That is passive courage, and it relates to Stoic philosophy.

Do we, though, have weapons of our own? I believe that Christians, Jews and Muslims have two common weapons: our belief in a loving God and our resultant conviction that hatred of other humans is corrosive and evil. (Some may oppose certain verses of the Koran to this, or certain passages from the Old Testament; but I am conviced that on the whole Allah loves the human race, as does YHWH.) We may hate forces that draw people deliberately away from a God who loves them, but we must not hate those who have been drawn into becoming such forces’ instruments.

Our weapons, then, are the recognition that Hatred is the key; that hatred corrupts its desired instrument but that the instrument in question is still human and thus someone (to speak as a Christian) Christ died for and was resurrected for. We do not necessarily have the power to root out the original causes of hatred; but Hatred itself is our business.

Contemplate it. Try to understand where it comes from, and how it works. Study it: it has habits, just as wasps and vultures have habits. Learn its habits and behaviour. Find out where it lives and what it eats. Discover which human beings are its chosen breeding-ground. And look very, very carefully at the people you personally know. Do any of them show any signs of the disease? Not of “radicalisation”; not of “Islamism”; not of “racism”; of the early stages of Hatred.

If you see that X and Y do, make friends with them. Unobtrusively, but do things for them. Go the extra mile. Help them get jobs. Uninvasively, see if you can help them straighten out tangles. Ease them away from drugs, depression or despair. Get them through a relationship breakup. Take them to dinner. Smile and touch (uninvasively, but a hug is often as good as a therapy session). Show them the good things you like and respect in them. If you find yourself discussing politics or public matters, ease them away from rancour, resentment and rage, and toward something or someone they admire for generosity. Ask them to help you, sometimes.

Like cancer, Hatred can sometimes – often, even – be beaten if it is diagnosed early. For Christians, perhaps this is the best interpretation of what Pope Francis means by a Year of (dedicated to) Mercy.

If we can all become alert and aware to the individual (often the lonely) humans around us, frequently young and male but not always and not only, if we can discreetly but generously act, we may have found the one weapon that can eventually win this war.   

TENEBRAE

John Howe, The Dark Tower

Dark days; and the terror is faceless.

War, and not war: as a scholar put it on French radio, ‘You cannot make war on terrorists; but they can make war on us.’

It is both sobering and useful, in times like these, to read with some care a couple of Prayer Book collects. The first is the Second Collect at Matins, and reads:

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord.

The second is the Second Collect for Evensong, which reads:

O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed: give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that both our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

I have long noted, and am now reminded, that in neither Collect do we pray for the destruction of our enemies, nor even that their assaults may not occur. In both Collects what we ask to be defended against is fear: ‘that we . . .may not fear the power of any adversaries’, and that we ‘being defended from the fear of our enemies’ may obtain rest and quietness – or, as another Collect puts it, be enabled ‘to serve Thee with a quiet mind.’ A peace which the world cannot give.

This is, as the media have reminded us, more easily said than done; but then, we are not asked to conquer the fear of our enemies ourselves. We pray that we may be defended, in the assaults of our enemies, by God; and defended, not from those assaults, but from fear.

God’s defence is absolute but peculiar. St Stephen had it, but he was stoned to death. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had it, but he was hanged with piano wire. Whatever God’s defence is, it is clearly not what we think or would normally desire. Is it, then, simply courage we are asking for: the courage to submit to atrocities without fear? If that were so, we should be no different from a pagan warrior, or an Islamist kamikaze praying just before he blows up himself and dozens of innocents. Courage is a great good and a noble virtue, but in itself it is as pagan as it is Christian.

No, there is another prayer to be added to those Collects, and Cranmer did not write it. Had he done so, it might have been something like this:

O Lord our heavenly father, who in the passion of thy Son Jesus Christ commanded and taught us to pardon our enemies and to love them that hate us; grant to them, we beseech thee, a true conversion, and to us the courage to conquer all hatred; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  

It is this Collect, or one very like it, that I should love and hope to hear in many churches tomorrow, and often.

Rubens, the Flagellation of Christ