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.

VERY, VERY DIFFICULT

 

I have written before about intercessory prayer. I have also upon occasion mentioned that in no church have I ever heard prayers for acknowledged enemies. These two issues are now coming to a head with the CoViD-19 hospitalisation of U.S. president Donald Trump, and the reactions to it reported in the news media. 

 

            For most people in the U.S.A. and in the Western world, Trump is an acknowledged enemy: someone who lies, cheats, bullies, and has done more than any previous holder of the presidency to degrade that office and to undermine the institutions of American democracy. Moreover, the position of his country in the world increases exponentially the effects of the damage he has inflicted on it. 

 

            So now that he is in hospital with an as yet unknown degree of the virus, the understandable reactions vary from a sense of almost Biblical tragedy – condign punishment specific to one of his many sins – via outright Schadenfreude to heartfelt and furiously-expressed wishes that he may not recover. Any good wishes or even prayers for his recovery seem to be limited strictly to his thick-and-thin supporters.

 

            So what should the reaction be for those of us who hate what he has done to the country, to politics generally, and to the world, but who are also reasonably devout if uncertain Christians (or, indeed, Jews)? He is our acknowledged enemy: can we bring ourselves to pray for him? This is a considerable test of our faith.  

 

            Reading the book by his niece, the psychiatrist Mary Trump, may help us to a greater understanding. The father of Donald and his brother was, by all accounts, a monster who taught his sons that the world was divided into killers and losers. Donald has clearly tried to be a killer, but as he isn’t a real killer (such as, for example, Erdogan in Turkey) he does his damage by flailing. His brother became an alcoholic and died at 42; Donald obviously has compensated for weakness and lack of self-confidence with sociopathic narcissism. There is in this a profound sadness: it shows us a damaged child lashing out at the world. 

 

            Naturally, such a child should not be let near an important function. That he was, through the ill-will of many professional politicians, the violence of their voters, and a seriously dysfunctional electoral system, is a tragedy. But beneath all that, we can perhaps still hear the cries of the damaged child. And we can, and should, perhaps remember that nothing is impossible to God except to deny Love.

 

            We should, then, perhaps pray earnestly for the damaged child Donald Trump, and beg the Lord to use this illness to bring about a change in his way of seeing the world and of living in it. Roger Cohen, the journalist, wrote that his experience with fairly serious CoViD-19 had made a deep impression on him. A loving Father might possibly use the same means to transform a damaged and dysfunctional President.