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.]

FLOWER POWER

 

the lilies of the field (Avalanche lilies)

²⁴No one can serve two lords. For either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be loyal to one and think ill of the other. You cannot serve God and money. So I tell you: do not worry your heart about what to eat or what to drink, nor your body about what to wear. Isn’t the heart more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the sky: they do not sow or reap or store up into barns, and your heavenly father looks after them. Are you not better than they? Which of you can by worrying add even a smidgen to his age? And is anyone worried about clothes? Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. I tell you that not Solomon in all his glory could overgo even one of them. And if God so dresses the fodder of the field, that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the bread-oven, how much more you, you of little faith? So do not worry, saying what shall we eat, or drink, or put on to wear? that is what the goyim seek; for your heavenly father sees that you need all those things. Seek first the reign of God and his justice/righteousness, and all those things will be given you as well. ³⁴So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow can worry about itself. The day is enough, and its uglies.

This, of course, is a famous and much-loved passage of the Sermon, often cited by critics of capitalism. Yet it does have its difficulties. The whole middle chunk of it sounds very Sixties-ish, as if Yeshua were a hippie guru, telling us all to be La Fontaine’s grasshoppers and stop worrying about stuff. The Ant would know what to reply to that: Kid, you are not a bird in the sky; in any case, the birds in the sky do nothing but search for food; sorry, petal, you are not a flower: the flower may be pretty but it cannot move about or think, and if there is a drought it will swiftly die.   So is that what he is, and is that what he is saying? Only if you slice out that part and look at nothing else. So let’s add the beginning and the end.

            First, no one can serve two lords at the same time. We moderns should not think of this as having two jobs, because lots of people do, and manage fairly well. Think feudal society. Think real service. In feudal terms, serving a lord means being completely loyal to him, preferring him to everyone else, wearing his  badge, being “his man” as they used to say. You cannot, says Yeshua, be that for two lords: such commitment can only be to one. So, if that premise is granted, you cannot serve God and money (mamōn is not a god, just “money”). Therefore – because of that, I am telling you not to worry about all the humdrumlies of daily life.

            This doesn’t mean that you should go swanning about playing your guitar and waiting for someone else to feed and clothe you. It means that you do, responsibly, everything that’s necessary, but that you don‘t let it fill your horizon. As so often, he gives a couple of illustrative images: the birds and the lilies, which are maintained by God – as, in a different way appropriate to being human, are you. What you, as a human and a Jew, should do is understand and follow that difference. What makes you, as a human, different from the bird and the lily is consciousness, both intelligent and religious. What makes you, as a Jew, different from the goyim, the Gentiles, is that you know that you have a heavenly Father who looks after you. And the reason you know this is the Torah. And what does the Torah tell you to do? It tells you – I tell you, because this is what the completed Torah means – to make looking for, seeking, working for, the reign of God on earth, God and His justice, your first and absolute priority.

            And if you do that, if you have your priorities right, then your life has shalom: the order of peace, the peace of due order. And since you have a heavenly Father who loves and cares for you, all those other things will be sorted also. Of course, to seek first the reign of God you have to believe in it: you must not be (and I love this Greek term) oligopistoi, “littletrusters”. As Paul Tillich wrote in Dynamics of Faith, this has to be the basket you put all your eggs in. 

            Finally, in what way does this fit into the pattern of a completed Torah that Yeshua has been establishing? The recurring element has been a converting of outward action to inwardness, from required deeds to the spontaneous doings of a converted heart. In this passage, the argument moves to our capacity for fides, faith and trust both. Only a heart that fully accepts the new Torah can give up on hedging its bets, on being an oligopistos who thinks of God only when all his worldly security has been taken care of. Only such a heart can make the basileia, the reign, of God and of his dikaiosunè, his justice and his righteousness both, its first priority. And then, as the Collect says, "His service is perfect freedom."

 

ISWEARTOGOD

 

³³ `Again, you heard that it was said to the ancients: Thou shalt not swear falsely, but thou shalt pay to the Lord thine oaths; (Num. 30:1-2)

³⁴ but I -- I say to you, not to swear at all; neither by the heaven, because it is the throne of God,

³⁵ nor by the earth, because it is His footstool, nor by Jerusalem, because it is a city of a great king,

³⁶ nor by thy head mayest thou swear, because thou art not able one hair to make white or black; (Deut. 6:13)

³⁷ but let your word be, Yes, Yes, No, No, and that which is more than these is of the evil (one).

 

Few people in Western societies in our time are awed by oaths; yet in the ancient world, and in Judaism, they were taken very seriously. Taking an oath to perform something meant that if one did not perform it something serious would happen to one. In the ancient world an oath was not a guarantee of a statement: it was the statement. An oath was not allowed to contravene the Torah – that made it a prohibited oath. What is intriguing is that in both the Jewish and the Roman cultures of the first century CE there was a tendency to invoke something other, and lower, than the deities themselves. Romans began to swear  by the Emperor’s name, still considered holy; Jews on the other hand began to swear not so much by God as by things created by God: the heaven, the earth, one’s head, one’s mother. This was thought to be less risky in case of non-fulfilment, and as such was condemned in several places: to swear falsely was in any case forbidden, and to avoid swearing by the Deity was to insult God.  Yeshua’s position agrees with such condemnation, and in this form aligns itself with that of the Essenes, who refused all oaths. 

            In Yeshua’s case, he thus once again follows the pattern of completion of the Torah in the direction of inwardness: from the outward act of taking an oath he moves inward to the mind of the person swearing. And if such a person is fully committed to the New Torah, no oath he can take will increase his credibility: a simple Yes and No will say everything. 

            Interestingly, here neither Christendom nor even Christianity have followed His rule; and unlike the previous case, this departure happened almost at once. Oaths were such a part of social life and of trust that they were clearly felt to be inevitable. In British and Australian courts, even heathen Chinese were permitted to swear, by a cracked saucer: if the oath was not kept, the swearer's soul, it was thought, would crack like the saucer. Opposition to swearing also remained, however: Quakers would not swear and were permitted to make a simple affirmation in court. Today, in a demystified and often secularised society, oaths have lost much of their necessary solemnity and mystique. This, though, would seem to make Yeshua's point much more important: we need to become people whose word it would occur to no one to doubt. We need that Torah of inwardness, which is more than ever a Torah of trust. 

ASTERS AND CHRYSANTHEMUMS

A melancholy Dutch poet, J.C. Bloem, wrote a poem about autumn that begins, "Asters en chrysanthemen / Het leven staat allengs stil."(Asters and chrysanthemums / Life gradually slows to a halt." Today (as I write, it's already evening) is, in France, le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead; in England, All Souls; for the Church, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. Chrysanthemums decorate tombs, and we remember those whom we have lost to our world. Some of us pray for their souls in the hereafter, perhaps hoping thereby to shorten their purgatory. Some just remember with tenderness and affection. Some still mourn, filled with the torn selvedge of grief.
I am always struck by the heart's selection of those whom it truly mourns. Embarrassingly, they are not always all our nearest and dearest: one may mourn one parent more than the other, one sibling more than another, one friend more than another equally close; and sometimes one finds oneself genuinely mourning someone one only met a few times. The heart has reasons reason knows not of, indeed.
The history of our faith's theology furishes many details concerning our future after that passage called Death: I wonder how many people know or believe them today. My mother, nearly 90 and suffering from Alzheimer's, once had a late-night conversation with me in which death came up. I asked her what she felt about it as it neared; and I've always remembered her answer. Ï don't know what happens,"she said, "but I don't think we're meant to know. That's what faith is: you go into the dark, trusting."
Many people believe that the dead are with us still, watching, encouraging, and sometimes even helping us. Our affectionate remembrance of them, our attention to their resting-place, and our prayers for them and for us, and for what still joins us to them: these are the quiet trusting joys that fill this day.

THE SIMPLICITY OF HOPE

Jean Vanier: “Hope lies in the true encounter”

I recently put on Facebook a link to an interview in Le Figaro with Jean Vanier, perhaps the greatest living Canadian and winner of the 2015 Templeton Prize. In the context of a summer examination of the classic virtues, the Figaro's journalist, Guyonne de Montjou, asked him to comment on Hope. Vanier is such a remarkable man that it seemed worth while translating the interview into English, which herewith. NB: unlike English, French has two words for hope: espoir and espérance. The latter is slightly more formal and grand. So I have used the capital H to express it.

Introduction:

The work of Jean Vanier, 87, shows and expresses his Hope. “L’Arche” which he founded more than 50 years ago, counts 150 communities in 38 countries. In those homes, mentally handicapped persons live together with those who accompany them, for six months, for a year, for a lifetime. Via the daily routine, Hope is established and consolidated: hope for a world in which no one will feel excluded. 

When we speak of Hope, who comes to your mind?

First of all Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in prison, most of them at hard labour. Maltreated, threatened, he knew – in his body, in his bones – that one day he would come out. Why? I don’t know. Where does that knowledge come from? That’s the real question. What I see is that he had the certainty that in the end justice would prevail. For him, it was inconceivable that evil would have the last word. That gave him the strength not to resign himself. Beyond evil there is always something else that draws us. That’s what Hope is. I strongly believe in that little inner voice that calls without ceasing and encourages us to see far.

Why do you say that Nelson Mandela’s Hope was rooted in his body?

 Because we are spirit AND body. At the beginning we spend nine months inside a body, in security. And then our life begins with that cry that also expresses the anxiety toward the infinity opening out before us. We cry because we no longer know what to do. For me, Hope lies in that cry of the newborn who calls for the arms, the security, who looks for communion. And so, for a bond, an encounter, tenderness.  Something in human life is marked with the seal of the Infinite, with that hunger for the Beyond. And also with the need for relation.

You describe Hope as “the little inner voice”. Charles Péguy, in his poem “The Porch of the Mystery of the Second Virtue” (1912), speaks of “little Hope”. Why is Hope so discreet? How would you define it?

The “little inner voice” is not a feeling. It’s deeper than that. It is an attraction to justice. To Truth. To Love. It’s a pull, a drawing, it’s not the fruit of discernment. The Second Vatican Council defined the place where we hear that little voice: in the individual conscience, that holy and intimate sanctuary where God speaks to each human being to help it to orient itself toward justice and truth. To turn it away from evil. The little voice is an attraction.

Is Hope the same as optimism?

No, optimism is a psychological attitude. One is optimistic because one feels too vulnerable to contemplate the glass as being half empty. Optimism, I believe, is less profound than Hope. Andrea Riccardi, the founder of Sant’Egidio, an association of more than 50,000 people in the service of the poorest and of peace, writes in his book on Pope Francis that every community is rooted in a history and is oriented towards “the hope of a utopia”. For example, at L’Arche, we help the shattered ones, the persons who are handicapped, to grow. We know that relationship lies at the core. As we live together, the mission is clear. We welcome people like Pauline, a 40-year-old paraplegic who all her life had been treated as garbage, to give them confidence in themselves. We do not want to change them, we simply want to encounter them with tenderness. We are filled with the utopian idea that the world is changing; instead of arming for war and showing that one is stronger than one’s neighbour, we feel that another world is possible. Each day we discover that communion is what’s important: a bond, via bodies, eyes, hands. Here we receive people who have been humiliated. And they begin to dance, to live, to grow, and to fill us with joy simply because of a bond of listening. But it is difficult truly to describe what is so small, so intimate, so discreet. I am convinced that the bond of communion between mother and child is the beginning of the red thread of the whole of life. We are always looking for that bond of understanding. Communion is linked to littleness, to humility. In order to obtain it, you say to the other, “At bottom, I’m no better than you. I need you.”

Someone else who, to you, incarnates Hope?

A man who I think incarnates Hope today is Pope Francis, precisely because he listens to that little inner voice. He doesn’t know where it will lead him, but he knows one thing: that we are healed by the poor. To go to the periphery, to the edges, means to listen to the way the marginal people, the poor, the burdened evangelise us and lead us to their wisdom. That is his essential message and it seems to me to carry Hope with it. The wisdom of the poor is the opposite of that of the world which always invites us to move up. Moving up is, somehow, pushing others aside in order to win. Going toward the wisdom of the poor touches humanity at its earthiest, its fleshliest and its most bodily. It is a cry. A cry to be recognised. I am moved by every story of humiliation. The humiliated cry out to be recognised. The great problem of our time is the separation between rich and poor. A billion and a half people live in shantytowns. And each day, another 100,000 people in the world join them, drawn by the big city’s ideal of consumerism, its materialist model. What do those humiliated people need? Someone who sees them and who believes in them.

Why to you does the cry of the humiliated, the poor, the handicapped represent a call, a plea?

Because it awakens something in the depths of my heart that gives me life. St Francis of Assisi tells how when he came out of prison, when he was barely 24, he found himself mysteriously attracted by a group of lepers even though previously he had found lepers repulsive. Something had changed in him. So he moved in with those lepers and shared their life. When, after two years among them, he continued on his way, he wrote, “I found a new gentleness in my body and in my spirit.” Finally, that experience of shared living had let him see the leper within himself. Often, when our heart is hard, if we protect ourselves and refuse to hear the cry of the poor, it is because we are afraid to reveal our own poverty. Recognising one’s limits allows one to enter into communion with the other.

In the midst of a society like ours, where the prime objectives are performance and success, where does one learn humility?

By not knowing. I knew a man who was perfect, who was successful in his marriage, in his career, in his family. One day. one of his daughters was born with a mental illness. He was completely lost. It was that little sick girl who taught him that there is something more to life than success. I think one learns humility when one looks for simple and true relationships. When one visits prisons, or the sick, one discovers that those one thought worthless are in fact terrific people. Everyone can do that. One doesn’t need a degree for encounters.

Do you think you have acquired a certain wisdom?

Not at all. I learn every day. A pharmacist, a woman, taught me something. Sometimes people come to her who suddenly say something very important. She told me that one of her clients came with her young son, and explained to her that he had lived through something dramatic and tragic. She was at once sad and furious. The pharmacist listened to her with great attention without saying a word. She showed her, with her regard, that she empathised with her suffering, that she felt compassion. But she said nothing. I asked her, what is wisdom? That woman answered me, “wisdom is the space, the time of silence, the regard which explains that you have understood the other’s suffering without necessarily speaking.”

In these times of families in mourning and where terrorism creates a desire for revenge, do you think that every man, the most radical of ideologues or a sanguinary criminal, is capable of amendment?

Of course. Who am I to judge him? I believe that each human being contains a seed of innocence.  It is buried inside him and functions as a base. I call it the seat of conscience, which goes deeper than the person himself. It is the inner place where one’s being is not shaped. That is why I think we should sometimes become like small children again, and touch the other’s innocent side. I believe that each true encounter between two people implies that virgin point, a certain humility, an attitude that can say, “I am no better than you.” When we help someone up who has tripped and fallen in the street, it changes us. Every human being is capable of that. Each man, whatever his way in life, whatever his suffering, hopes that someone will regard him with tenderness, without judgement, to discover the place of his innocence. One simply has to learn to welcome the other. And then one changes the world.

An example?

In the United States, a friend of mine, a doctor in a palliative-care unit, was called to care for a mafia boss who had throat cancer. All his life this man had wanted to be strong. And now, suddenly, he discovered someone who touched him with tenderness. Vulnerable now, he saw this doctor coming to his aid with goodness and gentleness. All his life he had believed that adults were bad and that one had to defend themselves from them. That was why with all his strength he had constructed a shell: deep down he must have had a fear of suffering. I believe that this story helps us understand the role of the encounter: it is the ingredient that nourishes Hope.

Doesn’t your sense of Hope for man sometimes come close to a certain naiveté?

 Perhaps. I’ll admit that sometimes I’ve been wrong. For example one time, I was working in a prison retreat in Winnipeg in Canada. They had seconded to me a pleasant prisoner, agreeable, near the end of his sentence, to help me. He was my secretary and was indeed devilishly efficient. He wanted to do his rehabilitation in the East of the country. So I recommended him to friends of mine to welcome him and help him with his first steps. I gave him their address. A few weeks later I had a call from my friends thanking me for the contact . . . the man, the ex-prisoner who had gained my trust, had disappeared with their stereo! Trusting is not always simple. There is always a risk. If I had listened more to the prison staff, I would have been more on my guard. They had warned me that this prisoner knew just how to inspire trust.  

What circumstances taught you about Hope?

What helped me most was the confidence of my father [Georges Vanier, diplomat, later Governor-General of Canada – RK]. I’m a Canadian, but I spent part of my childhood in England where my father was a diplomat. At the age of 13 I expressed the wish to join the Royal Navy. My father who had spent three years in the trenches near Amiens in World War I, said, “If that’s what you want to do, do it. I have confidence in you.” If he had said no, my life would have been different. The confidence he had in me was decisive, his greatest gift. I remained in the Navy for eight years. When I left it, I knew I had to go. Then I started L’Arche with the same conviction that this was my way. The little inner voice, still, that profound, intimate pull toward justice. Today, it seems to me that the most important thing is helping children to have confidence in their desire. That isn’t all that simple. To teach them how to trust that pull toward what is good. One can make mistakes, certainly, but time will tell.

What do you want to say to the young?

The other day I hosted a group of young people. They all had their smartphones in their pockets! I told them, “Here we don’t need experts in communication. What we are looking for is experts in presence.” Being present: it seems such a little thing! And it takes time . . . I spend time with you and I can’t spend it with someone else. But it is the only way to communion. Once one has tasted it, one can’t do without it. I still hope that when one person has changed, others will change. Deep down, that’s what my Hope is. “Encountering, meeting” is the keyword of Hope. It is the poor who will lead us to peace. In our world we need to create places where people can meet, play, live, experience something together. Once everyone has had a taste of that, everyone wants it to recommence. In a class, we need to pay attention to the student others make fun of; in society, we need to care for the person suffering beside us. Rather than in moving up, it’s in coming down to the humblest that we find ourselves transformed.