AS COMPACT AS YOUR GPS - TRINITY 14

Now imagine 40 years of this, with 80,000 people bitching...

Leonine sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei, et charitatis augmentum ; et, ut assequamur quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. 

1549 / 1662

ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde, through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Cranmer translated this literally, and the revisers of 1662 wisely left the handsome parallellism alone.

Someone wrote that there could almost be no more compact expression of the Christian faith than this Collect. It is brief and shapely, and of an extreme simplicity. We ask God – the Almighty and Everlasting God, the Creator of the Universe – to give us the three qualities that St Paul described as “what remains”: the irreducible core of the Christian’s life, the most basic psychic waybread, that which we survive on as we travel from birth to death in the company of the others who make up the new Israel. We cannot produce them for ourselves, as the old Israel could not produce its own food in the Negev but had to be fed by the hand of God with manna and quails. We need faith, because without it we cannot recognise the God who loves us. We need hope, because without it we have no reason to go on when the going is hard. And we need charity because we are not alone in our journey, but in the company of others as frail and frightened as we ourselves. 

Yet there is more. God has given us promises. (Remember? Last week we ran to them.) The Collects, when they refer to these, do not spell them out, mainly because the form is too compact to allow this. It may be useful to pause and remember what they are. God has given us His love: that’s not a promise because we have it already – whether we are ready to receive it or not. What he has promised us is chayei olam, “eternal life”. The modern Church is embarrassed by this, and tends to insist that we should not (necessarily) think of this as something after death, but that what it really refers to is an eternal dimension of life, potentially present even in this terrestrial life. I don’t want to get into this now, because either way it is something not immediately present to almost all of us, and thus proper material for a promise. 

Either way, though, eternal life has certain characteristics. The chief one is the real, actual presence of God. In the chayei olam we are in the presence of God: of the primal light and joy that brought the Universe into being, but also of the living Father whose love (His very nature) embraces not only the dance of planets but every living human creature. Because imagination is part of our equipment we can, however dimly, imagine what it must be like not, as now, always to be divided from the one we pray to, from the one who loves us, not always to have to decode, to imagine, to piece together His answers: we would open like a flower to the morning sun. 

But how to get there? Such a promise is worth running to, but by what trail? Ah, says the Collect: here is the answer. To get to the promise, to obtain (and the Latin assequamur is even richer, since it also means “to understand”) what is promised, we need to obey God’s commands. But, since He is Love, since love is his very nature, the only way we can do so, the only way we can obey his commands in the spirit in which they were given, is to understand them; and the only way to understand them is in the spirit of love. That we need to love what we are ordered to do sounds at first hearing both odd and rebarbative: kiss the rod, you scum. Not a bit of it. God has given us orders because we are in a dire state and slow on the uptake: orders at least are clear. And since we are wandering through a desert, when we understand that the orders are what will see us through and beyond, we will undoubtedly love them. 

Finally, how do we obey them? What is it we are ordered to do? Like other Collects, this one describes a perfect circle. We obey God’s commands by using, by living, the faith, the hope, and the charity we pray Him to give us. And in all of this, the central figure, the model, the living “command” is Yeshua Ha-moshiach, Jesus the Anointed. If we keep our eyes on him, if we walk with him, if we stick to him like glue, if we – like seconds on a climbing rope – try to follow His moves in the rocks and ledges and gullies of the desert we are traversing, then – in whatever dimension, this side of the grave and/or beyond it, the light and the warmth of our Father’s love is there, open and waiting.

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Veni, Creator Spiritus . . . I have always loved the Latin hymns with their stately iambic tetrameters; and this one especially. Since my youth – and an education not given to particular ‘devotions’ – I’ve had a special orientation towards the Holy Ghost (and towards St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named at baptism and who was the poet of the Gospels). The Third Person of the Trinity, so ungraspable, so strange and yet so close: what do we do with him?

The question is of course the wrong way round. What does He do with us? The readings I’ve seen recently give one useful answer, which has doubtless occurred to many. Jesus promises the disciples that he will send them the Spirit to be with them after he has gone up to the Father. So, says Fr Marc Sevin, all the things that Jesus says he still has to tell them but which they ‘cannot bear now’: these are the things the Spirit will tell them – tell us – in and through the community of the Church, from the first Pentecost to the Second Coming. 

So in that sense, the Spirit is the One who continues Jesus’ teaching. What else does he do? Another reading says that the Pentecostal event of the tongues is not about speaking, but about hearing and understanding. Each person heard and understood what was being said, in his own dialect. So the Spirit teaches us to hear and understand both God and our neighbour in our own dialect. First, we can look through and beyond language- and communication-barriers to the heart, and meet one another in the language of love; and secondly, we hear and understand both God and our neighbour in the way we, personally, are capable of doing so. The Spirit, then, removes barriers: the barriers between us and our neighbours are removed by both of us hearing the one who is speaking of God, and the barriers between us and God are removed by our understanding what is being said. 

What else does the Spirit do? Paul says that He prays in us. ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Romans 8:26) – and the Father understands this, says Paul, because the Spirit does so kata Theon, in conformity, in harmony, with God. This goes very deep. If when we pray the vastness of God Himself prays in us; like something holding us up as we learn to swim; then our prayer takes on a trembling confidence we may never have thought of.

I wrote last time that the Spirit is our Paraclete, our Defender, our Advocate. He is also our ‘shield and defender’ against the Evil One. And he is the Comforter – a word we have somewhat trivialised in applying it to blankets and such. And, we are taught, ‘comfort’ in Early Modern English still has the sense of con-fortare, strengthening. He is the Comforter in that sense: he strengthens us when we definitely do not feel up to things. Here again, we should learn to be aware of that as a Presence, and to rely on it: how many people might avoid the clutching quicksand of depression, the knifing of despair, if they knew Who was ready to hold them up and give them that extra ounce of strength they lack?

He teaches us; helps us hear and understand; prays in, with and for us; strengthens us and holds us up. No wonder Pentecost, Whitsun, is a feast. A feast; a festival; a celebration. We can’t earn the Spirit; we can’t work to receive him; we can’t get him by making sacrifices or fasting or doing good. He is given us, as a gift, a present, free of charge. He gives Himself. As the French say, Que du bonheur! What joy.