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.  

  

 

PAX VOBISCUM

We have all heard about the "peace of God, which passeth all understanding", and we are used to hearing "peace be with thee/And with thy spirit" in the Eucharist. But what is this peace the Bible talks about? There is an exhaustive lexical and contextual analysis here: http://biblehub.com/greek/1515.htm, which I won't attempt to reproduce. But it's a huge word, with a range of meaning as wide, but also as coherent, as a rainbow.

First, there is, well, peace. Not war. Those of us old enough to have been born before or during World War II have a visceral feeling about, and for, peace in that sense. In his novel The Empty Room (1942), Charles Morgan shows some people in England talking about the distant past and a hoped-for future. One evening, says one of them, some friends will sit together, talking in a garden, and one of them will say, with wonder and contentment, "A June night, and no war." Perhaps there are people in Syria today who feel the same way. It is eirènè, the fundamental meaning of that lovely Greek word, and the reason that the Dutch princess born during WW II was named Irene. Peace as a public condition, a condition of not-war, is never to be taken for granted. It is huge, a privilege, and should be savoured daily by those fortunate enough to live in it.

Then, there is peace as a condition between people. Here, the meaning is closer to harmony: an absence of strife, of quarrel, of awkwardness, of hostility. It is an emotion elevated to a condition, which means that it is felt by the heart rather than, or prior to, being understood by the mind. It is the peace sometimes seen in very old long-married couples whose love has over the decades been distilled to a fine and almost silent essence. It is the peace between true friends engaged together in some activity long known, long practiced and long loved. And notice that both these examples remind us that peace between individuals often has time as a component element.

There is the peace of science, or of scholarship. This is a peace experienced individually. It is the peace found by someone working tranquilly at some project within one's competence and which, again, requires time to mature and complete. It is a peace I have experienced while working in great research libraries: Duke Humphrey's 15th-century library in Oxford's Bodleian, the 17th-century Manuscript Room of Paris's Bibliothèque nationale. It is a peace composed in part of a going out of one's self, of losing oneself in a subject, in the life of another age, in the patient search for a clue. A similar peace is found, we are told, by writers, novelists for the most part, when they are engaged upon a lengthy task in propitious surroundings. The great Dutch poet Adriaan Roland Holst experienced it during the six long winters, in the1930s, when, in his little thatched cottage behind the North Sea dunes, he worked concentratedly on his masterpiece, the long, dense poem known as A Winter By The Sea.

Such peace  touches, and sometimes becomes, a peace of the spirit. This peace is known by some philosophers, by some contemplatives, by those who in one way or another have reached a true wisdom. In some societies such men and women are revered as sages; in others, they live unknown in corners of the world, sometimes with a small group of pupils, sometimes alone, quietly engaged in some trade and encountered by chance. I have known a watchmaker like that; a former paratrooper; a retired journalist who studied mysticism; and a professor of Indian philosophy. In some, this peace of wisdom can be and is expressed in words; in others, it communicates itself intangibly, mysteriously but unmistakeably.

All peace that is not cowardice is good. But it does not really, not truly, not completely pass oour understanding. It is not the peace of God. What, then, is?

Reading the Bible, Old Testament and New, one sees little peace. Humanity seems always at war with itself; Israel with its neighbours; Israel with its God; heroes with other heroes or with bloodthirsty monsters; brothers with brothers, fathers with sons; and the Serpent with everyone. Where, then, is the Peace of that God the Scriptures describe, explain, and adore? We find it, sometimes, in the Psalms. The Psalmist, nominally King David, finds peace in the Law,  which shows him a way through a trackless desert. He finds peace in adoring God, in being, as he says, an olive tree in the house of the Lord. And above all, remember that the term we are seeking occurs in a blessing; may the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7). One translation has guard for keep, which helps us understand. The peace of God, then, is something that keeps us, that guards us, that protects us from harm. It does so in Christ Jesus: which is a whole story unto itself. We are in Christ when we are a part of him; for since the Resurrection he is present wherever those who love God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are present -- as a congregation especially, in the Eucharist especially, but in prayer, in meditation, in contemplation also. And since he is Love, in the Spirit he not only neighbours us with his presence, but he surrounds us, he enfolds us; and when this happens, each time it happens (because in this mortal life it is never once and for all, not yet), we have come home. That is the peace of God: our homecoming to the relation he always intended, to the hearth of the Father's house.

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.