THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"

SMALL JEWELS: EASTER 4

DEUS, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis, da populo tuo id amare quod præcipis, id desiderare quod promittis, ut inter mundanas varietates ibi nostra fixa sint corda, ubi vera sunt gaudia. Per Christum Do. &c

O almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men : Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise : that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

  

In my occasional contemplation of the Collects in the Book of Common Prayer, the oratio for this week seemed particularly pleasing. Once again we begin with the Latin, compact and tense as always: “God, who makes the minds of the faithful of one will…” – and we see right away that Cranmer has been embroidering. “O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men . . .” Whoa! The Acknowledgement here departs considerably from the Latin. Adding “Almighty” to the Invocation is not a problem, but from there on Cranmer seems to veer off into interpretation. What does he add or change? Let’s follow the order of the Latin and start with “fidelium mentes”. No longer, in the English, does God unite the hearts of the faithful: it is of sinful men that He orders, not the minds or spirits but the wills and affections. Moreover, this is so difficult that He alone can do it. 

It all looks very pessimistic and Protestant, and to some extent it is; but there is more to it than that. I think that the Archbishop has been looking at the Petition and Aspiration, which specify what we are asking and to what end. These, interestingly, he translates simply and straightforwardly: we want to be able to love what God commands and to desire what He promises. But when we think about that, we realise that that is not only peculiar but feels oddly wrong: to love what we are commanded to do feels like not only being told to do something but being ordered to love it, while to desire what we are promised feels like putting the cart before the horse. And that strange wrongness, Cranmer clearly thinks and wants to tell us, comes from our wills and affections being somehow skewed: if we were in heaven, it would come naturally – there would be a natural concord between our will and God’s, so that what He commands would be what we love and what He promises would be what we desire. And conversely: they would all fit together in the perfect chords of His will’s harmony. That this is clearly not so, that we need to ask for it to be made so, shows that our wills and affections are “unruly” and that we the faithful are therefore “sinful men”. Being unruly, said wills and affections need to be “ordered” – as we pray every morning that our doings may be “ordered” by His governance.  Notes of music, duly ordered or well-tempered, make a harmony, among themselves and with the spirit of the composer. 

Once again, we see what a small intricate jewel such a Collect is. And Cranmer can even add some ornaments: the bald mundanas varietates become “sundry and manifold”, adding a pretty rhythm, and fixa is intensified by “surely”, that splendid adverb the richness of which I mentioned in my last post. A miniature treasure, for which we may be truly thankful.

FROM A RUGGED AND THOROUGHLY MODERN MYSTIC

Thomas Merton in his handbuilt Kentucky hermitage

"We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. The only thing is we don't see it...I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

My Lord, God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. The fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please You. And I know that if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear. For you are ever with me; and You will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Thomas Merton

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

After the Kingdom – or the kingship, the reign – the Will. Fiat voluntas tua: Thy will be done. We say it, often mechanically, as the third petition, or option: “may” or “let” Thy will be done – the verb is an optative, a mood of hope or encouragement. In the present case, of course, it may also be one of resignation. But how often do we really concentrate on what it means, what it can mean, what it might mean?

            The first stage of thinking about it is one of humility. Not my will, Lord, but Thy will be done. It is a phrase of obedience. You lead, Lord, and I will follow. Even if I think I want fishhooks (remember Tom Sawyer?), the fact that I don’t get them when I’ve prayed for them means, presumably, that Your will is for me not to get them. Oh well, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it: Thy will be done.

            But think some more. Where have we heard that phrase “not my will, Lord, but Thy will be done” before? That’s right. It leads straight to Gethsemane, and via Gethsemane to the Cross. It gets very serious indeed. You can get dead that way.

            Now keep thinking. Because it also leads us to a major problem. Christ, in Gethsemane, knew what His Father’s will was, or at least He had a pretty good idea, even though He was human enough to hope and pray it wouldn’t happen. But when we try to apply the phrase in our own lives, we run up against the serious fact that most of the time we do not know what His will is.

            I saw a photograph of a hand with W W J D tattooed on four fingers: What Would Jesus Do? It’s one way out of the problem: let our imagination suggest to us what He would do in present circumstances. But we are not called to be Jesus, and I’m not always sure we are even all of us called to be Disciples: there were only twelve of those, while there were hundreds, thousands, who were touched by Him and whose lives were changed. W W T D – What Would They Do?

            The second problem with this is that we’re depending on our imagination, which is a useful servant but an uncertain master. In fact, what “Thy will be done” should lead us to is Discernment. This quality, mentioned quite often by St Paul, is in its simplest form the capacity to tell good from bad; but as life is complex and the human mind was created to be a fine instrument, we can and should take Discernment further. At its best, discernment is the use of human reason in the support of faith.

            The relation of faith to reason is the chief topic with which the remarkable writings of Pope Benedict XVI are concerned; and in his little guide Doctors of the Church he reminds us that it is the essential element in the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas. Not only, said Aquinas, does faith illuminate reason; reason can be very good at underpinning, supporting and protecting faith.

            In other words, “Thy will be done” leads us down two paths. One is to using the minds God gave us: instructing them by reading (serious Jews read far more of their faith’s writings that Christians tend to), training them to analyze situations, and using them to help our faith live and work in the world. The other leads to the Cross. And there I am reminded of the final words of the great John Donne’s final sermon, “Death’s Duel”, on the text “To God the Lord belong the issues of death”, preached at Whitehall before King Charles I at the beginning of Lent, 1630. Donne was dying; and some in the congregation said that the Doctor was preaching his own funeral sermon. And he ended it with these words:

There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen.