A HAPPY MAN

I read this article in the French daily La Croix a few days ago and found it very much worth translating.

A few decades ago, Brother Francklin Armand decided to meet a formidable challenge: to pierce the land of Haiti, a dry soil eaten away by erosion, with artificial lakes in order to allow farmers to irrigate their land. And who knows? maybe to fish . . . A simple idea, but in no way self-evident in a country used to seeing water pour down in buckets during murderous cyclones and sow desolation in its wake.

            But water is life, too. And the project has grown, to the point where the Government has, in recent years, asked Brother Armand to widen his outlook, and has financed the creation of lakes on a national scale. Money is scarce and never on time, but the work gets done: the cheerful monk and his teams have so far created nearly 200 lakes in the entire country . .  Acres and acres of water, gallons and gallons of life.

            “It’s particularly important for the peasants in those parts of Haiti where it rains massively for six months, but then there is nothing for the rest of the year,” Brother Armand explains, during a stay in Paris this autumn. In the Central Highlands, for example, an area bordering the Dominican Republic, where in 1976 he founded the Little Brothers of the Incarnation, and then, a few years later, the Little Sisters of the Incarnation. Religious communities inspired by the spirituality of Fr Charles de Foucauld, combining prayer and action, “peasants among the peasants.”

            In Pandiassou, where the two congregations are installed, this man is always on the move. People to see, things to do . . . When the news gets around of his return from Port-au-Prince, where the Little Brothers also run a school, people crowd around. And it’s while walking along the country roads and side-trails that he listens to some and advises others. On matters as diverse as family worries, land quarrels or agricultural problems.

            In Haiti, erosion is an essential topic. Radical deforestation has made the country vulnerable to wind, rain and drought. But, speaking symbolically, Br. Francklin Armand points to four other forms of aggression that undermine the country: economic erosion – which ruins the countryside and feeds the anarchic growth of slums, even more so since the 2010 earthquake --, social erosion, due to an absent Government, intellectual erosion, a consequence of the flight overseas of the élite, and finally spiritual erosion, linked notably to voodoo.

            Hence the monk’s frustration when he observes the political class, for all its huge challenges, spending more time on its own problems than on those of the country. In a nation used to tearing itself apart in quarrels and disputes, he works, he walks, he advances. He is known to be closer to the Lavalas [political] school of thought of former presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide and René Préval, beaten in the 2011 election, than to that of Michel Martelly, the current Chief of State, who does not deny his friendship with the family and friends of former dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, in power from 1957 to 1971.

            But Br Francklin Armand remains discreet. “We have worked with all the presidents, whoever they were,” he reminds us. “Haiti’s problem is this division, the fact that people have other things on their minds . . .” Hence it is not rare to hear some people suggesting that it might be good for the country if he gave a new dimension to his uniting energy – that of power and politics. Wasn’t he declared, in 2008 at the age of 61, a National Treasure? Br Francklin Armand smilingly rejects the idea. He prefers to continue on the road where he feels most useful. Digging . . .

REIGN AGAIN

Today, the readings and commentary in my little French daily booklet seemed to chime so remarkably with my last post that I can’t resist sharing them here. In the passage from Wisdom, the wonderfully lyrical description given of her struck me as a perfect portrait of the Third Person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. And the use of the feminine pronoun (from the Greek original of ‘wisdom’) has something pleasing about it, since there is no reason necessarily to imagine the Spirit as masculine.

Wisdom 7:22 – 8:1

For within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, shrewd, irresistible, beneficent, friendly to human beings, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying, penetrating all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits.

For Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things.

She is a breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; so nothing impure can find its way into her.

For she is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power, and image of his goodness.

Although she is alone, she can do everything; herself unchanging, she renews the world, and, generation after generation, passing into holy souls, she makes them into God's friends and prophets;

for God loves only those who dwell with Wisdom.

She is indeed more splendid than the sun, she outshines all the constellations;

compared with light, she takes first place, for light must yield to night, but against Wisdom evil cannot prevail.

Strongly she reaches from one end of the world to the other and she governs the whole world for its good. [in the old translation: “and sweetly doth she order all things”.]

It is the Gospel reading that struck me most, with reference to my previous post: Jesus tells the Pharisees ‘God’s reign is among you’ – it’s there already. This should give us furiously to think. If it’s here already, it may just be growing slowly like dough with a core of yeast . . .

Luke 17:20-25

Asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was to come, he gave them this answer, 'The coming of the kingdom of God does not admit of observation, and there will be no one to say, "Look, it is here! Look, it is there!" For look, the kingdom of God is among you.'

He said to the disciples, 'A time will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of man and will not see it. They will say to you, "Look, he [or: it] is there!" or, "Look, he is here!" Make no move; do not set off in pursuit; for as the lightning flashing from one part of heaven lights up the other, so will be the Son of man when his Day comes.

But first he is destined to suffer grievously and be rejected by this generation.’

The commentary is by Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau, a Benedictine hermit from Southeast France whose comments are almost always the most intelligent and nourishing. She is the only hermit to whom I have ever written a fan-letter. (Obviously, there was no reply: I didn’t expect one.)

The Gospel verses belong to the “synoptic apocalypses” that deal with the Last Things, but not by way of calculation or speculation. In them, Christ rather invites us to take account of the unexpected nature of the irruption of God’s Kingdom and, in view of that, to live in vigilance and confidence. Jesus also warns us against the temptation of seeing signs everywhere, without taking time for discernment; a work to be undertaken under the guidance of the Spirit and in genuine inner freedom, yet without abdicating reason and good sense.

So we still wait: but not impatiently for a coup de ciel. We wait in 'vigilance and confidence' -- confident that the reign has already begun and that we are part of it; intelligently vigilant as semioticians of true signs.

PRAYING FOR REIGN?

Meditating in bed, as I often do upon waking, I thought of a friend who sometimes says, “I wish God would just take over. Why doesn’t He?” And for a moment I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. He is all-powerful. He made the world, the worlds, and us, and look what we – so far alone, at least in this corner of this galaxy – have made of the experiment. Why doesn’t He just blow the whistle, call the end of the exercise, and bring in His reign? The English Lord’s Prayer has “Thy kingdom come,” but in fact it is “regnum tuum” and it would better be translated “They kingship come,” or “Thy reign come.” So why leave it in the optative, the subjunctive, or any of those wish-list tenses? Why doesn’t He just take over in a coup de ciel and set this lamentable planet to rights, once and for all?

Of course, we know why. As I used to say to my students, if you are in love, and an apparently good fairy offered you the magic power to make your beloved love you back, would you take it? To their credit, they all said No. In that context, love and power are fundamentally incompatible. And God’s very essence being love, this is the one ineluctable exception to His omnipotence: He cannot go against His own being. Hence, loving all of us, it isn’t that He will not force us to love Him in return: He cannot.

The result is that for many thousands of years He has watched us doing good things, and smiled approvingly; but also watched us coming it the unspeakable, and not been able to stop us. The law of love is an iron law, and it binds even the Deity. I tried to imagine this, and found myself thinking of the tears of God.

It’s not as if He hasn’t done anything. He planted seeds of goodness in our hearts. He picked humans to work with: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and quite possibly Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Seneca. And in the end, He even sent His own Son to help us get it right; and when, typically, we crucified Him, He resurrected Him so that we might be liberated from the tyranny of definitive death. Given the iron law of love, there is not a lot more that He could do. So: instead of wishing for a coup de ciel that would overwhelm even CNN, we would do better to think of His tears. Children, and even adults, are acutely uncomfortable when they see their own parent weep. How much more should we mind the tears of our Father, and do what we can to dry them. . . .

HUMBUG? NO, HUMBLE

Jean Vanier with a friend from the l'Arche community 

“The only wisdom is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless.” (T.S. Eliot)

It’s a virtue unpopular with the young, who confuse it with humiliation or with an inferiority complex. As Paul Vallely wrote, à propos of Pope Francis, one tends to think that humility is a character trait – some have it, some don’t – when in fact it is a proper virtue, fostered by hard work. Like hope, it’s a virtue of the everyday, growing amid the humdrumlies of simple living and taking care of business. It both helps and is helped by looking at people around us and imagining their unknown private battles.

If Pride is the chief of the Deadly Sins, should Humility be the chief of virtues? The French have two words for “pride”: orgueil, which is the big bad Pride that looks contemptuously down on the world and everyone in it, and fierté, which is the good pride you take in the achievement of your offspring, and also the pride which, as Dryden’s Cleopatra observes, can be “all that held [you] up” when life gets rough. Given that pride can be complex, what about Humility? Luckily most Western languages have two words for “humility” and “humiliation”; one could say that the first is the opposite of orgueil and the second of fierté. And keeping Pride in mind when we think about all this will help us avoid the trap of thinking that a humble person thinks he’s nothing much. Well, compared to God, sure; but a genuinely humble person is probably quite a solid realist, who doesn’t think very much about his own level of whatever at all, but gets on with what needs doing and thinks of other people.

Humility also allows one to look back on one’s own life – by the day, month, year or lustrum – and recognize clearly the times when one has been a pig, a shit, or simply inadequate. Not in order to mull that over and over, but to face it without illusion and get on with being less of all three. Which, in turn, the humble person understands, involves going beyond our stone-dumb self and invoking the help of Him Who is always ready to lend a hand. In other words, prayer. No true humility without prayer. No true humility like the Cross.

True humility also allows for fierté, especially if it doesn’t last long enough to become one’s habitat.

One of the most positive things humility can do is help those who suffer from its poisonous parody: humiliation. If you look at the world around you, from children through adults to groups to whole nations, it’s easy to see how much of the world’s misery comes from humiliation. Humiliation is both an action and a feeling. The feeling can result from situations not intended to humiliate, in which case it expresses deep insecurity and an inferiority complex. What humility can do in such cases is be ultra-sensitive to words and actions that might cause humiliation in others. Pride, on the other hand, might say “Well, dammit, he/they shouldn’t be so bloody touchy: they’ve only themselves to thank.” Humility is good at seeing the hidden wounds. And seeing the innocence of others, however deeply hidden that may be; and appreciating that innocence, and other virtues, out loud.

No, it’s not just a trait of character that “some have and some haven’t, and that’s the way it is.” It’s looking at others, and talking to them, and looking at God, and talking to Him. Oh, and listening, in both cases . . . . .   

HALLOW?

Hallowed Be Thy Name . . .

        We tend to pass through the first clause of the Lord’s Prayer rather quickly, and not always with much thought. Yet it is in some ways the most remote and the most archaic. What does ‘hallowing’ mean, and what is it to hallow a name? Many people nowadays know ‘Hallow’ only from ‘Halloween’. This ancient word comes from Old English ‘halig’ which in another development evolved into ‘holy’. So in Middle English the ‘hallows’ were the Saints (hence Hallowe’en, i.e. Hallows-Even, the night before All Saints’ Day, when evil was said to be abroad and needed to be kept away by grinning lanterns), and ‘to hallow’ is to make, or consider as, holy. (In Dutch, the adjective can still be transformed straight into the verb: ‘heilig’ becomes ‘heiligen’.) In the Latin languages its equivalents come from ‘sancti-ficare’, from ‘sanctus’=holy. (English, being a hybrid language, also has ‘sacred’.)

       Fine. But what do ‘sanctus’ and ‘holy’ mean? Fundamentally, something set aside from the rest, special. Hence, something set aside because intended for, or in some way connected with, the divine. So to hallow something means to set it aside, to treat it with great respect, because in some way it is touched by, filled with, the numen, the magic, the uncanniness, of a, of the, Deity. In Hindu India, cows are considered holy.

      Now what is (to be) hallowed here is the Name of God. From the Old Testament, we know that Name. It is ‘I AM’; it is Yahweh. How does one hallow a name?

In the Netherlands of my childhood, there existed a League Against Swearing. It paid for neat enamel notices in trams and buses that said, ‘Speak freely about God, but never abuse His name.’ That was one basic way of hallowing the Name: its opposite is the now-ubiquitous ‘OMG’. Judaism has another way, which is never to write or say it. A lesser name of God is Elohim; and the common form of the Name is to use its consonants with Elohim’s vowels, which creates ‘Adonai’. And devout Jews, when writing the Deity’s name in English, spell it ‘G-d’.

If we pray that God’s name may be ‘hallowed’, we pray that, at the least, God (for the Name and the Being are one) may be respected as the loving Deity of a large proportion of the planet’s inhabitants. In a de-christianized but consciousness-raised Western world, most of us have learnt to respect the divinities of Moslems and Jews, and possibly Hindus, but the Christian God and His followers are still all too often fair game. More seriously, Christians are still actively persecuted in a number of countries. 

Respect of God’s Name is a minimal thing to pray for. Hallowing goes well beyond that. It is what the angels do. It is worship, thanks and praise. It is the choirs of Heaven. To hope for that on Earth, to pray for it, is a difficult but intense happiness.

TEMPTATION?

A friend asked me what I thought of the new French translation of the Lord’s Prayer that, at the end, reads ‘Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation’ (Do not let us enter into temptation) rather than ‘Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation’ (Do not subject us to temptation). The reason for this, I have since read, is to let the text reflect the fact that God cannot be, or be thought of as, a tempter. However, the Greek text reads kai mè eisenengkès hèmas eis peirasmon; the verb is a non-temporal aorist of phero, which when it refers to persons means to lead or to bring along with one; and peirasmos is a test or experiment. So however admirable the new translation’s aim is, I’m not sure it clears up the ancient mystery of this phrase in the prayer. 

St Augustine is not much help here: St Thomas Aquinas a little more. The basic idea seems to be that occasionally God tests a person, or allows a person to be tested: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is an example of the first, God’s permission to Satan to test Job, of the second. Satan’s temptation of Eve may or may not have been permitted by God. Melanchthon in the Loci Communes said, ‘The hardening of Pharaoh's  heart is a Hebrew figure of speech which signifies permission, not an efficient will; as, Lead us not into  temptation, means, permit us not to be led into  temptation."’
In any case, as someone put it, it seems to be such a scenario that Jesus is thinking of when He includes this petition in the prayer. And the fact that it is there at all may reflect His understanding that most of us would not feel (or, indeed, be) up to the heroic resistance of an Abraham or a Job.

What strikes me most about such an inquiry is the depths and breadths contained in that prayer. Each clause can introduce and sustain hours of meditation, all of them enriching.

NEW DIRECTIONS

This blog is changing. It already moved from LiveJournal to Blogger, but that was for practical reasons and irritation therewith. It will now change further, I suspect, in part because small amusing and interesting novelties are more at home on Facebook, but also because the the things that I find interesting to discuss at blog length and in a blog context have changed. When I turned 70 it occurred to me that a new exploration, a new adventure was needed. Since physical developments ruled out climbing more difficult rock walls and doing the Silk Road by motorcycle, religion presented itself as both appealing and appropriate to my age. I have previously mentioned my conversion to Anglicanism as an undergraduate; thoughts and meditations continue, and might be good to share. 

Really? As soon as one writes those last words, or indeed even thinks them, humility crowds in. Who am I to set forth my puny ideas where the greatest minds of two millennia have thought? Who am I to consider those puny ideas worth putting out on the public square that is the blogosphere, where there are already a number of genuinely profound contributions? I entirely agree. And yet, if those same murmurs can help just one passer-by in cyberspace the effort will not have been entirely useless. So, in all more-than-justified humility, I will try.