THE HARDLY, BARELY PRAYABLE

Reading Thomas Friedman’s excellent New York Times columns from Dubai recently, I was struck by his point that for the first time, the countries of the Middle East can no longer simply blame the problems on “the West” but are, or will be, forced to recognise that ISIS, or Daech, is a homegrown monster that calls into question everyone’s understanding of what and who they are and intend to be. And seeing the degeneration of Sunni-Shia relations in the area, I’m reminded of, say, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 and the fact that, 400 years after that, my mother still refused to buy meat from our town’s Catholic butcher. We Christians have been there, done that. Yes, torn the other guys limb from limb, cut their throats, decapitated them, drowned them in barrels, the lot. It makes one think about how we got out of that. I suspect it involved three or four successive and in part cumulative factors.

First, strong monarchies and symbolic power. When I first visited Versailles, I found it excessive and vulgar. Only later did I realise the gigantic and brilliant public-relations exercise it had been. Louis XIV accomplished, with Versailles, the astonishing feat of convincing provincial seigneurs, who had real power in the form of private armies, that the number of feet they were allowed to stand from the King’s bed at his morning levée – in other words, symbolic power – was more important to their well-being than being lords of Lorraine.  That began the drain away from murderous mobs run by ambitious warlords.

Second, the Enlightenment. That curious and formless movement toward knowledge in harness with civilised behaviour, that second Renaissance that briefly celebrated balance and harmony and went on to apply thought to emotion, modified faith by making it unreasonable to maim and kill for its sake. In the time, and the world, of Diderot and Voltaire, faith was increasingly what one lived in one’s private relation to God; the Church was where those of faith came together, but society as a whole was supposed to be directed by reasonable and civilised behaviour. This, of course, had a few serious birth-pains involving guillotines and terror, but in the end it proved irresistible because, like democracy, it was the worst conceivable system except for all the alternatives.

Third, the Industrial Revolution. This almost-unimaginable J-curve of social and material change, which is still going on, although for many it intensified their faith (think of the Oxford Movement), made the habits of the Enlightenment – faith as something you might propagate but you did not maim or kill for – not only attractive but essential. It also continued another aspect of the Enlightenment: atheism, the failure of faith when touched by reason, grew apace and from then on faith could no longer ignore it.

So, now. What about now? In large swathes of the world, Christian faith is being threatened by real, physical enemies who still consider faith something worth maiming and killing for. How do we, and should we, react? On a worldly level, Friedman, I think, is right: containment to stop the horror spreading, and amplification to help good developments where they are starting to happen. But what do we do as Christians? Well, in many churches there is an admirable movement to help fellow-believers in that part of the world. But beyond that? Yesterday at a dinner party I heard some devout people’s reaction: No truck with Islam in any form, it’s an evil masquerading as a religion, maybe it was decent once but that was centuries ago, etcetera etcetera.

It made me reflect that in the various churches I have worshipped in since 2001, not once have I heard prayers for those we feel, and often know, to be our enemies. I have heard prayers for the Queen; I have heard prayers for various Presidents and their governments; I have heard many prayers for persecuted Christians everywhere; but I have not heard prayers for the members of ISIS; I have not heard prayers for Vladimir Putin; I have not heard prayers for Boko Haram. Let us ponder this very seriously. And reread Matthew 5:43-48, in the full knowledge that for those in the field that is almost impossibly difficult, but that for us, for us in safety and in prayer, it is probably crucial.

HUMDRUMLIES

I was rereading the wonderful Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love where, in the introductory chapters, an author (they are always anonymous) explains the difficulties facing a young monk entering the Order. Seduced by the Absolute, expecting marvels of saintliness, he will be surprised and dismayed by the banality of the daily life there, “a kind of dull grey” with occasional conflicts among the brothers and endless compromises within the “family”. Only gradually will he discover that it is in precisely such banality that God develops the qualities which make the mature Carthusian such a remarkable figure in the world of devotion and prayer.

It touched a chord. Since, at the age of 70, I decided that religion was the adventure befitting this new stage of life, I was beginning to miss the illuminations of the early years, the sense of discovery, and had started to feel a dull grey weight of daily humdrumlies interfering with the adventure. So reading our Carthusian friend made me realise that perhaps precisely that weight of humdrumlies is the stuff of God’s action and His way of addressing one. Of course, once you realise that, you remember that George Herbert had been telling you the same thing ever since you discovered him at the age of 20 or so: you have been a little slow on the uptake.

You also remember Brother Lawrence, that amiable 17^th-century German servant of a monastery who turned out to be the saintliest man there, and whose very simple piety based itself on “the practice of the presence of God” and a continuing conversation with Him. A conversation that went on while he was cooking, baking, sweeping floors and tending the kitchen garden.

It is yet another stage in the education to humility. A Church service is wonderful: “I was glad when they said unto me: we will go into the house of the Lord” (Ps. 122:1). An exquisite service with flawless choirs, as in Oxford, is even more glorious. A simple Mass in a country church is still a Mass, where God is present in a very specific and precious way. But reading the stories of Elijah and Elisha at home, sweeping the kitchen floor “as for Thy laws”, making beds, changing the oil on the family car, cooking vegetable soup or dirty rice while having constantly one’s ear open for the murmur of the Spirit and conversing with Him as freely as with one’s intimate friend or family – that may lead us to unexpected uplands of surprising sunlight.

The Elixir

Teach me, my God and King,

         In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything

         To do it as for Thee.

         Not rudely, as a beast,

         To run into an action;

But still to make Thee prepossest,

         And give it his perfection.

         A man that looks on glass,

         On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

         And then the heav'n espy.

         All may of Thee partake:

         Nothing can be so mean,

Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"—

         Will not grow bright and clean.

         A servant with this clause

         Makes drudgery divine:

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,

         Makes that and th' action fine.

         This is the famous stone

         That turneth all to gold;

For that which God doth touch and own

         Cannot for less be told.

George Herbert

ANTI-GRAVITY?

"SOLEMN" (Oxford English Dictionary)

1.   a.  Associated or connected with religious rites or observances; performed with      due ceremony and reverence; having a religious character; sacred.

The seruice daylie doon..so deuoute, solempne, and full of Armonye. (Thos. Cromwell)

3.   a. Performed with, accompanied by, due formality or ceremony; of a formal or ceremonious character.

Watching the glorious Kristin Scott Thomas perform Sophocles’ ‘Electra’ recently, I was reminded of the Catholic Mass as practiced in the village churches in my area in rural France. The theatre performance was filled with passion, vast floods of it; there were occasional flashes of humour, but the semiotic of the whole production was “(Greek) Tragedy is Passion” – rip-roaring, throat-tearing, rolling-on-the-ground passion.  The Mass – the modern, post-Vatican-II Mass as presided over by our hyperactive, charming, big-hearted Algerian priest – has, obviously, a different kind of passion, but that is not its main characteristic. Its main feature is upbeat intimacy: the semiotic here is “the Mass is a family get-together – God’s family”. There are flashes of humour, and the moment of the Peace, where the liturgy is interrupted while everyone shakes hands with or kisses neighbours, here is not nearly as invasive an interruption as in some more formal Masses: it preserves the mood that has been there all along.

            Well, so what? In Electra, we are caught up in an uncontrollable hatred and grief; in the village Mass, we are absorbed into a good-humoured communal celebration. And yet, and yet. In both manifestations, something huge and important is missing, and it is the same thing: solemnity. Greek tragedies were solemn occasions, not religious services but performed and beheld with reverence and gravity. The performers wore masks. The ending comprised katharsis, a cleansing, a purification of the emotions of pity and terror that the story had called forth.

            The Mass is a religious service. It is the supreme moment of meeting between man and God, between Man and God-made-Man, between an ordinary person and the Resurrected Christ. Few people have said this better that John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a Roman Catholic – and what he wrote is equally true for Anglo-Catholics:

To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses forever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words -- it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.

Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on, as if impatient to fulfill their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick, for they are all parts of one integral action, for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon, as when it was said in the beginning, "What thou doest, do quickly".

Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass, because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven into the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass, for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the name of the Lord as He passed by, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth". And as Moses on the mountain, so we too "make haste to bow our heads to the earth, and adore".

So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, "waiting for the moving of the water", each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intentions, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly, following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our place with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

There are little children there, and old men, and simple laborers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving, there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one Eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and the scope of it.

What Newman wrote still supposes a congregation, a community; but it is a congregation united in a joy that is solemn, in a solemn hour of celebration. “Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble.” I have seldom if ever attended a post-Vatican-II Mass, or indeed an Anglican Common Worship Eucharist, where this sense was expressed. Solemnity is not boring, nor is it old-fashioned: it is gravitas, the expression of the respect and awe due to what is greater than our sloppy humanity. An expression that picks up and involves our sloppy human selves and catches us up, for all too short a moment, into the portals of eternity. Please, can we have our solemnity back?

ALL SOULS

Aladar Korosfoi-Kriesch, 'All Souls Day' (1910)

   ‘The souls of the faithful departed’. What does it mean, and what do we do with them? Where are they? Up there? Out there? Down there? Nowhere? For all our advances in knowledge of the Universe, we have no idea. The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, is undiscovered still. All we know for sure is what Jesus told the Good Thief, from cross to cross: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise’. That thief is one of those we remember today.

   So what we do with them is remembrance. That they be not forgotten. Lest we forget. Being forgotten, we sense, is the worst that can happen to one who has died, in this world. We remember our own dead men and women: parents, spouses, friends, sometimes and grievingly, children; we remember them with affection, we sometimes miss them, sometimes not; we re-call them, call them up in our minds, their faces, their voices (often the hardest to remember), their way of walking, their eccentricities; and in doing so we realise that we live in a web of the living and the dead, that the unforgotten are still with us, that we are not alone.

   And yet, as the Bible text on famous men reminds us, there are those who are forgotten, as individuals. Them we remember as members of a larger unit: those who died in the inferno of World War I, the numberless martyrs killed by tyrants and by the enraged because of their faith in God, those small ordinary folk who never got into the news or the history books but lived their faith truly and kindly in a corner of Dorset, of the Alsace, of Pomerania, of Tuscany or of Massachusetts. These we re-member: we put them together again, we imagine them again, we bring them briefly back to the life they departed, in order to honour them as they were perhaps not honoured before.

   Where they are, we don’t know. But we trust, which is the essence of faith and hope. We trust that they are in the warmth and light and joy of the Presence of God. We trust that they are filled with the happiness they deserved. We trust that, perhaps, we too may join them there. One day. One eternal Day.

OH, WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHIN' IN

In between ‘Trick or Treat’ i.e. the Great Candy Gulp, and ‘le jour des morts’ in France where millions of potted chrysanthemums get put on graves, there is ‘la Toussaint’, mainly known here as the date that gives its name to a school vacation. It’s hard to get one’s mind around, rather like the recent maps of the known Universe. All those ‘saints’, known and unknown – and what is a saint, really, anyway?

To some, saints are great people in the faith, who have gone before us, who are in Heaven around God, and to whom we can pray to put in a good word for us, because, after all, God Himself is a bit august for little me to be addressing. To others, all those who genuinely believe and who genuinely try to make their lives conform to the model we have been given are Saints.

In both cases, the Sancti, the consecrated, the set-apart, are a community of which we are a part. So who are the We who celebrate the They, and conversely? We are the ones who are still slogging it out down here (or in here, if you prefer Heaven out there to up there). We are the ones who have to deal with daily brown stuff that hits the fan, and to whom prayer comes in fits and starts when it comes at all.

They, on the other hand, have been there, done that.  Some have been murdered for their faith (alas, we still know about that happening); some have been great preachers who have inspired hundreds if not thousands with their impassioned speech; some have been immense minds who have spent their lives studying God’s thought and meaning in the Scriptures and elsewhere, and communicating their findings to the whole of the Church.

All of them have something to tell us, something to show us, something we can and profitably might well emulate. All of them took their faith seriously. All of them – even the martyrs, I suspect – took their faith with peace and joy and humour. What can they do for us? For some of us, they are the ones who can understand our prayers and pass them on to the Most High. For others, they are models to be studied, venerated, given thanks for, and emulated. In all cases, their stories are worth reading. One of the most delicious books for the coffee-table, the study, the bedside table or the place where kings go on foot, is a dictionary of saints. Not a life but is weirdly fascinating.

They are all around us. We live in a world that breathes creatures beyond our silly senses. Angels, and Saints. And maybe one day we will march in their number: from New Orleans to the Gates of Heaven.