AGE

There grows an old after the early light

That swells and shrinks in melancholy hues:

Each green excess that copper autumn rues

Remembers under snow the swirling flight

Of swallows, and the starlings’ cloud of fright

Disturbed by creeping frost. No ring-dove coos

In the laborious mornings where death woos

The unsuspecting soul surprised by sight.

Age is a burden borne up a long hill,

Lit by the sunset’s glory on the stones

And trees , warmed by the final rays.

Memories fade, new views come to amaze

Eyes vexed and tired, eternal tones

Now swell and grow: His vast, advancing Will.

The image is of St Ado of Vienne (d. 875 AD), today's saint.

JOY IN THE DARK

It is interesting that the only two Sundays in the liturgical year that have joyous names fall in the middle of sober, even penitential seasons. In the midst of Lent there is Laetare; the third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday – “Rejoice!”

Today was Gaudete, and the rejoicing was linked to John the Baptist replying to the envoys of the Pharisees. “No,” he said, “no, I am not the Messiah.” “Uh, huh? So, are you the Prophet Elijah?” “No, I’m not Elijah.” “OK, listen. We have to have an answer for the guys who sent us, all right? So who are you really?”

[Long, pregnant silence. Finally the scarecrow in rags with Al Pacino’s face deigns to answer. And he replies with a quotation.]

“I am the voice that cries in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’”

[? ? ?]

“In the midst of you there is Someone you do not know: Someone whose sandals I’m not worthy to undo.”

Temporary end of story. Beginning for us. As someone in France wrote: In the midst of us there is the Someone we do not recognise. He is here, already. He is here, among us. Whose face he has taken, we don’t know. We look around us and see all kinds of people on the train, in the shopping mall. Which one of them is He? We don’t know. Perhaps the best bet is to say, Anyone of them; Everyone of them; All of them.

The presence of God is one of the astonishing mysteries that gets deeper as you live and think about it longer. This morning I was at Mass in a vast and icy cold village church on a mountaintop, where the echo and the sound-system combined to make part of the service and almost all of the sermon incomprehensible. And yet, at the Consecration, at the Peace, and at the Communion, there was a sense of the Presence I have rarely felt. And the awaiting of the Birth became very quiet, and very joyful – an extension of ‘Be it unto me according to Thy word’ and of the Magnificat: the quiet, accepting, awaiting joy of Mary.

So today, three candles: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but all of them burning in Mary’s inner room. Rejoice!

THE TEST OF HOPE

In The Wound of Love, the admirable collection of Carthusian writings, one author describes what happens to a new monk. “In the first days of the monastic life, heaven is very near, and the road that leads there seems short.” Then, as time goes by, the way becomes longer and more sinuous, and the goal further and further away. Gradually, “God withdraws the sensible consolations of the first days and hides himself the mystery of absence.”

This happens, I think, not only to monks: it seems true of almost all believers who take their faith seriously. Most people who would not call themselves atheists or retreat into the often mendacious cover of “agnosticism” spend years being what Matthew Arnold memorably called “light half-believers of our casual creeds”. Then something happens that changes them and makes them decide to take their faith seriously. At first, this turns out to be brilliant and exciting. One wonders where it has been all one’s life. It seems as if each day is a conversation with God: one asks questions, and receives answers.

Then, gradually, this too becomes a routine. Prayer is more frequent and more intensive, but there is less and less sense of being answered. The “sensible consolations” seem to have disappeared except on rare occasions. One is increasingly aware of the total indifference to faith of the world around one, and even one’s own mind begins to ask awkward questions. Death is less and less distant: what does happen afterwards? “I have a sin of fear,” wrote John Donne, “that when I have spun my last thread, I shall perish on the shore.” Has it not all been an illusion, a centuries-old structure of wishful thinking?

If we can allow ourselves a metaphor, this state is like the increasing dark of the year as it moves into winter. Days get shorter; and while there is a certain comfort “when melancholy autumn comes to Wembley,/And electric trains are lighted after tea” (Betjeman) the air is cold and dank, clothes seem heavier and comfort harder to find. In other words, we are moving into Advent.

Today is Advent II, and it teaches us a hard lesson with which the Carthusians can help us. When God hides, as the sun seems to hide, in the mystery of absence, it is to us a lesson that we must rely solely upon Hope. Hope instructed by Faith; Hope fed by the Word of God – a daily diet of “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”; Hope that continues to bear the fruit of Charity, nevertheless. Never the less.

Hope, the second great theological virtue. Not blind hope; not Micawberish trusting that “something will turn up”; not betting on an outsider to win at 20 to 1. Informed Hope, instructed Hope, intelligent Hope. Hope as trust, Hope as the Force that is with us, that allows us to get up the twenty-seventh time after we have fallen twenty-six; Hope that keeps us hanging in there when all seems lost; Hope that sees beyond foolishness, beyond crime, beyond sin. Hope that lights two candles as the world goes dark and very, very cold.

ADVENIET!

 German Advent calendar ca. 1930. A shutter opens each day; on Christmas Day double doors open showing the Christ Child in his crib.

My old neighbour in the village (now gone to meet her Maker) had a long shapeless skirt and only one visible tooth. Since her husband’s death she lived alone in a vast crumbling farmhouse with a gorgeous view she did not, I think, take in. She told me once that every November she would go into a deep depression. Here in the South of France winters are not usually severe in the Canadian sense of that word, but they are chill, dank, dark grey and often rainy. Poor Mme Nouviale was clearly suffering from what we would now call Sunshine Deprivation Syndrome; but at this time of year many people (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) feel the cold and the dark in dimensions beyond the physical.

   For some, who still live the agricultural year, it comes with the slowing down of activity, the look back over a (frequently unsatisfactory) year of harvests, the anxious analysis of the accounts; for others, living in cities, there is the pressure of work, difficult relations in the office, family problems that seem to intensify as the nights grow longer; for many living alone there is a growing dread of the dark and the silence.

   Although this unease is often projected onto Christmas, it has little to do with that feast. It is the primeval dark that makes itself felt to humans no longer attuned to it. As such, it calls for the cave-dweller in us to stock up with meat and berries and wood, to light large fires and make loud and joyful noises to drive away the enormous night. Which is perfectly in tune with Christmas, that curious half-pagan half-divine festivity.

   But those of us to whom it is also the feast of the Incarnation, that stupendous and overwhelming surprise, these weeks of darkness leading up to it are more strongly, and differently, charged. As the readings for today – the first Sunday in Advent – point out, we are called to be night-watchmen, vigiles as the French say. We know when He came, but we do not know when He will come again; and Advent celebrates both that past and that future.

   If we are to be good watchers, we must be awake. And so this season is not, as I used to think, a penitential season so much as a thoughtful and a wakeful one. We need to use these weeks to awaken our faith, our hope, and our love. Our faith, which does tend to nod off at times, either through laziness or intellectual incredulity; our hope, which gets overwhelmed by duties, problems, activities and misery; and our love, which sometimes disappears beneath a scrum of tangled irritations and defiant selfishness.

   Today is the day of one candle in the night. ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the dark’ runs the old proverb. The candle has been lit. The night is no longer whole and definitive. Hope is awake, just barely, and sleepily stirring its neighbours Faith and Love. In my little German advent-calendar in the form of a snowy house, one shutter is open, and on the translucent paper window is written, in Gothic lettering, ‘Lord, I await Your salvation.’

IN A NEW YEAR

Last Sunday, we were reminded that the Last Sunday After Trinity, now known as the Sunday Before Advent, and known in Catholic circles as Christ the King, is in fact the last Sunday of the liturgical year. So tomorrow, the First Sunday in Advent, begins a new year. And it begins so quietly. One little candle in the darkness, in the storms, in the long nights of snow, in all the depths of the world. About that we can talk tomorrow --  but what about this new year, then? There should at least be a little celebration, a sense that renewal is not doomed but possible, a consciousness that, as someone put it, we fall down ten times; but when we get up the eleventh time, that’s faith. And hope.

   Many years ago, in early January, Schultz published a Peanuts cartoon featuring Lucy looking crossly at the sky and saying, “We’ve been cheated! It’s not a new year! They’ve given us a used year!” Sometimes January’s new year can feel like that. But the new year of Advent should not. No matter where we are, how we are, in that new year the year can be new. In our hearts, in our minds, and – let’s bring back that entity the Enlightenment downplayed – in our souls, a spring is possible. Somebody wrote that the fig tree is such a beloved symbol in the Bible because it burgeons, it gets leaf-buds, very early, yet its fruit ripen late. So if in the spring of this new year we bud early but then not much seems to happen, let us not be sad or discouraged: there will be a summer, and there will be fruit.

   And a final word about “the season” – “the holiday season”, “the shopping season” and all those things we love to get angry at even as we are part of them. A new year suggests a few good resolutions. Could we perhaps begin with the resolution not to be defensive about Christmas, not to bitch at bad music in shopping centres, not to grouch and grinch and complain? A resolution to live this season – which is as much happily pagan as it is, for us, also happily religious – with confidence and pleasure, on whatever scale pleases us and those we love? Such a resolution would help increase the joy of the world in expectation of the dies Natalis, would allow us to smile at our families, our neighbours, and strangers, and to pass on whatever help we can spare to those whose new year begins in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity. In newness of life.

ET IN SPIRITUS SANCTUS

Lately I've been pondering the subject of the Holy Spirit, Le saint Esprit, der heilige Geist, the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Trinity. On one Catholic forum I saw that someone had written, 'We Catholics tend to forget about the Holy Spirit: we have the Father, the Son and the Blessed Mother.' In slightly more sophisticated theological discussions, I have been seeing the Spirit referred to as the dynamic of love between the Father and the Son into which we can be drawn through prayer. In the New Testament, the Spirit is given in curiously specific ways at curiously specific moments, just as 'peace' becomes something very specific: leave your peace in the house you visit, but if it does not receive you well, take your peace back again. Jesus breathes on the apostles and they receive the Holy Spirit. 

It's all very confusing. How can the Spirit be both a spiritus -- a pneuma, a ruach -- a cloud, a wisp, a breeze, present but intangible like a gas or an odour, and a person? Is the Spirit a He or an It? One place this leads us, of course, is to the Creed, which tells us that the Spirit 'proceeds from the Father and the Son'. It did not always do so: the gestation of that phrase in the Creed was a long and horribly difficult one, as the Wikipedia article on the subject shows. 

So I thought I'd look up a Church Father or two -- in our busy lives we tend to ignore them, which is foolish of us. If Christians read the past scholars and thinkers of their faith as carefully and assiduously as devout Jews do those of theirs, our religious life would be less simplistic and infinitely richer. St Basil did not answer my question but he did write something very fine which, through a metaphor, answered another of my constant questions: how can God, creator of the Whole, be present to little me, a speck on a speck, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe? Here is Basil:

Simple in himself, the Spirit is manifold in his mighty works. The whole of his being is present to each individual; the whole of his being is present everywhere. Though shared in by many, he remains unchanged; his self-giving is no loss to himself. Like the sunshine, which permeates all the atmosphere, spreading over land and sea, and yet is enjoyed by each person as though it were for him alone, so the Spirit pours forth his grace in full measure, sufficient for all, and yet is present as though exclusively to everyone who can receive him. To all creatures that share in him he gives a delight limited only by their own nature, not by his ability to give.  . . . .

As clear, transparent substances become very bright when sunlight falls on them and shine with a new radiance, so also souls in whom the Spirit dwells, and who are enlightened by the Spirit, become spiritual themselves and a source of grace for others.

From the Spirit comes foreknowledge of the future, understanding of the mysteries of faith, insight into the hidden meaning of Scripture, and other special gifts. Through the Spirit we become citizens of heaven, we are admitted to the company of the angels, we enter into eternal happiness and abide in God. 

The question of the Spirit's Personhood remains; one keeps looking, and thinking. But meanwhile, we know that He is accessible to us, that He is our Comforter and Advocate, that whenever we pray, it is He that prays in and through us and makes it possible for us to pray at all. Perhaps we have trouble seeing Him clearly not because He is far away but because He is so close. Veni, creator Spiritus.