LAETARE: IT'S GRACE, STUPID.

The fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare from the Psalm that begins "Rejoice". It is a pause, as it were, when we may breathe in the midst of our intense self-discipline -- yes, well. Most of us are not very good at intense self-discipline, and so we can feel mildly guilty at not having earned Laetare.
Which brings us to the whole topic of Lenten guilt. Somewhere around Ash Wednesday many of us fully intend this year to "do a good Lent", fasting, praying and giving alms with sincerity, assiduity and regularity. By the time of Laetare for many of us this lovely plan lies in ruins, and we feel guilty.

It is worth stopping to reflect on the similarity of this experience with that of New Year's Resolutions.  And with that of weight-loss plans. For these last, the permanent success rate, it has been proved, is between 2 and 5 per cent: the figures may be the same for New Year's and Lenten resolutions. Even if we consider slimming to be a form of vanity (which it is, health excuses notwithstanding) and Januarius to be a pagan idol (which he is), we are still left with the shards of our Lent.

 The key, of course, lies in the possessive pronoun. Our Lent. My Lent. Not selfishness: I wanted to bring God the offering of a "good Lent", because I love Him and want to do something for Him, as one does for a loved one. Uh, huh. Niet. Time and again, with a divine smile or a heavenly tear, God raps us over the knuckles and says "You've done it again! You've misunderstood me again! I don't want your immolated oxen, your roasted rams, nor do I want your good Lent!"

Right, Lord: what do you want, then? "I want you to realise, once and for all, that contrary to what you humans keep saying it is more blessed to receive than to give, and also a great deal more difficult. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my complete love. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my only-begotten son. I was under no illusion as to what you would do with him. But I knew that once you had done that, I could turn precisely that horror, that evil so typical of y'all, into the greatest good, for you. So look at what my Son said to Nicodemus, that intelligent believer. 'God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but so that it might be saved through him. He that believes in him is not condemned; he that does not is already judged. The world did not accept the Son because men of evil deeds prefer the dark to the light.'"

So we should work at doing good deeds? "Yes and no: what He went on to say was 'but whoever does truth comes into the light.'" Doing truth. Not doing good deeds. Doing truth. It sounds odd and illogical. Is truth something you do?

Here we are with the shards of our Lent. But Lent is still going on. And we have failed. Again. So we smile, say "Thank you, Lord, for the lesson," and get up and go on. Knowing that we can do absolutely nothing; that we have been given the gift of God's love free and without charge, and that it does not matter a tinker's fart whether we fast or eat, write cheques or save, and go to Church or not. God did not check up on all those things before deciding whether we were worthy of his love. What we do, being loved like that, is work at fully realising it, taking it in, letting ourselves be overwhelmed. That, I suspect, is what "doing truth" is. Being love, God's love is always the same as our love, which is why we can love him back. Being God's, it is always also different. Always a little unsettling. But not -- pace much modern church rhetoric of the "naught for your comfort" kind -- demanding. I'm not sure God ever demands. I think he gives, and waits for us to receive and accept. Learning to do that is "doing truth". And it results in rejoicing. Laetare, indeed.

THAT LITTLE WORD AGAIN

In my previous post I looked at the prayer that God’s will may be done on earth AS it is in Heaven; today we might glance at the prayer that we may be forgiven AS we forgive others.

It seems, at first, much simpler than the previous AS:  a simple case of do as you would be done by. If you want to be forgiven, the least you can do is do some forgiving yourself. Let’s start with what’s to be forgiven. In all Gospels except Luke it is “debts”;  but many scholars think that the word Jesus used was the Aramaic hoba, which means both debt and sin. If this sounds odd, remember that in both Dutch and German the same word, schuld, is used for a monetary debt and to mean ‘guilt’; and in Dutch, therefore, the relevant line of the Lord’s prayer says: forgive us our schuld as we forgive our schuldenaren – literally our debtors, but in fact those who have schuld toward us. And let’s remember also that only a little over a century ago debt was considered so serious that an inability to pay it sent you to gaol. (Those who borrow from the Mafia are even to this day reminded forcefully of the need to pay both debt and vig.)

Are we God’s debtors? It seems odd: if God is love, and our relation to him is one of love, is it decent to express that in terms of debt? In the Old Testament, God put it very clearly to Israel: if you (plural: y’all) will love and honour me and keep my commandments, you will be my people and I will be your God. If you will not, I will turn my back on you and nasty things will probably happen to you. So it’s in one sense a transaction; and a transaction, agreed to by both sides, creates a debt. If this sounds one-sided, you can still find traces of the other side in the Psalms, when the Psalmist cries “Up, Lord, and do something!” And in Judaism arguing, even indignantly, with God is not considered outrageous.

With the coming of Christ there is a subtle change. It is no longer merely a matter of keeping commandments, but of a relation of profound intimacy with God: with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit. This is still simple, but where keeping commandments is simple on this side of complexity, the new relationship is simple far, far beyond complexity.

So what does that do to debt and schuld? It transforms it, or is meant to. Just as between great lovers the very thought of “owing” is inconceivable, so in the new relation of love between God and the soul it is (meant to be) inconceivable. Right, says God: but if you accept this, and you also accept that “what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me”, then the thought of “owing” between you and your brother must also become inconceivable.

But. But we still live in a sublunar and greebly world. So in the meantime, in the mean time – the time in the middle between promise and Parousia, the mean and ungenerous time of Auden’s “low and dishonest decade” --, there is forgiveness. It is the way-station to inconceivability. And we learn the HOW of forgiving by looking at the way we hope God will forgive us. Not a mean forgiving, that will go on reminding the forgiven of their nasties and my virtue; not a forgiving accompanied by stern lectures, demanding promises never to do it again; no, joyful forgiving with open arms, with a clean soft garment and a feast of rich veal from the fatted calf.

This takes a bit of learning. Most of the time we don’t even pray for our enemies, let alone forgive them. When did you last hear prayers in church for ISIS and its members? Forgiving is hard; forgiving and forgetting even harder. But the joy it brings is so enormous that the learning is worth every effort. Another of the Joys of Lent? 

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "The Return of the Prodigal Son"   

A TWO-LETTER WORD

Thinking about the infinite depth and variety that is the Lord’s Prayer, I was struck by the two appearances in it of the word “as”.

‘Thy will be done, on earth AS it is in Heaven’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses (or: debts) AS we forgive them that trespass against us’.

Extraordinary. I’ve written earlier about the curious use of the optative in the Lord’s Prayer’s first three petitions; and the AS brings home the full mysteriousness. Let God’s will be done here on earth; let us help God’s will be done here on earth; let us do God’s will here on earth; but how? ‘AS it is [done] in Heaven.’

Thinking about this makes one realise that AS can have two different if related meanings: ‘to the same extent’ and ‘in the same manner’. Which is meant here? Possibly both; but it can surely never be done here, on grubby old Earth, to the extent that it is done in Heaven? So we are forced back to ‘in the same way’. And the question that arises at once is: how do we know the way God’s will is done in Heaven? We can only know this by various forms of extrapolation.

The first is by extrapolation from Earth, and us, in all our incompleteness, spoiltness (in every sense), and bloody mess. Without fantasising, we do I think rightly assume Heaven to be the opposite of those conditions. So when we look at the way God’s will tends to be ‘done’ at all here, we can look at that doing’s incompleteness, its spoiltness (in every sense) and its bloody mess, and weep. The bloody mess is that of those who assume God’s will to be the massacre of all they consider as His enemies. The spoiltness is that of those who assume God’s will to be their own comfort and prosperity, and/or those who spoil and deform other’s attempts to do God’s will out of anger, envy or cynicism. The incompleteness is that of all of us, who invariably ‘leave undone that which we ought to have done, and do those things which we ought not to have done.’

Battlefield of Verdun, 1916

The beauty is that God has given us the gift of imagination. Although we cannot reach perfection, we can imagine it. Although by our own efforts and on earth we cannot reach Heaven, we can imagine it. As Keats wrote in a letter: ‘I believe in . . . the truth of imagination. The imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it true.’ If the imagination is joined to the humility of prayer, it may help to save us.

So if – knowing that we cannot accomplish anything by our own efforts – we consider doing God’s will AS it is in Heaven, we know that such a doing is complete, unspoilt and clean. We also know that we can’t do that. Hence, perhaps, the optative, with its deliberate ambiguity and passive voice. ‘Let (or: may) thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.’ By whom? Not by us, messy little sinners that we are. Not directly by God himself: he doesn’t work that way much as we’d like him to. No: if it gets done, it will be done only by him, through us. And if so, we should work at learning two things: opening our doors, windows and shutters to let the ruach, the pneuma, the spiritus sanctus in; and constantly imagining Heaven.

Heaven imagined: Carlo Carloni

There is of course another help we have: the one who taught us the prayer in the first place. He is the Law; we do God’s will by following him. The two ways are not contradictory; but following Yeshua Meshiach is full of contradictions, as anyone who has closely read the Gospels knows. WWJD never has an easy answer. So the first way I suggested may complement the second. Prayer is, in any case, the one constant essential.

I will write my next post on the second AS in the Lord’s Prayer. Stay tuned.

SOMETIMES YOU GET IT WRONG . . .

Partly because I have spent my professional life in the sixteenth century and its language, and partly because I became an Anglican by falling in love with the texts of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, I have always preferred to read the liturgy there and the Scriptural passages in the 1611 Authorised Version. Until yesterday, that is; when the lectionary proposed reading St Paul's Epistle to the Romans and when, reading it in the AV, I found my eyes glazing over and realised that I understood not three words together of a text that I thought I knew.

So I went to a website I have come to like a great deal: Bible Gateway, where one can look up any passage in the Bible in a vast number of different versions and in a number of languages. I typed in "Romans 1" and was faced with the choice of versions. There are modern translations I genuinely dislike for their chattiness, but I also thought that going to other older versions, like Douai or Geneva, would probably not be a help. For the Epistle to the Romans is a notoriously theoretical and difficult letter of Paul's -- Karl Barth's most famous work is a book-length study of it --, so a modern version was after all indicated.

Then I remembered that when I was a boy my father used to read us a passage of Scripture at Sunday breakfast, and that these often came from a volume called Letters to Young Churches, translated into modern English by J.B. Phillips. So within the list on Bible Gateway I looked for the name, and found the J.B. Phillips Bible. The result you can follow here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=PHILLIPS .

I started reading, and found I couldn't stop: it was fascinating, intelligent, challenging and wholly engrossing. My eyes glued to the screen, I read all 16 chapters. And at the end, I realised that there are moments when one's love for Renaissance English can be a hindrance rather than a help. A sobering thought, entirely suitable for Lent.

J.B. Phillips

UNUSUALLY BLESSED

My weekly e-mail from St Matthias in Somerset, N.J. sent me this colourful character. I thought he was worth sharing.

Bl. Daniel Brottier                                    

Daniel spent most of his life in the trenches-one way or another.
Born in France in 1876, Daniel was ordained in 1899 and began a teaching career. That didn't satisfy him long. He wanted to use his zeal for the gospel far beyond the classroom. He joined the missionary Congregation of the Holy Spirit, which sent him to Senegal, West Africa. After eight years there, his health was suffering. He was forced to return to France, where he helped raise funds for the construction of a new cathedral in Senegal.
At the outbreak of World War I, Daniel became a volunteer chaplain and spent four years at the front. He did not shrink from his duties. Indeed, he risked his life time and again in ministering to the suffering and dying. It was miraculous that he did not suffer a single wound during his 52 months in the heart of battle.
After the war he was invited to help establish a project for orphaned and abandoned children in a Paris suburb. He spent the final 13 years of his life there. He died in 1936 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Paris only 48 years later.
Blessed Daniel might be called "Teflon Dan" since nothing seemed to harm him while in the midst of war. God intended to use him in some pretty wonderful ways for the good of the Church and he willingly served. He is a good example for all of us. 

Cry aloud, spare not,
lift up thy voice like a trumpet,
and shew my people their transgression,
and the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet they seek me daily,
and delight to know my ways,
as a nation that did righteousness,
and forsook not the ordinance of their God:
they ask of me the ordinances of justice;
they take delight in approaching to God.

3 Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?
wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?
Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure,
and exact all your labours.
4 Behold, ye fast for strife and debate,
and to smite with the fist of wickedness:
ye shall not fast as ye do this day,
to make your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is it such a fast that I have chosen?
a day for a man to afflict his soul?
is it to bow down his head as a bulrush,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
wilt thou call this a fast,
and an acceptable day to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
to loose the bands of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free,
and that ye break every yoke?
7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,
and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?
when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him;
and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning,
and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee;
the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward.
9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer;
thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.
If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke,
the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
10 and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,
and satisfy the afflicted soul;
then shall thy light rise in obscurity,
and thy darkness be as the noonday:
11 and the Lord shall guide thee continually,
and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones:
and thou shalt be like a watered garden,
and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

Isaiah 58

UPDATE ON QUINQUAGESIMA

Thonas Cranmer, with his Prayer Book

 I've been neglecting this blog, not because of a falling-off but because I've been too busy trying to incorporate daily Matins and Evensong into my life. A pity in a way, because I notice that readership has been diminishing as well; and as thinking and writing about thinking are one of the few things I can do to take my faith beyond the walls of my skin, this is clearly a message that I should pick it up again.

Daily Matins and Evensong (from a 1662 Book of Common Prayer stamped "property of York Minster" -- sorry, York Minster) is an interesting experience. It makes you read the Psalms in an intens(iv)e way, and the old Lectionary gives you longer and more consecutive readings that most modern ones. Also, as is always the case when you repeat old and trusted liturgical texts on a regular basis, they acquire a slightly different content each day. Why?

A liturgical text is a score for performance. The real "text", in other words, is not the words as written but the written words pronounced, said (or sung) by your voice in the context of a service, even if it is a private one, said within the walls of your own inner room. And as such it consists of two parts: the words, the score, as written by Thomas Cranmer and/or Miles Coverdale on the one hand, and what your mind, heart and soul bring to those words at this time on this day on the other. And since that part changes each day, the liturgical text is never the same two days running.

Things you notice: first, the readings, being more or less consecutive, take you through stories in the form of a coherent narrative in longer sections than you are used to, which is not only salutary but pleasant and interesting. Second, you keep getting blown away by the Psalms, those strange haunting poems that keep changing the person of the speaker and therefore keep upsetting the manner and level of your own identification with them.

At the moment, the Old Testament readings are from Exodus, and recite the interminable and depressing story of the Plagues of Egypt. It goes on, and on, and on, and you occasionally feel a certain sympathy for Pharaoh, the more as we are told that it is the Lord who keeps hardening his heart so that even after the frogs, the hail and the locusts he still won't let the Israelites go, when it comes to the crunch.

The Morning Prayer New Testament readings are from Matthew and show us Jesus in conversation with Pharisees and Sadducees, with the ordinary folk listening in and oscillating between fanzone crowdcrushing of the Meshiach and politely urging him to go somewhere else. Again, sometimes you can see their point: when he lets the Legion (of) demons move into the herd of pigs at Gadara, which then plunge off the cliff into the lake and drown, that herd was presumably someone's livelihood.
There is a directness about Jesus' healing which can be disconcerting.

The Evening Prayer New Testament lessons are from Acts, and currently concern Paul's interaction with two Roman governors-general and the local King Agrippa, culminating in his being sent to Rome to bejudged by Cæsar because he has insisted that he is a civis Romanus as our school books called it. Great narrative, that has you wondering (because you had forgotten) what comes next, as in any good thriller.

As for the Psalms, they are demanding a separate post and I think I will indulge them, because there is a lot to be thought and said about them. I will try to be more regular about all this, so stay tuned.