THE CLOUD -- AND THE LADY

Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà

Growing up as a Protestant, however liberal and un-Calvinist, one doesn’t spend much time or attention on the Mother of Christ. Mainly in the Nativity story at Christmas. But Catholic Mariolatry (as Protestants call it) is vaguely distasteful and very, very foreign. I remember exchanging e-mails with a colleague, a former Episcopalian converted to Rome, about this: I told him that as an Anglo-Catholic I could go along with much of what I experience in the Roman churches to which, living in France, I now go, but that the whole BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) business still put me off.

            Yet as one deepens one’s faith, one cannot avoid it for ever. It must be faced and dealt with. And what better day to do it here than “le quinze août” as they call it, secularly, republicanly, in France, i.e. the Assumption of the BVM?

            Myriam, then. Small-town girl from Nazareth, Galilee. 18 or so, engaged to Yosef bar-Ya’akov the builder, perhaps about 25. And then, one day, the Cloud happens to her. Announced by a man-like figure all of light. And in the Cloud, as we know, the Deity very occasionally comes among humans. In this case, she is pregnant; she visits her cousin Elisheva, also pregnant, and poetry happens. And later she gives birth to the Meshiach, the Anointed of God.

            So far, so good. As a scholar and a Christian (Prot or not) I can follow this; and having seen evidence of the Cloud in other places in the Bible I can go along with the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity also. And, of course, she is so very touching. Not just in her small-town innocence, but in her unhesitating Yes to the proposed earth-shaking Event. In that, she is a female Abram. “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” And in her Magnificat, which shows her to be the greatest woman poet since Sappho.

            Now, though, minefields loom. I have serious trouble with the emphasis on her perpetual virginity. Not that it’s impossible; but it’s just so convenient to a Mediterranean civilization (owing much to Indian dualism) that esteems women only when they are virgins or mothers. You put those two categories together, and Wow, a new goddess. It has always struck me as undermining the whole concept of the Incarnation. (C.G. Jung admired it: he said Catholicism was psychologically right to complete the unstable male Trinity with a female fourth. Theologically, though, the problem remains.) Moreover, the Gospel itself mentions four brothers of Yeshua by name – Ya’akov, Yosef, Shimon and Yehuda – and throws in a few sisters (typically unnamed and unnumbered, but let’s assume two and call them Elisheva and Chana). The Church’s centuries-long hemming and hawing on the subject – they were cousins, all sorts of relatives were called “brother”, etc. – would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

            I find the picture of Myriam as a richly-fulfilled Jewish matriarch (Yosef seems to have died in his Forties), presiding over a Friday-night Sabbath dinner with her five sons and two daughters infinitely probable and attractive. And it in no way contradicts anything said later in the Gospels. She was with Yeshua at the wedding in Cana, and (like any mother) whispered to the attendants not to pay any heed to his demurral but to do whatever he told them to. She appears briefly with the others in a story of which the point is not rejection but every believer’s bond to Him. And she appears at the Cross, with a few other women, when everyone else – all those brothers and sisters, all the disciples except Yochanan – has skedaddled. She is the Blessed Mother of the Pietàs, of which Michelangelo’s Rondanini is the most suggestive and heartbreaking.

            Buoyed by Mediterranean virgolatry, the Church for centuries could not bear the idea that the Mother of God could just, like, die, and be eaten by worms. So various alternatives were considered, and spread everywhere in popular devotion. The Dormition, the Assumption, etc. And finally, as late as 1950, Pius XII declared the bodily Assumption of her into Heaven to be a dogma of the Church.

            Do we go along with this? An African priest this morning stated unequivocally – and perhaps rightly – that the Assumption was and is the inescapable accompaniment of the Resurrection. I’m not sure of this, but it is true that if you  can accept the second there is no inherent reason why you cannot accept the first.

            What, now I come gradually to pay much more attention to Our Lady, I find more important is her role as “la première de cordée”, the first on the rope, the one who leads the way of all other mortals in accepting her Son. That I can see, can admire, can even worship. I can pray a Rosary (though I keep forgetting the bits) without any qualm of conscience or scholarly mind. And I rather like the image of her being lifted out of our atmosphere into the glory of her Son and being close to Him for eternity. Where she can say Baruch atta Adonai for, and with, us.  

IN THE CLOUD? (SCARY. COMFORTING.)

Reading about Moses, about the Lord moving into Solomon’s Temple, and about the Transfiguration, there is that sense of Immensity suddenly moving right in. The Cloud, in each case, is hard to imagine: something like ball lightning only MORE, more intense, huger, and not going away. This is how the Creator manifests Himself to very occasional, very chosen and doubtless very terrified little humans. 

It made me think about the insanity of scale. I have shown before, on this blog, the current astronomers’ map of the Universe, above, with its Googols of constellations and Googolplexes of planets. If (and there is no reason to assume it’s not so) the God we woship created all this, how --- the stammering consciousness asks itself --- can this be the same God whom we call Father, to whom we pray about our little souls, and in whose presence Brother Lawrence so cheerfully cooked potatoes? When I think about this, my synapses very nearly short out. Of course, one can say that this is yet one more proof that Christianity is nonsense. Judaism, at least, preserves a sense of scale in that God is concerned more with a people than with individuals; Islam seems to be more about trumpeting God’s infinite greatness than about any interest of His in small human matters; and there is Christianity teaching us to worry about what the Creator of the Universe (see map) thinks of what we said to our spouse last night. When you fully take that on board there is the sound and smell of burning connectors. 

And yet. And yet. Keep thinking. Imagine, not that we Earthlings are merely an accidental breadcrumb on the skirt of the Universe, but that we inhabit something deliberately unique. Perhaps SETI is doomed to failure. Perhaps we really are alone. Is that depressing? Not necessarily. Imagine that this gorgeous tiny blue jewel of a planet was created by a joyous Creator in an outlying corner of the Whole, as an experiment, as a laboratory where, over the millennia, something was made to grow that could think, could react to Him, could create in its turn – Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. 

But He too saw the insanity of scale – well, let’s say the extremity of scale. So first He chose a people, and communicated with them in ways they could (just) understand. And they behaved, of course, as humans will. But/And, in the end, He saw they were ready for a new way to bridge the scale gap. And He created, for and with and out of His Son, the Second Person of His triune Being, the Incarnation. An ordinary human that humans could talk to. Incredible! I remember my colleague Irving Layton, a wonderful Canadian Jewish poet, saying to me, “But Roger, Jesus is my Jewish brother. My brother farts. Does God fart?” What could I say? “Yes, Irving.”

And so, yes, we have the map of the Universe; but we also have Yeshua bar Yosef, the builder and rabbi from Nazareth in Galilee (an ordinary town, now a city, been there, my son-in-law comes from there). And now ordinary fishermen and their wives, Roman sergeants, unpopular tax collectors, quiet scholars and provincial hookers could talk to – to HIM. To YHWH. To the Creator. He healed people. He had moods. He cried for his friend. He was loved by at least one man and one woman. 

Yes, well. And then, being human, they fucked it up. Exactly as he knew they would, they killed him. So much for that experiment. But no. Because in that unimaginable night of Easter, He – now again all of He, one again within the Triune God -- killed Death. Not death – death is still around and will take us all, for a while. But Death. 

And so the experiment continues, at a new level. The Universe is still there, unfolding (as Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said) as it should; our little blue ball is still there, with us humans busily overcrowding it; and (and this is the point) he, Yeshua bar Yosef, Yeshua Meshiach, Yeshua the Anointed, Yeshua Christos, having risen from the dead, is still here also. Here to be talked to. Here to be loved, here to be confided in, here to heal broken hearts. Here as human, here as God. Here to be communicated with in every Communion, in every Mass. Being the little stumbling creatures we are, could we ask for more? The synapses glow again, the energy flows. Gratias agimus tibi, propter magnam gloriam tuam.   

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

I have been looking up the ungodly. Not, initially, in the physical or social sense: they are all around us and we will get to them presently. No: in the linguistic sense. Since I have been reading the Psalms a good deal lately, I realise that there too they are everywhere. So I wanted to find out what the Hebrew term was, and then what was its Greek equivalent in the New Testament.

The Hebrew term, I find, is rasha, with the a’s pronounced as “ah”. And it’s a strong term, meaning ‘guilty’ or ‘wicked’. So ancient Israel did not beat about the bush, so to speak: the opposite of the chasid or godly person is not just somebody who doesn’t believe in the Deity but a guilty or wicked man.

If we read the Psalms, it is not hard – especially from Psalm 119 – to find out what a chasid is. He is someone who loves the Law and obeys it: the Law in all its glorious intricacies, the Law that provides the parched traveller, lost in the spiritual Negev or Nefud desert, with a path that if followed will inevitably lead him to a well and even to an oasis. The path was made and given by God: man’s job is to find it, follow it and learn it by heart. That is the way to God. The holy man is also the righteous man, who abstains from evil deeds and succours the defenceless; if he is so, then God’s favour will uphold and follow him. His granaries will be full, his wife and children will be as green olive trees, and he will not eat a morsel or drink a drop without giving thanks – Baruch atta Adonai Elohenu . . . .

His opposite is not the decent man who just doesn’t believe in God: his opposite is the evil man, the one who robs widows and children of their savings, who says “Tush, God will not see it” and cheerfully enriches himself without a smidgen of charity, and who, as the Psalm wonderfully says “grins like a dog and runs about the city”.

In the New Testament, where Greek takes the place of Hebrew, there is a significant change. The “ungodly” now is the asebès, the man who will not venerate, will not be respectful, will not “hallow” the holy. Not actively wicked, he is the one who shrugs. He reminds me of the Athenians who listened politely to Paul on the Unknown God and said, “Hmmm. Interesting. Come back some other time.” To the asebès, all gods are sort of equal, equally interesting, equally boring in the long run, equally irrational and thus quaint but unimportant.

Today’s ungodly are more like the Greeks. They tend to say, when asked, that yes they believe in some sort of higher power as long as they can think of feeling it on a mountaintop at sunrise; but above all never, never in a church; not in a church, not in any sort of group, not in the context of any kind of intellectual definition or spiritual rigour, not in a tradition of thinkers, not in any context that would bind or constrain them in any way at all.  Moreover, a number of them, reacting to militant Islam in a carefully non-discriminating way, proclaim the idea that all religion is not just slightly irritating but positively harmful.

While our very modern and rhetorically evangelising churches keep telling us that we must be active witnesses, encountering today’s ubiquitous ungodly is a challenge neither St Paul nor Luther ever had to face. Paul did better with Jews than with Athenians; Luther convinced many members of a degenerate Catholic Church. And we? We are often told (by our own churches) that as long as we live a life of clear and evident faith, that will interest and intrigue people enough to start a conversation. In my own experience this is mostly untrue: people note that Dwight is religious, in the same way that Beatrice does crosswords and Charles collects old absinthe bottles, and move on.

The not-very-satisfactory provisional solution is to keep a keen ear open for  the opportunities that do sometimes arise in conversation, and to keep one’s private feelings about today’s asebèsis firmly to oneself.  One point I have sometimes made is a modern version of Pascal’s Wager. “Look around you at the people you know,” I suggest: “Do you on the whole think those who do not believe in God are happier than those who do?” That sometimes makes people stop and think. But the problem is huge, and remains. How does one make inroads on a culture, not of anger or persecution but of complete indifference?

OF HOMESICKNESS AND GOING HOME

Crucifix in the St Crucifix Chapel, Cordes-sur-Ciel, France (sculptor unknown)

This morning – Trinity 3 for us Anglicans, 11^th of Ordinary Time for modern RCs – the second reading was from 2 Corinthians 5:  
“For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.

So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. Yet whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him. For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”

When I saw this I wondered what our little Algerian priest would say about it; and I couldn’t help wondering also about its relation to Luther and sola fide. However, what he said was surprising and, I thought, rather marvellous. “Don’t think, he said, “that ‘standing before Christ to be judged’ is like the courtroom of the Assizes.” And he pointed to the huge and fascinating 17C crucifix after which the chapel we were in was named (see above). “When you stand before him,” he said, “you stand before Love Himself. And it is not he who will judge you. It is your own heart that will judge you, in the face and in the presence of that love.”

I found this a powerful and extraordinary thought. It was, of course, neither his nor new: in the Orthodox faith it is common, and it was uttered in a slightly different way by both St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great. In one sense, it is a comforting thought: as Sergei Komarov puts it, “no one is going to be dragged anywhere like a caught thief.” And Gregory Narekatsi, the Armenian poet, wrote “Isn’t God’s judgement still a meeting with God?/ Where will the Judgement be? I’m going there!” Yet the thought of our standing – you, I, us chickens just as we are – before the Son of God himself, with his eyes of absolute love upon us, is both pure joy and real terror. Even the most faithful and loving among us know that they are going to need a great deal of mercy at that moment.

The greatest thoughts I have read about the Last Judgement are those of C.S. Lewis, scattered about his writings. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.” Moreover, he says somewhere else, Hell is not fire and brimstone: it is cold and dark. Why? Because Heaven is the continual presence of God in light and warmth. But some there are to whom that would be unbearable. For them God has, in his mercy, left a place where they can live Eternity far away from him. It is cold, dark and dreary, but that is all they have made themselves capable of.

This is entirely compatible with the idea of our own heart’s judging us in Christ’s presence. And it should give us furiously to think.

THE ATOM OF DIVINITY

Andrei Rublev, icon of the Trinity (1425), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I almost always celebrate Trinity Sunday by showing Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the three Persons sitting round a table, because it is so hauntingly beautiful and also because it corrects one of modern theology’s common faults – a tendency to speak of the Spiritus Sanctus as the relation of love between the Father and the Son. A relation cannot be a person; not even a Person. (Socinius is dead.)

However, one should never simplify the Trinity: it is perhaps the faith’s greatest intellectual mystery. There is an admirable brief outline of its dogmatic history on the Christian History blog, yet it too discusses essentially the Father and the Son, and the relation between the two, but not the Holy Spirit. Let’s try and shed a little glim of light.

First: how can “God” be both One and Three? This is easier for us to understand than it was for our forefathers. We know that what appears like a stable molecule – and is a stable molecule – is also composed of a number of rapidly spinning atoms, and breaking those down reveals protons and electrons. I am not trying to establish an analogy here with the Trinity: merely suggesting that we understand better than previous ages how something can be simultaneously single and multiple.

Tertullian, the first great Church Father to work on the Trinity and defend it against the Arians, explains that when in working through a problem you discuss it with yourself, the ‘other voice’ in your mind is as it were a second person. It is a Logos; and if you are God, it is the Logos. And at some point that Logos may ‘proceed from’ the Father and take on its form as a second Person: the Son. Who is ‘begotten not made’ because no foreign substance is involved from which he would have been made.

The Spirit of God is there from the beginning: it is the Spirit that ‘brooded over the waters’. The Spirit, says one explanation, has a sovereign will comparable to the other Persons; he is free and not, to humans, predictable; he works on humans and creates, in them his own works – he creates, he guides, he strengthens, he advocates, he inspires, he teaches.

So today we celebrate the Ultimate Molecule, or Atom: the Holy Trinity. What holds it together is the Ultimate Energy: Love. This is one atom that cannot be split, though it can communicate its energy, and does so freely, generously and unendingly. We cannot even contemplate the Trinity without the concept of Love.

The Father, who created and creates the entire Universe; the Son, who is the Father’s Other-yet-not, and whose joy it is to do the Father’s will; the Son who came to us, who became for us fully human (Yeshua bar-Yosef of Nazareth with a saw in one hand and a scroll in the other) and died in order that we might be taken back into the divine relation of Love; and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Strengthener, who remains with us always and is always as near as skin, always available, always ready to listen and to help.

What richness, what glory. Where else, said Moses to his people, can you find such a God?

A DEEP BREATH

Veni, creator Spiritus . . .

I have always had a special feeling for the third Person of the Trinity. Perhaps because I felt he was getting short shrift, always less talked about than the Father and the Son: it seemed unfair. Later, as I finally learnt more about the content of our faith, this feeling persisted, if only because I found him referred to as the loving relationship between the Father and the Son, and I could not figure out how a relationship could be a Person.

There are, of course, all sorts of mysteries surrounding him. For instance, both in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles he is sometimes referred to as if he were a specific, almost physical and delimited object or motion. Yeshua breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Almost like your peace, which you can bestow upon a house but which you can take back if the house does not receive you decently.

In three languages he is the same. In Hebrew, ruach; in Greek, pneuma; in Latin, spiritus; and in each of those languages the word can have the same three meanings: breath, wind, or spirit. It/he is what animates matter: God made Adam of clay, then breathed life into him. It is he who hovered over the primeval waters of the planet, creating differentiated life.

And when the Son approaches his final trial, he promises his friends that he will send them a Defender, an Advocate, someone who will accompany them always and be on their side no matter what the big greebly world will do to them. He is the paraklètos, the one who is on your side. And since he is also God, how can he fail?

Then, when Yeshua has risen and spent some time with them and finally gone to his Father’s house, the pneuma comes to them in a huge way on the feast of Pentecost, seven weeks after Pesach. By this time the followers of Yeshua are many, and from many countries around the Mediterranean; a crowd of them has assembled somewhere, possibly for a liturgy; and suddenly there is a sound as of a mighty rushing wind and tongues of fire appear on everybody’s head (the origin by the way, of the bishop’s mitre). And, amazingly, each person hears the apostles’ sermon in his own language or dialect. The ruach is there in Person,  just as a fiery Cloud appeared in the Temple.

And what the ruach does is in this case fascinating. As a French commentator said, this is the opposite of the Tower of Babel. There, there was uniformity and an ambition to be divine; here there is diversity and a Divinity who comes down. And the lesson, said the Frenchwoman, is that the Spirit allows us to hear the Word each in our own way and still (in every sense) communicate. We do not have to be the same or even much alike. The Word of God comes to us. All we need to do is unlock the door, open our windows, and fling the shutters wide.

And when he comes in, he will not only defend us but teach us. Teach us to pray, teach us to get things right, teach us discernment, teach us how to live in such a way as to make a home for him in our hearts. Coming into us, he breathes, and we are clay receiving life. Awkwardly blindly, we start moving, like a golem or Frankenstein’s monster; gradually we are filled with more of that spiritus until at last we become fully human. Human, that is, in the way we were created and meant to be. He is creator spiritus: he (re-)creates us to be new beings. We leave the caterpillar’s husk behind, marvel at out new colours, and spread our wings.

Illustration: El Greco, "Pentecost" (Madrid)