WHAT SORT OF HOUSE

I have, in recent years, found enormous inspiration in reading the writings of Carthusian monks. They are often as learned as Benedictines, but since their life is built entirely around prayer they are as one might say its professionals. Reading them is both humbling and informative: rather as if one owned a decent sports car and did the occasional track day and then comes across a manual written by and for Formula 1 drivers. 

            In one such book – and they are always signed “A Carthusian” – I found a fascinating meditation on Jesus’ whipping the merchants out of the Temple. Rather than pondering whether or not this is a comment on capitalism, the Carthusian author proposed seeing the temple as being our heart. Thus, the words of Jesus, “this is a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves”, take on a new and richer meaning. As I spend my time at my computer, ordering books or clothes, annotating texts, organising meetings; as I go out to dinner parties or restaurants, as I look at advertisements for classic cars – is my house not rather full of merchants? Good merchants, not necessarily thieves; but then the men selling sacrificial doves, lambs and candles in the spacious Temple courtyard were probably perfectly respectable shopkeepers. 

The point is not what they do but where they are doing it. They are pursuing their perfectly proper mercantile calling not in a shop in the city but in “a house of prayer”. And so, transferring the image as did the Carthusian, I arrive at the fact that my heart should be “a house of prayer, where the Son can meet the Father in love.” I found, and find, this thought overwhelming. And it has become my daily, and almost my only, prayer:

LORD, MAKE MY HEART A HOUSE OF PRAYER

            

Because that prayer potentially includes everything else. It is in fact an application of the saying “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” If my heart is made a house of prayer, everything else is secondary but/and will fall into place. 

I share this thought because it occurred to me that others may find it inspiring also. There is such wealth to be found in Carthusian thinking: those Olympic athletes of prayer have much to teach us -- starting with their ancient motto (useful when looking at the news cycle): STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. (The Cross stands, while the world turns.)

HELP!

On this Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, and very suitably following the feasts of Michaelmas and of the Guardian Angels, we ask to be protected.

Latin original

CUSTODI, Domine, quæsumus, Ecclesiam tuam propitiatione perpetua; et quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas, tuis semper auxiliis et abstrahatur a noxiis, et ad salutaria dirigatur ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum Amen. 

1549

KEPE we beseche thee, O Lorde, thy Churche with thy perpetuall mercye: and because the frailtie of man without thee, cannot but fall: Kepe us ever by thy helpe, and leade us to al thynges profitable to our salvacion; through Jesus Christe our Lorde. Amen.

1662

Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy : and because the fraily of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the rare occasions when the 1662 revisers were more faithful to the Latin original, in restoring its a noxiis. One wonders why Cranmer left it out. He may have thought it self-evident and considered that its omission would lead the sentence more swiftly and elegantly to its conclusion. The Latin is, as usual, a jewel of compact form and shapely rhythm, employing no less than four cursus tardus and ending in a cursus velox (which, in spite of its name, I always suspect was seen by the writers as slower and more dignified).

The Latin original of Cranmer’s “perpetual mercy” is propitiatio, “an appeasing, atonement, propitiation” – which is very odd. One might translate it as “Keep,, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church in perpetual atonement”; and one wonders if the perpetual atonement may not belong rather to the church than to its keeping: so that God may be being asked to take care of a Church that lives in perpetual atonement. I suspect, though, that it is rather an unusual medieval use of the word, which makes it rather a peace-offering on God’s behalf, and which thus comes a little closer to Cranmer’s “mercy”.

It is a prayer for protection: custodi, Domine. Take care of us, Lord: protect us. And the rest of the prayer makes specific both the protection and the threat. We ask to be protected from “all things hurtful”, and if Cranmer had used 18^th- or 19^th-century punctuation instead of Tudor, he would have put a second comma after “profitable”. Because what dismays us here is not the threat of things hurtful in general, but the threat of things hurtful to our salvation. 

What are those? What can hurt our salvation? Not the horrors of the world: as St Paul put it in his letter to the Christians in Rome, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” No: the only things hurtful to our salvation can come from ourselves. And the Collect understands this: it makes this request because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall. Not the nastiness of man; not his inherent evil; no, his frailty. He is weak. He wants to do everything right; but on his own, on a daily, hourly basis he falls, he screws it up and scuppers his own salvation. So we ask Him to protect us from doingall things hurtful, and to lead us to doingall things profitable, to our salvation.

Again, a close reading of, and meditation on, a brief prayer shows how rich it is in meaning and how it helps us increase our understanding of ourselves in our relation to our loving but doubtless frequently exasperated Father.

AS COMPACT AS YOUR GPS - TRINITY 14

Now imagine 40 years of this, with 80,000 people bitching...

Leonine sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei, et charitatis augmentum ; et, ut assequamur quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. 

1549 / 1662

ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde, through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Cranmer translated this literally, and the revisers of 1662 wisely left the handsome parallellism alone.

Someone wrote that there could almost be no more compact expression of the Christian faith than this Collect. It is brief and shapely, and of an extreme simplicity. We ask God – the Almighty and Everlasting God, the Creator of the Universe – to give us the three qualities that St Paul described as “what remains”: the irreducible core of the Christian’s life, the most basic psychic waybread, that which we survive on as we travel from birth to death in the company of the others who make up the new Israel. We cannot produce them for ourselves, as the old Israel could not produce its own food in the Negev but had to be fed by the hand of God with manna and quails. We need faith, because without it we cannot recognise the God who loves us. We need hope, because without it we have no reason to go on when the going is hard. And we need charity because we are not alone in our journey, but in the company of others as frail and frightened as we ourselves. 

Yet there is more. God has given us promises. (Remember? Last week we ran to them.) The Collects, when they refer to these, do not spell them out, mainly because the form is too compact to allow this. It may be useful to pause and remember what they are. God has given us His love: that’s not a promise because we have it already – whether we are ready to receive it or not. What he has promised us is chayei olam, “eternal life”. The modern Church is embarrassed by this, and tends to insist that we should not (necessarily) think of this as something after death, but that what it really refers to is an eternal dimension of life, potentially present even in this terrestrial life. I don’t want to get into this now, because either way it is something not immediately present to almost all of us, and thus proper material for a promise. 

Either way, though, eternal life has certain characteristics. The chief one is the real, actual presence of God. In the chayei olam we are in the presence of God: of the primal light and joy that brought the Universe into being, but also of the living Father whose love (His very nature) embraces not only the dance of planets but every living human creature. Because imagination is part of our equipment we can, however dimly, imagine what it must be like not, as now, always to be divided from the one we pray to, from the one who loves us, not always to have to decode, to imagine, to piece together His answers: we would open like a flower to the morning sun. 

But how to get there? Such a promise is worth running to, but by what trail? Ah, says the Collect: here is the answer. To get to the promise, to obtain (and the Latin assequamur is even richer, since it also means “to understand”) what is promised, we need to obey God’s commands. But, since He is Love, since love is his very nature, the only way we can do so, the only way we can obey his commands in the spirit in which they were given, is to understand them; and the only way to understand them is in the spirit of love. That we need to love what we are ordered to do sounds at first hearing both odd and rebarbative: kiss the rod, you scum. Not a bit of it. God has given us orders because we are in a dire state and slow on the uptake: orders at least are clear. And since we are wandering through a desert, when we understand that the orders are what will see us through and beyond, we will undoubtedly love them. 

Finally, how do we obey them? What is it we are ordered to do? Like other Collects, this one describes a perfect circle. We obey God’s commands by using, by living, the faith, the hope, and the charity we pray Him to give us. And in all of this, the central figure, the model, the living “command” is Yeshua Ha-moshiach, Jesus the Anointed. If we keep our eyes on him, if we walk with him, if we stick to him like glue, if we – like seconds on a climbing rope – try to follow His moves in the rocks and ledges and gullies of the desert we are traversing, then – in whatever dimension, this side of the grave and/or beyond it, the light and the warmth of our Father’s love is there, open and waiting.

DON'T TRIP, STUMBLE AND FALL: TRINITY 13

Joss Naylor, shepherd and fell-runner

Latin original (in both Leonine and Gelasian Sacramentaries)

OMNIPOTENS et misericors Deus, a cujus beneficentia profiscitur ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur, tribue quæsumus nobis, ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus. Per Jesum Christum Do. &c.

1549 

ALMYGHTIE and mercyfull God, of whose onely gifte it cometh that thy faythfull people doe unto thee true and laudable service; graunte we beseche thee, that we may so runne to thy heavenly promises, that we faile not finally to attayne the same; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service; Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer’s translation is fairly tight, but deftly underlines a few points he sees in the Latin. He translates God’s beneficentia as his “onely gift” with an Elizabethanly-displaced adjective: it is not God’s only gift, it is only by His gift that we can serve him truly and well. To his credit, he keeps our running (remembering the Collect of a couple of weeks ago)to God’s promises, but he wants to stress that they are heavenly; and he dodges the complexity of the Latin offensiones, which are both physical stumbling-blocks, things that one trips over when running, and bad things one may commit or undergo. Instead, he translates the sense, neutrally hoping that in running to the promises we may not, in the end, fail to reach them.

At first this seems like a much less rich and dramatic Collect than Trinity 12. Yet it is worth looking at with real care and discernment. First, the choice of the Invocation. It’s a common one – God both almighty and merciful – but here it explains the beneficentia that earns our gratitude: God is both mighty enough to give us the capacity to serve him and merciful enough to be ready and willing to do so, recognizing our need. 

Then, the Acknowledgement. God’s fideli, His faithful people, serve him in ways that are both true (faithful and efficacious) and laudable (well enough to be praiseworthy); and they recognize, because they are fideli, that they can do this only because it is itself already His gift. We, faithful as we may be, can still do no true and praiseworthy thing for God on our own initiative and behalf. 

Now for the Petition. The sentence turns from the third person plural, the general category of the fideli and their actions, to the first person plural: we who are here in prayer. What do we realize we need, what do we want, what can we ask for? Well, first of all, to run to His heavenly promises. To recognize that they are there, that they are infinitely desirable, to desire them urgently enough to drop our parcels and run.

And secondly (this is really the Aspiration), as we run, panting, we hope and pray that we may not trip over an unseen obstacle, some sleeping policeman, some banana skin, that will leave us flat on our face with two broken ribs; or, to put it another way (Trop., say Lewis and Short), that in running toward heavenly promises, we may not do something unforgivable, like elbowing a neighbouring runner out of the way, that will ban us from receiving them.

Once again, the 1662 revisers do not like the image of running and suppress it, replacing it by the dutiful serving which, if it is dutiful enough,  will let us attain the promises,though only by the merits of Christ. One may think, as I do, that this change is a weakening; but whatever one’s opinion, it is clear that even what we may at first think a humdrum sort of Collect is a wonderfully compact commentary on the life of both fides, faith, and re-ligio, the restoring of the bond between the human race and its long-suffering Deity.

RICH AS A SUNRISE, DEEP AS LIFE - TRINITY 12

I am shamefully late in discussing this magnificent piece of dense and glorious prose, but we still just in the twelfth week after Trinity, so I will allow myself to print his now.

Leonine>Gelasian Sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, qui promptior es semper in audiendo quam nos in orando, et abundantia pietatis tuæ et merita supplicum excedis et vota; Effunde super nos misericordiam tuam; ut dimittas quæ conscientia metuit, et adjicias quod oration no præsumit nisi per merita Mediatoris nostri Jesu Christi Filii tui et Domini nostri. Amen.

1549

ALMIGHTIE and everlastyng God, |which art alwayes more ready to heare then we to praye,| and art wont to geve more than eyther we desyre or deserve; | Powre downe upon us the aboundance of thy mercy; | forgeving us those thynges wherof our conscience is afrayde, | and gevyng unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to aske,| through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire, or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer, as usual, translates closely and beautifully, even finding an English alliteration to reflect the Latin ‘et merita . . .et vota’; but he has difficulty with the compact Latin ‘quæ’, translating it first as ‘those things’ and second ‘that’ – which is awkward with the other ‘that’ that immediately follows (and which we would translate as ‘which’). However, he does get the strength of ‘præsumit’ by adding ‘dare’. Notice that what he leaves out entirely is God’s abundantia pietatis. Perhaps because for Englishmen piety was proper to men but not to God.

The 1662 revisers didn’t like the ‘that that’ either, and expanded it to ‘those good things which’; and expanded  the ‘dare not presume’ to the original's statement about our unworthiness and its palliation through the merits and mediation of Jesus. Nevertheless, as so often, I prefer Cranmer’s version, which (given the prose rhythms in the Latin) may reflect an earlier form of the original.. 

This is a favourite collect, and rightly so. People react to the parallelisms of rhythm and alliteration, and these bring us to consider the content. It is both joyful and humbling to know that our Father is readier to listen than we are to pray; and the same is true of his habit (the ‘wont’) of giving us not only more than we deserve but more than we thought we wanted! 

The psychology is profound all through. In the first place, we are reminded that even taking prayer in the very restricted sense of asking, we simply do not pray enough. As Wordsworth said, the world is too much with us: late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. We ask too much of the world – prosperity, friendship, happiness – and not enough of God. Meanwhile, He is always ready to hear. One does not have to make an appointment, say on Sunday morning: He is always there, waiting, loving, listening. 

Secondly, God is “wont” – it is His custom, His habit – to give us not only more than we deserve, but more even that we desire. That’s a two-edged statement: it reminds me of the old saying that the only thing worse than not getting what you wished for is getting it. So in one sense, God’s giving us more than we desire may appear at first to be unwelcome: the lesson is that we have to learn to desire what, and how much, He gives us. In Huck Finn’s phrase, He doesn’t give us fishhooks, even though we asked for them.  He gives us something much bigger that we didn’t hink of asking for, and so magnificent that we couldn’t remotely deserve it. 

Now, since we are here in a prayer, what are we asking for now? We ask Him to pour down upon us– abundantly, streamingly, like a downpour – and what? His mercy. Such a wonderful word, mercy. It is – not the opposite but the pendant of justice, without which justice is cold and brutal. And since we are sinners who consistently fuck up in life and in our relation to God and man, mercy is what we desperately need: more mercy than even we think we need, and certainly more mercy than we, in justice, deserve. 

And if God does this – if we get the mercy we ask for – what will that accomplish? What is the goal of our prayer? First, to be forgiven for “those things whereof our conscience is afraid”. Oh yes, we have a conscience, and it talks to us; and what it so authoritatively says is all too often not pretty. It makes us afraid – afraid of justice: unlike the Psalmist, we do not long for justice because we know all too well where it would leave us. We long for mercy.

And since we know all too well who and what we are, there are so many Divine gifts – Divine love, mercy, the beauty of holiness, the joy of heaven – that we “dare not presume to ask”. Only after the downpour of mercy, after the forgiveness, can we ask them. And so this wonderful Collect, this “treasure-chest” as Barbee and Zahl call it, comes full circle, and in its end is its beginning. 


Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Eerdmans, 2007)

SPRINT OR MARATHON? TRINITY 11

Could this be the origin of "runner's high"?

Latin Collect (<Gelasian Sacramentary)

DEUS, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserendo manifestas, multiplica super nos
misericordiam tuam, ut ad tua promissa currentes cœlestium bonorum facias esse participes. Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.

Prayer book of 1549

GOD, which declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewyng mercy and pitie; Geve unto us abundauntly thy grace, that we, running to thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Prayer book of 1662

O GOD, who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(It's interesting that the Latin “parcendo et miserendo” is translated by “showing mercy and pity”. The mercy is the furthest from the Latin: “parco” means to spare. And “misericordia” is translated as “grace”.)

This is a curious Collect, and an attractive one. The attraction lies in the “currentes”: we run to God’s promises of heavenly treasure. But it is also odd: what is the relation between that running and God’s power shown in mercy and pity?

So we start thinking. Usually, in a Collect, the relation between pts 2 and 3 is somehow causal: so here we ask God to multiply upon us his mercy, so that we may run to his promises and thus may be made partakers of his heavenly treasure. In other words, we need his mercy to start running. We cannot run toward God without his mercy; and there we see the genius of Cranmer as a translator – here he has understood that what we need even to be able to start running toward God is God’s own grace.

We can do nothing good of ourselves. We are stuck in the mud of our own little barnyard, and our feet can barely suck themselves out of it to take a single step. Yet when we hear what God promises us, we are on fire with enthusiasm: we want to go, to run even, toward him and toward the treasure he promises us. But the world is too much with us: getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. So we pray for mercy, we pray for grace, to free us, to pull us out of the mud so that at last we can run.

And the interesting thing is that the essence of the promise itself is grace. What is the heavenly treasure? Eternal life: a life without time, lived in the permanent presence, in the glorious ambient grace, of the Triune God. We need his grace to run to his grace. A wonderfully virtuous circle.

THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"