NOT A PARABLE

The present pandemic has taught us some things about viruses, and about infection, that are perhaps not without pertinence to the life of the soul. It gives us, not so much a parable as a controlling metaphor of great power. 

            Let us imagine (this is how great metaphors begin) that humanity suffers from a slow but certain viral pandemic. We nowadays but rarely believe that it began with one man; and yet we have learnt that a whole planet can be halted in its activities because one man ate an undercooked and dubious pangolin. The pandemic of our metaphor we will call SIN. And if we think we know all about it, we are as wrong as we were with the coronavirus. Its varieties; its mutations; its rate and direction of spread; the pattern of its victims; about all these, if we consider it in this new manner and context, we will have learnt a vast new humility. But since this pandemic has been with us for a very long time and is currently in its nth wave, there are things we know about its behaviour and about ways to combat it.

            Of its earliest attacks we know very little, because few notes were kept, and it is possible that a kind of rough herd immunity was attained. There was as yet no treatment, and of course no vaccine; but by trial and error a sort of method was produced that made it possible to avoid or to contain infection. If you acted in certain ways, by yourself or toward others; if you more or less avoided certain types of behaviour; if your group or clan or tribe abstained from some doings; you, or most of you, would probably escape infection.

            Gradually, though, the virus became both more virulent and more specific, and concentrated its spread on one dozen tribes, who formed one people, Israel. But as the crisis increased, research also became more focused, and at one point a treatment was discovered. The treatment was called TRH (LAW in English) and was quickly made available throughout the infection area. As often happens, those making it available considered it to have complete efficacy – as long as it was made mandatory. And so it was. 

            Like all such treatments, it was not perfect. Its main failing was that it was complex and demanding: its efficacy depended on an intricate pattern of actions and avoidances that took little notice of human fallibility and even, on occasion, produced a problematic side-effect known as Pride. But it was a treatment; nobody had a better one; and it was on the whole seen to work. How much at its best it was appreciated can be seen from a famous text that was written in its honour, which is still extant under the title Psalm 119. 

            For a long time, then, that was the situation. The virus continued to circulate; the treatment was applied with varying degrees of strictness and success. The various bodies of Doctors did what they could to refine and popularise the treatment. However, there were always those who were unsatisfied, who thought the authorities were too lax and who argued stridently for stricter application and even for modification of the theoretical base (usually in the direction of something simpler but more profoundly invasive). These last were known as Prophets and, as usual, got most of the publicity while often unsuccessful in achieving their specific aims. 

            And then came the huge breakthrough. At an unlooked-for moment, from an absolutely unexpected corner, a provincial backwater, there appeared a vaccine. Not a treatment: a vaccine. Its coming had been predicted, but with no certainty whatever as to its nature, time or place; people knew what its name was – Meshiach – but nobody knew for sure if, or how, it would work. And when it arrived it surprised everybody. Most – not all – of the treatment specialists didn’t like it: it seemed too simple. The public, however, went for it in a big way. In part, this was because its basics were so simple. Unlike TRH, it involved just one complete immersion and a simple series of formulas and concentrations. (The complete theory and practice was not fully understood till later, but essentially consisted of an absolute love on one side that depended for its efficacy on an absolute transfer of trust and power on the other. The synthesis, the union, of those two elements created a vaccine that at its best blocked the virus completely.) Once one had gone through that, the vaccine began working and could be stimulated and perfected with relative simplicity by the patients themselves. 

            Meshiach was extraordinary. Not only did it attract crowds from the start, it began to spread beyond the borders and was seen, surprisingly, to block similar viruses in other places as well. Mind you, the Establishment of treatment specialists felt threatened by it and opposed it tooth and nail; and a number of people who felt either blithely unthreatened or too sophisticated and/or too suspicious for the necessary transfer of trust formed, then as since, a hard core of incurable anti-vaccinators. And when the Establishment managed to get the original and sole deployer (the son of the creator) of the vaccine assassinated, it seemed that the virus was henceforth and forever out of control. 

            However, it soon appeared that both the vaccine and its originator were indestructible. Both came back, and now in a form that could no longer be suppressed. Moreover, a Standing Meshiach Committee for virus control had been created that had been given the originator’s licence to dispense and apply it everywhere. 

            And since then? you may ask. Since then the virus has not, alas, been suppressed entirely, and in recent centuries the anti-vaccinators have, like many of their anti-reasonable kind, been in the ascendant. But they have not been able to suppress the vaccine, and it remains available just about everywhere, though not, in some hideous and war-torn lands, always as easily as it should be. Like the coronavirus, the SIN-virus is spread by the deniers, the self-righteous, the irresponsible, and the morally foolish. But the Standing Meshiach Committee is still active worldwide, and neither the Xi nor the Trump has been able to stop it. 

P.S. The image is of course not a virus, but a praying mantis looking unusually diabolic. Added as a reminder that the SIN virus, we are told, did not happen by accident. 

 

HOPE AND STRENGTH?

“God is our hope and strength : a very present help in trouble.” (Psalm 46)

If one has faith, this is stirring; and instinctively one feels it’s true. But it it? And if so, how? 

First of all, the Psalm says that God is our, not my, hope and strength. As always, the original referent is the people of Israel; as always, for a Christian, the Psalms’ people of Israel is now the Church. 

As members of the Church, then, we can say that God is our hope. Between faith and charity; between our belief in the Resurrection and our active love for our neighbour, there is hope. Hope is symbolised by an anchor: it is what prevents us from drifting on to a lee shore. Hope is what permits us not to give up. Hope is what sustains us when we see the decline of Christendom, when we are depressed by the oceans of complete indifference to religion around our battered fleet. And our hope is – God. Is it our hope that He will, magically, act? that he will come flying into history on the wings of a divine wind and take over? We may daydream of such a dénouement, but we are pretty sure it will not happen. If our hope is God, it is perhaps rather that He will give us the strength and the stamina to carry on regardless; that He will continue to be the well of life, where we can go to draw the living water of renewed faith and energy.

As members of the Church, again, we can say that God is our strength. He is our strength, the strength of the Church: and the Church, in turn, is the strength of its members. There are times when our belief in this is sorely tested: when the Church, through its leaders, singularly fails to cope with the travails of modern life; when the Church, through some its visible groups or individuals, shows itself foolish or sinful or both. And yet – anyone who has tried to maintain an active and lively faith for a long time on his own knows how much the strength needed for that surpasses his little private store of resources. Within the Church, through the liturgy, through the Eucharist, but also through the sharing of thought and feeling in both theology and devotion – within the Church there is strength in abundance, available to all. 

A help in trouble. That is where it comes to the nub. Trouble is always with us, and may emerge from any shadow at any moment: for the community and/or for the individual. In what way is God our help in trouble? First, as hope: it is our hope in God that gives us strength and stamina. That hope is what is expressed in prayer. When we beg and beseech, we do so hoping. Because we know that, if we do not ask for fishhooks but for the force that will allow us to do His will whatever befalls, He will not let us down. 

Second, as strength. In trouble, God is our strength. Our strength. If we face trouble as a body, as members of the Church, as the Church, we will have the strength needed to survive and overcome trouble. This means unity. This means solidarity: not (only) in the now usual sense of helping the poor, but of knowing how to bury our differences and metaphorically link arms, watch each other’s back, and deal with it, whatever it is. And if God is our strength, that means that we receive it through prayer.

Finally, God is a very present help. Present, here; present, now. Not absent, not future. I often find it hard to remember, to realise, that God is with me here and now. As air is. As radio waves are. As light is. So, in trouble, prayer does not have to be elaborately organised and anticipated. It can be hurried, panted, cried, whispered; and if there are more of us, physically, it can be remembered and recited, or improvised, together. 

If I am in trouble, let me remember that I am not alone, but that I am a member of a body, the Church, the new people of Israel. And let me remember that as such, I have at all times the ear of our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God. Through – per, by means of, by way of, through the mediation of -- Jesus Christ our Lord. 

WALKING THROUGH WALLS

          

 

Now, after Easter, we are in the Resurrection Time – a limited period between Easter and the Ascension. The time when Yeshua is back, for a specific task: to explain to the disciples and the expanding community what his ministry, passion and resurrection have all been about, so that they will understand it as a coherent whole, an act of the Father’s love for his human children; and to set the community on its future path of realising the New Alliance between God and the expanded Israel that is the whole human race. 

            It is a strange time. One of the things Benedict XVI points out in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week is the fact that when the disciples closest to Yeshua meet him after the Resurrection, they do not recognise him. This is extraordinary. They have lived with him every day for three years ; and yet when they land their boats and see a man grilling fish on the beach who says “Come and have breakfast!” they do not recognise him at first. Likewise the two less close disciples walking to Emmaus, who were clearly among those who had listened to him, seen him, admired him and followed him, and who now spend a couple of hours at his side, listening to him explain the Scriptural basis for the Passion: they only recognise him when, at table in the inn, he breaks the bread with the Baruch atta Adonai prayer – at which point he vanishes. 

            It makes you wonder what his resurrection-body looked like, what it was. Rembrandt painted it, and when you compare it to his paintings of the living Yeshua (probably after one of his Jewish neighbours in Amsterdam), you can in fact see a very uncanny difference. I’m not sure anyone else has imagined it so well. But would he have been unrecognisable? One may also wonder what this resurrection-body in fact was. Was it a temporary one, taken on only for this time between Easter and the Ascension? It did have the stigmata of the Passion, as the story of Thomas shows. Or was it his definitive eternity-body which he still has today, sitting at the right hand of the Father? That’s not something even the boldest theologian can answer.

            Also, this resurrection-body walks through walls. The disciples are together in an upper room; the doors are closed and locked; suddenly there he is among them. Not a ghost: feel my wounds. But suddenly, there. At table in Emmaus: whoosh, he is gone. Now this reminded me of something Benedict does not mention, although I’m sure others have – nothing that can be thought about the Gospels has not been thought and written, usually many times. When Yeshua returns to Nazareth and at first the people are thrilled by him and then turn against him, they want to throw him off a local cliff: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”(Luke 4:29-30). I have always found that astonishing in its serene calmness. This is an angry mob, the kind that stoned Stephen and would have stoned the woman taken in adultery. Few things are more terrifying and more dangerous. But he passed through the midst of them. 

            In other words, even in his entirely human mortal body there was something uncanny. A touch of the resurrection-body, one might say, was always already there. This was not one of his “miracles”: it was not done for someone else, and no fuss is made about it. He just wasn’t there any more. 

            So now, in this Between-Time, this Resurrection-Time, we might wish that he would still suddenly appear among us and have a bite of fish; but that’s not going to happen. The Ascension is past, and he is now in Eternity-Time. But still patiently waiting for us, as he was on that beach at breakfast. Would we have recognised him? Do we now? He did tell us where to look: in the child holding out a trusting hand; in the lonely old woman whose children never phone or visit; in the retired psychiatrist whose days not longer make sense; and in the entirely unexpected smile of a total stranger. Perhaps, apart from the gestures such incarnations call forth in us, the thing for us to do at this time is to think and learn and discuss as we would have in that inn at Emmaus, and so come to understand the coherence of the life, calling, death and resurrection of this most unlikely Meshiach.

Images: Rembrandt, "Head of Christ" and "The Risen Christ"

THOUGHTS ON A PECULIAR LENT

“Why is this Lent different from all other Lents?” Different indeed. Even before isolation, confinement, or incabination began, the pandemic was well and truly under way at the time of Ash Wednesday and, to boot, I was sick with sinusitis and a racking cough that made it impossible to go and receive the ashes. And since incabination? Some paradoxical developments. 

            First of all it should be said that I have been most unfairly fortunate in the conditions of my confinement. A comfortable old French farmhouse on the edge of a tiny village; being together as a couple; children in the other half of the house who will occasionally take turns at the shopping; a friendly atmosphere all round; around the house a couple of acres of field and garden; and on top of that a singularly beautiful spring; conditions could hardly have been better. 

            As Mardi Gras approached, I had had the idea of, for once, trying a Lent entirely without meat, something I’d never done before. (When I was a child we always ate frugally but there was no thought of fasting: that was for Catholics, and we were liberal Protestants.) Perhaps because at the age of 3 I had been, though protected as much as possible, through a real famine – the result of German reprisals following the failure of Operation Market Garden – I had never managed fasting of any kind. But as, since my 70^th birthday, I had begun to take (my) religion more seriously, I found the current Catholic insistence on Lent as a tripedal experience of prayer, fasting, and giving attractive. More attractive than the old doctrine of repentance, repentance, and repentance. I liked the thought of Lent as a cheerful spring cleaning, the more since earlier I had always suffered from the imposed gloom at a time when Nature rejoices. Now, I was told, one can live Lent as a way to take all the parts of one’s faith more seriously: from “worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness” to deepening prayer, sharing not only money but time and care with others, and – yes, well, fasting. 

            So I decided that “Carne, vale” would indeed be Goodbye to Meat, made a superb bœuf bourguignon for Mardi Gras, and have not touched meat or meat products since. Much to my own surprise, a combination of occasional fish and seafood (fishmongers are quite far away and rarely come to our market) with vegetarian dishes, often curries, worked very well indeed, and neither my wife (a natural almost-vegetarian) nor I missed meat. 

            As far as prayer was concerned, not only did I take to saying my morning prayers on my knees instead of in bed, but I decided to translate a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk into English – not at the computer but with a fountain pen in a notebook. This helped me not only to pray more consciously but to think about prayer for part of the day as well, and to learn: Carthusians are prayer’s ultimate professionals and although their experiences and thoughts are as far beyond me as a Himalayan North face is beyond a weekend climber, many precious crumbs fall from their table. 

            As for giving, on the one hand the Internet has multiplied both the opportunities and the ease of giving, and on the other hand the new Catholic teaching reminds us frequently of the degree to which giving is, and can and should be, about more than money. Which in turn makes one think about what to give to whom how and when; and makes one realise how many small opportunities there are in a day and a week for giving time, thought and care to others’ needs, needs of every kind. Not that one manages to seize them all: laziness, selfishness and care-less-ness don’t give up and go away, more’s the pity. 

            So here we are on Holy (or Maundy) Thursday. Commemorating has had good reason to become more inward. I saw a pleasant Palm Sunday Mass on television, but reading and, as they say, praying the Psalms on a daily basis and occasionally saying Morning or Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer brings me, I honestly believe, closer to God. I have been rereading volume II (”Holy Week”) of Pope Benedict’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth, from which I learn more each time I read it. Tonight I may watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, of which I have always been a little nervous; tomorrow, Good Friday, I shall do what Dutch Protestants have done for at least a century: listen to the integral recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the sublime Peter Pears as the Evangelist. Saturday will as always be perhaps the strangest day in the Christian year: the tabernacle open and empty; the statues, in one’s mind as in the church, shrouded; participation in the disciples’ sense of absolute loneliness, loss, abandon, and desolation. Everything holds its breath. And then . .

THE SMILE OF FAITH

In his admirable television series “Civilisation”, Kenneth Clark titled the chapter on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment “The Smile of Reason”. Virtually all the portraits of the time, he claimed, wore a smile: neither gloom nor outright laughter, but a smile of intelligent amusement. 

Pondering this, it struck me how rarely one sees the smile of faith, and how surprising that is. We are not encouraged to think of Jesus as laughing or smiling, nor indeed of the saints as doing so. After all, the Gospels seem to deal mainly with the halt and the lame and the miserable, and their penultimate chapters deal in some detail with the gruesome horrors of crucifixion. As Stanley Holloway lamented, “Nuthin’ to laff at, at all”. 

And yet. Let’s try a different regard, Begin with the incredulous joy of Myriam, once she has understood what is happening to her. Go to the jubilation of the angels and the broad smiles of the shepherd folk who came to congratulate. Go to the attendrissement on the severe and thoughtful faces of the Magi. Fast forward to the wedding at Cana. “Yeshua, they’re running out of wine. Can’t you do something?” “Hush, Mother – my time has not yet come.” I see a faint smile there. And then, Myriam to the servants: “Do what he tells you”, again with a very maternal smile. 

Now take any of the countless episodes of his life from then on in Galilee. The formerly lame man, dancing with an idiotic grin on his face. The parents of a little girl, brought back from near death, embracing each other, and Yeshua, with huge smiles through their tears. Why do we forget that this man brought sheer blinding JOY wherever he went? Happiness. Amazed laughter. 

OK, there were exceptions. The owner of the herd of pigs at Gadara probably wished him to the devil. The people of Nazareth wondered who he, Josh, the son of the local builder, thought he was, preaching at them like a learned rabbi. And the religious professionals found him positively dangerous. But the ordinary folk who crowded him everywhere seem to have found true happiness in his company; and E.V.Rieu the Hellenist even found what he thought was the confused memory of a joke on Yeshua’s part: when he tells Peter to look in the mouth of the next fish he catches to find there a tribute-coin.

We Christians have as the symbol of our belief an instrument of torture. But the essence of our faith is Easter, is the Resurrection. Imagine the slowly dawning smile, wide as the horizon, of Myriam of Magdala once she recognises the man in the gardener’s hat. Imagine the incredulous laughter and embraces of the disciples eating grilled fish on the beach at dawn with the man they had seen slaughtered and buried only days before. 

In Lent we are asked to think seriously about our shortcomings in faith, in hope, and in love. To stop repressing them, and to beg that they may be forgiven. Perhaps one of those shortcomings may be our forgetting of the sheer, real happiness, the joy, of a faith “looks through death”. At best, the smile of reason and the smile of faith should be found on the same face. Ours.

Image: St Julie Billiart (1751-1816), founder of the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"? OH, SURE

I am currently translating into English a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk, and though it might be useful to share one or two things I have learnt from it. Today, a word about prayer of intercession. All of us who pray know what it is to pray for others, from the most intimate prayer for a loved one to the prière universelle that is part of every Mass and other church services. And all of us know, and grieve at, the fact that so many of those prayers seem to go unheard or at any rate unfulfilled. We know that our reaction must be “Thy will be done,” but we still wonder at that will and at what look like its vagaries. 

My Carthusian suggests we look at this differently. First, we should cease to imagine intercessory prayer as an attempt to influence, push or divert the Lord, to change His mind, to alter what He was originally going to do. All prayer, he says, is originally God’s initiative. St Paul says that it is the Spirit that prays in us; and so in the fact that at this moment I am praying for X I am aligning myself with God’s initiative. 

Secondly, just as the air around us is filled with waves of all kinds that we do not perceive unless we have a receiver and turn it on, so that same air is filled with prayers, a kind of quærosphere. God hears all prayer, but it must also be received by the beneficiary – a fact which, in the name of love and its necessary liberty, God cannot guarantee. 

Thirdly, as Huck Finn found and as I have mentioned several times in these posts, it is no use praying for fishhooks. God does not micromanage His creation. The extreme conclusion from this is that all we can truly pray for, concerning someone else, concerning X, is X’s salvation. And that prayer’s efficacy depends on whether X’s receiver for such prayers is turned on. If it is, the prayer will be granted. 

To add a point of my own: what about the prayers for healing and so on? Apart from the fact that God does not micromanage Creation, I am convinced that they are nevertheless effective in a certain way, especially if the beneficiaries know that they are prayed for. I believe that such prayer creates a small or large tidal flow of spiritual support that in itself helps the healing process.

I believe it was St Thomas Aquinas who wrote that the only way prayer can be effective is if it is a) for oneself, b) pious, and c) insistent. I see the point of this, and b) and c) are important; but a) should not be abandoned, even in the face of what sometimes seems to be a great and uncaring silence. Intercessory prayer, after all, is a genuine form of loving. Perhaps for a) we should substitute “with our eyes open,” clear-headedly, intelligently and without illusion. Then b) piously: we should put our whole hearts into it, in hope and trust; and c) insistently: like the widow in Jesus’ parable who importuned the unjust judge till he gave her what she wanted just to get rid of her, God smilingly allows us to bother him.

ALL IS REVEALED (?!)

In an ecclesiastical calendar not obsessed with Sundays, today is the Feast of the Epiphany. In France, people have to be reminded that it is not just the feast of the marzipan-filled cake with a bean in it: they come together all through the month of January “pour tirer les rois”, i.e. to draw the kings – to see who gets the bean (invariably a child, who gets a cardboard crown and gets to choose his queen or her king).
    Epiphany, as the local priest reminded us, is Revelation. Not in the sense of the Apocalypse: it is not the opening of a secret book, but the making clearer of something already partly known. It is, for once, a feast of and for scholars: the Three Kings were three Wise Men or Magi: they were scholars, probably from Persia, whose study of the constellations (the distinction between astronomy and astrology came later) had told them that a new king would be born in Judea. One wonders why that news was important enough to make them assemble strange gifts and mount their camels in the dead of winter. Something in their studies must have told them that this would be more than a new monarch in a foreign state: they clearly came prepared for something out of the ordinary. One almost wonders if they had read Isaiah.
    In any case, they were the first goyim, the first Gentiles, to see the new-born Meshiach. And so their feast celebrates the revelation of the Meshiach’s importance for people beyond the Jews, which was to be one of the keys of Yeshua’s preaching, of St Paul’s, and of the whole orientation of the early Church. If the Meshiach had just been a new King of Israel, he might have been important to the region but hardly beyond. Even if he had been an Isaic Meshiach strictly within the Jewish faith, his reputation might have filtered through to a Jewish diaspora throughout the Middle East, but Greeks, Turks and Romans would hardly have thought him relevant.
As it was, though, they ended up listening. And what they heard convinced a surprising number of them that this man, who had healed bodies and souls, who had loved Jews and Samaritans equally, and who had risen from the dead and eaten grilled fish with the living, was a) the Son of God and b) the incarnation of God’s love for the human race in its entirety; that he was the new Alliance, a rainbow that now extended over all the earth; that he was the new Torah, one that embraced not only Jews but any and all who welcomed it/him in faith.
    It also meant that unlike a second King David, who would syllogistically have been mortal and thus temporary, this Meshiach was and is still here: a forgiveness still accessible, a love and a healing still present, right here and now.
    And for those of us who are scholars, this feast is a comforting reminder that even the learned are not excluded from the New Alliance. For the Beatitudes mention the “poor in spirit”, ptochi to pneumati; but those are not necessarily poor in mind or learning: they are those who have humility, who realise that they have nothing to contribute to God and everything to receive from Him. And that, curiously, is something true scholars understand: for over a lifetime of study, the more one learns, the less one feels one truly knows. If we can learn to apply that humility to our humanity, we too my find a narrow gate and slip into the Kingdom of Heaven where we may meet, not only (as Eliot ironised) Sir Philip Sidney but the Three Magi themselves – who would have much to tell us.