THE LOWDOWN

 

I’ve often said that the worst thing, emotionally speaking, humans can do to one another is humiliation. The Nazis knew this, when they set elderly Jewish gentlemen to cleaning sidewalks on their knees with a toothbrush. Schoolchildren often have a diabolically fine sense of it, when they find just the right insult for the victim of their bullying. And at the other end of the scale governments upon occasion do it to whole countries. 

            Humiliation is almost never forgiven, and never forgotten. A woman in her mid-eighties remembers with crystal clarity the day when a grade-school teacher made an example of her for some transgression, in front of the whole class. And thousands of Russians now support their murderous and vengeful Führer because a generation ago, when Berlin’s vile wall came down, they felt their country had been humiliated beyond bearing. 

            The French language has two words for “pride”: orgeuil and fierté. The former is the chief of deadly sins; the latter is the healthy pride one may feel in an achievement of one’s own, of one’s daughter’s, of one’s football team’s or of one’s country’s. English has an additional word of great value, “self-esteem”: the form of psychologically healthy, indeed essential, pride that allows one to hold up one’s head, to walk tall. In humiliation, all these are battered, as one is made to feel worthless and of no account. The word, after all, comes from humilis, low, close to the humus, the earth, the soil, the mud.

            What, if anything, defends us against humiliation? One may take refuge in overweening pride, orgeuil, but that is a bitter draught that corrodes: not for nothing is it the chiefest of all sins. No: there is one defence, and I suspect one only, against this terrible condition. T.S. Eliot expressed it memorably and with perfect accuracy in “Four Quartets”:

 

                                    the only wisdom we can hope to acquire

                                    is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless. 

 

In what is nearly a form of homeopathic medicine, we find a word with the same root, the root of eartth, of soil: humility. He that is down need fear no fall: he that is low, no pride. Humility does not mean hating or feeling contempt for oneself: humility means the openness and the generosity of looking at most other people with admiration for their unique talents or achievements, and not thinking of oneself as better than they. And it protects one against humiliation, because if that’s the way you feel and someone snide snarls “you’re not much” you quite naturally feel that he has a point, unpleassant though he is about it. It is hard, if not impossible, to humiliate a genuinely humble person. 

            What message is there here at the level of nations? A major reason for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party was the Treaty of Versailles, which in sealing the Allied victory after the Great War humiliated the German nation as well as bankrupting it. And it has been said that one reason for the present war in Ukraine is the humiliation Putin and many Russians feel was infliucted upon their country at the fall of the Soviet Union. “In victory, magnanimity” prescribed Churchill:  a phrase sometimes remembered but rarely acted upon. 

            It would be a Good Thing if every government’s foreign policy included a constant, recognized, and expressed, contemplation of every other nation’s especial talents and achievements. Thus we, as citizens, might be taught to look upon, say, the Turkish nation with admiration for its long history of Ottoman civilization and governance; to admire the Moroccans for their medieval philosophers; to be grateful to Spain for teaching us a certain kind of pride and courage, and to Portugal for introducing us to the exquisite melancholy of saudade. We might then tell our Russian neighbours on this planet how we admire the depth and intensity of feeling that their particular culture has made known to us, and compliment the Dutch for having almost invented the precious quality of religious tolerance. We might send a memorandum to the Chinese, gravely thanking them for having presented the world with the wisdom of Confucius. And who knows? the climate of international relations might possibly improve to the point where the other kind of climate would actually benefit.

 

PECCATA MUNDI

 

Lamb of God, mosaic in Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna

 

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi

dona nobis pacem

 

It’s a beautiful text in the liturgy, and the English version was, for 400+ years, “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world”. As such, many loved it, for the world’s many sins have always needed removal through forgiveness. Then came the (19)Sixties, when everything was felt to need change, and suddenly the Lamb of God was taking away the “sin of the world”. Was, and is, that more, or less? And why the change?

            Well, said modern churchmen, it is based on John 1:29, where John the Baptist says “Behold the Lamb of God, ho airōn tèn hamartian tou kosmou” (who takes away the sin of the world). So we are just correcting the Latin. Of course, the Latin comes from the Vulgate, some manuscripts of which read peccatum (singular) and some peccata. And the liturgy, which adopted the Agnus Dei in the late 7^th century, took the peccata text.

            So the singular is the Gospel version, and thus “correct”. And it makes sense, because the Meshiach does deal with the Sin of the world, original sin, the worm in the apple of every human endeavour. 

            And yet there are those, I know, who feel a real sense of loss with the disappearance of the peccata. (It remains in Latin masses.) Because we are taught to examine our own consciences, not for Sin, but for sins; sins in their depressing plurality are what weighs us down; sins in their multitude are what we confront each Lent. And it is a constant comfort to hear, to be reminded, that they are what He takes away, they are what He forgives and, in His infinite mercy, forgets.

            So while I read St John’s Gospel with undiminished love for that wonderfully poetic text of salvation, I am happy still to recite in the Liturgy “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi”, in the comforting assurance that even peccata smaller but knottier than the Sin of the World may not escape the notice of the Lamb.

PLENI SUNT COELI ET TERRA

“Pleni sunt cœli et terra gloria tua”

”Heaven and earth are full of thy glory”. We know this and have heard it often. Do we ever think about it? I’ve often wondered. Heaven is full of His glory, yes, I can believe that, wherever Heaven actually is. But earth? 34th St in New York? Soho in London? An undistinguished B road in the British or French countryside? Full of His glory?

A few days ago I had a sudden revelation on the subject. I was in hospital, in a clinic in a French provincial city near where I live. For three days I had a room in the cardiology department. And over each 24-hour period, a succession of nurses and care personnel came into my room, took my blood-pressure and temperature, did the cleaning, gave me blood-tests, brought me charmingly inedible salt-free meals, shaved my body hair in embarrassing places, and gave me unfailing smiles, encouragement and gentleness. And as I lay on my rather uncomfortable bed in between snoozes, two great truths came to me. First: medical science is one of God’s languages. If you have ever wondered why we see so few healing miracles these days, you haven’t been looking. From the invention of CoVid vaccines in less than a year to the possibility that a bypass operation might actually work, they are all around us: just not being performed by itinerant rabbis but by hardworking doctors and laboratory specialists. Second: the glory of God is all around us, right down the hall in the nurses’ station. If God is love, His glory surely shines through these young-to-middle-aged, always-tired-but-never-showing-it women of pure care and kindness to patients who range from the stoically quiet to the roaring and screamingly rebellious who bang the walls of their rooms (an old lady next door to me). I left feeling instructed and overwhelmingly grateful. Heaven and earth are full of His glory. Indeed.  

 

A COLD CASE?

 

                   

                                        

This is an attempt to clear up a mystery, a “cold case” from way back. 

 

How can it be that the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion coincide so remarkably with the references in at least two Psalms (22 and 69)?

 

If we exclude the possibility that the Evangelists were deforming the reality in order to make it conform to the Psalms, and if we also, at least for now, discount the idea of a mystical and prophetic conformity of the Psalms to the later reality, we need to find some probable and realistic explanation. Here is a possibility:

 

The Sanhedrin and its mob bring the captured Yeshua to Pontius, howling for his blood. Pontius is awoken disgracefully early to deal with this. I do not believe that he saw Yeshua alone. A colonial Governor like him would always have staff on hand. And on that staff I postulate one Marcus Manlius ‘Judaicus’, his expert on the local population and its culture. (Even Manlius may have had staff under him.) He might have gone native to the point of having married a Jewish woman. But he is of good family and highly cultured, and indispensable to Pontius (who, historians tell us, is a faily average colonial administrator). 

So, Pontius tells whoever wakes him to call and summon Manlius immediately, to assist at the hearing. 

            We know how the hearing went. Yeshua is his usual taciturn self, replying only with two enigmas: first “the words are yours”, and later “my kingdom (basileia) is not of this world.” However, it is clear to Pontius (and to Manlius, who has not spoken but watched and listened) that this chap has done nothing that should lead Romans to execute him. He curtly says so to the Sanhedrin people, who insist that he is challenging the authority of Cæsar (and imply that they may send a complaint directly to the Emperor if Pontius doesn’t give in). 

            So eventually he goes along. Now for my insertion. I imagine a conversation between Pontius and Manlius, along these lines:

 

P. OK, I guess we’ll have to crucify him, but boy, does it go against the grain. Those bloody Jewish elders! You know, he genuinely made me wonder with his kingdom. I’m wondering if he mightn’t be genuine, and important. And we’re going to string him up?

M. I know what you mean, sir. I felt the same way. 

P. If we do crucify him, isn’t there something we can do to show that we do it reluctantly and that we take him seriously?

M. Well, there might be something. In fact, I can think of two things. First, as we always put up a sign above each cross with the description of the crime, how about in his case putting one up that simply says “Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judæorum”? That will placate those who believe in him and infuriate the elders.

P. Brilliant. And the second?

M. The Jews have a prophet, Yeshayahu, who describes the Meshiach, the great future king and liberator of Israel, not as a conqueror but in terms of a suffering sacrificial lamb, slaughtered for the sins of the people. This Yeshua of ours clearly identifies with that character. Now, they also have a Psalm that closely describes what could be seen as his execution: “they pierced my hands and my feet,” “they cast lots for my clothes” and so forth. These texts are known to all the Jews. How would it be if we conducted the crucifixion precisely as described in their texts?

P. Sounds a bit different.

M. Well, we don’t usually nail them to the cross, but it has been done on occasion. And as for the lads drawing lots for his clothes, we can tell them to do that, and perhaps put something decent on him before we nail him up so it’s worth dicing for.

P. Manlius, I like it. At least we can make them look foolish, even if he has to go.  Carius!

[enter Publius Carius, the Centurion in charge of today’s executions]

C. Sir?

P. This latest prisoner, Bar-Yosef, we’re going to do something different with him. It’s important for the effect. So you get the armourer to make up some 12-inch nails, and instead of tying him to the cross you nail him. Here’s the text for the notice on top; and I need the execution detail to put on a little show once he’s up. [describes the dicing]. And prepare some gall and some sour wine to put up on a stick if he calls for it. I know it sounds odd, but it’s important  for the politics of the thing.

C. Yes, sir. May I say, sir, how sorry I am to have to execute this fellow? He’s a truly good man, who healed my servant a year or so ago, quite miraculously and at a distance.

P. I know, Carius, but the situation is tense enough, and I really cannot let him go. After all, if he is who and what he seems to imply he is, this may not be wholly the end of him. Anyway, get the men together and get this show on the road. I want all three of them up there by noon. 

C. Very good, sir.

 

And Carius gets together the execution platoon with a sergeant. They perform the ritual flogging, though without much enthusiasm, but several of the legionaries have had a few drinks before the distasteful task, and so they decide to have some fun with the prisoner. “Since we have to crucify a king, let’s dress him up as one. Jam some thorn branches on his head; here’s a broomstick for a sceptre, hey, anyone got a nice red cloak?” Private Varus has nicked one from the officers’ cloakroom, so they wrap him in it. Carius passes by and gets very angry. “Sergeant, take those men’s names!” he snaps. But it is in these improvised regalia that he is led to the waiting beams and nails. And it is for the stolen officer’s cloak that the soldiers draw lots . . . . .

 

Of course I have no idea if this is how it happened. But I’m morally sure that Caius Pontius Pilatus had a Manlius on his staff; and something like this makes the parallels at least plausible.  

A VERY QUIET JOY

 

For Christmas, I always put up this exquisite small poem written by a very young English actress, Jill Furse, around 1940. At the outbreak of World War II, Jill married the poet and glass-engraver Laurence Whistler, had a daughter Robin, whom I knew at University, and died soon after giving birth to her son Simon, at the age of 29.

CAROL

 

Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf. 

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

 

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

 

Jill Furse (1915-1944)

Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE?

7. All mine enemies whisper together against me : even against me do they imagine this evil.

8. Let the sentence of guiltiness proceed against him : and now that he lieth, let him rise up no more.

9. Yea, even mine own familiar friend, whom I trusted : who did also eat of my bread, hath laid great wait for me. (Ps. 41)

12. For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour : for then I could have borne it.

13. Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me : for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.

14. But it was even thou, my companion : my guide, and mine own familiar friend.

15. We took sweet counsel together : and walked in the house of God as friends. (Ps. 55)

Given the peculiar and oniric relation of the Gospels to the Psalms, I am moved to wonder whether we might not find in these passages the beginnings of an explanation for the strange conduct of Yehuda of Kerioth. 

I have always found the explanation in John 12:6, that Yehuda (Judas) was the group’s thievish treasurer, scarcely believable; and the whole story of the actual ‘betrayal’, the kiss in the park, too theatrical to make sense. As Yeshua himself said, he was not exactly hiding himself: he taught and preached in public practically every day, and the Temple guards could have taken him whenever they wanted. He did not need to be identified.

Once again, I am transgressing Benedict XVI’s injunction against writing a ‘Jesus novel’: first, I believe that if His actual, historical existence as a man in Galilee is of such crucial importance, then whatever we can find out or reasonably deduce about that existence is worth while; secondly, a combination of a historian’s and a reporter’s mind makes me bridle at improbabilities and search for what might actually have happened. 

And in the case of Yehuda of Kerioth, there is a possible narrative. That it comes to us from the Psalms would normally invalidate it at least in part: the Psalms are poetry, and from a time much earlier than the Gospels. Yet the relation between the two is so strange and close at times as to be unnerving. Most of us discover it first in Psalm 22, parts of which read like a description of the Crucifixion even unto the foolish details of the soldiers dicing for the robe; and we meet it again in Psalm 69:22: ‘They gave me gall to eat : and when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.’

Does this mean that Yeshua modelled his life upon the Psalms? That the Evangelists took Psalm passages to fill in details of the Crucifixion? Or that there was a deeply strange but real coincidence between the two? My narrative concerning Yehuda, I suppose, postulates the third of these possibilities. Here it is.

Imagine that from the beginning of the Disciples’ life as a group it was Yehuda who was the ‘disciple that Jesus loved’. That it was he who was the ‘familiar friend’, especially close to the Master; that it was with him that the Meshiach took sweet counsel in the Temple and who had the favoured place beside him at meals. 

And then, gradually, over the two or three years that we know of, Yochanan the ‘Son of Thunder’ began to make inroads upon that relationship. He it was, young and charming, who wormed his way into Yeshua’s confidence; he it was who became the new favourite. One can then easily imagine Yehuda’s feelings. Disquiet growing slowly but surely and morphing into a green-eyed monster. At first, dislike turning to hatred for the young co-disciple; and little by little a turning of that hatred to the Master himself. The verses from Psalm 55 might then equally well have issued from the mouth of Yehuda of Kerioth himself. 

That the end result was a pointless but deliberate and vengeful giving-up of Yeshua to the Temple authorities makes, in this case, perfect sense. Hell hath no fury like a loving friend and disciple scorned. And it makes all the more likely and understandable, also, his instant and total remorse once the inevitable consequences of his action began to unroll, and his swift dramatic suicide.

There are holes in this narrative, sure; but it seems to me a great deal more likely than the grubby suggestion that he had been stealing shekels. Poor Yehuda. It would indeed have been better for him had he never been born. And yet, if this story is true, may there not, at the end of time, be mercy even for him?