WHAT JOY - ! - ?

 

“let the righteous be glad and rejoice before God : let them also be merry and joyful.” (Psalm 68)

 

As the number of self-confessed Christian believers continues to dwindle in virtually every Western country, I sometimes wonder if the above quotation is not among the reasons. I suspect that for the author of the psalm there was no real problem: the ungodly and wicked should disappear (and a merciful God could be trusted to take care of that, sooner or later), and those who believed, and who worked at keeping His commandments, should be merry and joyful. That is one of the beauties of Judaism. 

            Christianity, though, can never take this simply: the minute a Christian reads and begins to ponder this verse, and this Psalm, he at once realises that while the righteous should be merry and joyful, he cannot count himself one of them. Who am I, to call myself righteous? Think of all the ways in which I have not lived up to what the Lord expects of me. Think of all the ways in which I have not been constantly alert and awaiting the Bridegroom’s coming. Think of my oil lamp, long since dry. Think of all the poor I have not helped. Think of all the misery of the world I have not done much to allay. Righteous, me? Merry and joyful, me? You’re joking. 

            And yet, he’d be wrong. If, as Luther and the Catholic catechism both say, we are saved by faith, then the criterion for the happiness of being accepted as a loved child of a loving Father is not whether we are good enough but whether we honestly believe that Yeshua bar-Yosef was the Meshiach, that he was crucified for us, and that he arose from the dead. And moreover, it is not even demanded of us not to have doubts: as long as we incorporate those into our prayers and say “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief”, we are accepted. And being accepted, we are what ‘King David’ called righteous; however unperfect we are in our daily life. And as such, we have every reason to be merry and joyful. 

            Ah, but. In our relentless search for obstacles, we say, OK, fine, but what about all the people around me whom I love but who feel not the slightest interest in, let alone need for, faith in their life, and who cheerfully live, not in wickedness at all, but in perfect ungodliness? If I try to convert them it will only drive them further away; if, as the Church sometimes counsels, I live a noticeably good life while being known as a believer, they will simply think I’m a good man and make no connection whatever to my faith. So will they, in the Psalm’s words, perish as wax melteth before the fire? A friend’s evangelical mother said to her daughters in all seriousness how sad it made her to think that after she died she would never see them again, because she, being a believer, would go to Heaven while they, being unbelievers, would not. (She did not actually mention Hell, but the implication was there.) I’m prepared, if you insist, to be merry and joyful, but what about my faithless loved ones? 

            I believe – not in the sense of full faith, but in the sense of a trusting guess – that the answer to that question is just that: trust. I think that if we have faith, we need to trust the God we believe in and love back to deal with our loved ones as He, the God of love, thinks fit. “Thy will be done” applies. You may call it smorgasbord Christianity, but we are asked to trust our Father’s wisdom rather than even the collective and cumulative theorising of centuries of theologians. I suspect that on this particular question He is telling us to butt out and leave it to Him.

            Ah, but. In our relentless search for obstacles, we say, OK, fine, but what about the people whose houses in Mariupol are flattened by missiles; the people who are fleeing wildfires everywhere; the women maltreated by Taliban or murdered by ex-spouses; the farmers committing suicide because their farms will not feed their families; what about the sheer accumulated misery of humankind? How can anyone who has a heart even think of being merry and joyful, righteous or otherwise? Now that everyone on this overcrowded and overheated planet is deemed to be my neighbour, how can I not be devastated every single day? How dare I be merry and joyful?

            I believe – and yes, in the sense of faith – that such a question puts us before some basic choices. Seeing all this, we have to make up our minds. Either 1) there is no God; 2) there is a God, but he is monstrous in uncaring or evil; 3) there is a God of love, and we are getting something wrong. If our faith opts for 3, then we have to figure out what we are getting wrong. 

            The “neighbour” may be the clue we need, as it will send us back to the parable of the Good Samaritan. He – remember – was a businessman on a business trip. Seeing the wounded victim he stopped, took time and energy to administer first aid and set him on his own horse, then took him to the nearest inn, told the landlord to look after him and said he would pay the bill on his return. He then continued his business trip. His “neighbour” was not someone of his own tribe or nation, but it was not someone 1500 miles away either. It was someone who turned up. An inconvenience, but not a sacrifice.              What, then, is the answer? Faced with the world’s misery, the answer seems to be: Live your life and keep an eye open for need. If there is need on your way, stop and do what you reasonably can to take care of it. If and when it goes beyond your capacity, get help. If there is not at this time need on your way, carry on while staying alert. And as for distant miseries, pray to the Father that he may find and send Samaritans in other places. And having done all that, be merry and joyful; for joy and merriment are gifts of God it is ungrateful and graceless to refuse. 

 

image: dancing at a Lebanese wedding

FURTHER TO THE KATHAROI

 

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

I wrote a blog post on this as I did on the other Beatitudes, and thought at the time that the “seeing” was through the Spirit. This may be true, but another thought occurred to me. In John 14 (8), Philip the disciple says to Yeshua, ‘Show us the Father and that’s enough for us,’ and Yeshua replies, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don’t know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.’

This stunning reply should make us think, inter alia about the Beatitude. ‘No one has ever seen God’, true: but ‘Who has seen me, has seen the Father.’ Could it be, then, that whoever saw, and sees, Yeshua and believes, is pure in heart? For he, the Meshiach, the Anointed, is, then, the visible form of the Creator. And the cleanness, the purity, of heart that is required to see, really to see, is faith. Because it is the eye of faith that sees through the lean, tough, dark-haired, brown-skinned man, the Father of an infinite majesty, the God of endless, suffering love.

Tricky for Philip. Trickier for us, who do not see him face to face. There are, possibly, three ways through this enigma. 1) First, the icon. Not necessarily an Orthodox icon: it can be a painting or a sculpture, a Gospel scene, a Pietà, or a crucifix. Really to see such an icon, with the eye of faith, is perhaps to come close to seeing Him, and through Him, the Father. 2) Secondly, meditation. In the first part of an Ignatian meditation we are asked to take a Gospel scene and to recreate it as vividly as possible with our own mind, assigning ourselves the place of a minor character. If we do this with complete engagement, we may again, perhaps, come close to seeing Him, and seeing through Him. 3) And finally, we should remember that He also said that ‘‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Mt 25:40) If, then, we are to look on any man and see Yeshua, are we to look on any man and see the Father? The mind not only boggles but rebels. And yet. What does the eye of faith behold? It sees, in the beaten and wounded traveller, a neighbour. It sees, in the down-and-out begging for food, Yeshua. It sees, in the man Yeshua Bar-Yosef, the Father. What have they all in common? Suffering. 

If, now, we go to the end of this trail of learning, what do we find? A Father who suffers. A Father who is denied and rejected, a Father who continually sees his love thrown back in his face. Could it be that that is exactly what Yeshua meant us, through Philip, to learn? We see the Son on the Cross. We see the Father in the Son. How much discernment does it take to draw the conclusion? 

KIDDING?

 

We all know the Gospel story of Yeshua calling up a little child, pointing to it, and telling the disciples and passers-by that whoever is not ready to accept the Kingdom (read: kingship) of God like such a child cannot enter there. But what does he mean? Those who have small children love them desperately but in no way and at no time idealise them. They are adorable, selfish, slobby, brattish, quarrelsome and difficult at meals. Yeshua, as a 31-year-old bachelor, might have idealised the child in question; but as one who was Divine as well as very human, it’s doubtful. So, knowing everything about children, how could he say that that is what we should become to be citizens of the Kingdom?

            I think he was thinking first of all about a child’s simplicity. If a little girl is standing by the roadside with her father, waiting to cross, she sticks up her hand without looking, knowing that it will find the big strong secure hand beside her. A small boy who wants something from his parents asks for it. (He may or may not get it, but that doesn’t stop him asking.) Children, in relation to adults they trust, are simple and direct.

            Secondly, children naturally and necessarily experience love as a gift. They know that adults are powerful in ways that they themselves are not, and so they know that love is something they receive. Not necessarily in the form of concrete gifts, but in the form of hugs, comfort, bedtime stories, occasional treats, and Winnie-the-Pooh. If they are fortunate enough to have such love on a daily basis, they take it for granted. One day, if they meet other children who do not have it and are miserable, they will begin not to take it for granted. But meanwhile, they regard it as natural. And return it, naturally. 

            Thirdly, how do they love? First of all, it’s a love of belonging. My Daddy’s mine. My Mummy’s mine. Jackie is my brother. Lucy’s my sister. This is my house. Bingo is my dog. They all belong to me – this I know. What I don’t know, or can’t put into words,  is that I belong to them, and that thus we belong to each other.

 Then, it’s without question. Sometimes they hate Daddy, sometimes they love him, but they don’t doubt him. 

 

            Here, surely, there are lessons for those of us who wondered what the man across from us was talking about when pointing to the little kid. In relation to our Father (who is in heaven), be simple. Be direct. When you receive blessings in whatever form, recognise them as gifts from that large being who loves you. Give him a hug in return. Then go on with your day, and learn to live the  same way with those around you. If it moves, hug it. If it hits you, hit it back smartly and then hug it while you both cry. If you break something, confess and say you’re sorry (and mean it), and He will forgive you. Don’t be clever and doubt him; don’t be clever and try to outsmart him; if you want to be clever, find new ways of loving him and loving your neighbour. Channel your inner 7-year-old.

 

[What, a friend’s voice whispers in my mind, if you have never known this kind of loving happy childhood? If yours was miserable, violent, poor, and abusive? Well, I think that he would tell you a) to realise that you are now loved for real, b) that you can therefore know that trust is possible, and that c) you can therefore tell him all your past miseries, knowing that he will never tell anyone and that he will love you all the more for having told him.]

[And if you are handicapped or sick or in pain, tell him that and listen. You may hear him whisper that he knows what pain is like, he’s been there before you, and that he hopes you’ll remember what he said to the Good Thief on the cross next door. He may not be able to make it all go away, but he will give you without stint, give you strength and endless love.]

HOCUS POCUS

 

            This term for threadbare illusionism was coined by the Reformation to represent the ‘ordinary’ (i.e. non-Latinate) person’s hearing and interpretation of the priest’s words of consecration at the altar: Hoc est corpus meum, ‘This is my body’ – Christ’s words at the Last Supper, instituting the Eucharist. The Roman Catholic belief that at these words the substanceof the wafer was changed from bread into the real body of Christ – ‘transubstantiation’, a word never used by the Church itself – was seen by Reformers as a degeneration from a mystic truth into a form of magic.

            Rather than concentrate, as the Reformers did, upon what happens to what during the Consecration, I want to think for a moment about the Why. Why did Yeshua Meschiach create not merely a solemn moment (it was, after all, a Goodbye event) but at that moment a ceremony of symbolic sacrifice, to be repeated (‘Do this, whenever ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me’)?

            It is a fearful thing to attempt to enter into the workings of the Divine Mind. But between waking and sleep, I like to meditate drowsily on the life, thoughts and actions of Yeshua bar-Yosef before he became the Meshiach in deed as well is in potential. And at such moments I imagine him, with his brother Ya’akov, shaping a scroll-case for a wealthy client, Mr Salamon, in the city of Tsippori (Sepphoris in Greek) about five miles up the hill from Nazareth, and discussing the then-popular topic of the Meshiach and his coming. Unlike Ya’akov, who liked to think of that magical Liberator as a new King David arriving with an army out of the desert, Yeshua imagined an itinerant rabbi, a healer, preaching the Law and the Prophets, but in a different way, a way that stressed inwardness rather than outward observance.

            To the question (asked, either by Ya’akov or by the interested Mr Salomon), ‘But how can an itinerant rabbi walking around Galilee liberate Israel?’ Yeshua, after considerable thought, replies ‘I’m not sure his purpose is to liberate Israel from the Romans. I suspect it is to liberate Jews and Romans both – and Greeks, and others – from sin, and from evil.’ And to the obvious next question, ‘How?’, he replies by citing his study of the prophet Yeshayahu (Isaiah), who shows somebody very like the Meshiach going ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’: being, in other words, the sacrifice that atones for the sins of others.

            Joe Rat, the sainted Joseph Ratzinger, reminds us, in his Jesus of Nazareth, that our culture has largely forgotten the concept of atonement and the need for it. It responds to a very deep element of our human and social nature: an evil committed cannot simply be forgotten as if it never happened. Before we (individuals, or society as a whole) can ‘move on’, it must be atoned for. This not the same as punishment, but something needs to be done to ‘appease the gods’ in the old term, to right the wrong, to restore the balance. Hence the idea of a sacrifice, the surrendering of something precious. 

            Following Yeshayahu, Yeshua explains that the Meshiach can liberate humanity from sin by himself being that sacrifice, that offering. After all, it was always already likely that those who consider themselves the guardians of the Law and the Prophets would not take kindly to one who preached following them differently: they would almost certainly act against him, and given the importance attached to even minor points of observance, they might well go so far as to condemn him to death.

            I imagine him explaining this to Ya’akov and Mr Salomon as, the lovely scroll-case duly installed, they sit down and drink a glass of wine to celebrate. There is a long silence, as the others assimilate this stupendous concept. And then Mr Salomon says, ‘I think I understand, young man. But tell me: such a liberation by sacrifice may wipe out the sin of the whole present generation; but what about the unborn? You can’t efface it pre-emptively for coming generations. Imagine our great-grandchildren. How would the Meshiach’s liberation apply to them?’

            At that moment, Yeshua (we are still a year or two away from Yohanan’s baptism of him) does not yet know the answer to that question. But at some point before that fateful Supper (whether or not it was a Pesach meal) he understood that the best, perhaps the only, way for future men and women to be the beneficiaries of the Meshiach’s sacrifice was to institute a ritual, a ceremony of the utmost solemnity, in which the sacrifice was mystically repeated, in their own time and era. In that way, there would be a genuine Atonement for sin and evil in each generation. And each man and woman taking part in it would be able to feel, in the deeply-moving words of a Victorian hymn, ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. In other words, reborn. 

Image: Laure Albin-Guillot, 'Consecration' from Missa Est by Daniel-Rops

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.