THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

 Tomorrow is the glory of all the saints. The grand saints, who are known to millions: St Mary Magdalen, St Francis, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Teresa of Avila, Ste Thérèse of Lisieux, and my beloved patron saint St John (Yochanan), the only disciple who didn’t skedaddle from Golgotha but stayed at the foot of the Cross.  But also the little saints whom nobody knows except their neighbours, their family members, or the customers of the store or restaurant or gas station where they serve, or the passengers of the taxi they drive. The people who are always there when you are ill and feeling down, who give you a smile on a grim day, who make you feel for a moment that life is not so bad after all. The people of whom you know that they feel your pain – and the knowing already calms it a little. 

            Tomorrow, then, is their feast. Worth celebrating hugely. Buy them a beer, or just lift your glass and think of them with love.

            But tonight: the Eve. What is the Eve? La veille, as the French say. And in that word is the verb veiller, to watch, to stay awake and alert. Because, said the ancients, on the Eve of such a feast, a feast of so much sheer goodness, the forces that cannot bear the goodness, that find it intolerable, will come out and torment. They will flly and slide and whisper around our houses; they will try to enter our minds and persuade us that the world is lost, that Evil has allready won, that there is no hope, and that we all are just killers without a gun. 

            And that – tell your children – that is why we carve pumpkins into grimaces, why we parody evil in silly costumes, why we celebrate goofy trick-or-treats, why we have drunken parties: to taunt the evil spirits, to show them that we are not afraid, because All the Saints are with us, and tomorrow we will celebrate them with dignity and style, and be thankful for their prayers and their protection. We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the universe, but we are also children of God, and we are loved. We are never alone under a black sky; we are never delivered utterly unto hate; we are loved, and the Evil One cannot defeat our faith. 

Happy Hallowe’en!

IN THE BREACH

In reaction to the events in Israel, we feel intolerably weak, helpless, and uncomfortably near to despair. Yet, thinking of this in the small hours, I was drawn to contemplate the Carthusians. If we believe, as several Popes have said publicly, that the contemplative orders have an important part to play in the life of the Church, we must recognise that that function can only be based on the power of prayer. Their sole business is to pray for the world; given that fact, the combined force of 450 professional prayer generators (to count only the number of Carthusians at present in the world) must be enormous. And if we add to that all the other orders for whom prayer is their central occupation, we arrive at a vast concentration of power. Such power is of the utmost importance when the hounds of Hell are loosed upon the world. The media speak of counter-offensives upon the battlefields in Ukraine; in the chaos unleashed in the Middle East military and propaganda weapons cancel each other out and atrocities are joined and compounded by vengeance. At such times diplomacy is an indispensable component; but, like all adult acts of civilisation,  it is slow to start and almost imperceptible in its successes.

A Godless world has no more to offer and no other remedies to try. But faith has armies reason knows not. Legions of angels, to be sure; but while they are mentioned in Scripture, they have not often been perceived in earthly action. No; as St Teresa of Avila said, we need to remember that God has on earth no hands, no eyes, no ears other than ours. This may be enough for what is known as humanitarian aid; but there is more. For there is in this world a vast army that works and fights in alliance, in joint command, in communion, with the forces of Heaven: the immense, international, millions-strong army of prayer. And of this army, the contemplative orders are the commandos, the special forces, the shock troops. 

What can we do to support them? We are their reservists, their Territorials, their National Guard. We pray for them, we study them, we make them known, we help them, we do some recruiting for them: they do none for themselves. 

And finally, let us not forget that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God, a God who singled out this tiny out-of-the-way planet in His vast creation for a special environment of shalom, salaam, peace, and a malkut, a kingdom, a reign, of love between Himself and the humanity He drew out of its oceans. A God Whom we, as a race, repeatedly drive to hot tears of near-despair; but a God Who never gives up on us as long as prayer – the language of love He taught us in our infancy – persists and thrives.  

  

 

STRANGE GARDENER

It was forty days. It had to be. The “intervals” are always forty days. Forty days in the wilderness, from the baptism to the beginning of ministry’s work. For a long time, I’ve been looking at – and looking for – the shaping of Yeshua’s mind during the “lost years”, the years not mentioned in the Gospels, for him between the ages of 12 and 30. In spite of warnings from my beloved Joe Rat (Benedict XVI to you) and other Church spokespersons that we should not indulge our imaginations where the Bible is silent, nor compose in our minds a “Jesus novel”, I find myself unable to still my historian’s curiosity and my Christian desire to recapture – with my imagination since there is no other tool – wie es eigentlich gewesen, what really happened, what it was really like. 

            I tried to follow him through his young manhood, to see him in the Nazareth workshop with Ya’akov his brother, saying the blessings at Shabbat dinner with Mother Myriam, four brothers and two sisters, and then going off to join the baptism crowd around Cousin Yochanan the Dipper. I tried to follow him into the desert (Sinai?) and then to renting (or even buying) a small house in Capharnaum, near the Synagogue, from which he went out to be what he had known the Meshiach would be: an itinerant rabbi, walking around Galilee (a distant place, Israel’s Maine or Yorkshire), teaching, healing, and preaching the surprising idea that the basileia to theou, the Reign of God, had in fact come, and was right here and now.

            It is not impossible so to follow him, and we know where one ends up, so doing. One ends up on Golgotha, first, in the noise and heat and obscene unrolling of an execution; and then, after a day of stunned silence, on Easter morning with Myriam from Magdala, talking to a gardener. And from there on it becomes exponentially harder. Dare we try anyway?

 

            That gardener, then. Notice that, on a number of occasions during the forty days that follow, even those who had been closest to him do not recognise him: not Myriam, not the disciples in the fishing-boat coming to shore in the dawn, not the followers walking to Emmaus. So one thing we know is that his face was not the same. His body, though, was: he invites Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds. So how, in what details, was his face different? It could be, say, the difference between bearded and beardless; it could be that the unimaginable interval between death and resurrection had marked his features in some indelible but disguising way, like the sudden greying of hair or the carving of lines in the face. 

What is sure is that he was recognised when he spoke: his remarkable voice – remember he had addressed a large crowd from an offshore boat, without a microphone – had remained untouched. 

            Now let us go further. If we could imagine his thoughts and feelings while making scroll-cases and furniture for clients of the family business, can we imagine them in this strange between-time?

            First of all, why did he come back? He could have gone straight home to his Father, into whose hands he had commended his spirit. Instead, he comes back to spend forty days – very much off and on – with his friends and students. Why?

            Well, we know the answer. It was, in a sense, the whole point of everything. St Paul, in one of his vigorous letters, put it best: “If the Anointed One did not rise from the dead, everything we proclaim is nonsense.” Humans – his humans first, then all the others – had to know that he had conquered Death, and that Death, thenceforth, had no dominion other than an apparent one. And so he had to be there: not a ghost, not a spectre, but a human resurrected, a man who had tangible scars, a man who could make a fire and eat grilled fish. 

            What did it feel like, for him? How human was he still, in this time? Did he feel twinges of nostalgia for the old days of exchanging repartee with a foreign Samarian woman at a well, or of calming his fearful friends in a storm-tossed boat on Kinneret? Did he feel he was performing a duty, establishing the Resurrection in the minds of a core group who would then go out and proclaim it to the world? I think he felt a great wave of affection for this little group of friends who were so obviously suffering from their loss. Was he always meant to stay forty days, that Biblical interval, or did he persuade his Father to prolong it from a shorter original? He may have eaten fish, but he also walked through walls and disappeared at the dinner table. That must have felt peculiar, but doubtless in an odd way natural – a between-state in a between-time.

            I do think, though, that when Ascension Day arrived it was not a surprise to him. Interestingly, it seems to have been so for the disciples: clearly, they were not counting in forties, though they might have done. But he, I am sure, did know, if only by counting the days. We may assume that during this time, whenever he was not with them, he was in that Other Place, with the Father; and that when the moment came to go Home definitively part of him must have been deeply relieved. As he was whisked out of our dimension (they read it as “up”) he could honestly say that he had done all his duty, that he had accomplished the task the Father had set him. And the homecoming must have been joyful to a degree, and in ways, truly beyond our imagination.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Mary Magdalene and Christ as gardener" (1638)

 

ALMOST THE SQUARE ROOT OF INFINITY

For many thoughtful people hovering on the edges of faith, the Trinity is a stumbling-block. For both Jews and Muslims, it comes perilously close to polytheism. For the philosophic psychologist Jung it was a sign of incompleteness, in the Catholic Church suitably completed by the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even for many of the faithful, it is a puzzlement elevated to a mystery. So it is worth thinking about. 

St Athanasius, that uncompromising Church Father whose Creed is printed in the Book of Common Prayer as the Quicunque Vult, wrote a magnificent letter in which he explains the Trinity. Here are two excerpts:

“We acknowledge the Trinity, holy and perfect, to consist of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this Trinity there is no intrusion of any alien element or of anything from outside, nor is the Trinity a blend of creative and created being. It is a wholly creative and energising reality, self-consistent and undivided in its active power, for the Father makes all things through the Word [the Son] and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly, in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.”

“Even the gifts that the Spirit dispenses to individuals are given by the Father through the Word. For all that belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son, and so the graces given by the Son in the Spirit are true gifts of the Father. Similarly, when the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.” (Letter to Serapion)

I find this admirably clear and wholly convincing. What is still difficult, once one has absorbed it, is the complementary understanding of the Unity. Once one has grasped the identity and the relation of the three Persons of the Trinity, one wrestles with the fact that “they are” One God. In Athanasius’ explanation of the Unity, God as above all things as their principle and source and Creator is understandable. God as in all things as the indwelling Holy Spirit also makes sense. Where it becomes harder is when A. sees God being through all things as the Word, or the Son. What, here, does “through” mean? I think that it becomes easier if we change the verb. God does all things as the Source and Creator of them; He does them through (dia, per, via) the Word; and He does them in the Spirit. This leads us back to the Gospel of St John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And, as Athanasius reminds us elsewhere, Jesus also says, “Who has seen me has seen the Father.”

In the full sense all this is of course well beyond our complete understanding. We see very much as in a glass, darkly. Our window is grubby, and our binoculars ill-focused. But we can get something of a sense of this vast core of our faith. Pater (non) e(s)t Filius (non) e(s)t Spiritus Sanctus. Its dazzling strangeness reminds me of what Tertullian (or someone close to him) wrote of the death and resurrection of the Son of God: et mortuus est dei filius: [prorsus] credibile est, quia ineptum est. et sepultus resurrexit: certum est, quia impossibile. “The Son of God died: this is utterly believable because it is improper. And having been buried, He rose again: this must be true (is certain), because it is impossible.” 

 

BEYOND WEB AND WEBB

In a continuation of my Outline for a Personal Catechism (6 July 2021), this is an attempt to understand theological cosmology in Christian terms, continuing the concepts and phenomena of the Ascension. Given the current knowledge of the physical universe, with its thousands of trillions of stars and planets, a cosmological conception of Heaven is not really viable. It seems more reasonable to postulate the existence of another dimension to which we may apply the Biblical term “heaven” and which is the dwelling of the Deity. In this dimension neither time as we know it nor space as we know it exist. Its equivalent of “time” is what we know as “eternity”. It may well have an equivalent of “space”-- which is very faintly suggested by expressions such as “sitteth on the right hand of God” and “in my Father’s house are many mansions”--, but we do not know it. This dimension, “Heaven”, is not accessible to our five senses: it cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. It is accessible through prayer (and perhaps through meditation). Its cartographers are the systematic theologians; its explorers are the mystics. Apart from the Trinity (and perhaps the Blessed Virgin Mary), its inhabitants are of several kinds: angels, saints, and the faithful departed.

            The shape of the inhabitants is not readily imaginable. The likelihood of angels’ resembling adult humans with wings is small. And we know little of the “glorious body”  that is promised to the faithful for their future: even the perfectly tangible body Jesus assumed between His Resurrection and His Ascension was a temporary affair. (And note that He was not physically recognisable even to his intimate followers.) The heavenly body of the saints and faithful departed may or may not resemble what they inhabited on earth: we have no way of knowing. Given the diversity of fates that their earthly bodies met, a formal reconstruction of decayed matter seems improbable. On the other hand, we are told that they are very much their individual selves, and recognisable by loved ones. Again, this suggests a different dimension with completely different forms of life, yet with a fundamental connection to humanity.

            All Biblical scholarship and theology tells us that “eternal life” is not simply life prolonged to temporal infinity. Some explanations lead me to think that the authors are trying to prepare us for a future without life after death; yet Jesus leads us to believe otherwise --  see his words ot the Good Thief. We may perhaps imagine that “eternal life” is life in that dimension called Heaven, where there is no time. 

            When the resurrected Jesus, after forty days on earth with his friends, is “taken up into heaven” in front of their eyes, what may we imagine actually happened? I suspect that, as their conception of Heaven was spatial, His sudden disppearance was seen by their eyes as having an aspect of “up-ness”, of a rising diagonal or even a vertical. In fact, we may assume, it was a move outward, or inward, (back) to that other dimension we call Heaven, where he came “home” to his Father; a dimension not accessible to our, or the disciples’, eyesight.

 

There are other words that give us earthlings trouble when we try to understand or visualise them. “Glory” is one. If we translate it as the honour or fame that heroes or great athletes reap, its theological meanings are odd and unlikely. It is perhaps better approached by way of John Keats’s vision of Madeline in “The Eve of St Agnes”: “Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,/ And on her silver cross soft amethyst,/ And on her hair a glory, like a saint”. The glory here is a sort of halo, a glow that surrounds her head. If we can understand such a glow as not outwardly surrounding but emanating from an inwardness, then at least the terrestrial part of “heaven and earth are full of thy glory” becomes clearer. And it is thus perhaps that we can detect one of the connecting spaces or routes between our earth and that other dimension, “Heaven”.

            Another such word is”peace”. To us it is usually either the absence of war or a condition of inner quiet and comfort. But that makes its use in the Gospels distinctly peculiar. When Jesus says “Peace I leave unto you, my peace I give unto you”; and when he tells the apostles upon entering a house to say “peace be upon this house” but if they are not received then that peace will come back to them; we are left wondering. Part of the answer lies in the Hebrew word shalom, which has a much wider meaning than our “peace”: it describes a kind of universal, even cosmic, harmony, where everyone and everything is in their proper place and fulfilling their proper function, in a joyful co-operation. And Jesus seems to use it in an almost local way, as if it is a something that can be bestowed -- or taken back. 

 

Both “glory” and “peace”, then, are words that belong to our languages here on Earth, but which have a dusting of Heaven still upon and within them. And as such they help us to add to our very partial understanding of that dimension, I should almost say, that parallel universe. In that dimension – we’re tempted to call it a place or a space, because it’s hard to imagine a dimension without space as we know it – in that dimension glory and peace are part of the atmosphere the inhabitants breathe. 

            It may  be the same with all the Biblical expressions of “joy” and “exultation” which look so odd in our fallen and embattled world. In the dimension we may call Heaven it is possible that they are part of the atmosphere, part of the weather. 

            The more we go into this territory of thought, the more we learn about our world, our life, and their relation to the “land”, the dimension, of which we are supposedly also the autochthonous citizens. And when we complain morosely that “heaven and earth are full of thy glory” seems like a cruel joke in the presence of the Russian army and drowning migrants, what we should understand is perhaps that the glory is there -- but too often ignored and trampled underfoot by the human race in all its brutish and brutal sinfulness, in its uncaring search for diversion and distraction, and in its passion for domination, prohibition and the bitter ashes of false victory.

 

Image: "Heaven and earth are full of thy glory"

 

FILLING IT FULL

 

The verb “fulfil” is interesting. It means “to complete” something, to add a missing element and thus to make something whole. In some ways it is a cousin to the verb “to perfect”. One can fulfil an expectation; one can fulfil a promise; one can fulfil a prophecy.

 

“I have not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them.” (Mt 5:17)

 

Yeshua’s interpretation of the Meshiach’s task is one of inwardness. The Law gave people (individuals and the community both) ten commandments and 613 regulations to observe, in order to present themselves worthily before God. Obviously, this required much study and practice: as Psalm 19 says, “Who can tell how oft he offendeth? O cleanse thou me from my secret faults.”  

            Yeshua, steeped in the Psalms and in the Prophets, notably Isaiah, seems to have pondered this and concluded that another way was possible. After all, what was the Law for? It existed to bring God and man together again, to re-bind (re-ligare) their bond. Might there not be a way to do this more purely as well as more expeditiously? Not by abolishing and replacing the Law: that would be blasphemous, as it had been given by God through Moses. On the other hand, achieving the Law’s aim more directly would, as it were, “fulfil” it, accomplish its purpose more simply as well as more purely. After all, it is possible to live a perfectly kosher life respecting the commandments and still have a mind full of resentment. 

            So he reduced the ten commandments to two: thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart and all thy soul and all thy mind and all thy strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. I have written previously (1 September 2022) about the seeming oddity of joining the injunction of ‘thou shalt’ with the verb ‘love’; here what is important is that if you live those two forms of love completely and wholeheartedly, none of the other commandments are relevant. And this is all the more true concerning the 613 rules: if you live the second commandment fully enough to enable you to live the first, and live the first completely, then in that love between you and God the 613 rules are completely fulfilled.

            Ah, says Rabbi Neusner[1], but you are forgetting Shabbat. That is a commandment not so much for the individual but for the community, for the community of the people of Israel. However much you, as an individual, love your Father in Heaven, that does not exempt you from observing Shabbat with your family, your clan, your town. 

            And just as that was for Neusner the point where, regretfully, he parted company with Yeshua, so it is the point where the followers of Yeshua Meshiach part company with the Rabbi. Because now we come up against a further huge step in the evolution of the Meshiach. Yeshua, the man from Nazareth, had interpreted the Meshiach’s task as fulfilling the Law by creating a direct route from the human heart to God. Now, however, he has become, he is, that Meshiach, and as such he gradually goes much further. 

            First of all, he (not man in general, but he) is “Lord of the Sabbath”. Once again, he looks for the purpose: what is the observance of the Sabbath for? And he concludes that it exists to bring the people closer to their God. Shabbat is made for man: not man for Shabbat. Meaning: man is made to be with God; if there is a better, more direct, more inward (note: not easier!) way for man to come closer to God on the special day of the week than observing rules about eating wheat tops or activating a light switch, then man should choose that. 

            Next: he has always read Isaiah; now he is coming to see that Isaiah’s relevance is complete and direct: the Suffering Servant is not the People of Israel but the Anointed One himself. It is he who will take upon him the sin of the world; it is he who, alone, will face the measureless evil that is its consequence; it is he who will be at the same time the High Priest and the High Priest’s sacrificial lamb; and on the third day, he rose again from the dead. 

            So, as he has taught men to “fulfil” the Law, he himself “fulfils” the Scriptures – he gives them, retrospectively if not retroactively, their ultimate meaning. 

---

[1] Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, Doubleday 1993.

A SECRET IMMENSITY

“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

 

This saying is of measureless profundity. We live several lives simultaneously. Our daily life with its tasks and pleasures and frustrations and pains; our emotional life with its joys and griefs; our intellectual life with its searches and discoveries; and our religious life, our life as a child of God. This last is too often neglected as it does not, like daily life, obtrude and trip us up. But it is our absolute life, the breath of ultimate life, love, sin and death. And as we grow, in age but also in the questioning of our place in the scheme of things, it is of this life that the importance swells and increases. And it is there that one day we confront this saying, telling us that our life is hid with Christ in God. 

            At first sight it seems absolutely mysterious and incomprehensible. So, to understand it, let us turn to that Doctor Ecclesiæ, Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI. In the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, he explains the necessity and the immensity of Jesus’ Passion and of the Cross. In the Cross, he says, God opens himself completely to man, makes himself definitively accessible in an act of ultimate love. And this complete and utter gift that took place once, in real historical time and in a real geographical place, is still taking place: it is repeated in each Mass and Communion. 

            This is stupendous and very nearly beyond understanding, if we take it seriously and try to get our mind and soul around it. It explains that other saying, “I am with you till the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). And if we keep it in mind when we reread that saying in Colossians, we realise that this truth is true in both directions: he is with us till the end of time, but we are also with him. 

            After the interim period of his appearances following the Resurrection, he leaves the disciples, and is ‘taken up to Heaven’ in the cloud that always signals the presence of the Deity. He rejoins the Father, and sends the Holy Spirit; but he is still with them, with us, till the end of time. What Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians is that through the gift of the Meshiach, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Him even unto his presence in the Trinity. This, I think, is what it means that our life is hid with Christ in God. If we entrust ourselves completely to him, he draws us up to him within the Trinity, within the presence of God. And that life, then, is our ‘eternal life’, as Ratzinger explains it: a life no longer subject to time and death.

            The more you ponder this in meditation, the more immense and moving it becomes. It turns everything around. That touching verse, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14) now glows in both directions: for we are now also invited to make our home with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

            Finally, our life is hid – it is in the worldly sense a secret life, a hidden life. Although it may shine through our eyes, the world of humdrumlies mostly will not recognise it or comprehend it. So we should probably be ready at least to try to explain it, however difficult that may be. But in the meantime, let us taste and savour fully the mystery and the glory that is offered to us.

Image: the Holy Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 - c. 1430)