THAT OLD MAN AGAIN

After my last post, I remembered that T.S. Eliot had written a poem about him: "A Song for Simeon" (1928). So here it is, for those who may have forgotten it (as I did):

A SONG FOR SIMEON

   Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and

The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;

The stubborn season has made stand.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Dust in the sunlight and memory in corners

Wait for the wind that chills toward the dead land.

   Grant us thy peace.

I have walked many years in this city,

Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,

Have given and taken honour and ease.

There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children

When the time of sorrow is come?

They will take the goat's path, and the fox's home,

Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

   Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation

Grant us thy peace.

Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,

Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,

Now at this birth season of decease,

Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,

Grant Israel's consolation

To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

   According to thy word.

They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation

With glory and derision,

Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.

Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,

Not for me the ultimate vision. 

Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,

Thine also.)

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,

I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

Let thy servant depart,

Having seen thy salvation.

Edward McKnight Kauffer's original

illustration to the poem

AFTER ALL THOSE YEARS

                                     Rembrandt, "Simeon in the Temple" (1669)

“Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace”

Nobody told the old gentleman that this particular eldest male child, this anonymous infant, was what he had been waiting for all those years. There must have been many of them, as every eldest male child had to be presented to the Lord in the Temple: given to God, and then bought back for a couple of symbolic pigeons. So here is this provincial couple, a carpenter and his wife, bringing in their offspring for the ceremony. And there is old Mr Simeon, who has been told that he will not die before the Meshiach has come, pottering around in a corner; and suddenly he points like a game-dog. Shuffles over. Lifts a corner of the blanket covering the kid. Peers. And a vast quiet comes over his features. He lifts up his eyes, and possibly his arthritic hands, and says, “Thank you, Lord; now you’re letting me go. Now I have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all mankind: a light for the goyim, and a glory for Israel.” But then he turns to the confused parents, and tells them what else he sees; looking ahead. “This child,” he says, “is going to be the the rise and fall of may people in Israel. He will be an icon of controversy. And you,” he says, turning to young Miriam, “will have a sword thrust right through your heart. Many people’s secret thoughts are going to come out into the open.” And after this salvo, nodding heavily, he turns and shuffles off.

But there is more. Anna, an 84-year-old widow who spends all her time in the Temple, praying, and is known to be a prophetess, a seer, also comes over – probably having heard Simeon exclaim. She sees the parents in confusion and in real distress – understandable, after what they have heard from the old man. She, too, peers into the future, but sees it differently from her friend Simeon. What she sees is crowds: the crowds of people who, as Paul would later write to the Jews, live in the slavery of the fear of death. The crowds who need redeeming. The crowds who need the Meshiach, the Anointed, to do what He has come for. She reassures the parents: their son is not just an icon of controversy, a sword through his mother’s heart. He is what Jerusalem is waiting for; and beyond Jerusalem, Israel; and beyond Israel, the world.

Why is the Presentation in the Temple the festival of lights, the blessing of the year’s candles, Candlemas? Three reasons; it is the right time after the birth for the firstborn son to be presented and bought back; it is the middle of winter, between the solstice and the equinox; and it is the commemoration of the “light to lighten the Gentiles”. We – groundhogs and Super Bowls notwithstanding -- live with the consequences. Light that is born; controversy; and all those crowds, all those people in dire need of the love we have been left to bring to them.

ORDER LOVE IN ME!

As you will have noticed, I've been finding voices lately that say things in ways I admire and could not equal. I take the liberty of presenting one more: a meditation by Sister Emmanuelle Billoteau, a Benedictine hermit from Provence. She is a fine example of treating our intelligence as an integral part of God's creation. The translation is mine.

“ordinavit in me caritatem” (SS 2:4 Vulgate)

“He ordered love in me”: this remark by the Bride in the Song of Songs, which could become ours, may serve as the guideline for this meditation. The verse has been commented on often, inter alia by St Bernard and by a less well-known author, Richard Rolle. Rolle, who lived as a hermit in turbulent 14^th-century England, experienced God as “warmth, sweetness, song”. It is in one of his many works, The Song of Love, that he examines at some length the ordering of love – a theme already emphasized by St Augustine.

The point is that “God is love” and “All that is of God is ordered”. What is at stake is the proper use of the desire to love that lives in us: a vestige of our creation in the image and the likeness of God. For without charity “no one can attain the supreme joy, no one can be saved”. Indeed, as we know from experience, we are often overwhelmed and, in this area, faced with our limits, our wounds, with our sin, with a kind of chaos that comes from desires dominated by passions. How shall we escape from possessivity, from fusion, from selfishness, so that our capacity for loving can blossom fully to the glory of God, to our own happiness and to that of our peers?  A huge question, which impels us not only to seize all human means that may help us but above all to turn to God and to pray Him to ‘order love in me’. For what is needed is not just a simple psychological change or a moral issue, but the transformation of our being by the presence of the Risen One.

            For Rolle, who unceasingly read and meditated on Scripture, “love well ordered, then, consists of always and everywhere preferring the Creator to every creature”. It is also “loving only God and for God” and “bringing to God all the love we are shown”. This approach, of course, is embodied in concrete choices: a sensitivity in our relation to the Lord which will not let us turn away from Him for what we want ourselves, which will impel us to invest our energy and our time in prayer, and to resist the temptation of getting our own back upon our enemies but rather to call down upon them the blessing of God – to give just a few examples.

            Richard Rolle, who has a living relation to the Word, at once expresses an objection that may already have suggested itself to us. How can one speak of order in love? Should love not be without measure? Rolle distinguishes between love of God and love of men. The former is called to be without limit and to function “at every moment”,  for we can never love Him “as He deserves”; the latter is limited only by this, “never to let the created compete with the Creator”, i.e. never to put the creature in the place of God.

            Let us then, learn to find in the Church’s tradition what we need to support our own quest to let God be, as Rolle puts it so beautifully, ‘the joy of my silence, the balm of my repentance, the force of my prayer, the sweetness of my meditation, the food of my contemplation.’ True, our sensibility is not that of the Middle Ages: the contribution of the human sciences has changed our relation to ourselves and to others. But some truths transcend time.

OFFERING (AGAIN)

The French author Daniel-Rops published, in 1952, a little book called "Missa Est" with very fine B&W photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot and a series of brief texts explaining parts of the Mass followed by short meditations on each part. Here is his meditation on the Offering of the bread and wine (my translation):

If you have nothing else to offer the Lord, lay before Him only your works and your travails:

this piece of bread resting there on the paten cost many men many efforts.

If your hand is empty and your mouth painfully dry, offer your wounded heart, all you have suffered:

for the wine to be poured into the chalice, did the grapes not have to be trampled and their skin opened?

If all you have inside you is sin and bitterness, the pain of living and all humanity’s anguish:

let your hands lift up those sad things, for Mercy has received them in advance in His Supper.

And if you do not even have the strength to offer and implore, if all inside you is absence and abandonment:

only accept in silence that Another take care of you on your behalf and accept you, so that the Offering and the Offerer may be one gift. 

GUEST COLUMN

Today I'm turning over this blog to David Brooks of the New York Times, whose column today I found moving and take the liberty of reproducing.

Alone, Yet Not Alone

There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.”

It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

         Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.

For example, Audrey Assad is a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (You can see her perform her song “I Shall Not Want” on YouTube.) She writes the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor.

She had an idyllic childhood in a Protestant sect prone to black-or-white dichotomies. But when she was in her 20s, life’s tragedies and complexities inevitably mounted, and she experienced a gradual erosion of certainty.

She began reading her way through the books on the Barnes & Noble Great Books shelf, trying to cover the ones she missed by not going to college. She loved George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and was taken by Tolstoy. “He didn’t have an easy time encountering himself,” she says, sympathetically. “I was reading my way from darkness into paradox.”

She also began reading theology. She’d never read anything written before 1835. She went back to Augustine (whose phrases show up in her lyrics) and the early church fathers. Denominationally, she went backward in time. She became Baptist, then Presbyterian, then Catholic: “I was ready to be an atheist. I was going to be a Catholic or an atheist. “

She came to feel the legacy of millions of people who had struggled with the same feelings for thousands of years. “I still have routine brushes with agnosticism,” she says. “I still brush against the feeling that I don’t believe any of this, but the church always brings me back. ...I don’t think Jesus wants to brush away the paradoxes and mysteries.”

Her lyrics dwell in the parts of Christianity she doesn’t understand. “I don’t want people to think I’ve had an easy time.” She still fights the tendency to go to extremes. “If I’d have been an atheist I’d have been the most obnoxious, Dawkins-loving atheist. I wouldn’t have been like Christopher Hitchens.”

Her life, like all lives, is unexpected, complex and unique. Her music provides a clearer outward display of how many inwardly experience God.

If you are a secular person curious about how believers experience their faith, you might start with Augustine’s famous passage “What do I love when I love my God,” and especially the way his experience is in the world but then mysteriously surpasses the world:

“It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.”