ANSELM AGAIN

My little French booklet printed this prayer of St Anselm's yesterday, and it has been running through my head:

O my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You,
where and how to find You.
.
You are my God and You are my all and I have never seen You.
You have made me and remade me,
You have bestowed on me all the good things I possess,
Still I do not know You.
.
I have not yet done that for which I was made.
Teach me to seek You.
I cannot seek You unless You teach me
or find You unless You show Yourself to me.
.
Let me seek You in my desire,
let me desire You in my seeking.
Let me find You by loving You,
let me love You when I find You.

Amen

That does rather sum it up. Let us pray this until we can think of something better.

ASTONISHING

As a pendant to my recent post on the importance of thought in faith, I thought I would mention a recent experience of quite another kind. I had been thinking about prayer and what it can legitimately request; and as so often, more and more of the things we tend to ask for came in my mind to resemble Huck Finn’s fish-hooks. To me this is still one of the great mysteries of faith. We are encouraged to pray for others; and if we love them or even merely wish them well, we quite naturally pray for their healing if they are sick, for their joy if they are miserable, for their victory if they are in any kind of battle. And yet such results may or may not come to pass, according to what seems either blind chance or materially explicable results. Clearly to any such prayer we must add a te Deo volente, ‘if it please thee, Lord’. 

For what, then, can we pray unconditionally? For ourselves to come, for others to be brought, to the (greater) knowledge and love of God, was my conclusion. For an increase in these may take place in sickness as in health, in unhappiness as in joy, in defeat as in victory. 
And as, in consequence, I made this prayer, feeling (and saying) that such an increase would be a great blessing for me, I had a sudden and vivid sense of the Risen Lord himself at my side, who said, “Oh, and such a blessing for me!” And who then left.

An extraordinary thought, which I suspect others than myself may also find new and inspiring. We know that from the Incarnation to the Passion, his life was a constant gift of love and humility. But how often do we stop to think that our coming (closer) to the knowledge and love of him may be experienced as a blessing by him? It is of course the point of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and such points we often understand as it were at a distance; but here it was present, personal, and immediate. If you, Aardvark Zygote, in any way increased your openness to his love yesterday, you have given him a day of pure happiness and thanksgiving. Imagine a spontaneous smile of pleasure on his face as he puts another fish on the fire. “Shalom, Aardvark! I was so hoping you’d come! What joy!”


The image is of a crucifix in the castle of  Javier in Northeast Spain, known as 'the smiling Christ'. Probably 15th century.

THE FEAST OF ST GEORGE

This was a St George I hadn't yet seen -- by Raphael, no less. Notice that the saint has already broken his lance on the beast, which seems oddly small and with a look on its face almost more conversational than ferocious. He is now going to try again, with his sword this time, and we know he will win.

I was pleased, this morning, to see in the printed edition Prions en Eglise that the Vatican has not quite dared to eliminate George from the calendar. The note on him was a masterpiece of diplomacy: "Died in 303. The name is linked to a Roman soldier martyred under Diocletian. Legend has made of him a slayer of dragons. Patron Saint of England." (The online edition, however, has replaced him with St Adalbert.)

He is, of course, Spenser's Red Cross Knight in Book I of the Faerie Queene, where he is the Patron (both presiding figure and pattern) of Holiness. What is fascinating about Spenser's George is that the Patron of Holiness is both rustic -- not a born knight -- and stumbling: Holiness has to be learnt, it has to be slowly achieved, with many ups and downs. If you have never read the Faerie Queene, I recommend it strongly, at least Book I. It doesn't contain definitions or allegories of holiness: it is itself, in its entirety, an allegory and an image of, an instruction in, holiness. You can't summarize it: the learning about holiness is coterminous with the reading of the whole book, with its irresistible stories and characters (including Error: a hideous serpent with a human face that vomits books). The language is a little archaic and was so already in Spenser's time; but it is easily mastered, and the whole is the best of good reads. And if you do, ask yourself at the end what you have learnt about holiness. What is it? What image of it do you have in your mind now?

If Redcrosse, the "clownish (i.e. rustic, hayseed) young man" can be picked for the adventure of saving the maiden and her parents from the Dragon, who are we to say that we couldn't be? There are dragons enough in the world today.

P.S. A few years ago, the annual Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo sold their best-ever conference T-shirt: a dragon sitting under a tree, surrounded by bits of chivalric hardware and idly picking its teeth with a lance. The inscription read: DRACO INTERDUM VINCIT ("Sometimes the dragon wins" . . . . . )

THE JOY OF THOUGHT

Today is the Feast of St Anselm of Canterbury, the first to offer an ontological proof of the existence of God. What I found particularly pleasing was that this proof, so far from being an outmoded relic of medieval primitivity, was picked up and elaborated by one of the 20th century's greatest mathematicians, Kurt Gödel. As a Bear of Very Little Brain, I have never been any good at either philosophy or mathematics -- to my great regret, since I understand just enough to glimpse the extraordinary beauty that expert practitioners find in both. However, in the explanation given here, I think I can just follow it, and find it deeply pleasing.

I have cited Benedict XVI a number of times in this blog. I'm an Anglican, not a Roman, Catholic, but Benedict has always impressed me greatly by the quality of his thought and by the fact that he has always directed that thought to the relation of faith and reason in our time -- a problem far more important than the interminable arguments about sexuality and reproduction that seem to obsess churches these days. St Anselm might well be adopted as the patron saint of such endeavours.

In the little daily publication I subscribe to, Prions en Eglise, the admirable Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau recently wrote that in this Eastertide where we read Acts and the Gospel of John, we might fruitfully ponder the language we use to one another as Christians. What, she said, do we talk about among ourselves? What, in other words, do we use our minds on? I once frequented a small charismatic community of considerable devotion and spirituality; but I left them, saying to their leader that they seemed to regard God as having created every part of them except their intelligence.

In Spenser's Faerie Queene the Red Cross Knight, stumbling Patron of Holiness, in mortal combat with the serpent Error, is urged by Una, his companion, to "add faith unto your force!" We might suitably adapt this as an injunction to add thought unto our faith, at the highest level we can manage.

FISH AGAIN

“And while they were still talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said, “Shalom!” They shrank back in terror for they thought they were seeing a ghost. “Why are you so scared?” said Jesus, “and why so confused? Look at my hands and feet—it is really I!  Touch me and see; ghosts don’t have flesh or bones as you can see that I have.” But while they still could not believe it through sheer joy and were utterly bewildered, Jesus said to them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of grilled fish and part of a honeycomb which he took and ate before their eyes.” (Luke 24:36ff.)

I love these Resurrection stories. They are so unlike what one would expect from a God in a Holy Scripture. Here is the Risen One, walking along a country road with a couple of his former followers who don’t recognize him, explaining the scriptures to them and pointing out that Deutero-Isaiah had it right about the Messiah; letting himself be persuaded to come into the inn with them and have a meal; disappearing as he said the Baruch Atta Adonai blessing over the bread and leaving them with “burning hearts”. Here he is again as they are telling that story to the others in Jerusalem: just standing among them and saying “Hello!” Staggered they are, as we would be. We know about ghosts: this has to be one. He shows them his hands and his feet – with ragged holes in them and traces of blood. OK, an apparition would have the right visual detailing. But no: he goes on and asks if they’ve any food. And lo and behold, there’s that grilled fish again, this time with a bit of honeycomb. I’ve never tried fish with honeycomb, though I like both; but that is obviously not the point here. The point is that he sits down and eats them, then looks at them with a grin and says “So -- do ghosts eat?”

The sheer beauty of this, of Jesus, is that combination of the absolute majesty that rises out of the tomb in huge silence on the one hand, and the down-to-earthness that comforts a woman delivered from stoning, that talks Zacchaeus down from his tree, that discusses Heaven in terms of vineyards and mustard-seeds, that goes to dinner with a collaborationist (un collabo, as the French called it, ‘someone who was wrong in the war’ as my parents used to say), and eats grilled fish on the beach or in a city apartment.

The other point, though, is that both here and on the road to Emmaus what he came to do was explain the Scriptures, i.e. the Old Testament. And as Benedict XVI points out in Jesus of Nazareth, what is it that he teaches them? Not that they should be good charitable progressive citizens: “No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality,” wrote C.W.F. Smith. Not that the Kingdom of Heaven will arrive like the eschaton, the End of Time, with a cosmic bang in the next few weeks or even years. No, what he teaches is that with him the Kingdom has come: that he is the regnum, the reign of God, literally incarnate. Not only does he explain the Word of God in terms of a mustard-seed, he himself is also the mustard-seed, which must die in the earth to rise and become the tree that shelters and gives fruit.

That thought is so stupendous that we tend to avoid it instinctively, either by not thinking about it or by accepting it easily in words and then, and thus, avoiding it. It makes us understand the force of “where two or three are together in my name, I will be there with them”; it makes us understand the power of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. There may or may not be pie in the sky when we die – it may, in fact, be grilled fish, get used to it --, but the Kingdom of God is right here whenever we seriously link, with heart and mind and soul, to the one who said, and says, “Shalom!”

                    Image: "Christ appears to the Apostles at Table" by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319). 
Note the bread, the fish, and the honeycomb in pots!

TIBERIAS

The sails are slack against the morning sun,

Whispering wavelets part to let us through.

The night was long and hard, the dawn shines blue

And gold, the nets are full, the work is done.

We yawn and stretch, and cap each brimming tun

For transport to the town, nailing it true;

Set tillers for the beach. The day is new

But we are old and tired and sere and dun.

Then on the air a smell of charcoal fire

And frying fish caresses us from land:

Who is that waving in the curls of smoke?

The bow grounds on the sand; we pull it higher,

And recognize, and run, as the raised hand

Becomes the Risen, calling laden folk.

CHRISTOS ANESTI!